822.8
S530
B66
Cop. 2

ARTES
LIBRARY
1837
SCIENTIA
VERITAS
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
E PLURIBUS UNUM.
SI-QUAERIS PENINSULAM AMOENAM
CIRCUMSPICE
READING
ROOM
1
i
}
SHAKSPERE
AND HIS
PREDECESSORS
THE UNIVERSITY SERIES
Shakspere
and his
Predecessors
BY FREDERICK S. BOAS, M.A.
FORMERLY EXHIBITIONER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1900
829.8
S530
B66
capio.
019
364424
CHAPTER
PREFACE
CONTENTS
I. THE Mediaeval Drama
II. THE EARLY RENAISSANCE DRAMA
III. THE RISE OF THE THEATres.-Marlowe's Dramatic
REFORM
IV. KYD, LYLly, and PEELE
V. ROBERT GREENE
VI. SHAKSPERE AT STRATFORD
PAGES
vii-viii
1-18
19-31
32-61
62-76
77-88
89-106
107-129
130-157
VII. SHAKSPERE IN LONDON. THE SOnnets
VIII. SHAKSPERE'S DRAMATIC APPRENTICESHIP
Titus Andronicus-Henry VI-Richard III-
IX. SHAKSPERE'S POEMS. THE EARLY PERIOD OF COMEDY 158-196
Venus and Adonis-Lucrece-Love's Labour's Lost→
The Comedy of Errors-The Taming of the
Shrew-A Midsummer Night's Dream-The Two
Gentlemen of Verona.
X. SHAKSPERE ITALIANATE
Romeo and Juliet-The Merchant of Venice.
• 197-234
XI. The Chief GROUP OF CHRONICLE-HISTORY PLAYS. 235-291
King John-Richard II-Henry IV-Henry V.
XII. THE GOlden Prime of Comedy
292-343
The Merry Wives of Windsor-Much Ado about
Nothing-Twelfth Night-As You Like It.
XIII. THE PROBLEM-PLAYS
344-408
All's Well that Ends Well-Measure for Measure--
Troilus and Cressida-Hamlet.
vi
Contents.
CHAPTER
XIV. THE CLIMAX OF TRAGEDY
•
Macbeth-Othello-King Lear.
XV. THE PLUTARCH SERIES OF PLAYS
Julius Caesar-Antony and Cleopatra-Coriolanus-
Timon of Athens.
XVI. THE DRAMATIC ROMANCES
PAGES
409-453
454-503
• 504-539
Cymbeline-The Winter's Tale-The Tempest.
APPENDICES
540-550
INDEX
31-555
PREFACE
In spite of the ever-increasing mass of Shaksperean
literature, there is, so far as I am aware, no English
work dealing in some detail with all the dramatist's
writings in their approximate chronological order. The
present volume is an attempt in this direction. Professor
Dowden's fine study of Shakspere's Mind and Art, to
which my debt is manifest, is, by virtue of its scope,
most intimately concerned with the historical plays and
the tragedies, and especially with those elements in them
which help to reveal the personality of their author.
What I have here aimed at is to discuss Shakspere's
works in relation to their sources, to throw light on their
technique and general import, and to bring out some of
their points of contact with the literature of their own
and earlier times. Hence in the opening chapters I have
sketched the rise of the English drama, and have briefly
indicated Shakspere's bond of kinship, not only with his
immediate predecessors, but with the mediaeval play-
wrights. And throughout the volume I have given
greater prominence than has, I think, been usual to
those features in his works which link them to the pre-
Renaissance period. But, as is always the case with
consummate genius, Shakspere looks 'before' as well as
'after,' and in discussing such plays as Measure for
viii
Preface.
·
Measure and Antony and Cleopatra, I have sought to
interpret the dramatist's attitude towards some problems
which are often supposed to be distinctively modern.
My obligations to previous writers are so fully acknow-
ledged in my text and notes, that here I need merely
say that I am indebted to the main body of English
and continental critics, as well as to the publications
of the New Shakspere Society and the German Shak-
spere Society's Fahrbücher. The writer whose critical
method has specially influenced me is Kreyssig. But
in some important matters I have not been able to
accept his conclusions, and indeed on all points of
controversy, I have sought to give an independent
judgement, rather than to reproduce the dicta of others,
however illustrious. I should add that in my references
I have adopted the uniform spelling, 'Shakspere.'
For the compilation of the Index I am mainly indebted
to my wife.
F. S. B.
SHAKSPERE
AND HIS PREDECESSORS.
CHAPTER I.
THE MEDIAEVAL DRAMA.
THE attitude of religion and the drama towards each other has
been strangely varied. Sometimes it has been one of intimate
alliance, sometimes of active hostility, but never of indifference.
In Greece the connexion between the two was of the closest,
for tragedy had sprung directly out of the worship of Dio-
nysus, and the art of Aeschylus and Sophocles bore visible
stamp of its sacred origin. Euripides introduced a more
secular tone into his plays, and thenceforth the breach between
the stage and religion had ever grown wider. The Attic New
Comedy, and its Latin reproduction by Plautus and Terence,
drew their materials purely from social life, and were concerned
with the most mundane interests. But the degraded taste of
imperial Rome and Byzantium could not appreciate an enter-
tainment in which wit and literary grace were cardinal features.
Comedy, in the higher sense, was unable to keep the boards;
it was ousted by farce and pantomime, by the shows of the
Circus and the Amphitheatre. Thus Christianity found the
stage in the lowest depths of degradation. To regenerate it
seemed impossible, and therefore the Church took the course
of proscribing it entirely. Hence an absolute line of cleavage
B
2
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
separates the classical and the mediaeval drama. The former
sank out of sight, to reappear at the Renaissance: the latter
had an entirely independent birth¹.
The Church had attacked the corrupt stage of the Caesars,
but she could not abolish the theatrical instinct in human nature,
and almost unconsciously she turned it to her own account.
Once again, as in Greece, the drama had its origin in religious
ceremonial. The liturgy of the Mass, including the actions and
gestures of the consecrating priests, the chants and confession,
the reading of portions of Scripture, the prayers and responses
of the congregation, contained from the first true dramatic
elements. On festival days there were frequently added tableaux
vivants of scenes from the Gospels, often accompanied by song.
Into these tableaux action and dialogue were soon introduced,
and Easter became the season of especially elaborate ritual.
A highly impressive ceremony was the burial of the crucifix on
Good Friday in a sepulchre within the church, and its disinter-
ment, amidst jubilant strains, upon the following Sunday. In
another of the Easter services a dramatic colloquy took place
between two choirmen representing St. Peter and St. John, and
three others in albs, personating the three Maries, who announce
the Resurrection to the disciples.
Such ceremonies readily developed into liturgical plays, written
in Latin, and acted by the priests in the churches. Soon other
incidents in the Gospel story, and episodes in the lives of the
saints, attracted the clerical dramatists, and thus a severance
began between the liturgy and the scenic representations of
which it had been the source. The plays dealing with scriptural
events were originally called Mysteries, while those which handled
This broad fact of dramatic history is not invalidated by the composi-
tion during the earlier Middle Ages of a few plays on classical models.
Such are the comedies of Hroswitha, a nun of Gandersheim, which are
largely inspired by Terence; and the Xploròs Iάoxwv, a Greek play on
the Passion, incorporating several hundred lines of Euripides. This work,
long attributed to St. Gregory Nazianzene, is most probably a production
of the tenth century. Neither it nor Hroswitha's comedies exercised any
influence on the development of the mediaeval drama.
2 See Pollard's Introduction to his edition of extracts from the English
Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes, pp. xiv-xvi. I am indebted
to this Introduction for valuable suggestions, especially on the subject of
the Morality.
1]
3
The Rise of the Miracle Plays.
legends of the saints were distinguished by the name of Miracles.
In England, however, the former term seems never to have taken
root, and the title of Miracle was given indiscriminately to all
species of sacred plays. They were almost certainly unknowin
in this country till after the Norman Conquest, and the first
performance of which we have record may be assigned to about
f100. The play acted was in honour of St. Katherine, and
was written by a certain Geoffrey, a member of the University
of Paris, who afterwards became Abbot of St. Alban's. Testi-
mony to the popularity of Miracles in London is given by
William Fitzstephen in his Life of Becket, about 1180, and at
an earlier date in the twelfth century an Englishman, Hilarius,
who was a pupil of Abelard, wrote three sacred plays, which
have been preserved. The subjects are the story of Daniel, the
Raising of Lazarus, and a miracle of St. Nicholas. The dialogue
was in Latin, but French refrains were occasionally introduced,
and we thus get the first hint of an all-important change the
substitution of the vernacular for the language of the Church
The earliest play in the common tongue that has come down to
us is the Norman Adam, dating from the thirteenth century. It is
probable that the English Miracles had their beginning at the same
period, though there is none extant that goes back quite so far
The rise of the vernacular sacred drama was associated with
a number of important changes. The plays passed from the
church to the churchyard, but the latter soon became unable
to accommodate the crowds who flocked to the spectacle,
especially at fair-times. Hence a further migration took place
into the adjoining meadows, and eventually into the streets and
squares of the market-towns. This change of locale involved
a change of performers. The clergy, who had naturally been
the actors within the sacred building, could not well take part in
entertainments whose surroundings had become entirely secular.
A papal edict in 1210 forbade their appearance on the stage,
and the prohibition was repeated by the Council of Treves in
1227. Yet, in spite of such decrees, the inferior Church officials
continued to share in the performances. Thus Chaucer's parish
clerk, 'joly Absolon,' used to display his talents in the part
of Herod'on a scaffold hie.' But by the end of the thirteenth
B 2
4
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
century the representation had passed almost entirely into the
hands of the laity, especially the trade-guilds, who in a number
of towns took over the entire arrangements. A great impetus
was given to the dramatic activity of the guilds by a decree
of the Council of Vienne, 1311, ordaining the strict observance
of the feast of Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Trinity
Sunday. This day was adopted by many of the guilds as their
chief festival, and as it is generally one of the longest in the
year, it lent itself to the production of an elaborate 'cycle'
of plays in which each craft could enact a separate scene.
Neither trouble nor expense was spared to secure a creditable
performance. A notice of the Chester plays states that the
actors were 'the occupacions and companies' in the city, and that
'the charges and costs thereof which was great was theirs also.'
A bill preserved at Coventry gives a list of the items spent at the
rehearsals and performance of one of these pageants,' and an-
other document contains a quaint account of the sums disbursed
for properties,' from 'a pair of gloves for God' to a 'pollaxe for
Pilate's son.' From the municipal records at York we learn
that great care was taken to choose and train competent actors.
A proclamation of April 3, 1476, ordained:
That yerely in the time of lentyn there shall be called afore the maire
for the tyme being iiij of the most connyng discrete and able players within
this citie, to serche, here, and examen all the plaiers and plaies and
pagentes throughout all the artificers belonging to Corpus Xti Plaic.
And all such as they shall find sufficiant in personne and connyng, to the
honour of the citie, and worship of the saide craftes for to admitte and
able; and all other insufficiant personnes either in connyng, voice or
personne to discharge, ammove, and avoide.'
The Corporation at York also issued stringent regulations for
the control of street-traffic during the performances, which were
conducted on what may be called a rotatory system. The
spectators took their places at various 'stations' throughout the
town, and each scene, acted on a movable scaffold drawn by
horses, passed in succession before them. The locus classicus
on the subject is the account by Archdeacon Rogers of one
of the last performances of the Whitsun plays at Chester
in 1594:
'Every company had his pagiant or parte, which pagiants weare a high
ɛcafolde with two rowmes, a higher and a lower, upon four whecles. In
1]
5
The Miracle Cycles.
the lower they apparelled them selves, and in the higher rowme they played,
being all open on the tope, that all behoulders mighte heare and see them.
The places where they played them was in every streete. They begane
first at the abay gates, and when the firste pagiante was played it was
wheeled to the highe crosse before the mayor, and so to every streete: and
soe every streete had a pagiant playing before them at one time, till all the
pagiantes for the day appointed weare played.'
It is not surprising that performances arranged on this elaborate
scale drew not only crowds of humbler folk, like Chaucer's Wife
of Bath, who in Lent was wont to frequent preachings, pilgrimages,
and 'plays of miracles,' but also the highest in the land, including
at times the King himself. Thus we hear of Richard II being
present at the York 'pageants,' and of Richard III visiting the
Coventry plays in 1484.
The golden era of the religious drama begins about the
middle of the fourteenth century, and extends over a period
of about one hundred and fifty years. Throughout this time
Miracle Plays were acted with great success in nearly every part
of England. It is probable that the earliest performances in the
vernacular took place in the East-Midland district, and spread
thence to the North, finding in Yorkshire specially congenial soil.
York, Beverley, and Woodkirk became important dramatic
centres, and the influence extended as far as Newcastle. In
the West the chief home of the pageants was Chester, but there
are traces of them at Lancaster, Preston, and Kendall. Coventry
was their principal seat in the Midlands, though they were per-
formed also at Worcester, Tewkesbury, and Reading. London.
and Canterbury each had its series, and Miracle cycles flourished.
even in distant Cornwall and across the Irish Sea in Dublin.
Of the mass of literature which thus sprang up only a portion
has come down to us, but it comprises four complete cycles,
besides fragments from series that have disappeared from view.
The extant cycles are known as the York, Towneley, Chester,
and Coventry plays, and each embraces the main events of
Biblical history from the Fall of Satan to the Day of Judgement.
The York plays (which were not printed till 1885) are probably
the most ancient. They are spoken of in 1394 as being 'of
old time,' and they often employ the early alliterative long
lines, though rhymed and arranged in stanzas. They contain
6
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
forty-eight pieces, and in their choice of subjects they strikingly
resemble the great religious poem, Cursor Mundi, written by
a native of the Durham district in the early part of the fourteenth
century. This cycle, composed and acted under metropolitan
auspices, was naturally dignified and reverent in tone, though full
of dramatic life and energy. The central theme of the Passion
and Crucifixion is elaborated with a painful but deeply impressive
realism. Special prominence is given to the Nativity and the
domestic life of the Holy Family, as also to the ascension of
Mary and the relations between Mother and Son in heaven¹.
Closely allied to the York cycle is the Towneley series, so
called because the only known MSS. was long in the possession
of the Towneley family. A tradition current in that family
assigned them to the Abbey of Widkirk near Wakefield.'
Widkirk is doubtless a mistake for Woodkirk, about four miles
from Wakefield, where there was a cell of Augustinian Canons.
The connexion with Wakefield is proved by various points
of internal evidence. At the head of the first play is written
'Wakefelde, Barkers' (i.e. Tanners), and in one place there is an
allusion to the 'shroges' or moorland of Horbery, a neighbouring
village. But the whole cycle cannot have been peculiar to the
Wakefield district, for of the thirty-two plays which it contains
five are practically identical with the corresponding 'pageants'
in the York series. In spite, however, of this close connexion
between the two groups, the Towneley cycle has marked cha-
racteristics of its own. Its dialect has, as a rule, a more rustic
flavour, and broadly humorous elements are much more abundant,
as in the scenes between Cain and Abel, between Noah and his
wife, and the Shepherds on the eve of the Nativity 2.
The Chester plays are twenty-five in number and were per-
formed at Whitsuntide. They probably date originally from
the end of the fourteenth century, and have remarkable points.
of similarity to the French Mystère du Vieil Testament, from
which they may have been partly adapted. Ten Brinck is
¹ On other special characteristics of the York cycle see Miss L. Toulmin-
Smith's introduction to her edition of the plays.
2 A full account of the Towneley cycle is given by Miss Bates in her
book on The English Religious Drama, chap. 2.
1)
7
The Coventry Plays.
of opinion that the series underwent considerable revision, for it
exhibits a singular uniformity of style and metre. Nearly all the
plays are written in an eight-lined rhyming stanza, with a smooth
and even movement. The element of popular humour is
present, as in the Towneley cycle, but the fun is, on the whole,
less boisterous, though the Shepherds' play in its homely country
realism does not lag far behind its Yorkshire counterparts.
A didactic tendency is visible in the introduction of an Expositor,
who at the end of each play explains its significance and lesson.
The didactic element reappears, greatly intensified, in the
collection known as the Coventry cycle. On the fly-leaf of the
MSS. which belonged to Sir Robert Cotton, there is a note by
Dr. Richard James, his librarian: Contenta Novi Testamenti
scenice expressa et actitata olim per monachos sive fratres mendi-
cantes: vulgo dicitur hic liber Ludus Coventriae, sive Ludus
Corporis Christi. On the strength of this inscription, the series
has been identified with that performed on Corpus Christi day
by the Grey Friars at Coventry. But it is very doubtful whether
this cycle belongs to the Midland town at all. The concluding
lines of the prologue, which announce that the play will be
begun in N- town' on Sunday next 'at six of the belle,'
point to a performance by a strolling company rather than
by a resident body of clergy. Moreover, the linguistic evidence
suggests a connexion not with Coventry, but with the North-
East Midlands, a district conspicuous for its dramatic activity in
the fifteenth century, to whose earlier years this cycle may
be attributed'. There are forty-two pageants, of which only
seven deal with Old-Testament history, and these entirely lack
the humorous elements of the Towneley and Chester plays.
The history of the Virgin, drawn chiefly from the Apocryphal
Gospels, is treated at great length, and one of the chief aims of
the series is to promote Mariolatry. The didactic speeches are
put into the mouth of Contemplacio, and other personifications
appear on the scene; Veritas, Misericordia, Justicia, and Pax hold
dialogue together in heaven, and Mors makes his entry into
Herod's palace. In the introduction of these allegorical figures,
1 For a fuller discussion of these points see Ten Brinck's History of
English Literature, vol. ii. pp. 294-6 (German edition).
8
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
as also in the special prominence assigned to the Devil, the
Coventry plays anticipate the Moralities.
Having thus outlined the distinctive features of the four extant
Miracle cycles, we may briefly consider certain aspects of
the sacred drama common to them all. It was only under
peculiar conditions that such a form of art could exist. A naïve
conventionality was of its very essence. To adequately represent
upon the stage spiritual beings and conceptions is impossible;
all the more daring attempts to solve the difficulty hang perilously
between the sublime and the ridiculous. The frankly insufficient
devices of an uncritical age are really far more successful, just
because the gulf between the reality and the symbol remains so
manifestly unbridged. Shakspere indeed was afterwards to
ridicule the stage-artifices of his day; Starveling coming on with.
a bush and a lanthorn to disfigure or present' Moonshine is
doubtless fit matter for mirth. But it was the survival of these
conventionalities from the era of the miracle-pageants that made
possible some of his own finest effects. The fairy-world of
A Midsummer Night's Dream, the ghosts in Hamlet and Julius
Caesar, the witches in Macbeth, Ariel and Caliban in The
Tempest, could all be easily brought upon a stage where a crudely
simple representation of the supernatural was traditional. The
more fastidious spirit of the modern theatre, striving after a less
inadequate realization of the unseen world, has often merely
aroused the critical faculty without satisfying it.
Closely akin to the treatment of the supernatural in the
Miracles is the treatment of history. The first claim made to-
day upon a writer who deals with a period of the Past is that he
should steep himself in its spirit and reconstruct as far as
possible its form and pressure. The method followed in the
Miracles is diametrically the reverse. It ignores all distinctions
of time or place. The personages in the plays are Jews or
Romans, but there is no attempt to reproduce the life of the
East or of classical antiquity. On the contrary, we see before
us the knights, the churchmen, the burghers of the Middle Ages,
with their religions and social surroundings. Thus in the
York plays Noah speaks of the rainbow as a sign to 'all Christen
men'; and Joseph, before the birth of Christ, appeals to the
і
1]
Characteristics of the Miracle Plays.
9
'God in Trinite.' In the Towneley cycle Pharao and Herod
swear by 'Mahowne,' and one of the shepherds, at the time of
the Nativity, invokes 'Jesus o' Nazorus, Crucyefixus.' In the
Coventry series the Jewish high priest appears as a mediaeval
bishop with his court for the trial of ecclesiastical offences, in
which those fare best who pay best.
Herod and Pilate are
practically feudal lords, the one an arbitrary tyrant, the other
ready to do justice in 'Parliament'; Satan himself is the Great
Duke of Hell; and, most curious of all, the wicked queen on the
Judgement Day is found appealing to knight or baron to wrest the
law on her behalf. Thus Shakspere, when he placed his Roman
and Celtic characters amidst the conditions of his own time, was
perpetuating a distinctive feature of the early English drama.
There is another less obvious aspect in which the religious
playwrights anticipated the method of their mighty successor.
Their treatment of their originals-the Bible and the Apocryphal
Gospels-is curiously akin to Shakspere's attitude towards.
Plutarch and Holinshed. They never tamper with essential
facts, and in handling these they chiefly confine themselves to
the task of selection and arrangement. This is specially true of
the central situation of the Passion and Crucifixion, where little
attempt is made to heighten the impressiveness of the incidents
by literary embellishment. The playwrights trod reverently
upon such holy ground, and their attitude helps to remind us
that the Miracle cycle, viewed as a whole, was a profoundly
solemn, indeed tragic, species of art. It dealt with what were
to the spectators the profoundest of realities; it set vividly before
them the cardinal events of history; it lifted the curtain of the
unseen world. The Crucifixion itself was but the crisis in an
eternal struggle between Good and Evil, beginning with the
Rebellion of Satan and lasting till the Judgement Day. This
colossal theme was handled with much simple power, and
genuine moral insight. The English sacred drama rests
upon the same rock-bed of Anglo-Saxon righteousness that
supports the solid fabric of Shaksperean ethics. But the
Miracle cycle, like the Gothic cathedral to which it is the
literary counterpart, could find room within its vast sweep for
much that is at first sight incongruous with its exalted design.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
[CH.
Herein it was instinctively, though crudely, carrying out the
great principles of Romantic art-that tragedy is heightened not
lowered by comic relief, and that the stage should be many-
sided as life itself. It was in these episodical scenes that the
rical playwrights gave free rein to their invention, and drew
aterial from their own surroundings. Thus a tender light from
the old English home falls over such incidents as Abraham's
conflict of feelings, when preparing for his son's sacrifice, or
the Virgin's fears for the infant Saviour and her agony at His
betrayal.
But it was in melodramatic or broadly humorous scenes
that the authors of the Miracle plays found their chief scope.
The element of 'rant,' immemorially dear to popular audiences,
was chiefly supplied by Herod, a character immortalized by
Shakspere in a single phrase. Judging by 'joly Absolon's'
preference for the part, it would seem to have been a favourite
with the amateur players, then, as now, inclined to fustian.
Akin to Herod in the extravagance with which they were
drawn and acted were Pharao and Pilate, in whom we recog-
nize a type akin to the Miles Gloriosus of classical comedy.
At the head of the purely humorous rôles stand Noah and his
family, who evidently afforded endless amusement. Even by the
time of Chaucer 'the trouble that Noy had with his felawschipe'
had become proverbial. The patriarch's wife, with her whims
and airs, her disinclination to leave dry ground for her husband's
'chest,' her love of gossip and 'a pottel full of Malmsey good
and strong,' is a genuine and distinctive comedy type-a fit
companion to Chaucer's good wife of Bath. Other favourite
humorous characters are the shepherds at the Nativity, with
their homely jests upon the hardships of their lot, the troubles.
of matrimony, and the comfort of a good supper. The second of
the two plays devoted to them in the Towneley series develops
into what is practically an independent comedy whose hero is
the sheep-stealing rogue Mak, a Yorkshire predecessor of Auto-
lycus. In the Chester play the comments of these rustics upon
the angels' song, Gloria in Excelsis, is extremely diverting; but
when they take their way to Bethlehem to pay homage to the
Divine Babe in the Manger, and make their quaint offerings of
1]
II
The Early Moralities.
a 'bell,' a 'flaggette,' and a 'cape,' while their boys add such
gifts as a pipe and a nuthook, we have a scene of idyllic sim-
plicity and charm.
Such episodes prove that the Miracle was feeling its way to
a more untrammeled, more purely human form of art. But the
grasp of sacred history upon the drama was too firm to be
lightened at a blow. We see it loosening under the pressure of
the Moralities, which form the transition stage in theatrical
evolution. In the Coventry cycle, as has been shown, personi-
fied abstractions had appeared among the Scriptural figures.
(The function of the Moralities was to detach these abstractions
from their religious setting, and to make them the sole factors
in a new species of art. Not that the Moralities were merely
an offshoot of the Miracles. They were, to a great extent, an
independent growth, though they assimilated elements from the
older plays, and began by forming themselves upon their model.
The allegorical instinct lay deep at the heart of the Middle
Ages. It had pressed painting and architecture into its service;
it had moulded and coloured literature in all its forms.
inevitable that the stage should feel its influence, and the
Morality is the result.
It was
This dramatic species becomes prominent about the reign of
Henry VI, and its earliest and most notable specimens are
associated with the East Midlands. For the Morality in its
original form preserves much of the breadth and impressiveness
of the Miracle cycle. It describes the struggle between the
personified forces of good and evil for the possession of a human
soul-a struggle begun at the cradle and only ended at the
judgement-seat of God. The most elaborate and typical play
of this class is the Castell of Perseverance, which contains about
3,500 lines. It was acted by an itinerant company, whose
banner-bearers went on in advance proclaiming that the per-
formance would take place on the grene in ryall array.' Thus
for the movable series of 'pageants' on which the Miracles
were played we have now substituted a single temporary erec-
tion shaped like a castle in the centre, and with four stations,
one at each corner, for the World, the Flesh, the Devil, and
God. Underneath the castle is a bed whence appears Humanum
12
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Genus, as an infant, naked save for the baptismal cloth on his
head. A good and a bad angel at once begin to struggle for
his soul, and the latter wins the day. In the next scene
Humanum Genus, grown to youth's estate, is introduced to the
World, who confides him to the care of the Flesh, the Devil,
the Seven Deadly Sins, and other undesirable companions. But
his Good Angel, with the aid of Confession and Shrift, rescues
him from his sins, and lodges him for safety in the Castell of
Perseverance. Then begins an assault of the castle by the
Seven Deadly Sins led by the Devil, but the Virtues beat them
back with roses, emblems of Christ's Passion. The World then
calls in the help of Covetousness, who lures Humanum Genus,
now an old man, out of the castle, by the gift of 100 marks.
The money, which is not to be lent to the Church or to the
poor, is hidden underground, but when Death prepares to strike
down Humanum Genus the World claims it as his inheritance.
Wretched and bereft of all, Humanum Genus mounts before the
throne of God, where Truth, Justice, Peace, and Mercy argue
over his fate. Mercy's plea is heard; the sinner is saved by the
grace of the Father in heaven.
The World and the Child, printed in 1522, belongs, as
characteristics of style and metre show, to a much earlier date.
It is similar in scope to the Castell of Perseverance, but it does
not carry us beyond the grave. A newborn child is called by his
mother Dalliance. In boyhood the world renames him Wanton.
When fourteen years are gone he gets the fresh title of Lust-
and-Liking, and is dismissed to a life of pleasure. At twenty-one
he is styled Manhood, and is given as companions the Seven
Deadly Sins. But now Conscience addresses him in the guise
of a monk, and declaring himself 'a teacher of the spirituality,'
warns him against consorting with these associates. Manhood
is on the point of obeying him, when Folly enters, born in
Holborn,' and with London as his chief dwelling. Manhood
takes him into his service, and is thus brought to misery. In
his last state he is called Age, and repents of his misdeeds.
Perseverance then appears, to remind him of the counsels of
Conscience, and christening him Repentance, bids him be of
good hope.
17
13
The Moral Interludes.
But of these early Moralities the most impressive and ably-
planned is Everyman. God sends His mighty messenger, Death,
to summon Everyman on his long journey. No respite can be
granted, but he is allowed to take with him any friends who will
bear him company. Fellowship and Kindred both refuse; Gold
makes mock of his request. He then betakes him to Good
Deeds; but she lies helpless and cannot accompany him till her
sister Knowledge has guided him to Confession, by whom he
is released from his sins. Good Deeds is then set free, and
accompanied by her, starts on his journey, taking with him also
Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and Five Wits. But, beside the
grave, all these desert him, and Good Deeds alone remains to
plead for his soul, and see it taken up to heaven. Everyman
thus deals nominally with only the final episode in human life,
but its construction is so ingenious that it reaches back over all
that has gone before. It is this breadth of design that distin-
guishes the Morality in its earlier and higher form from its later
developments, which may be more appropriately termed Moral
Interludes. These, as Pollard has pointed out, seldom greatly
exceed a thousand lines in length, they required no stage acces-
sories, and could mostly be performed by four or five players
dividing the parts among them. In place of the whole of man's
life in its relation to its eternal issues, they deal with mere
fragments of it, and their moral teaching is confined to exhorta-
tions against the besetting sins of youth, and to the praise
of learning and studiousness.' It is in these Moral Interludes
that the Vice plays a prominent part. The Morality had
retained, amidst its personified abstractions, the Devil of the
Miracle plays, and the Vice was now added as an attendant.
He is the elfin spirit of evil that takes all forms, but is at root
ever the same. Thus he appeared under varied titles-Iniquity,
Hypocrisy, Shift, Fraud, and the like. He was dressed in a fool's
coat, and, like the Harlequin, wore a vizor and carried a wooden
sword. His business was to move the audience to merriment
by his gibes and antics, generally at the expense of the Devil, on
whose back he was finally carried off to hell. We find in the
Elizabethan drama, especially in Jonson's works, lingering echoes
of the impression he created, and in his rôle of jester he
14
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
may claim to be in part the forerunner of the Shaksperean
Fool.
The Moral Interludes, which deal with the temptations of
youth, belong chiefly to the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary,
and have generally a controversial tendency. Thus Lusty
Juventus is a dramatic 'tract for the times' on the side of the
Reformation. It opens with a pretty lyric, with the refrain, 'In
youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure,' sung by Juventus, or
Youth. He is interrupted in his merriment by Good Counsel
and Knowledge, who take him to task for his religious ignor-
ance, and imbue him with strict Protestant principles. This
puts the Devil on his mettle, and he sends as a companion to
Juventus his son Hypocrisy, the Vice of the piece, who intro-
duces him to Abominable Living. In her company he follows
evil courses till at last he is rescued by his former tutors, who
renew their instructions in Divinity. Juventus repents, and ends
the play with appropriate Lutheran sentiments.
The champions of the orthodox faith naturally rejoined in
kind to such attacks, and among their contributions to this
polemical stage-literature are Hycke-Scorner and its recast in
the reign of Mary, The Interlude of Youth. The other, and
more attractive, class of these Moral Interludes is not con-
cerned with religion, but with the 'new learning' introduced by
the Renaissance. The earliest play of the kind that has been
preserved is The Nature of the Four Elements. The Messenger
who speaks the prologue laments that English books deal only
with 'toys and trifles,' and that 'works of gravity' are to be
found only in Latin and Greek. Then Nature enters with
Humanity, whom she instructs in the properties of the elements.
Studious Desire continues the lecture, which is interrupted by
the entrance of Sensual Appetite, a rollicking character, who
carries off thirsty Humanity to a tavern. After he has been
refreshed, the traveller Experience instructs him in geography,
but Ignorance breaks in with a song and dance. Then Nature
reappears and warns Humanity that while mirth is allowable
within limits, he must make study his chief concern. Similarly
didactic in its tendency is the interlude of Wyt and Science,
written by John Redford, probably in the latter part of
1]
15.
John Heywood.
Henry VIII's reign. It traces the adventures of Wit, who is
wooing Science, the daughter of Reason and Experience. He
is led astray by Ignorance and Idleness, and suffers a defeat at
the hands of the giant Tediousness, whom, however, he finally
overthrows. He is then robed in the gown of Knowledge,
and united in wedlock to the lady of his heart.
But these Moral Interludes, with their echoes of the Reforma-
tion and the Renaissance, carry us beyond the mediaeval
atmosphere. The novel forces of which they were in part the
product were destined eventually to crush them out of existence.
Indeed, neither in its earlier or later form had the Morality so
prolonged or vigorous a life as the Miracle cycle, and the per-
sonifications whom it substitutes for the Biblical figures of the
older plays are often less interesting and vitally conceived than
their predecessors. Yet an immense step was taken when the
drama shook itself free from its exclusive dependence on Scrip-
tural themes. In the Miracles the playwright had been compelled
to confine himself within prescribed limits; his plot was deter-
mined beforehand, and he could only vary it in details. But the
writers of Moralities and Moral Interludes had to invent their
own framework, and this liberty in choice of theme once asserted,
it was inevitable that other than abstract figures should gradually
be introduced on the stage. Indeed, abstractions like Folly,
Abominable Living, or Hypocrisy, only became dramatically
effective in proportion as they ceased to be allegorical symbols,
and took the concrete shape of typical human representatives of
the vice in question. It was natural that a writer of realistic
temper should push this tendency to its logical issue, and, boldly
dispensing with personifications, should introduce in their place
familiar social types.
Such a writer was John Heywood, who enjoyed the favour of
Henry VIII and of Mary. He is the creator of a peculiar
dramatic species, which has been distinguished as the Satirical
Interlude, though the satire is bright and genial. Orthodox in
doctrine, he yet had a keen eye for clerical failings, and these he
rallied with much of the racy vigour of Chaucer in his Mery
Play between Johan the Husbond, Tyb his Wyfe, and Syr Jhon
the Preest, and in the Mery Play between the Pardoner and
16
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the Frere, the Curate and neghbour Pratte. More comprehensive
in its range is his chief work, The Four P's, which hits at clergy
and laity alike. It introduces four stock characters of mediaeval
society, the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary, and the Pedlar.
The dialogue is opened by the Palmer, a professional pilgrim,
who relates how, in the hope of saving his soul, he has journeyed
'in many a fair and far country,' and gone the round of all the
shrines. The Pardoner, the seller of Papal indulgences, sneer-
ingly retorts that he is a fool for his pains. Why wander over
the world in search of salvation when it can be obtained much
more easily and comfortably at home? An indulgence bought
at his own door will do as much for him as a voyage 'thrice to
Jericho'; for the trifling expenditure of a penny or twopence,
'In half an hour, or three-quarters at most,
The soul is in heaven with the Holy Ghost.'
While the two men of religion are disputing about the merits of
their rival methods, the Poticary breaks in with a word for the
medical profession. How seldom is it that an honest man is
ushered into the next world' without help of the Poticary'!
Thus the duel becomes triangular, when the Pedlar enters, and
he is appointed umpire. He disclaims any competence to judge
in things spiritual, but he has some skill in lying,' and if the com-
petitors will give a display of their powers in that art, of which
he knows them all to be past masters, he will make his award.
The Poticary leads off with a sensational story of a marvellous
cure that he has effected. The Pardoner caps this with his
burlesque account of his 'harrowing of Hell' to rescue the soul of
his friend Margery Corson. There are few passages in our early
literature to surpass this episode for humour and verve. Lucifer
and all the devils, who have more to do' with two women than
with the rest of their charge,' are only too delighted to get
rid of such a shrew, and 'roar' with joy at her delivery. This
gives the Palmer his chance: he declares that he cannot under-
stand why women have so bad a reputation in hell, as, though
he has met on his travels half a million of the sex, he has never
seen or known ‘any one woman out of patience.' Such a quint-
essential falsehood simply takes away the breath of the listeners;
1]
17
Decline of the Mediaeval Drama.
not only the judge, but even his two rivals, unanimously acknow-
ledge the Palmer's victory, and the piece ends with a few serious
words from the Pedlar on the right use of pilgrimages and
pardons.
The Four P's is the last typical utterance on the stage of
the Pre-Renaissance spirit in this country. It shows absolutely
no trace of foreign influence, and is English to the core alike in
its excellences and its faults. Its dialogue is pungent and
nervous in a high degree; its sketches of character are firm and
effective; its mixture of good sense, humour, and piety is singu-
larly pleasing. But it lacks the distinctive mark of the higher
drama, for in spite of the neatness of the dénouement, there is
nothing that can seriously be called a plot. Many of the features
that go to make a first-rate comedy are present, but we miss one
that is essential-the constructive faculty. This was a gift
almost entirely withheld from the mediaeval playwrights, and in
his lack of it Heywood proves himself a late-born son of the era
which produced the Miracle and the Morality. Before his death
the new learning had begun to familiarize men with higher
dramatic types, and the old-world forms had had their day.
It is true that allegorical figures are found in some of the early 、
Elizabethan comedies, and in such first-fruits of native tragedy
and chronicle-history as Cambises, Apius and Virginia, and
Bale's Kynge Johan. Moreover, the representation of Moralities
and of Miracles continued till the opening of the seventeenth
century, and thus overlapped with the production of Hamlet.
Hence it is something worthier than love of picturesque anec-
dote that prompts us to accept the statement of biographers,
supported by apparent reminiscences in his works, that Shak-
spere in his boyhood had made the short pilgrimage from
Stratford to Coventry, to witness the famous Corpus Christi
pageant. It is genuinely significant that the historic continuity
of our dramatic literature should thus have been preserved.
But by this time the Miracle cycles and the Moralities were
a mediaeval survival amidst the surroundings of the Renaissance.
By their very nature they were wanting in flexibility and power
of adaptation to a novel environment; their decay was inevit-
able, and left no regrets behind. But they had done an
C
18
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
all-important work. They had kept the theatre alive through
centuries whose instinct was largely hostile to it. They had
preserved and popularized the knowledge of stage conventions
and technique. They had identified the drama with the national
life, and had ensured it against monopoly by a single class or
school. They had based it on a moral foundation which, shaken
by the tumultuous forces of the new age, was to be relaid, deep
and broad, by the master-builder Shakspere.
CHAPTER II.
THE EARLY RENAISSANCE DRAMA.
ENGLISH literature, though its spirit is so distinctively national,
has throughout its course been highly sensitive to foreign in-
fluences. To Italian stimulus, more especi. lly, our writers,
from Chaucer to Browning, have responded with alacrity; and
through the thinner if purer veins of our native poetry there
tingles a stream of the rich, full southern blood. Thus, at the
eventful epoch which we now reach in the history of the drama,
it is from Florence and Rome that a fresh and dominant impulse
comes. To trace the course of the Renaissance in Italy is not
within our present scope. It is sufficient to note how from the
middle of the fourteenth century onward scholars and poets
were busied in bringing to life again the buried past of the
ancient world: how this movement was gradually accelerated
and intensified till it took the form of a violent recoil from
mediaevalism and a return to the classical sense of the dignity
and interest of human life: how this new birth' of a feeling
long dead found a majestic expression in architecture, painting,
and letters, and gave to the southern peninsula the intellectual
primacy of Europe. So when, towards the beginning of the
Tudor period, Italy and England were brought into`closer
communication than before, the southern country could put
forth a double claim to the homage of the island power; she
appeared bringing forth from her treasury things old and new.
She could point to the recent productions of her genius, to the
poems of Ariosto and Tasso, the histories of Guicciardini and
Machiavelli, to novels, plays, treatises innumerable. But, in
C 2
20
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
a certain sense, all this splendid achievement was an imitation,
a reflex of the infinitely more glorious Past of Classical Antiquity.
It was as the inheritor, guardian, interpreter of this Past that
Italy stood forth unassailably supreme, the one law-giver in
things intellectual. Was it not natural that England, destitute
of literary traditions, of fixed native forms of art-for Chaucer's
language and metrical system had become more than half
obsolete should bow before these august credentials and
accept the methods and models proferred to her from the
south? What was to be gained by hazardous experiments in
prose or verse, when here at hand were methods and forms
of tested efficiency and immemorial prestige? So in every
branch of letters we find England following a foreign or classical
lead. It almost seemed as if native effort would be stifled
by alien pressure, and that no more honourable portion was
reserved for our literature than to become a series of lifeless
imitations of imported models. But, happily, before it was too
late, English genius rose insurgent and vindicated its claim
to independent life and power. It is the struggle of the spon-
taneous, national instinct with external forces that forms one
of the most striking aspects of Elizabethan literature, and, in
particular measure, of the Elizabethan drama. It may therefore
be taken as a leading thread through the period upon which we
now enter.
The play which opens this period, Ralph Roister Doister, was
written about 1550, by Nicholas Udall, Headmaster of Eton and
afterwards of Westminster. As might be expected from the
position of its author, it exhibits in full force the classical influ-
ences of the Renaissance, and proves that they were needed to
produce the decisive dramatic combination of plot, dialogue, and
action which Heywood failed to attain. Ralph Roister Doister is
founded upon the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus, who is mentioned
with Terence in the Prologue as 'bearing the bell' among the
learned of the day. Its two principal characters, Ralph Roister
Doister, a pusillanimous, vain, and foolish braggart, and Matthew
Merigreek, a needy adventurer and parasite, who makes him
his tool, are types directly borrowed from the Roman stage.
But they are adapted with considerable skill to the conditions
[I]
21
Ralph Roister Doister.
of English life, and made the chief actors in a bourgeois
drama, whose plot is natural and well-constructed. Ralph
is in love with Christian Custance, a widow betrothed to
a merchant, Gawin Goodluck, who is away on a voyage.
During Goodluck's absence, Ralph, through the agency of
Merigreek, besieges the widow with letters, vows, and visits.
She rates this persistent suitor at his true value, but in a spirit
of fun gives some encouragement to his attentions. Goodluck
arrives home unexpectedly, and finding an apparent courtship
in progress between Custance and Ralph, is aroused to jealousy.
But Ralph's own foolish speeches help to clear up the situation,
and the play ends with his exposure and discomfiture. Thus
the comedy, as is interesting to note, turns to some degree
upon the same pivot as The Merry Wives of Windsor, and
however immeasurably inferior in the qualities of humour and
imagination, it may claim to be a respectable forerunner of
Shakspere's farcical masterpiece. Its versification is simple and
natural, and with a certain note of homely refinement, but it is
monotonous in its flow, and lacking in the vigour and verve of
Heywood's metre in The Four P's.
Inferior alike in conception and execution to Roister Doister
is Gammer Gurton's Needle, dated about 1566, and generally
ascribed to John Still, Master in turn of St. John's and Trinity
at Cambridge, and Bishop of Bath and Wells. The play,
unlike its predecessor, is by no means such as we should have
expected from a scholarly hand, and it furnishes a negative,
as Roister Doister a positive, proof that it was only under
classical guidance that comedy of the higher type could as yet
be written in England. It is a coarse and vigorous sketch of
low country life, without a connected plot, and turning upon
a single farcical incident. Gammer Gurton loses her needle,
and Diccon the Bedlam, a mischief-making rogue and vaga-
bond, with many of the characteristics of the Vice of the Morality,
accuses Dame Chat, the ale-wife, of stealing it. Hence arises
a sad imbroglio into which the whole village is gradually drawn.
But, when the commotion is at its height, peace is restored by
the discovery of the missing needle sticking in the breeches of
Hodge, the Gammer's farm-servant. The humour of the piece
22
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
is rude and slight, but, as Ward has pointed out, it is the first
English play which employs the device, so often since put to
brilliant use, of making the action of the drama turn upon the
fortunes of an inanimate property.
In the same year as Gammer Gurton's Needle was performed
at Christ's College, another comedy, more suited to the hall of
a learned society, was acted at Gray's Inn. This was the
Supposes of George Gascoigne, a translation of the Gli Suppositi
of Ariosto, which, in its turn, was constructed from materials
supplied by Terence and Plautus. The work is important for
several reasons. It is our first humorous play in prose; it
suggested part of the plot of The Taming of the Shrew; and it
illustrates the influence on our stage, not of the Roman drama
direct, but of that drama as interpreted by the Italian play-
wrights'.
That
We have thus briefly traced the development of comedy,
and have seen that it is the resultant of English, Italian and
classical influences combined, though, in this branch of the
drama, the native elements were sufficiently powerful to absorb
and give colour to the others. If we turn to tragedy, we shall
find that here the alien forces were far more aggressive, and
that they made a determined effort to capture the whole field.
It is therefore important to realize clearly their exact nature.
To the modern student ancient tragedy means, and practically
means only, the Athenian drama of the fifth century B. C.
drama deals, as a rule, with a definite crisis or entanglement
rather than the gradual development of a character or intrigue:
hence its action is usually confined within narrow limits both
of time and space. Treating, moreover, stately and solemn
themes, it tends to avoid, though with no uniform austerity,
the intermixture of lighter episodes, and permeated with the
Greek artistic sense it keeps in the background all realistic.
details of suffering or death. But these features are the spon-
taneous outcome of a natural instinct; they are not due to the
¹ For an account of the influence of the Italian Renaissance drama on
the English, see Mr. Churton Collins' The Predecessors of Shakspere, in his
Essays and Studies. In this essay, which has been reprinted since the
above chapter was written, Mr. Collins shows that the various forms of the
Elizabethan drama had their prototypes on the Italian stage.
[1]
23
Influence of Seneca.
conscious observance of fixed canons or rules. They are not
arbitrary limitations upon the free action of the dramatic spirit,
but rather the methods through which that spirit elects to work.
Thus had the men of the Elizabethan age been brought into
immediate contact with Aeschylus and Sophocles, they would
have felt the force of a creative activity, genuinely inspired and
inspiring. But this was as far as possible from being the case.
After the great masters, with their living and plastic energies,
invariably follow the imitators, the pedants, the formalists.
In his critical treatise, the Poetics, Aristotle, by the mere act
of analysis, went some way to systematize and reduce to rule
what had been instinctive in the dramatists themselves. Later
on, the Romans, with their passion for legal accuracy and
precision, carried the process further, with the final result that the
free dramatic spirit was handed over to the arbitrary despotism
of the Unities.'
The outcome of five centuries of gradual degeneration
may be seen in the tragedies of Seneca, the Roman dramatist
of the time of Nero'. In these plays there is little action,
and, in its place, we have sententious dialogue, born of
the rhetorical and forensic faculty, not of the poetic. Unfor-
tunately for the world, the age of the Renaissance in Italy had
much in common with the Neronian age in Rome, and,
with a fatal instinct, out of the classical treasures laid bare
to its view, it fastened upon these compositions of Seneca as
its models of dramatic art. Its playwrights imitated and repro-
duced them with unceasing diligence, and sought to bring the
other literatures of Europe under their spell. Their success in
France is among the commonplaces in the history of the drama.
In England, there was the danger of a similar result. Here
too it was Seneca, not Sophocles, who was taken as the true
type of classical art. Between the years 1559 and 1566 five
English authors are found translating his plays, a complete
edition of which was published in 1581. According to Nash
1 For a full account of Seneca's characteristics and their bearing on our
dramatic literature, see the interesting monograph, The Influence of Seneca
on Elizabethan Tragedy, by J. W. Cunliffe. The same subject is treated in
Rudolf Fischer's Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen Tragödie.
24
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
(in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, 1589) this version was
a storehouse of phrases to contemporary dramatists, 'English
Seneca read by candlelight yields many good sentences, as
Blood is a beggar and so forth.' But a more important tribute
to Seneca's influence than this translation was the production of
an English tragedy, Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, modelled
as closely as possible upon his style. The play was the joint
work of Thomas Norton, a lawyer of eminence, and Thomas
Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, a brilliant courtier and
man of letters. It was acted, for the first time, in January,
1562, before Elizabeth, at the Inner Temple. The plot is
drawn from the legendary history of early Britain, and, in its
main motive, reminds us of King Lear. It shows how Gor-
boduc, the king, divides his realm during his lifetime between
his two sons Ferrex and Porrex, and how from this rash act
spring unnatural crime, 'domestic fury and fierce civil strife.'
While the story is thus thoroughly national, the treatment.
is completely in the debased classical manner. There is no
attempt to exhibit character in action, no collision of person-
alities, no development on the stage of incident or intrigue.
The dramatis personae come upon the scene only to utter long
sententious monologues; the murders, rebellions, battles, with
which the plot is rife, do not take place before the eyes of
the spectators, but are related by messengers. The play, in
imitation of the Roman model, is divided into five acts, a
practice which henceforth became universal in tragedy. Each
act is preceded by an allegorical dumb show, and concluded
by a chorus spoken by 'four ancient and sage men of Britain,'
who moralize upon the situation.
Thus Gorboduc is Senecan to the core, and judged from this
standard it has very real merits. Its theme is serious, and of tragic
significance; the treatment is dignified and, from the special
point of view, adequate; there is no lack (to use Sidney's words)
of 'stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the
height of Seneca his style.' As a fact, it is in the language rather
than in the matter that the main interest of the play lies. In
their attempt to be completely faithful to their classical model,
the authors discarded the rhymed metres which had hitherto
[1]
25
Introduction of Blank Verse.
been the sole dramatic vehicle, and adopted in its place the new
blank verse which Surrey had just used for his translation of
the Aeneid, and which seemed to them, as to him, to be the
one way of reproducing the unrhymed measures of Greece and
Rome. Thus the use of blank verse was, in the first instance,
due, like so much else in that age, to conscious and deliberate
imitation; it came of the same spirit that strove to force the
Hexameter and the Sapphic upon English poetry. Yet the
one experiment resulted in glorious success, and the other in
disastrous failure. The reason thereof lay in a vital difference,
overlooked by the men of the time. The genuine classical
metres are based upon the principle of quantity, and they can
never be reproduced save as the feeblest of exotics, in the
modern languages which take accent as the basis of their
prosody. But the heroic measure, the iambic pentameter
employed by Surrey, Sackville, and Norton, is native to our
tongue by throwing aside rhyme, though it gains immeasurably
in freedom, flexibility, and range, in its essential nature it con-
tinues unaltered. The verse of Gorboduc, though not without
vigour in parts, is monotonous and stiff, but it had in it, far
beyond the conception of those who first used it, infinite
possibilities. They had thought of it as a pale replica of
classical measures: it was really destined to an existence in
the world of art as independent, as glorious, as immortal as
theirs. To have discovered the fitness of blank verse for high
dramatic purposes is the distinctive achievement of the English
classical playwrights.
Sackville and Norton soon found followers among the scholars
and wits of the day. We have already seen that in 1566 the
members of Gray's Inn acted a prose comedy translated by
Gascoigne from the Italian: together with it was performed
a tragedy by the same author, called Jocasta, and modelled upon
an adaptation from Euripides, by Dolce, the Italian translator of
Seneca. Like Gorboduc it was written in blank verse, and
introduced choruses and explanatory opening scenes of dumb
show. Another drama directly inspired by Senecan influence is
Tancred and Gismunda, written and performed by members of
the Inner Temple, in 1568. The plot is borrowed from the
26
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Decamerone, but the style is modelled on that of the Roman
playwright. In the 'epistle dedicatory' the work is asserted to
be 'in stateliness of show, depth of conceit, or true ornaments
of poetical art, inferior to none of the best in that kind: no, were
the Roman Seneca the censurer.' Originally written in rhyme,
it was afterwards recast into blank verse, to recommend it more
fully to the fastidious taste of the polite world. It employs the
classical machinery of prologue, chorus, and messenger; and the
principal incidents, except the death of the heroine and her
father in the last act, take place behind the scenes.
In 1587 the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, whose theatrical activity
is worth noting, produced at Greenwich before the Queen
another work in the Senecan style, The Misfortunes of Arthur.
The body of the play is from the hand of Thomas Hughes, but
various members of the Inn contributed. The story, as in the
case of Gorboduc, is drawn from the legendary annals of early
Britain, and was peculiarly adapted to classical treatment,
for its theme is one dear to ancient dramatists, the ruin of
a royal house through wanton crime. Uther Pendragon, in
adulterous love with the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, whom
he afterwards slays, begets a son and daughter, Arthur and
Anne. These, in their turn, by incestuous union, have a son
Mordred, who, when grown to man's estate, seduces Guenevora,
the wife of Arthur's later years. Hence arises war between
father and son, ending in the death of Mordred at Arthur's hand.
It is with the final episode, the conflict between Arthur and
Mordred, that the drama mainly deals. It is opened by the
Ghost of Gorlois, so foully wronged, who cries for revenge upon
the sinful house of Uther, and who, at the end of the play,
retires appeased by the penalties of blood. The Ghost is
directly borrowed from Seneca, and is thus of distinctly classical
origin, though we shall see later to what high destinies it was
advanced by Romantic art. Yet even in The Misfortunes of
Arthur its introduction is neither unskilful nor unimpressive,
and, indeed, the play has real merit throughout, and marks an
advance upon Gorboduc¹. The characters of Arthur and
1 It should be noticed, however, that Hughes, not content with imitating
the general style of Seneca, introduces into the play long extracts from
II]
27
Popular Plays.
Mordred have individuality and force; the blank verse is often
spirited and vigorous; the whole tone of the drama is less
artificial than that of its predecessor. In fact, as has been
pointed out by Ward, it has the distinction of reminding us in
parts of Greek rather than of Roman tragedy, not of Seneca
but of Euripides.
Such was the line of development of classical tragedy in
England. But side by side with it there flourished another
homelier species of dramatic art. The plays of this class
were not written by scholars and gentlemen of the Court
who could afford to have them printed and preserved to
posterity, nor were they acted by learned societies. They
were the outcome of the general popular taste for the drama,
the same taste that had fostered Miracles and Moralities;
they were played by professional actors in great men's halls, or
the yards of inns, or the permanent theatres which were
beginning to be built. Many of them remained in the sole
possession of the company who performed them, and never
found their way into print. But such as were best received by
popular audiences were repeated before the Queen, and from the
minutes of the Revels we can gather a list of their names.
Between 1568 and 1580 fifty-two of these dramas were
performed at Court', dealing with every variety of subject—
classical history, Italian fable, mediaeval legend, English tale
of domestic life. I may boldly say it, because I have seen it,'
says Gosson, 'that The Palace of Pleasure, The Golden Ass, The
Aethiopian History, Amadis of France, and The Round Table,
comedies in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been
thoroughly raked to furnish the playhouses in London.' Among
the classical titles it is significant in the light of later events
to notice such names as Caesar and Pompey and Catiline's
Conspiracies, and even of greater interest is the fact that one
of the first English tragedies drawn from Italian romance was,
in all likelihood, a Romeo and Juliet.
·
several of his dramas. For a list of these, see Appendix II in Cunliffe's
The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy.
1 For a list of the plays thus performed, see Fleay's History of the Stage,
PP. 14-31.
28
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
These dramas, whatever their subject, followed in the track
of the Miracles and Moralities. They were written in rhyme;
they had no regard for the Unities, and they intermingled lighter
matter with the serious stuff of tragedy. They obeyed a
native instinct rather than external rule, and their aim was to
give a vigorous picture of life in its varied phases. These
facts about them may be gathered less from the plays them-
selves, which have chiefly perished, than from the attacks of
contemporary critics. Among these George Whetstone occupies
an important and, in many respects, unique position. In the
preface to his play, Promos and Cassandra, 1578, he pleads for
an intermediate dramatic species, free alike from the monotony
of the classical type and from the absurdities of the popular
stage. The English playwright, he declares, 'is most vain,
indiscreet, and out of order: he first grounds his work on
impossibilities; then in three hours runs he through the world:
marries, gets children: makes children men, men to conquer
kingdoms, murder monsters, and bringeth gods from heaven, and
fetcheth devils from hell.' These extravagances, he complains,
are rendered even more ridiculous by the use of one order
of speech for characters however different. Against this he
protests in words which strike the keynote of the true Romantic
drama: 'grave old men should instruct young men, strumpets
should be lascivious, clowns disorderly, intermingling all these
actions in such sort as the grave may instruct and the pleasant
delight.' Promos and Cassandra is written to illustrate these
principles, and thus uses a medley of styles, including long
rhyming lines, ballad metre, the heroic couplet, and blank
verse. But it is a loosely-jointed piece in two Parts, each of five
Acts, and is chiefly memorable as the source of Measure for
Measure. Whetstone's service is to have pointed out the way
in which others more richly gifted than himself were hereafter
to walk.
Another censor of the popular stage was Stephen Gosson in
his School of Abuse, 1579, but it was the Puritan rancour of
a renegade playwright, not zeal for the welfare of the drama,
that inspired his splenetic onslaught. 'Let us but shut up our
ears to Poets, Pipers, and Players, pull our feet back from resort
II]
29
Sir Philip Sidney's Criticisms.
to Theatres, and turn away our eyes from beholding of vanity,
the greatest storm of abuse will be overblown, and a fair way
trodden to amendment of life. Were we not so foolish to taste
every drug and buy every trifle, Players would shut in their
shops and carry their trash to some other country.' Finally
the indictment is summed up from the rigidly Senecan point of
view, by Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defense of Poesy, 1583. 'Our
tragedies and comedies,' he states, are cried out against,
observing rules neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry.'
By these 'rules' he means chiefly the strict observance of the
Unities, and his remarks on their violation are so characteristic
that they deserve to be quoted in full. 'Where the stage should
always represent but one place; and the uttermost time pre-
supposed in it, should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common
reason, but one day: there is both many days, and many
places, inartificially imagined. You shall have Asia on the one
side and Afric of the other, and so many other under kingdoms,
that the player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling
where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now shall
you have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then we must
believe the stage to be a garden. By and bye, we hear news of
shipwreck in the same place; then we are to blame if we accept
it not for a rock Upon the back of that comes out a hideous
monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders
are bound to take it for a cave; while, in the meantime, two
armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and
then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field ?
Now of time they are much more liberal; for ordinary it is, that
two young princes fall in love: after many traverses she is got
with child: delivered of a fair boy: he is lost, groweth a man,
falleth in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in
two hours' space; which, how absurd it is in sense even sense
may imagine; and art hath taught and all ancient examples
justified, and at this day the ordinary players in Italy will not
err in.' He then proceeds to make the further charge against
the plays of the period, that they violate dramatic unity by their
medley of light and serious episodes: 'they be neither right
tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns.' And
30
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
he points with admiration to the ancients who 'never or very
daintily, match hornpipes and funerals.'
Thus here from the mouth of the typical scholar and humanist
of the Elizabethan age, only a few years before the advent of
Marlowe and Shakspere, we have an uncompromising philippic
against the contemporary stage. And we, who can now judge
of the romantic drama by its fruits, to whom it calls up
Hamlet and King Lear, Egmont and Faust, Wallenstein and Don
Carlos, may with easy self-complacence make merry over
Sidney's want of insight and foresight. But it is true of many
contests, intellectual and political, that the best men on the
wrong side are often only just inferior to, and have much in
common with, the best men on the right. We may therefore
feel sure that so fine a 'wit' as the author of the Arcadia was
not wholly beside the mark in his strictures. He saw before
him, on the one hand, the compact, stately, well-ordered
structure of ancient drama, dealing with high themes, in fitting
language on the other, the straggling, invertebrate compositions
that found favour with his countrymen, wherein tragedy jostled
against buffoonery and grossness, and 'jigging' rhymes were
the only vehicle of the theatrical Muse. It was but natural
that he should think meanly of the work of his contemporaries.
Even if we take plays like Marlowe's Tamburle and Faustus,
so much finer than anything spoken of in the Defense of Poesy,
we see sufficiently plainly the faults against which Sidney aimed
his shafts. Tamburlaine is a series of dramatic pictures rather
than a drama in the true sense; it lacks cohesion and unity
of design. In these qualities, it stands far below the least
admirable work of Euripides. Again, the humorous episodes
in Tamburlaine, and in Faustus, are a blot upon the tragic matter
rather than a genuine comic relief: Sidney's words are fatally
apt, they thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a
part in majestical matters with neither decency nor discretion.'
Sir Philip has just grounds for his indictment; he puts his finger
on real faults. But he was mistaken in the remedies that he
proposed. He thought that the glories of the classical drama
could be reproduced by compliance with a few definite canons,
the caput mortuum which criticism had blindly substituted for
II]
31
Sir Philip Sidney's Mistakes.
the living spirit of ancient art. He could not discern that a new
and equally noble tragic type was winning its way to victory,
dissimilar to the drama of the Greek world in its outlook upon
life, and in its methods of working, yet really akin in that it was
the spontaneous growth of a native, energizing instinct. Almost
at the time that Sidney was penning his Defense of Poesy new
circumstances were coming into play which were to be decisive
against his ideas and aspirations, and which thus mark an
important epoch in dramatic history.
CHAPTER III.
THE RISE OF THE THEATRES.
DRAMATIC REFORM.
MARLOWE'S
WITH the third decade of Elizabeth's reign opens its most
glorious period, political and intellectual. One of the tendencies
of the Renaissance epoch throughout Europe was to break down
the mediaeval hierarchy of classes, and to substitute a compact
national body with the throne as head and centre of its life.
This movement had affected England, but it had been partially.
checked by the religious and political troubles springing from
the Reformation, which had created so much discord during the
reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and the earlier years of Elizabeth.
Twenty years, however, of the maiden queen's strong govern-
ment had produced, broadly speaking, order and unity in
Church and State. The mass of the people were thoroughly
well affected to the throne and to its policy; Roman Catholics
on the one hand, and Puritan extremists on the other, might
chafe or conspire against the existing settlement, but they were
powerless to upset it. The days of Elizabeth's coquetting with
France or Spain were over; the logic of events and the aspira-
tions of the people were more and more clearly defining the
position of England as the champion of the Protestant cause in
the west. The national spirit ran higher year by year, and
found for itself splendid expression in deeds of adventure and
daring Between 1577 and 1580, Frobisher made his voyages
to the northern seas, Humphrey Gilbert visited the shores of
America, Drake sailed round about the earth. In the years
III]
33
Growth of National Spirit.
immediately following, Raleigh sent forth his Virginian ex-
peditions, Davis tracked his way nearer to the Pole than any of
his forerunners, Philip Sidney found a hero's grave at Zutphen.
Then, to crown all, came the annus mirabilis of 1588, when
national life and death hung in the balance, and in a fashion as
decisive as it was unforeseen, the scale dipped to the side of life.
From the day that the Armada turned northwards to its doom,
England thrilled with a patriotism as intense and operative as
that of Athens after Salamis. And this feeling, ardent at all
points, glowed, as it were, into flame about the person of the
sovereign. Elizabeth, to the men of her day, was no longer
merely a woman or even a Queen: she became the incarnation
of England, an ideal and romantic figure, a fount of inspiring
energy. Such she remains to all time as the Gloriana of The
Faerie Queene.
It was natural that this growing national spirit should leave
its mark on literature, and that it should give an impulse to the
forces that were of native growth. Its first epoch-making
product is Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, 1579, wherein the
poet, bursting through the trammels of quantitative verse to
which Sidney and Harvey had sought to bind him down,
compelled a generation, that had almost forgotten Chaucer, to
give ear anew to the melody of English rhythms. Almost at
the same date Lyly and Sidney woke the English novel into
fresh life. Stow and Holinshed, by the publication of their
Chronicles of Britain, gave proof of the renewed interest in the
national annals; Warner in his Albion's England made these
annals a theme of epical verse. Hakluyt, in putting forth his
first collection of Seamen's Voyages called the world to witness
that all lands were full of the labours of his countrymen.
It was inevitable that the drama should feel the force of the
same quickening touch. But, before we speak of this in detail,
another point claims notice. For the literature of the stage is
not solely the result of intellectual forces. There is a determin-
ing factor of a material kind, the condition of the theatre. In
this respect, as in others, the period that we have reached saw
a notable fresh departure.
We have seen that Miracle Plays had been acted principally
D
34
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
by amateurs in the streets and squares of towns. The Moralities
and Interludes were performed by roving companies at first in
open spaces, afterwards in the banqueting-rooms of lords and
gentry. But the great Tudor nobles were not long satisfied
with the occasional services of these strolling troupes. We find
them, as early as the reign of Henry VII, attaching permanent
companies of actors to their households. Thus a professional class
of performers was gradually developed. In the earlier years of
Elizabeth the principal companies belonged to Lords Leicester,
Warwick, Clinton, and Charles Howard. Warwick's men were
later succeeded by Lord Hunsdon's, Clinton's by those of the
Earl of Sussex, and Lord Charles Howard's by those of Lord
Derby. In addition to these men-actors, there were troupes
of boy-performers, composed of the choirs of the Chapel Royal
and of St. Paul's, or of the scholars of Westminster and
Merchant Taylors'. When not playing at Court or at the
houses of their patrons, these companies, as a rule, made use
of inn yards, such as 'The Bell' in Gracechurch Street, 'The
Bull,' mentioned by Gosson, in Bishopsgate, and The Bell
Savage' on Ludgate Hill. Leicester's influence with the Queen.
enabled him in 1574 to procure for his servants' a royal
patent empowering them to perform within the city of London,
and throughout the realm of England, provided that their plays
were licensed by the Master of the Revels. But the company
was to meet with strenuous opposition to the exercise of these
privileges. The Corporation of London was the determined
enemy of the stage, on the double ground of the immorality of
so many of the performances, and of the peril of contagion
in time of plague. Accordingly, in the year 1576, it issued an
order that no theatrical performances should be given in public
within the city bounds. This order led to a prolonged contest
between the Corporation and the Privy Council, which had
a highly important result. The players, relying on the favour
of the Court, yet not daring openly to defy the authority of
the Mayor, established themselves in permanent buildings just
beyond the boundaries of the city. Here they were outside
the jurisdiction of the Corporation, and yet close enough to the
town to permit of both the public and the Court gallants being
III]
35
Elizabethan Theatres.
present at their performances. In this way regular theatres
sprang into existence, and took the place of the inns and the
temporary erections which had hitherto sufficed for dramatic
shows: the stage passed from a nomadic to a settled condition.
6
.
In the year 1576, Leicester's men, of whom James Burbage
was the head, built the Theater' in Shoreditch, and the 'Curtain'
was erected in the same year. These were followed by the
Rose,' the Swan,' and others of less note. The history of
these early playhouses, and of the companies which successively
occupied them, is still partially obscure, and it is unnecessary
to dwell upon it in a volume not concerned with the anti-
quarian details of the Elizabethan stage¹. What calls for
emphasis here is the broad fact that the growth of permanent
theatres guaranteed that the drama should have as its patrons
and inspirers, not a clique or a coterie, but the nation at
large. Sidney and his school might sigh after an ideal of
classical perfection, and ridicule the conventionalities of popular
drama, rendered so transparent by the simplicity of Elizabethan
mise-en-scène. But the people, with its eager, straining life,
was careless of perfection. What it wanted was vigour and
movement, and these it found in the plays which were the
product of untutored instinct, not of formal rule. Thus a
mighty impulse was given to the native species of dramatic
art, and that in more ways than one. For authors, writing to
meet a specific and immediate, instead of merely an occasional,
demand, threw themselves into their work with the energy
usual in such cases. The 'moving accident' was distinctly
their 'trade'; and indeed the word is apt, for their close con-
nexion with the theatre-as actors often as well as authors-
lent to their writings a dramatic effectiveness and reality, the
fruit of professional experience. And the very artlessness of
the scenic arrangements of the day, however irritating to the
developed critical faculty, gave the playwright an unbounded
scope. Time and space were at his command. He laid his
The fullest account of the early companies and theatres is given in
Fleay's Chronicle History of the Stage, where much laborious and fruitful
investigation is combined with a good deal of hazardous and over-confident
theorizing.
D 2
36
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
plot in Scythia, or Africa, or Italy, without taking thought of
labour or expense; his audience were ready at a word to follow
him whithersoever he wished; they looked for no attempt at
realistic illusion. As Hallam has pithily said, 'the scene is per-
petually changed in our old drama precisely because it was not
changed at all.'
Thus two very different forces, the growth of the national
spirit, and the establishment of permanent theatres, combined
to influence the group of dramatists immediately preceding
Shakspere, foremost among whom are Marlowe, Kyd, Lyly,
Peele, Greene. There is a singular resemblance in the lives
and careers of all these men. They were of good birth and
position, graduates of the University, members of learned
societies, cultivated by foreign travel. Yet when they settled
in London they plunged into the wildest debauchery. Greene
has in various pieces of autobiography given us a vivid picture
of his career. At the very time that he was famoused for
an arch play-making poet,' his companions were lightly the
lewdest persons in the land, apt for pilfering, perjury, forgery,
or any villainy, who came still to my lodging, and these would
continue quaffing, carousing, and surfeiting with me all day
long.' His end was in accord with his life: he died penniless
and deserted by friends on a bed for which he owed money, and
attended only by a landlady and a woman whom he had
wronged.
Equally Bohemian was the career of CHRISTOPHER
MARLOWE, born at Canterbury in February, 1564. He was
the son of a shoemaker, but doubtless through the liberality
of some rich patron, he was entered at Benet College (now
Corpus Christi), Cambridge, in 1581, where he took his B.A.
degree in 1583, afterwards proceeding to his M.A. in 1587.
We have proof of his scholarship in his frequent classical
quotations, and in his English versions of part of Lucan's
Pharsalia, and of Ovid's Amores, though of the latter it has
been said that 'he misses the sense in passages which could
be construed to-day with ease by any fourth-form boy.' For
the details of his career after he left Cambridge no satis-
III]
37
Marlowe's Life.
factory evidence exists. We only know that some time
previous to 1587, when his first play was produced, he must
have joined that literary circle in the capital described above,
whose members appear to have eked out their gains as play-
wrights and pamphleteers by occasional appearances on the
boards. In addition to a too well deserved reputation for
riotous living, Marlowe seems during his residence in London
to have come into special discredit for 'atheistical' opinions,
possibly fostered by Francis Kett, a Fellow of Benet College,
who was burned at Norwich in 1589 for heresy ¹. We are told
that he wrote a book against the Trinity,' and that he declared
'the holy Bible to be but vain and idle stories, and all religion
but a device of policy.' And when in June, 1593, he came
to a discreditable end beneath the dagger of a serving-man
at Deptford there were not wanting moralists to draw the
appropriate lesson. Thus did God,' says Vaughan in his
Golden Grove, 1600, 'the true executioner of divine justice,
work the end of impious atheists,' or as a poet of the time
summed up the case in a neatly conclusive couplet:
'Our theatre hath lost, Pluto hath got
A tragic penman for a dreary plot.
But the pitiable record of Marlowe's short term of years only
serves to throw into more brilliant relief his achievements as
a dramatist, whose epoch-making importance it would be
difficult to exaggerate. It is not necessary to depreciate the
tentative efforts of the earlier Elizabethan playwrights in order
to recognize that they had failed to point with certainty to
a glorious dramatic future. The situation was beset with
dangers and difficulties. The scholarly critics, as we have
¹ Greene in a repentant death-bed pamphlet addressed a special warning
to Marlowe on this head: 'Wonder not thou famous gracer of tragedians
that Greene, who hath said with thee, like the fool in his heart, "There
is no God," should now give glory unto His greatness: for penetrating
in His power, His hand lies heavy upon me; He hath spoken unto me with
a voice of thunder, and I have felt that He is a God that can punish enemies.
Why should the excellent wit, His gift, be so blinded that thou shouldest
give no glory to the giver? Is it pestilent Machiavellian policy that thou
hast studied? Oh peevish folly!... Defer not with me till this last point
of extremity, for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited.'
38
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
seen, frowned upon the works which, whatever their imper-
fections, had in them most of native salt; the majority of the
play-going public were addicted to mere buffoonery and drollery,
a fault for which even in later years they do not escape censure
from the lips of Hamlet. A considerable section of the citizens
objected entirely to the theatre and all its surroundings. It was
still a question whether any man would arise of sufficient genius
to successfully combat these sinister influences, and become the
dramatic interpreter of the Elizabethan 'grand age.' By 1587
the question was determined, for in that year Marlowe produced
upon the stage Part I of his Tamburlaine the Great, followeɗ
shortly afterwards by Part II. In the few lines of prologue
to his work the young playwright explicitly announced his
mission:
'From jigging veins of 1hyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine,
Thicatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.'
In these introductory verses Marlowe calls his audience to
witness that his play will differ from the conventional type alike
in language and in subject. With the jigging veins' of
rhymsters are contrasted the Scythian's 'high-astounding terms,'
while his heroic exploits are similarly set off against the mere
conceits of clownage.' Thus the author of Tamburlaine
aimed at a double reform in the dramatic art, and seldom has
a literary revolutionist achieved so swift and enduring a triumph.
Ilis innovation in style was extremely bold, and yet in a sense,
like other intuitions of genius, extremely simple. It consisted
in the adoption of blank verse, the accredited metre of the
classical school, for the purposes of the popular drama, which
had hitherto found its instrument in the rhyming couplet. Such
a change was absolutely essential if Romantic art was to attain
to a rich and untrammeled development. Of all forms of litera-
ture, the drama, which calls its creations into independent life,
and bids them be their own interpreters, naturally craves the
largest and freest utterance. Its organ of expression must be
stately enough for the highest uses, and yet sufficiently simple
III]
39
Marlowe's Blank Verse.
and nervous to render articulate the cry of the human heart
in passionate extremes. Rhyming metres with their necessary
element of antithesis and artificiality are unequal to this service ;
they throw emotion into leading strings, they distort its linea-
ments, dwarf its stature, emasculate its virility. Thus the genius
of Marlowe, seeking a fit channel of utterance, turned instinctively
to blank verse. We have seen how, and for what reasons, this
metre had become the instrument of the Senecan school of
dramatists. But as yet it had only been declaimed to select
gatherings of scholars and courtiers within academical or legal
precincts. To dissever it from these associations, and submit it
on the boards of the public theatres to the rough-and-ready
verdict of the groundlings, might well have seemed a hazardous
experiment. Yet it achieved an instant success which completely
disconcerted contemporary playwrights. Nash, writing shortly
after the production of Tamburlaine, held up to the ridicule of
the 'gentlemen students of both Universities' the 'idiot art-
masters who intrude themselves to our ears as the alchemists
of eloquence: who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think
to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging
blank verse'; and who can find no other vent for their choleric
humours than the spacious volubility of a drumming decasylla-
bon.' Similarly Greene compared the metre of the play to the
'fa-burden of Bo-bell,' and spoke with scorn of the writers who
'set the end of scollarisme in an English blank verse.' But the
satire glanced harmlessly aside, and Marlowe so indisputably
bore off all the honours of the campaign that his opponents, as
we shall see, notably in the case of Greene, thought well to
capitulate, and to test the efficacy of the new weapon in their
own hands.
This decisive result was principally due to the transformation
which Marlowe wrought in the metre which he had adopted.
In blank verse of the Senecan school each line ended with
a strongly accented syllable, and stood by itself, separated by
a pause from the preceding and following verses. The effect
was thus tame and monotonous, and would certainly never have
held the ear of a popular audience. But Marlowe, breaking
through conventional restraints, altered the structure of the
40
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
metre, varied the pauses, and produced an entirely novel
rhythm of surpassing flexibility and power¹. The epithet
which Nash threw in the young poet's teeth, 'alchemist of
eloquence,' may be fairly turned to his honour, for with the
serviceable magic of genius he ran the leaden ore of the metre
of Gorboduc into the liquid gold of his 'mighty line.' Or it
would be more accurate to say that Tamburlaine began, but did
not complete this process, for though its verse moves at all
times with majestic energy, its sonorous cadences are not with-
out a sameness in their swing. This is not the only fault with
which the language of the play may be charged. Extravagance
of diction was a common literary sin of the epoch, and one to
which Marlowe was irresistibly drawn both by temperament and
by the special circumstances under which Tamburlaine was
produced. Rhyme being discarded, the dramatist sought to fix
the attention of his hearers by strange, swelling phrases, and it
was inevitable that this 'great and thundering speech' (as it is
called in the first few lines of the play) should not unfrequently
be exaggerated into mere bombast and rant. We have numerous
contemporary references to the impression made by Tambur-
laine's 'high astounding terms.' Thus Hall, the satirist, writing
in 1597, speaks of the Turkish Tamburlaine,'
'Graced with huf-cap terms and thundering threats,
That his poor hearer's hair quite upright sets.'
Ben Jonson is even severer, alleging that the language of the
'true artificer, though it differs from the vulgar somewhat, will
not fly from all humanity with the Tamerlanes and Tamer-
Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them but the
scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to
the ignorant gapers.' And every one remembers Shakspere's
burlesque of the Scythian's grandiloquence through the mouth
1 'If we examine the mechanism of his verse, we shall see that it differed
from that of his predecessors in the resolution of the iambic into tribrachs
and dactyls, in the frequent substitution of trochees and pyrrhics for mono-
syllables, in the large admixture of anapaests, in the interspersion of
Álexandrines, in the shifting of the pauses, in the use of hemistichs, in the
interlinking of verse with verse.' Churton Collins, Essays and Studies,
P. 153.
III]
41
Tamburlaine.
of ancient Pistol, who directly quotes a notorious couplet from
the play.
But these blemishes could not mar the general effect of
Marlowe's reform of dramatic style, and they sprang almost
inevitably from his simultaneous reform of dramatic theme.
The exploits of the Scythian shepherd Tamburlaine, who rose
to be lord of the Eastern world, were known to Englishmen
through Fortescue's translation of his Life by a Spaniard, Pedro
Mexia. There was also a biography in Latin by Petrus
Perondinus, with which Marlowe was probably familiar. In the
stupendous career of this Oriental conqueror the young poet
saw a subject exactly suited to his purpose. Such heroical
deeds of arms fittingly set forth upon the stage would put to
shame the buffooneries of the popular plays. Accordingly he
threw into the creation of Tamburlaine the full ardent force and
passion of his genius. The result was a mighty Titanic figure,
throbbing with intense vitality, a figure that by sheer masterful
pressure storms its way into the imagination. But this figure is not,
in the strictest sense, dramatic, with an objective and independent
individuality; it is rather, in its highest aspects, an embodiment
of its author, and of the epoch which he supremely represents.
For a distinguishing note of the Renaissance age, intoxicated
by the magnificent possibilities opened to it on every side,
was an uncontrollable aspiration after the ideal, a scorn of
earthly conditions, a soaring passion that sought to scale the
infinitudes of power, beauty, thought, and love. It is this
spirit-ever one and the same-that breathes in Sir Thomas
More's visions of a perfect society, in Spenser's pattern of the
highest, holiest manhood, in Bacon's clarion-call to the conquest
of 'all knowledge,' and in the heroic deeds and speeches of
Sidney, Gilbert, and Grenville. But nowhere does it find more
characteristic vent than in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, though it
there takes chiefly, yet not solely, its least noble form-the
thirst for limitless power. Almost in his first words the Scythian
shepherd declares himself as one who,
'Means to be a terror to the world,
Measuring the limits of his empery
By east and west, as Phoebus doth his course.
42
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
When a Persian commander is sent against him he addresses
him with sublime egotism:
'Forsake thy king and do but join with me,
And we will triumph over all the world :
I hold the fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn fortune's wheel about,
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.
The Persian is won over by these 'pathetical persuasions,'
and marches against his rightful sovereign Mycetes, whom
Tamburlaine defeats in battle. He first bestows the crown
upon Cosroe, the brother of Mycetes, but then turns against
him and wrests from him his new dignity. In answer to
his victim's reproaches he pleads Jove's treatment of Saturn as
a precedent, and he further claims that he has a warrant from
'nature' who teaches all men to have aspiring minds.'
'Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.'
These superb lines are put with almost ludicrous inaptness
into the mouth of a Scythian conqueror addressing a dying foe,
but they throw into clear relief Marlowe's dominant instinct
that ambition on the grand scale is akin in origin to the
intellectual and the artistic impulse. So unfamiliar a con-
ception startles us, and doubtless it will not stand the test of
a rigorous ethical analysis. But ethical considerations apart,
the aspiring warrior may be said to aim at the realization of an
ideal in the sphere of will, as the artist in the sphere of beauty,
and the scientist in the sphere of truth. Hence Tamburlaine
becomes the mouthpiece of all who have yearned after the
vision of absolute loveliness, that vision which ever beckons the
artist onwards, and ever hovers beyond his reach, jealous in its
reserve of
'One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.'
III]
43
Tamburlaine.
For the Scythian, as set before us by Marlowe, is poet no less
than hero. The beauty of his captive bride, the Egyptian
Zenocrate, 'lovelier than the love of Jove,' moves him to rapturous
utterance. When she is being taken from him by death he
pictures the bliss that awaits her beyond the grave, in lines that,
with their haunting and impressive refrain, fall upon the ear like
a solemn chant:
'Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,
As sentinels to warn the immortal souls,
To entertain divine Zenocrate. .
The cherubims and holy seraphims,
That sing and play before the King of Kings,
Use all their voices and their instruments
To entertain divine Zenocrate,
And in this sweet and curious harmony,
The God that tunes this music to our souls,
Holds out his hand in highest majesty
To entertain divine Zenocrate.'
Similarly Tamburlaine rises to lyric rhapsodies over the show
and colour of the world. He revels in the thought of sun-bright
armour, of milk-white harts drawing ivory sleds, of the 'Pyra-
mides' that grace the Memphian fields. Never again, till
the coming of Keats, did the sensuous imagination that glories
in the lust of the eye and the pride of life speak in tones
so full and rich. His fancy luxuriates in the mysterious
splendours of Oriental geography, and the prospect of riding
in triumph through old-world cities, Persepolis and Damascus,
lends glow and colour to his ambition. That ambition he
sates to the full. Not only the King of Persia, but the
Emperor of the Turks, the Soldan of Egypt, and a host of
minor potentates fall before his victorious arms. Even the
deities he claims as tributaries:
'The God of War resigns his room to me,
Meaning to make me general of the world:
Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan,
Fearing my power should pull him from his throne:
Where'er I come the Fatal Sisters sweat,
And grisly death, by running to and fro,
To do their ceaseless homage to my sword.'
Thus when sickness suddenly strikes him down, he would fain
44
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
in revenge carry war against the immortals, who have ventured
to dispute his supremacy :
• What daring god torments my body thus,
And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine? ...
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven,
And set black streamers in the firmament,
To signify the slaughter of the gods.'
He seeks with scornful glance to scare away his 'slave, the
ugly monster Death,' but the 'villain' still comes stealing back,
and at last he yields, with the hard-wrung avowal that 'Tambur-
laine, the scourge of God, must die.'
Such, in essence, is Marlowe's first hero, a veritable incarnation
of the genius of the Renaissance. But the poet's imagination
flagged at times, he was encumbered by his historical data,
and, above all, he was under the necessity of keeping the
attention of his audience alert. We therefore find baser elements
mingled with 'the air and fire' of his 'raptures.' Tamburlaine
is often merely an insolent and bloodthirsty tyrant. He carries
about the conquered emperor of the Turks with his wife in
a cage, and uses him as his footstool; he yokes other of the
captive kings to his chariot, and upbraids them as 'pampered
jades of Asia' that can only draw twenty miles a day. He
flings to the spears of his horsemen the virgins of Damascus
who come to crave his clemency; he burns down the city in
which Zenocrate dies; and he even stabs one of his own sons
upon the stage, because he gives proof of cowardice ¹.
But Tamburlaine has more serious faults than these melo-
dramatic extravagances. It is absolutely without dramatic unity
or cohesion; the various scenes are only held together by the
dominating personality of the central figure, and apart from him
they would fall asunder like a pack of cards. This artistic
defect springs in great part from Marlowe's ethical point of
1 The purely farcical extravagances which disfigure the play need not be
laid to Marlowe's charge. The publisher of the printed drama states in
his preface that he has omitted some fond and frivolous gestures far
unmeet for the matter, though they were of some vain conceited fondlings
greatly gaped at, what time they were shown upon the stage in their
graced deformities.' It is thus plain that low-comedy 'gag' had been
introduced into the play by the actors, and it is highly probable that even
the revised literary version retains traces of it.
III]
45
Dr. Faustus.
view. In Richard III and Macbeth Shakspere shows the
working out of the Nemesis which attends upon an overreaching
ambition; in both plays the lines converge from the outset to
the vindication of moral law. But Marlowe's instinct, as has
been shown, is to sympathize with ambition, and no avenging
ghosts dog the footsteps of the Scythian conqueror. He simply
continues his wild career till the weapons of war fall from his
nerveless hands, and, when he lies dead, his eldest son recites
over his bier an epitaph suited to a pattern of every virtue :
'Let earth and heaven his timeless death deplore,
For both their worths will equal him no more.'
From the exploits of Tamburlaine Marlowe turned to a subject
of a very different kind, but one peculiarly suited to his genius.
The legend of the man who sells his soul to the devil dates
from the beginning of the middle ages, but during the early
part of the sixteenth century it became identified with a certain
Dr. Faustus who studied at various German universities, in-
cluding Wittenberg, where he was seen by Melanchthon. He
engaged in the practice of necromancy, and numerous legends
grew up around him, which took literary form in the Volksbuch
published by Spiess at Frankfort-on-the-Main. This work was
soon rendered into English under the title of The History of the
Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus, and
in this translation Marlowe found the materials for his drama
of Doctor Faustus. The exact date of its first performance is
uncertain, but it was probably about the year 1588, and the
hero was played by the tragedian Alleyn, who had also created
the part of Tamburlaine. The piece attained great popularity,
not only in London, but abroad, where it was acted in German
by an English company. It also went through numerous
editions in book form, of which the earliest extant is the quarto
of 1604, republished with very slight changes in 1609. There
is a later version, considerably expanded and altered, belonging
to the year 1616, and undoubtedly incorporating work by other
hands, though also possibly preserving portions of Marlowe's
original work omitted in the quarto of 1604. Thus here, as in
the case of Tamburlaine, we are entitled to recognize the broad
46
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
fact that Marlowe is not to be held accountable for all the
weaker elements in the play, as it has come down to us; but
there is no safe criterion by which we can definitely reject
particular scenes as spurious.
It is important to notice Marlowe's special treatment of his
theme. No doubt there is a truth in the statement that the
Volksbuch, Marlowe's Faustus, and Goethe's Faust all have this
point in common, that they represent love of knowledge as the
primary motive which urges the Doctor to sign his contract
with the powers of evil. But the Faust of the popular story
is a mere vulgar enchanter, while the hero of the German
masterpiece, though he covets forbidden lore, is at heart
a sceptic, who sells himself to the spirit of denial, and, under
his guidance, plunges straightway into sensual pleasures.
Marlowe's Faustus, on the other hand, has the genuine Re-
naissance passion for 'knowledge infinite,' but it is not with
him, as in the case of Browning's Paracelsus, a purely intel-
lectual yearning. He aspires to unlawful knowledge because it
is an instrument of power. This is shown clearly in the fine
opening scene where Faustus is discovered in his study. He
discusses each of the arts in turn, Logic, Physic, Law, and
Divinity; he has mastered them all, and yet they leave him
still but Faustus and a man.' He chafes at these mortal
limitations, and he seeks freedom from them in magic:
'These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly.'
These alone promise him 'a world of profit and delight,' the
command of all things that move between the quiet poles,'
a power exceeding that of kings and emperors. It is thus,
strictly speaking, the passion for omnipotence rather than
omniscience that urges Faustus to summon Mephistophilis by
incantations to his side. In bringing an infernal spirit upon
the stage Marlowe was confronted with the difficult problem of
presenting the supernatural in visible form. The crude realism
of the miracle plays was no longer possible; on the other hand,
hell had not become refined away with him, as with Goethe,
into an idea. Hence Marlowe's delineation avoids physical
III]
47
Dr. Faustus.
horrors, while retaining a vividly graphic force. His Mephis-
tophilis is not, as in the German drama, the arch-enemy himself,
but an attendant spirit, 'a servant to great Lucifer.' He is
a fallen angel, eager for the prize of a sinner's 'glorious soul,'
and yet sorrowing with a stately pathos over the bliss that he
has forfeited for ever. In his colloquy with Faustus, he perhaps,
from a dramatic point of view, does not sufficiently play the
part of devil's advocate,' but in his simple wistful answers
there rings the piercing note of a deeper than human despair
(
'Faust. Tell me what is that Lucifer thy lord?
Meph. Arch-regent and commander of all spirits.
Faust. Was not that Lucifer an angel once?
Meph. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly loved of God.
Faust. How comes it then that he is prince of devils?
Meph. Oh, by aspiring pride and insolence,
For which God threw him from the face of heaven.
Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer?
Meph. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,
Conspired against our God with Lucifer,
And are for ever damned with Lucifer.
Faust. Where are you damned?
Meph. In hell.
Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?'
But this utterance of spiritual agony leaves Faustus unmoved,
and he offers to surrender his soul to Lucifer, if he is allowed to
live four and twenty years 'in all voluptuousness,' with Mephis-
tophilis as his attendant. Here his motive seems to take a lower
and more sensual form, but he immediately afterwards reverts
to the idea of power in his declaration that by infernal aid he
will be 'great emperor of the world.'
Through this play, however, there runs the feeling, of which
there is no hint in Tamburlaine, that the satisfaction of unbridled
desire is unlawful, and the poet vividly paints the struggle in
Faustus' soul before he finally surrenders himself to the powers
of darkness. Good and evil angels whisper their counsels
to him; a voice sounds in his ears, 'abjure this magic, turn to
God again.' But the temptation is too strong, and at midnight
48
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
(
in his study, alone with Mephistophilis, Faustus seals the bond.
The scene is weirdly impressive, and the effect is heightened by
genuine dramatic touches. Faustus is bidden sign with his own
blood, but as soon as he has written a few words, it congeals,
and has to be melted on a chafer of coals brought in by
Mephistophilis. When he has finished the bill,' he is startled
at seeing on his arm the mysterious inscription, Homo, fuge,'
and Mephistophilis has to divert his thoughts with a pageant of
devils who make rich offerings to him. Assured that he too
may raise up spirits such as these, Faustus hands over his 'deed
of gift of body and soul' written in legal prose, and declaring
with all formality that on the fulfilment of certain conditions,
'I, John Faustus, of Wertemberg, Doctor, by these presents do
give both body and soul to Lucifer, Prince of the East, and his
minister Mephistophils, and furthermore grant unto them, that
twenty-four years being expired, the articles above written in-
violate, full power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus, body
and soul, flesh, blood, or goods, into their habitation whereso-
ever.' The contract thus duly executed, Faustus is bidden ask
what he will, and he returns to his old question of the where-
abouts of hell. Mephistophilis answers in the same spirit as
before:
'Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place: for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be.
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven.'
Faustus then suddenly puts his new power to a very different
proof by demanding a wife, 'the fairest maid in Germany,' and
afterwards makes other requests, all of which are granted by
Mephistophilis. Yet he cannot stifle the prickings of conscience:
the Good Angel keeps whispering 'repent' in his ear, and in an
outburst of remorse he calls upon Christ to save his soul. At
the cry Lucifer rushes in with Belzebub and Mephistophilis to
warn him that he is breaking his contract, and Faustus vows in
terror,
'Never to look to heaven,
Never to name God, or to pray to Him,
To burn His scriptures, slay His ministers.'
III]
49
Dr. Faustus.
Up to this point the plot has developed on natural and impres-
sive lines, but here it is suddenly arrested. The vulgar conjuring
tricks which Faustus performs at the courts of the Pope, the
German Emperor, and the Duke of Vanholt, are utterly out of
keeping with the dignity of the true theme of the play: even the
famous scene in which he summons up the vision of Helen of
Troy, and addresses her in words of passionate rapture, has, in
spite of its beauty, no true dramatic relevance. It would almost
seem as if the poet had husbanded his powers for the great final
situation, when the twenty-four years have run their course, and
Faustus is awaiting his doom. The prose dialogue on the fatal
eve, when the doctor's agonized outbursts move his scholars to
such touching solicitude, leads up to the highly wrought blank-
verse soliloquy of Faustus, as he is left alone with 'but one bare
hour to live.' Seldom has monologue been handled with such
tragic intensity or mounted step by step to such heights of passion
and terror. In the frenzy of despair Faustus appeals to the sun,
'to rise again and make perpetual day,' he seeks to leap up and
catch one drop' of the blood of Christ that streams in the
firmament, he calls upon the hills to hide him from the heavy
wrath of God, upon the earth to gape and harbour him. But the
minutes pass, and the clock strikes the half-hour. It is too late
to hope for mercy, all he now craves is some end to his pain:
'Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and, at last, be saved.'
And as he curses the immortality which ensures his everlasting
torment, the midnight hour strikes and the devils come for their
prey. The horrors of hell hedge him in on every side: he
gasps out broken agonized prayers for mercy:
'My God! my God! look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books! Ah, Mephistophilis.'
And with the last long-drawn sigh of a lost soul in the clutch of
its captor, Faustus is borne off to his doom.
When Goethe said of Doctor Faustus, 'how greatly it is all
planned,' he condensed much criticism into a phrase. The play
is conceived on noble lines, and the beginning and the end are
E
50
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
worthily executed, but between them there is a yawning gap.
It is thus rather a fragment than a dramatic whole, yet neverthe-
less it marks an advance upon Tamburlaine in many ways. The
verse moves with less tumultuous energy, but it is freer and
lighter, with more varied and subtle cadences. The power of
characterization has ripened, for Faustus is a more complex and
human figure than the Scythian conqueror, while Mephistophilis,
unlike any of the subordinate personages in the earlier play, has
an independent interest. In point of ethical significance there
is notable progress, for sin works out its own Nemesis, and thus
the catastrophe of the drama is in vital relation to conduct, not
utterly divorced from it, as in the case of Tamburlaine. But
perhaps the highest praise that can be given to Marlowe's
Faustus is that, while it inevitably challenges comparison with
the masterpiece of modern literature, it must always have its
unique interest, not only as an Elizabethan play, but as the
typically Renaissance rendering of the great story upon which
it is based.
Marlowe's next play, The Jew of Malta, resembles Faustus
in that it is the unequal and incomplete carrying out of a
great design. The source of the drama is unknown, and
its date cannot be accurately fixed, though it must have been
later than the death of the Duke of Guise in December, 1588,
Imentioned in the Prologue. This prologue is put into the
mouth of Machiavel,' whose spirit is supposed to brood over
the tragedy, and whose nefarious 'policy' regulates all the
actions of its leading personage. In Barabas, Marlowe found
another of the flamboyant types to which his genius was specially
drawn. The opening scene, in which the Jew is 'discovered in
his counting-house, with heaps of gold before him,' is wonderfully
effective. As Barabas fingers the glittering coins and hovers
with the rapture of a lover over his precious jewels, his 'seld-
seen costly stones'; as he follows in fancy the track of his
argosies laden with silk and spice,' avarice itself becomes
transfigured. It ceases to be a sordid vice, and swells to the
proportions of a passion for the infinite, though it be only for
'infinite riches in a little room.' We have thus in Marlowe's
Jew a vein of idealism which is wanting in the more miserly
III]
51
The Jew of Malta.
Shylock of Shakspere, of whom he is certainly in part the
progenitor¹. The laying up of treasure is, in the eyes of
Barabas, sanctified by divine benediction:
Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea,
And thus we are on every side enriched;
These are the blessings promised to the Jews,
And herein was old Abram's happiness.
What more may heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,
Making the sea their servants, and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts?'
Thus when at one blow he loses his whole wealth, which is
confiscated by the governor of Malta to pay a tribute due to
the Turks, his fortunes excite compassion, and he has our
sympathy when he contends that theft is a worse sin than
covetousness, and bitterly asks of his persecutors whether they
are 'satisfied':
'You have my goods, my money, and my wealth,
My ships, my store, and all that I enjoyed:
And, having all, you can request no more,
Unless your unrelenting flinty hearts,
Suppress all pity in your stony breasts,
And now shall move you to bereave my life.'
We even feel inclined to condone the stratagem by which he
repossesses himself of a portion of his treasure. His house has
been forfeited and turned into a nunnery, and, in order to
recover a store of wealth hidden in an upper chamber, he
induces his daughter Abigail to enter the sisterhood, and throw
out the jewels to him by night. As the money-bags come
tumbling into his arms, he cries out in confused ecstasy:
'O my girl,
My gold, my fortune, my felicity!
O girl, O gold, O beauty, O my bliss!'
The relations of Abigail to her father prelude those of Shylock
and Jessica, though Marlowe's Jewess certainly has the advantage
over Shakspere's in filial tenderness. Like Jessica she has given
her heart to a Christian lover, but Barabas craftily procures his
death at the hands of a rival, whereupon she again retires to the
1 The connexion between Barabas and Shylock is well brought out by
Elze, Essays on Shaksper e, pp. 72–79.
E 2
52
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
convent, though no longer in a spirit of hypocrisy. From this
point the play, so finely begun, suddenly degenerates into
a tissue of melodramatic villanies. The plot indeed develops
in a sufficiently ingenious way, and Barabas is skilfully made
the instrument of his own destruction. But the record of his
unnatural crimes moves no interest: all the poetic and human-
izing touches which elevate the portrait in its earlier stages
vanish, and the Jew becomes a mere stage caricature. The reason
of this strange falling off can be only matter of speculation.
The poet's genius may have faltered in its flight, or the play
may have been hastily completed for production at a given date,
or it may have been turned over to an inferior collaborator.
Whatever the cause, Marlowe just failed magnificently where
Shakspere as magnificently succeeded. Barabas in the malignity
of revenge turns to a monster, but with Shylock, revenge itself is
dignified by its triumph over the baser sin of avarice, and, for
all his cunning ferocity, he remains life-like and human to the
last. Moreover Barabas moves in a dull and colourless atmo-
sphere, among Christians and Turks little less deceitful and
covetous than himself, while the lurid gloom of Shylock's
personality deepens into sable intensity against the radiant
Renaissance environment in which it is set. If Marlowe has
come within measurable distance of creating the solitary figure
of the Jew, he has given us no hint of the complex glories of
The Merchant of Venice.
In his next work Marlowe entered upon a new field. Turning
aside from the fortunes of foreign and semi-legendary person-
ages like Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas, he went for his
materials to the national history of his own country, and selected
for dramatic treatment the tragical career of Edward II. His
authorities were the chronicles of Fabian, Stow, and Holinshed,
but he treated them in a bold and free spirit, adapting them to
his purpose with skilful tact. Thus Edward II, in the matter
of plot and construction, stands on a different level from any of
its author's previous works. Instead of being a collection
of unconnected episodes, or the tantalizingly imperfect fulfil-
ment of a great design, it is a complex and organic whole,
working up by natural stages to a singularly powerful climax. In
[11]
53
Edward II.
style also, from the dramatic point of view, it marks an advance.
The 'high astounding terms' of the earlier period have almost
entirely disappeared, though there is still a plentiful supply
of the unseasonable classical allusions which had so irresistible
a fascination for Elizabethan playwrights. Otherwise the language
is of chastened simplicity, verging at times on baldness, but full,
for the most part, of silvery charm and grace.
The measure,
as has been well said, 'that had thundered the threats of
Tamburlaine' is now made to falter the sobs of a broken
heart.' But it is above all in power of characterization that the
play shows most distinctive evidence of growth. Marlowe's
earlier dramas are each dominated by the commanding figure
of the hero, which overshadows and dwarfs the other personages,
robbing them of all interest on their own account. In Edward II
this fault is avoided, and while the King stands clearly out as
the central character, we have other well defined types in
Gaveston and Mortimer, to whom, though of inferior interest,
may be added young Spencer and the Queen. Gaveston, the
favourite, is pourtrayed with much insight and skill. He has
a Frenchman's dislike of London and its citizens, and a con-
tempt for the English nobles whom he infuriates with his oreign
fashions and airs. As Mortimer indignantly complains:
'I have not seen a dapper Jack so brisk;
He wears a short Italian hooded cloak,
Loaded with pearl, and, in his Tuscan cap,
A jewel of more value than the crown.
While others walk below, the king and he
From out a window laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.'
He craftily strengthens his hold on the King's affections by
ministering to his artistic and musical tastes, and providing him
with congenial entertainment. So successful are his devices
that Edward for his sake proves false to his duties as a ruler
and a husband. He leaves his wife to pine with grief at his
neglect of her, and offers to share his kingdom amongst the
barons if he may have some nook or corner left to frolic with
his dearest Gaveston.' The nobles and clergy compel the
favourite's banishment for a time, but he is speedily recalled,
and shows the same insolent spirit as before, bidding the
54
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
base, leaden earls' to go home and eat their tenants' beef.
They answer the taunt by rising in insurrection. Gaveston is
captured, and sentenced to die. When he is told that, as the
King's favourite, he is to have the privilege of meeting his fate
upon the block instead of on the gallows, he retorts, even in this
extremity, with characteristic insouciance:
'I thank you all, my lords; then I perceive
That heading is one, and hanging is the other,
And death is all.'
When he is gone, his place in Edward's affections is taken by
Young Spencer, who, though more slightly drawn, is skilfully
discriminated from Gaveston by a few firm and vigorous touches.
He is lacking in the aesthetic sensibilities and defiant gaiety of the
Frenchman, but he outrivals him in cynical audacity and statecraft,
and in the end he draws down upon himself a similar fate.
At the head of the barons in their conflict with the favourites
stands Mortimer, who is pourtrayed with great spirit and power.
It has been too little noticed that Mortimer is remarkably akin
to Marlowe's earlier heroes, especially Tamburlaine. The lines
of his character are. of course, toned down to suit the altered
environment, but there is the same note of lawlessly aspiring
ambition. It is he who throughout is the advocate of violent
measures, urging the lords to 'parley' only with their naked
swords.' He is eager to depose the king unless he consents
to banish Gaveston, and when the favourite on his return pro-
vokes him by his insolence, he stabs him. When taken prisoner
in an unsuccessful revolt and condemned to the Tower, his
haughty spirit chafes at such a curb upon his 'virtue that
aspires to heaven.' He escapes to France, and there gains the
love of Isabel, the Queen, with whom he returns to England.
Having overthrown Edward, he assumes royal state, and vaunts
his authority with despotic arrogance :
The prince I rule, the queen do I command,
And with a lowly congé to the ground
The proudest lords salute me as I pass;
I seal, I cancel, I do what I will.'
He even speaks of himself in the true spirit of Tamburlaine,
as one who makes fortune's wheel turn as he pleases. But he
III]
55
Edward II.
fears a popular rising on the King's behalf, and with mingled
cruelty and craft procures his removal to Berkeley Castle, and
his brutal assassination within its vaults. The crime carried
out, Mortimer feels himself safe; he stands as 'Jove's huge
tree' to whom the others are only shrubs.' But young Prince
Edward summons the peers to his side, arrests his father's
murderer, and orders him to instant execution. Mortimer meets
his fate with a haughty indifference and without a touch of
repentance or regret. He has made the most of this life, and
he looks forward with eager zest to the new possibilities that
lie beyond the grave:
'Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel
There is a point, to which when men aspire
They tumble headlong down: that point I touched,
And seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
Why should I grieve at my declining fall?
Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.'
Thus here, at the close of Marlowe's last play, the note is
struck that rings throughout his writings-the contempt for
earthly limitations and the yearning to glut human desires with
a completeness denied in this world.
Of Mortimer's partner in crime, Queen Isabel, few words
are needed. She is drawn more elaborately than any of
Marlowe's other women, yet she fails to arouse sympathetic
interest. In the earlier scenes her grief at the King's neglect
of her for Gaveston and her eagerness to win back his love
are forcibly depicted. But the transition to her unlawful passion
for Mortimer is crudely handled, and her ready consent to her
husband's destruction revolts us by its callous cruelty.
Edward II is a strangely different figure from the protagonists
of Marlowe's former plays, and his career seems an ironical
retort to Tamburlaine's exultant cry, 'Is it not brave to be a
king?' Throughout the earlier scenes of the drama he exhibits
every form of unroyal baseness. Absorbed in his infatuation
for his minions, he alienates the nobles, drives the commons
to angry discontent, and looks on listlessly while enemies
overrun his borders on every side. And to sins of weakness he
56
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
(
adds others of cruelty, for he banishes his queen from court
during the exile of Gaveston, and afterwards bloodily avenges
his death upon the peers. The one doubtful redeeming element
in his character is the constancy with which he clings to his
unworthy favourites, and this is at best the perverted virtue of
honour rooted in dishonour. It is thus only with his fall at the
end of Act IV that he begins to appeal to our sympathies, and
it is certain that the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty'
(to use Lamb's famous phrase) have never been more finely
interpreted than in the closing portions of the play. The
pathetic scene in the abbey of Neath, where Edward and his
followers take refuge among the monks, leads up to the yet
more pitiful situation in Killingworth Castle where the captive
sovereign is bidden surrender the crown. He cannot bring
himself to such an act, and the plaintive cry bursts from him:
"What are kings when regiment is gone
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?'
He pleads that he may at least be king till night, and wear
his crown till then; and in words that recall Faustus in his
agony, he bids the sun stand still for ever in heaven. But at
last he is fain to yield up the emblem of royalty, and with it he
sends a handkerchief, wet with tears and dried again with
sighs,' which may move the queen to pity. Thus through ever-
mounting stages of passion and pathos the play moves onward
to its superb climax in the last dread scene within the vaults
of Berkeley Castle. Here the dramatist's genius has achieved
its highest triumph in combining with extreme and even painful
realism that subtle poetic touch which keeps everything within.
the limits of true art. The unhappy king is seen in his
dungeon standing up to the knees in mire and puddle,' sleep-
less and starving, and with the added agony of the remembrance
of past days of love and glory :
"Tell Isabel, the queen, I looked not thus,
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleiemont.'
When Lightborn enters Edward is struck with presaging fear,
and sees his 'tragedy' written on the murderer's brows. He
[II]
57
The Massacre at Paris.
seeks to win his good will by the gift of the one jewel left to
him, and by reminding him that he is a king, though robbed of
But all is in vain, and Edward, too feeble to resist,
is barbarously done to death.
his crown.
Of the murder of the king Charles Lamb has written that it
moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern,
with which I am acquainted.' These may seem strong words
when we think of Prometheus chained to the mountain top,
or of Lear storm-tossed on the heath, but they are memorable
as coming from so clear-eyed a critic. In any case there can
be no doubt that the fifth act of Marlowe's tragedy far surpasses
the corresponding portion of Shakspere's Richard II. This is
partly due to a characteristic difference between the dramatists
in the handling of their allied themes. Shakspere's aim is to
show how Richard's weakness and sentimentality bring about
his downfall. The purpose of the play would have been de-
feated had he awakened a reaction in the unhappy king's favour
by a vivid picture of his prison sufferings and death. This, on
the contrary, is what Marlowe has done, and so persuasive
is his art that our recollection of Edward's sins is almost
effaced in the contemplation of his long-drawn agony. Here,
as always, Shakspere's moral point of view is loftier than his
forerunner's, and Richard II moreover breathes a spirit of
fervent patriotism absent in the earlier work. But in the variety
of its situations, and in closely sustained dramatic interest,
Edward II has without question the advantage over Shakspere's
play.
Marlowe wrote another historical piece, The Massacre at
Paris. Its date is unknown, but it cannot have been an early
work, as it ends with the death of Henry III of France, which
took place in 1589. The play has come down in an imperfect
form, yet even when complete it must have been its author's
weakest composition. It is chiefly interesting as an index
of contemporary English feeling upon the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew and the events which followed. In this play the
'atheist' Marlowe shows the most approved Protestant leanings
throughout, and the Roman Catholic personages, headed by
Catharine de Medici and the Duke of Guise, are drawn in the
58
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
darkest colours. The only one of them who is allowed a re-
deeming quality is Henry III, the suitor of Elizabeth, to whom
he sends salutations with his dying breath. The most power-
fully drawn character is Guise, another member of Marlowe's
lawlessly aspiring brotherhood. His temper and aims are
frankly revealed in a notable soliloquy:
"That like I best, that flies beyond my reach.
Set me to scale the high Pyramides.
And thereon set the diadem of France:
I'll either rend it with my nails to nought,
Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,
Although my downfall be the deepest hell.'
Guise closely resembles Mortimer, and in its general theme
-the struggle between a feeble throne and rebellious peers-
The Massacre at Paris is a weak anticipation or echo of
Edward II.
Of greater interest is Dido, Queen of Carthage, published in
1594, and stated on the title-page to have been written by
Marlowe and Nash. It has been conjectured that Marlowe left
the work incomplete at his death, and that it was finished by the
lesser playwright. But there is no proof of this, and, whatever
Nash's share may have been in the drama, there is no scene
that does not contain lines which must have been written by the
author of Tamburlaine and Faustus. Indeed, but for the external
evidence, we should not assign the play to two hands, as though
constructed on comparatively simple lines, it is very neat and
even in execution. While following closely the story of the
early books of the Aeneid, and even putting into the mouths of
the leading characters several Virgilian lines, the drama is
thoroughly original and merits more attention than it usually
receives, especially as it contains Marlowe's most elaborate
picture of a woman. Dido, the oriental queen, is conceived
with power and refinement, but instead of being a complex
creation, like Shakspere's Cleopatra, she is yet another of
Marlowe's embodiments of limitless desire, which in her case
takes the form of amorous passion. In the supremely difficult
task of portraying a woman who makes the advances in court-
ship, without being a mere wanton, the dramatist is not quite
[II]
59
Dido.
unsuccessful, and he of course excels in giving utterance to
Dido's ecstasy when she finds that her love is returned:
'What more than Delian music do I hear,
That calls my soul from forth his living seat,
To move unto the measures of delight?.
Heaven envious of our joys is waxen pale,
And when we whisper, then the stars fall down
To be partakers of our honey talk.'
So she declares that in her lover's looks she sees 'eternity,' and
that he can make her 'immortal with a kiss.'
When he sails
away at the call of destiny, she cries that she will follow him:
'I'll frame me wings of wax, like Icarus,
And o'er his ship will soar unto the sun,
That they may melt, and I fall in his arms.'
Despair drives her to seek her end upon the pyre, but her
suicide has nothing of the theatrical magnificence that lights up
with hectic brilliance Cleopatra's dying moments. Shakspere
surrounds the Egyptian queen with an atmosphere of voluptuous
splendour to the last, only to convince us more irresistibly of the
essential worthlessness of the purely sensuous life. Such an aim
was far from Marlowe, and his treatment of the story of Dido
illustrates vividly the contrast in ethical temper between him and
the author of Antony and Cleopatra.
Aeneas is little more than a lay figure, and is chiefly
noticeable for his account of the fall of Troy, which presents
the main difficulty of the play. His speech contains lines
which must have been written by Marlowe, but the passage
describing the murder of Priam by Pyrrhus in the presence of
Hecuba is extravagant beyond even the worst excesses of
Tamburlaine, and reads like an intentional burlesque :
At which the frantic queen leaped on his face,
And in his eyelids hanging by the nails,
A little while prolonged her husband's life.
At last the soldiers pulled her by the heels,
And swung her howling in the empty air,
Which sent an echo to the wounded king.'
Among the minor characters Iarbas, the jealous rival of Aeneas,
is drawn with some force, and the Nurse, garrulous of tongue,
and still alive to the stirrings of the tender passion, is a type
бо
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
which Shakspere was to develop. The Olympian deities are
skilfully introduced, and their action fits naturally into the plot.
The play, as befits an oriental theme, recalls Tamburlaine in the
brilliant colouring of many passages, notably Jupiter's opening
dialogue with Ganymede, and Dido's description of how she will
repair Aeneas' ships:
4
I'll give thee tackling made of riveld gold,
Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees:
Oars of massy ivory, full of holes,
Through which the water shall delight to play:
Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks,
Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves:
The masts, wherein thy swelling sails shall hang,
Hollow pyramides of silver plate:
The sails of folded lawn.'
With Dido our survey of Marlowe's dramatic works comes
to a close, as the plays, usually ascribed to Shakspere, in which
he had a share, will be more conveniently treated in a later
chapter. But a few words must be said on his narrative poem
Hero and Leander, which, though fragmentary, is one of the
most remarkable of Elizabethan compositions, and gives ample
proof that Marlowe might have achieved no less fame as
a poet than as a dramatist. Indeed the two Sestiads of Hero and
Leander, which he lived to complete, are, for sustained beauty
and consummate workmanship, the most perfect product of his
pen. The Renaissance spirit is there in its very quintessence:
it leaps and glows in every line. Its frank Paganism, its
intoxication of delight in the loveliness of earthly things,
especially, the bodies of men and women, its ardour of desire,
the desire that wakens at first sight' and that presses forward
impetuously to possession-all these find here matchless utter-
ance. The atmosphere of the poem is, of course, highly
sensuous, but the tale moves forward with such lightness and
freedom, and Marlowe's imaginative touch is so unerring, that
there is never a feeling of closeness. In this respect Hero and
Leander is incomparably superior to the Venus and Adonis,
which is oppressive in its realistically detailed study of lustful
passion. In freshness too and winding beauty of melody
Marlowe's fragment far outvies Shakspere's completed poem,
and it achieved an immediate and widespread popularity.
6
III]
61
Marlowe and Shakspere.
We are told that rowers used to sing the poet's couplets as
they plied their sculls on the Thames, and that
'Men would shun their sleep in still dark night
To meditate upon his golden lines.'
Among these men we may reckon Shakspere, through whose
mind Hero and Leander was clearly running when he quoted
one of its most notable verses in As You Like It, and apostro-
phized its author in a tone of tender recollection as 'Dead
Shepherd.'
Christopher Marlowe is one of the most fascinating figures
in our own, or indeed in any, literature. In the temple of
poetic fame the highest places are sacred to genius that has
mounted securely to its meridian splendour, to Homer, Dante,
Shakspere. But seats only lower than these, and hallowed
with perhaps richer offerings of human sympathy and love,
are granted to genius dead ere its time, cut down in the
freshness of its morning radiance. It is here that Marlowe
is to be sought, side by side with Collins and Shelley and
Keats. What the world has lost by the untimely close of
his career we cannot know; but we do know that, even had
he lived, he could never have been ‘another Shakspere.' For
nature, so lavish to him in other ways, had entirely withheld
from him the priceless gift of humour, and the faculty of
interpreting commonplace human experience. He never learnt
the secrets of a woman's heart, and he knew of no love lifted
above the level of sense. Between him and his mighty successor
there is, and there must always have been, an impassable gulf.
Marlowe is the rapturous lyrist of limitless desire, Shakspere
the majestic spokesman of inexorable moral law.
CHAPTER IV.
KYD, LYLY, AND PEELE.
THE fascination of Marlowe's genius and the enduring success
of his reform have tended to overshadow the important services
rendered to dramatic progress by some of his contemporaries,
notably by Kyd in tragedy and by Lyly and Greene in comedy.
Of no leading Elizabethan playwright do we know so little as
of THOMAS KYD, yet persistent stage-tradition during the
earlier seventeenth century testifies to his remarkable influence
and popularity¹. With the exception of Tamburlaine, no pre-
Shaksperean play excited so much enthusiasm and was at the
same time so widely ridiculed and parodied as The Spanish
Tragedy. This is the only drama which can be with certainty
ascribed to Kyd, except his paraphrase of Cornelia by the French
writer Garnier. It is possible that he wrote Soliman and Perseda,
whose theme is briefly introduced as 'a play within the play'
into The Spanish Tragedy. The First Part of Jeronimo may
also have come from his hand. It deals with the events preced-
ing the story of The Spanish Tragedy, and may have been
composed by Kyd before the more elaborate work. But this
conjectural, and there is much to be said in favour of the view
1
"
¹ It has been recently suggested with great plausibility, that the dramatist
may be identified with the Thomas Kydd, son of Francis Scrivener,' entered
at Merchant Taylors' School, October 26, 1565. In this case Nash's famous
reference in the preface to Greene's Menaphon to the shifting companions
that leave the trade of noverint whereto they were born and busie thems. Ives
with the endeavours of art,' probably alludes to Kyd, and not to Shakspere,
as has been sometimes supposed. See further on this subject Thomas Kyd
und sein Kreis, by Gregor Sarıazin, chaps. 2 and 5.
The Spanish Tragedy.
63
►
that Jeronimo is an expansion in dramatic form of the opening
narrative in The Spanish Tragedy by an anonymous playwright
anxious to make capital out of the popularity of the subject'.
To these dramas of doubtful origin we may add the old version
of Hamlet, satirically mentioned by Nash in 1589 as the work of
an author deeply read in English Seneca,' and further scoffed
at by Lodge in his Wit's Miserie, 1595. Recent criticism has
tended to fix on Kyd as the object of Nash's invective, and there
is certainly no dramatist of the period to whom a play on the
subject of the Danish prince, treated in the Senecan style, can be
so plausibly ascribed 2.
For The Spanish Tragedy, dating probably from 1587, with
revenge and madness as its main themes, anticipates in certain
aspects Shakspere's mighty work, and at the same time borrows
much of its machinery from the Roman writer. Thus it opens in
orthodox Senecan fashion with the apparition of Andrea's Ghost,
accompanied by Revenge. These two figures are supposed to
watch the development of the action throughout, and they serve as
Chorus by commenting at intervals on the situation. The place of
the classical Prologue is filled by the General who gives the Span-
ish king an account of the battle in which the Portuguese prince
Balthasar slew Don Andrea, and was afterwards taken prisoner
by Horatio, son of the Knight-marshal, Hieronimo. Balthasar,
during his captivity at the Spanish court, falls in love with
Belimperia, the betrothed of Don Andrea, but she spurns the
addresses of her lover's murderer, and transfers her affections to
Horatio, in alliance with whom she hopes to avenge Andrea's
death. The scenes between them strike a more intense note of
amorous passion than had hitherto been heard on the English
stage, and their parting interview heralds the last leave-taking of
Romeo and Juliet. For their joy is of the briefest. Belimperia's
brother Lorenzo, whose coolly methodical villainy anticipates
that of Iago, favours Balthasar's suit, and is resolved to further
it at all hazards. He employs an agent, Pedringano, to spy
'This view is ably worked out by Fischer, Zur Kunstentwicklung der
Englischen Tragödie, pp. 110-112.
2 The evidence for this is excellently worked out in Sarrazin's essay,
chap. 5.
64
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
upon his sister and her lover, and thus surprises them at night-
fall in Hieronimo's garden. Horatio is seized, hung upon
a tree, and stabbed by Lorenzo before Belimperia's eyes. Her
frantic cries for help as the villains carry her away rouse the
Marshal from his bed, and he rushes to the bower to find his
'sweet son' Horatio shamefully done to death. Solemnly he
dedicates his life to revenge for the outrage, but resolves to
dissemble his grief till he has tracked out the murderers ¹.
From this point the plot is skilfully developed. Belimperia,
whom her brother keeps in durance, contrives to send Hieronimo
a letter written with her own blood, in which she discloses the
assassins' names. The Marshal, fearing a ruse, makes inquiry
for Belimperia at her father's house, and thus arouses the sus-
picions of Lorenzo, who fears that the plot has been betrayed.
He artfully contrives that Pedringano shall slay Serberine, one
of the accomplices, and shall immediately afterwards fall into the
hands of the Watch. The cynical egotism of his soliloquy after
he has despatched his wretched dupes to their fate is in the true
spirit of Shakspere's villains:
'Better 'tis that base companions die
Than by their life to hazard our good haps;
Nor shall they live for me to fear their faith;
I'll trust myself, myself shall be my friend;
For die they shall: slaves are ordain'd to no other end.'
Yet this crafty scheme recoils upon its author. After Pedringano
has been executed for the murder of Serberine, there is found
upon him a letter to his master from which Hieronimo learns
that Lorenzo and Balthasar are, without doubt, guilty of
Horatio's death. This discovery plunges him into frenzied
agitation bordering on madness. Wellnigh hopeless of revenge
on such highly placed offenders, he bethinks him of suicide, that
he may appeal for justice to the infernal powers. In the presence
of the King he digs up the earth with his dagger, to find Horatio,
and show him with all his wounds. He wanders about at night
1 In the additions to the play by Ben Jonson in 1602, Hieronimo is
represented as straightway going mad on the discovery of Horatio's body.
This seems to me by no means an improvement, for it is psychologically
improbable, and it weakens by anticipation the effect of later scenes. In
my analysis of the play I have omitted Ben Jonson's additions.
[v]
65
The Spanish Tragedy.
with torchbearers prying in every crevice and brake, searching
in woods and waters for his murdered son. At times, as with
Hamlet, his purpose seems to evaporate in rhetorical outbursts,
and like Hamlet too he feels rebuked by the contrast between
his own inaction and the energy of a suppliant who has suffered
a wrong similar to his own..
But though swayed to and fro by imaginative ecstasies, he
never loses sight of his aim. He goes through a feigned recon-
ciliation with Lorenzo, but it is merely to disarm suspicion
before he strikes his grand blow. In the method that he adopts
he again forestalls Hamlet. In honour of the Viceroy of Por-
tugal he arranges a dramatic entertainment on the tragic subject
of Soliman and Perseda, and so apportions the parts that under
the colour of a stage-murder he can stab Balthasar to death.
Belimperia follows suit with Lorenzo, and then kills herself.
Thereupon Hieronimo explains to the horror-stricken audience
that they have witnessed a real, not a 'fabulously counterfeit'
tragedy. When threatened with torture to extract a fuller
confession, he bites out his tongue; and then with a penknife,
obtained by a ruse, he stabs Lorenzo's father, the Duke
of Castile, and finally crowns the heap of slain with his own
body. In a brief epilogue the Ghost of Andrea declares himself
appeased by the series of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts'
that have taken place before his eyes. But he is not content
with the spectacle of the guilty and the guiltless weltering in
death side by side. He lifts the curtain of the future and shows
us his friends amidst heavenly bliss, while his enemies are haled
by Revenge down to Hell, and there doomed to an 'endless
tragedy' of suffering.
This brief analysis of The Spanish Tragedy proves that in Kyd
a dramatist had arisen capable of devising a well-sustained plot.
He was not so bold an innovator as Marlowe, and his machinery
was mainly borrowed from the Senecan school. It was from it
that he drew the Ghost and the Messenger, or his equivalent;
under its influence he frequently employed orixoμveía, and put
classical quotations into the mouths of his characters. Thus
much of his verse has the monotonous rhythm distinctive of all
the plays written after the Senecan model. He lacked Marlowe's
F
66
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
sensitive ear, his joy in the roll of golden periods. But his dialogue,
at its best, has the quality of passionate directness and simplicity
essential to the highest dramatic achievement. The love-scenes,
short as they are, between Belimperia and Horatio touch a re-
sponsive chord in our hearts, and the mingled agony and rage
of Hieronimo are rendered with masterly power. In this complex
delineation of character Kyd made a notable step forward, and
he may justly claim to be the pioneer of introspective tragedy in
England. Yet the moral basis of the play is crude in the
extreme. A wild insatiable fury of revenge is the sole animating
impulse of all the chief personages, and suffices to condone every
atrocity, even the murder of the innocent Duke of Castile. But,
in spite of defects, The Spanish Tragedy is an organic creation,
and fully deserved its widespread influence. It holds a unique
place in dramatic literature, reaching back to Gorboduc, and
forward to Shakspere's early plays, probably even to Hamlet
and King Lear.
While tragedy was thus making rapid advances in the hands
of Marlowe and Kyd, comedy was being raised to a higher level
by JOHN LYLY. Born in Kent in 1554, Lyly was educated
at Magdalen College, Oxford, and afterwards came up to
London, where he wrote novels and plays, took part in the
Marprelate controversy, and made vain efforts to obtain the post
of Master of the Revels. He sprang at a bound into fame by
the publication in 1579 of Euphues, a prose romance whose
slender story is used as the thread for dissertations upon love,
friendship, and a variety of moral themes. The subject of
the book, and of its sequel, Euphues and his England, does
not immediately concern us, but its style had an effect on
all contemporary literature, including the drama. It therefore.
claims a brief examination, the more so because it has paid for
its brief spell of popularity by being made the mark for much
ignorant ridicule and caricature. 'Euphuism' in one of its
aspects was merely an exaggerated form of a prevalent tendency.
The Renaissance loved the classics not wisely but too well, and
its enthusiasm often ran into perverted channels. Thus the
habit arose of introducing in and out of season references to
IV]
67
Euphuism.
mythology and ancient history, and of quoting constantly from
Roman writers. This vice of style appears in its most flagrant
form in the Euphues, but it is combined with other more dis-
tinctive and unusual features. One of these is the habitual
balance of the sentences in two or more parisonic parts, through
a highly artificial system of antithesis and cross-alliteration.
This peculiarity did not originate entirely with Lyly; it is
employed in less elaborate form by earlier writers, especially the
Spaniard Guevara and his English translator, Lord Berners.
But the author of the Euphues raised it from a mere literary
ornament into a definite type of structure. Alliteration, which
had been the basis of the earliest English verse, was adopted by
Lyly as the basis of his new-fangled species of prose. In his
hands, as has been lately said, it was 'not a trick, but a con-
vention,' and though wearisome to modern ears, it had its
saving virtue in an age whose besetting temptation was to
carelessness of construction. No such excuse can be made
for the third, and most singular feature of Lyly's style—
his constant introduction, in the guise of similes, of an almost
entirely fictitious natural history, borrowed largely from Pliny.
He is deeply versed in the attributes of a strange flora and fauna
with which science has nothing to do, and he drags them in at
every turn in ingenious illustration of human passions and
actions. Sidney, Drayton, and Nash united in ridiculing this
amazing fashion, but it had immense vogue for a time, and we
shall have occasion to trace its influence on Lodge and Greene,
and, in a measure, on Shakspere.
The distinctive features of Euphuism all reappear in Lyly's
comedies. Excluding one or two doubtful plays, they are eight
in number, and were acted by the 'children of the Chapel' and
the children of Paul's.' Six of them were performed in the
presence of Elizabeth, and they were admirably adapted to
gratify the prevalent court tastes. These six were The Woman
in the Moon, Campaspe, Sapho and Phao, Endimion, Gallathea
and Midas. As the title show, the subjects were drawn from
mythology or classical legend, but Lyly displayed extraordinary
skill and originality in his manipulation of this traditional
material. None of these comedies has much dramatic move-
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
ment or plot, or can claim to be a play in the stricter sense.
They are graceful and ingenious exercises of fancy on a chosen
theme, and they partake of the qualities of the Masque. But
they mark an important stage in the development of comedy.
Except The Woman in the Moon, which was the earliest, and
which retained the blank verse of the classical school, all these
pieces were written in prose. Gascoigne had used prose in his
translation of Ariosto's Suppositi, but it had not hitherto been
employed in an original play. It is Lyly's distinction to have
discovered its fitness for dramatic purposes, and to have handled
it with notable success. His dialogue, it is true, often exhibits
the full-blown peculiarities of Euphuism, but these are found
chiefly in the soliloquies and other set speeches. On the stage,
too, the merits of the style, its pregnancy, finish, and precision,
go further to counterbalance its defects than in the pages of
a novel. Moreover, dramatic necessities often demanded
a swifter verbal interchange than was possible under strictly
Euphuistic conditions, and here Lyly throws off his cumbersome
panoply and thrusts right and left with nimble dexterity. The
volleys of wit between his characters are frequently exercises in
extremely thin-spun repartee, but his dialogue at its best moves
with exemplary ease and vivacity, and has a true ring of
distinction.
These court-comedies may be conveniently separated into two
groups. The Woman in the Moon, Gallathea, Campaspe, and
a pastoral written in Lyly's old age, Love's Metamorphosis, are
simply fanciful renderings of classical myths or legends, without
any secondary design. But Sapho and Phao, Endimion, and
Midas are dramatic allegories dealing under transparent fictions.
with social and political incidents of the period. Amongst the
first group Campaspe is remarkable for its polish and neatness of
workmanship. Its main story is the rivalry in love between
Alexander the Great and the painter Apelles for the fair Theban
captive Campaspe. The contrast between the man of action
and the artist foreshadows a favourite Shaksperean device, and
Alexander exhibits many of the qualities of a Theseus or
a Henry V. He is merciful to the vanquished and courteous to
his inferiors; he loves a practical joke or a sally of wit; and in
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Campaspe.
the end he magnanimously surrenders Campaspe to Apelles.
He frankly confesses that 'Alexander cannot subdue the affec-
tions of men, though he conquer their countries,' and declares
'it were a shame he should desire to command the world, if he
could not command himself.' Apelles' sudden passion for his
beautiful 'sitter' is well pourtrayed, and there is a charming
scene in the painter's studio. 'When will you finish Campaspe ?'
asks the amorous monarch. 'Never finish,' is the reply,' for
always in absolute beauty there is somewhat above art.'
Alexander borrows Apelles' pencil, but finds that he bungles
sadly in his attempts. How have I done here?' he inquires.
'Like a king,' is the diplomatic answer, to which Alexander
makes rejoinder, 'I think so: but nothing more unlike a painter.'
Apelles has musical as well as artistic gifts, and from his lips
floats one of the daintiest of Elizabethan songs, 'Cupid and
my Campaspe.' A minor plot is provided by a group of
philosophers and their servants. In bold defiance of dates,
Plato, Aristotle, Crisippus, Crates, Cleanthes, and Anaxarchus
are all included in Alexander's retinue, but they are shadowy
figures. Diogenes, on the other hand, the tub-philosopher, is
admirably drawn. His biting repartees show Lyly's dialectical
power at its best, and he would more than hold his own in
wordy warfare with Shakspere's Apemantus. On the principle
of 'like master, like man,' he is suited with a servant Manes, who
can give as good as he gets, and who as often as not bears off
the honours in a duel of abuse.
Two of the allegorical plays, Sapho and Phao and Endimion,
treat of Elizabeth's relations with Leicester. In both cases Lyly
twists the original story to make it serve his special purpose.
Phao, the ferryman of Syracuse, is endowed by Venus with
marvellous beauty, and thus wins the heart of Sapho, the princess
of the city. For long it had been said of her that she conquers
affections and sendeth love up and down upon errands,' but
Cupid at his mother's bidding transfixes her with an arrow. The
result is her passion for the handsome ferryman, which he
returns, though aware that it is 'unmeet for his birth, his for-
tune, his years.' The struggle in Sapho's breast between love
and dignity is well pourtrayed, and there is true charm in the
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scene where the princess, sick with concealed affection, sends
for Phao as a physician, and they hint at their feelings in phrases
of double meaning. Lyly uses an ingenious artifice to cut the
knot. Venus herself becomes enamoured of the youth whom
she has made so fair, and she bids Cupid strike Sapho with
a fresh arrow which will cause her to disdain Phao. This he
does, but at the same time he strikes the ferryman with an arrow
which inspires him with loathing of Venus. Thus the goddess
is crossed in her purposes, and Cupid even adopts Sapho as his
mother, and promotes her to the place of Queen of Love. Phao,
when he finds that Sapho has become indifferent to him, bids
farewell to Syracuse, though he declares his resolution, wher-
ever I wander to be as I were ever kneeling before Sapho; my
loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.'
In the Epilogue to the play Lyly hints at its underlying
meaning, to which he dares not venture to furnish a key. The
same subject is more elaborately handled in Endimion. Here
Lyly, reversing the classical story, represents Endimion as
enamoured of Cynthia, the moon-goddess. For her sake he
slights his earthly mistress, Tellus, who in revenge persuades the
witch Dipsas to charm him into a deep sleep. Tellus suffers for
her treachery by being condemned to imprisonment in a lonely
castle under the charge of Corsites. Endimion slumbers for
forty years, till his friend Eumenides learns by supernatural
means that Cynthia's kiss will waken him. The goddess visits
the sleeper and finds him grown from youth to age, but a touch
from her lips breaks the spell and rouses him from his trance.
Tellus, who has inspired her gaoler Corsites with a violent
passion, then confesses that she plotted against Endimion
because she was jealous of his love for Cynthia. But Endimion
protests against his feeling for one so exalted being given such
a name.
'The time was, madam, and is, and ever shall be, that I honoured
your highness above all the world, but to stretch it so far to call it love
I never durst. There hath none pleased mine eye but Cynthia, none.
delighted mine ears but Cynthia, none possessed my heart but Cynthia.
Such a difference hath the gods set between our states that all must be
duty, loyalty, and reverence, nothing (without it vouchsafe your highness)
be termed love,'
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Midas.
These words are exactly applicable to the relations of Leicester
and Elizabeth, which almost certainly form the groundwork of
the play, though Halpin's interpretation of details may be open
to doubt. He identifies Tellus with the Countess of Sheffield,
whom Leicester clandestinely married while he was paying
suit to Elizabeth. Endimion's sleep is his imprisonment at
Greenwich; the friendly intervention of Eumenides is that of
the Earl of Sussex; and the solution of the difficulty in Tellus'
marriage to Corsites is the union of Lady Sheffield with Sir
Edward Stafford. Besides these incidents in Elizabethan court
life, the play has a humorous underplot, of which the central
figure is Sir Tophas. He is an admirable specimen of the Miles
Gloriosus, a type which had already been introduced from the
classical stage in Roister Doister; and in his mixture of bragging
and pedantry he specially anticipates Don Armado. He at first
loudly protests his scorn of love, but soon becomes infatuated
with the witch Dipsas, and at the end, when she is found to be
married, he is paired off with her maid Bagoa. This degrading
union completes his contrast with Endimion, who remains.
unwedded because he has fixed his affections on a being above
the sphere of earth.
Midas lifts us out of the atmosphere of courtly love-compli-
cations into the region of international politics. It is the most
powerful of Lyly's comedies, and though extremely simple in
construction, it merits high praise as a piece of imaginative
satire. The story of Midas, King of Phrygia, who obtained the
fatal gift of turning all that he touched into gold, is here applied
to Philip of Spain. We see Midas debating with his advisers.
what to choose from Bacchus, and finally deciding in favour of
gold. But he soon bitterly rues the effects of his greed, and he
bursts into fierce self-reproaches in a speech which is in reality
a crushing indictment of the Spanish foreign policy, especially of
the expedition against England.
'I have written my laws in blood, and made my gods of gold. Have
I not made the sea to groan under the number of my ships and have they
not perished, that there was not two left to make a number? Have I not
thrust my subjects into a camp, like oxen into a cart; whom having made
slaves by unjust wars, I use now as slaves for all wars? . . . Why did I wish
that all might be gold I touched but that I thought all men's hearts would
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
be touched with gold; that what policy could not compass or prowess, gold
might have commanded and conquered? A bridge of gold did I mean
to make in that island where all my navy could not make a breach. Those
islands did I long to touch that I might turn them to gold and myself
to glory. But unhappy Midas, who by the same means perisheth himself
that he thought to conquer others: being now become a slave to the world,
a scorn to that petty prince, and to thyself a consumption. A petty prince,
Midas? No, a prince protected by the gods, by nature, by his own virtue,
and his subjects' obedience.'
The same theme of Philip's shortsighted ambition in seeking to
conquer Lesbos, as England is named, recurs throughout the
second half of the play, where Midas, freed from his disastrous
gift, is endowed with asses' ears for preferring Pan's music to
that of Apollo. The man who lets his perceptions of the fitness
of things be blunted by his desires is turned into a laughing-
stock, as Philip had found in the case of the Armada. There is
only one way by which he can get rid of his deformity, he
renounces for the future all aggressive aims: 'I perceive (and
yet not too late) that Lesbos will not be touched by gold, by
force it cannot: that the gods have pitched it out of the world,
as not to be controlled by any in the world.' It speaks well for
Lyly's sagacity that he should have so clearly foreseen that Spain
would be ruined by her gold-fever and lust of dominion; and
Midas is an interesting specimen of the political type of drama
which was developed later by Middleton and Massinger.
One play of Lyly, Mother Bombie, stands apart from the rest.
It is not an adaptation of a classical story, but a comedy in the
characteristic Italian manner, though the scene is supposed to
be laid at Rochester, in Lyly's native county. The plot hinges
upon an elaborate series of mistakes in identity, and of the com-
plications in wooing which thence arise. The unnaturally
symmetrical balance of the characters gives an air of artificiality
to the whole, but the construction is ingenious, and Mother
Bombie is remarkable as the first original English comedy, in the
strict sense, written in prose.
Thus both as novelist and playwright Lyly may justly
claim to be an innovator, and Shakspere is among those who
came under his widespread influence. Doubtless the Strat-
ford dramatist, with his aversion to all affectations of speech,
was keenly alive to the absurdities of Euphuism, which he
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Lyly and Shakspere.
parodies in the speech of Falstaff to Prince Hal (1 Henry IV,
ii. 4).
• •
'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.
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; for, Harry, now
do I not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not in pleasure, but in passion;
not in words only, but in woes also.'
Further evidence is supplied by As You Like It and The
Winter's Tale. These plays are founded on novels written
in Euphuistic style, but Shakspere, as will be more fully
shown, substituted a simpler diction, and replaced Lyly's 'un-
natural natural' philosophy by genuine Warwickshire country-
lore. Yet the great dramatist shows traces of his predecessor's
influence in the remarkable frequency of the allusions to
animals—sometimes of a fabulous nature—which occur in the
early plays and poems, as well as in later works like Lear and
Coriolanus. Moreover, though Shakspere mocked at the artifices
of Euphuism, he must have appreciated its incisive force, its
lucidity and refinement. These are the qualities which specially
distinguish his own colloquial prose, and when we listen to the
brilliant sallies of Falstaff or Benedick, Beatrice or Rosalind, we
should remember that they have their prelude in the witty.
dialogue of Campaspe or Endimion. Lyly too set the fashion
which Shakspere followed of introducing lyrics, as a musical
relief; and his imaginative type of comedy, with its supernatural
framework and allegorical design, pointed the way to A Mid-
summer Night's Dream and The Tempest.
GEORGE PEELE was born in Devonshire about 1552, and
like Lyly, after studying at Oxford, came up to London, where he
wrote plays and poems, and made vain efforts to secure court
patronage. His services to dramatic literature were slighter
than his conventional reputation would lead us to expect. His
first work of importance was The Arraignment of Paris, per-
formed in 1584 before the Queen by the children of the Chapel
Royal. It is written in verse, but otherwise it bears a strong
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
resemblance to Lyly's comedies, for its main motive is to turn
a classical story into a neat compliment to the sovereign. Paris
has to award the apple, the prize of beauty, to the fairest of the
three goddesses, Juno, Pallas, and Venus. His choice falls on
Venus, but her jealous rivals arraign him for injustice before
Zeus and the Olympians. He makes an eloquent defence,
which is received with favour, but on the motion of Apollo, who
holds that women should be judged by women, the final award
is referred to Diana. She solves the difficulty by assigning the
prize, not to any one of the competitors, but to the 'gracious
nymph Eliza,'
In state Queen Juno's peer, for power in arms
And virtues of the mind, Minerva's mate;
As fair and lovely as the Queen of Love,
As chaste as Dian in her chaste desires.'
The dénouement is felicitous, and Diana's eulogy on England,
'An ancient seat of kings, a second Troy,
Y-compassed round with a commodious sea,'
breathes exactly the spirit of John of Gaunt's eloquent apostrophe
in Shakspere's Richard II. The play is graceful throughout,
and, despite a few somewhat irrelevant episodes, is well con-
structed. It is written chiefly in rhyming metres, but the
speeches of Paris and of Diana before the Council of the Gods
are in flowing and agreeable, though slightly monotonous, blank
verse ¹.
Peele's patriotism found less worthy expression in a later play,
The Chronicle of Edward 1, wherein his hatred of all things
Spanish prompted him to blacken the fame of good Queen
Eleanor of Castile. Though not published till 1593, it was
acted several years previously, and almost certainly preceded
Marlowe's Edward II, to which it is immeasurably inferior.
1 A curious play, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, was attributed to
Peele by Dyce, on insufficient evidence. Its date is probably about 1584,
and it deals with the fortunes of two mediaeval heroes, who are supposed
to meet at the court of Alexander the Great. It is written almost entirely
in hyming septenars, and the verse besides lacking Peele's usual grace,
contains peculiarities of diction (e.g. the habit of adding a pronoun after
a noun, The King of Norway, he,') not found in his known works.
An analysis of the play is given in Morley's English Writers, vol. ix. 238.
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Peele's Plays.
But it was later in date than Tamburlaine, and was affected by
the revolution in dramatic style produced by the success of that
play. The rhyming couplets of The Arraignment of Paris are
discarded, and in their place we have blank verse written in
evident imitation of Marlowe's manner, and often with incongruous.
effect. The most successful lines occur in some of the earlier
speeches, which ring with a genuinely national tone. One
passage may be quoted as an apt embodiment of the spirit of
Elizabethan England, here transferred to the age of 'Longshanks':
The people of this land are men of war,
The women courteous, mild, and debonair,
Laying their lives at princes' feet
That govern with familiar majesty;
But if their sovereigns once 'gin swell with pride
Disdaining commons' love, which is the strength
And sureness of the richest commonwealth,
That prince were better live a private life
Than rule with tyranny and discontent.'
The Battle of Alcazar, printed anonymously in 1594, has the
same characteristics of style as Edward I, and is almost un-
doubtedly by Peele. Its hero is Thomas Stukeley, a Devonshire
man, whose life was a series of extraordinary adventures, ending
on an African battle field. The story is told with vigour, but
construction and character-drawing are both immature. The Old
Wives' Tale, printed in 1595, is chiefly noticeable for having
probably furnished Milton with hints for the framework of
Comus. In the Tale, amidst a variety of other disconnected
episodes, we have the adventures of two brothers seeking their
sister Delia, who has been beguiled by the enchanter Sacrapant,
and is only set free at the last through the intervention of
a ghost or spirit. Among the secondary threads of interest is
a caricature of the classical school of versifiers, especially Gabriel
Harvey, whose hexameters are quoted and ridiculed by a comic
character, Huanebango. Finally, we have from Peele's hand
a play founded on Scripture history, David and Bethsabe. It
has been called 'a curious specimen of the Miracle Play in its
most modern form,' and is noticeable as one of the few dramas
of the Renaissance period drawn from Scriptural sources. This
is Peele's most ambitious and finished work. It is written
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
throughout in blank verse, and, as its full title tells us, deals
with two incidents, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe,
With the Tragedie of Absalom. The earlier plot is handled with
tact and delicacy, and the story of Absalom's revolt is powerfully
told. But little skill is shown in connecting the two episodes,
and the play is rather a dramatized chronicle than a drama in
the stricter sense. The blank verse is facile and fluent, and is
often not without a real, though somewhat grandiose, beauty,
but it seldom varies its cadence and soon palls on the ear.
Peele's theatrical activity extended over a period of fifteen
years; he was not cut off in mid-career like Marlowe and
Greene. Yet he made less contribution than either to dramatic
advance, and he was not an originator in the same sense as
Lyly. He can scarcely be said to show the instinct of a true
master, whether in plot, portraiture, or versification. But his
versatility, his urbane and graceful treatment of his themes, his
command of imagery and language, his freedom from the
sensuous taint-all these combine to give him an honourable
place among the lieutenants, not the leaders, of Elizabethan
drama.
CHAPTER V.
ROBERT GREENE.
AMONG Shakspere's predecessors the place second to Marlowe
must be assigned to ROBERT GREENE, of whose personal
career, as typical of the Bohemianism of the times, some details
have already been given. Like Lyly, he was novelist and
playwright in one, and attained high excellence in both arts.
He himself tells us that as soon as he had taken his degree
he 'left the University and away to London, where I became
an author of plays, and a penner of Love-Pamphlets, so that
I soon grew famous in that quality.' Of his early dramatic
works, published previously to Marlowe's Tamburlaine, not one
has survived. Whether from professional jealousy, or the
more respectable motive of literary conservatism, Greene, as
has been said, had opposed with envenomed ridicule the intro-
duction of blank verse upon the stage. But the victory of the
new metre was so decisive that he found himself compelled to
follow in the fashion that his rival had set. Alphonsus, King of
Arragon, which is almost certainly the earliest of his extant
plays, is written in obvious imitation of Tamburlaine. Not only
are Marlowe's style and diction faithfully copied, even to the
almost literal reproduction of individual lines, but the whole plot
of the drama is modelled upon that of its predecessor. The
interest is supposed to centre round Alphonsus, who, like the
Scythian, rises from a lowly fortune to high estate, conquering
kingdom after kingdom, and finally overcoming the Great
Turk,' whose daughter he wins as his wife. But the play shows
few traces of power or spontaneity. It was not difficult to
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
improve upon Marlowe's extravagances, and to represent the
victorious Alphonsus making his entry with a canopy carried
over him by three lords, having over each corner a king's head
crowned.' But it was quite a different matter for Greene to
catch the real spirit of his predecessor's great creation, with
its superb poetry and pas: ion, and in this he completely failed.
His hero is a purely lay figure, whose exploits arouse scant
sympathy, and the subordinate characters are equally wooden.
There is little attempt at dramatic development of plot; we
have merely, as in Tamburlaine, a succession of scenes without
any adequate binding motive. Perhaps the most effective touch,
and one which owes nothing to Marlowe's example, is the
skilfully managed reappearance of the hero's father in the last
act, to resolve complications and bring about a happy finale.
The play exhibits a magnificent contempt for historical per-
spective, which is remarkable even in that age of jumbled
chronologies. The story is mediaeval, but it is introduced by
Venus, who acts throughout as Chorus; Medea, Mahomet, and
the Homeric seer Calchas are all pressed into the service of the
plot, and Calchas is represented as rising 'in a white surplice
and a cardinal's mitre,' while the Great Turk orders prisoners
to be led to the Marshalsea.' A similar naïveté characterizes
many of the stage directions, as for instance, 'Exit Venus; or if
you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of
the stage, and draw her up.'
Orlando Furioso is similar in its general style to Alphonsus,
and is written for the most part in equally inflated diction, but
it shows a distinct advance both in constructive power and
characterization. The plot is taken from Ariosto's epic, though
numerous additions and changes are made by the dramatist.
Angelica, the daughter of Marsillius, Emperor of Africa, is
sought in marriage by princely suitors from all parts of the
earth. In the opening scene of the play the wooers one by one
make their appeal, and Angelica, passing over mighty potentates
like the Soldan of Egypt and the King of the Isles, fixes her
choice on Orlando, the County Palatine. The foreshadowing of
a leading situation in The Merchant of Venice will be noticed,
and there can be little doubt that this episode was introduced
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Greene's Orlando Furioso.
to gratify Elizabeth, before whom (as the title page of the first
edition informs us) the play was acted. Orlando's success
inflames to furious jealousy a rival lover, Sacripant, whom it is
difficult not to regard as a conscious burlesque of Tamburlaine.
He thus sets forth his ambitious visions:
'When I come and set me down to rest,
My chair presents a throne of majesty;
And when I set my bonnet on my head,
Methinks I fit my forehead for a crown;
And when I take my truncheon in my fist,
A sceptre then comes tumbling in my thoughts:
My dreams are princely, all of diadems.'
In order to sow disunion between the two lovers Sacripant has
recourse to craft. In a grove where Orlando is wont to walk
communing of his mistress, Sacripant carves on every tree the
name of Angelica, coupled with that of Medor, one of her friends,
and hangs roundelays on the boughs, in which the latter declares
his love to the princess. The plot meets with full success, for
Orlando passing through the grove is struck with furious jealousy,
and straightway goes mad. Little art is shown in leading up
to this crisis, which occurs with a suddenness that is far from
plausible, nor is the course of Orlando's unreason impressively
depicted. Scenes that might not be wanting in a certain pathos.
and force are marred by the introduction of purely farcical inci-
dents, without any bearing on the plot, and the climax of
weakness is reached in the device by which Orlando is restored
to sanity. For this is not effected gradually through proof of
Angelica's continued love, but with sudden completeness by the
arts and potions of an enchantress Melissa, who otherwise has
no connexion with the play. An anticipation of the opening
scene in Lear may be found in the conduct of King Marsillius,
who on hearing of the charge against his daughter with im-
petuous fury banishes her from the court. Angelica bears her
wrongs with dignity and unfailing loyalty to her love, and though
only drawn in outline she may take a humble place among
Greene's charming portrait gallery of women. Her constancy
has at last its reward, for Orlando, being informed of Sacripant's
treachery by Melissa, slays him in single combat, and after
further vanquishing the peers of France, he begs Angelica's
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
pardon, which she readily grants on the plea that his madness.
was a proof of the extremity of his love. Marsillius repents of
his harshness, and in token of his contrition bestows his crown
upon Orlando, who thus wins at once a kingdom and a bride.
While Orlando Furioso thus marks an evident advance upon
Alphonsus, the two plays may be classed together as treating
mediaeval and foreign subjects in a style modelled upon that
of Marlowe. They thus differ from another group of dramas,
belonging to the more matured period of Greene's art, which
take for their theme English history and traditions, and which
are written in far purer and less ornate verse, with an inter-
mixture of really humorous prose scenes.
To this group
belong James IV, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and
George-a-Greene. There is no certain evidence to determine
the order of these three plays, of which James IV is the most
artistically rounded in design and execution. Its full title is
The Scottish History of James IV, slaine at Flodden, intermixed
with a pleasant Comedie presented by Oboram, King of Fayeries.
The main plot is skilfully drawn, and may be briefly summarized.
James of Scotland weds Dorothea, daughter of Henry VII of
England, but at the same time he conceives an unlawful passion
for Ida, daughter of the Countess of Arran, who, however, will
not listen to the suit of a married lover. The King, therefore,
on the suggestion of the villain, Ateukin, arranges to make away
with his Queen. She hears of the plot, and escapes in the
disguise of a page. But she is pursued and wounded by a hired.
French bravo, and has to remain for a time in concealment.
Her father, hearing of her supposed death, makes war upon her
husband, whereupon she leaves her hiding-place and by her
intervention reconciles them. The lady Ida has meanwhile
married an English nobleman, and thus the play has a happy
ending. The reference in the title to the death of James IV at
Flodden has no justification in the drama, and the pleasant
comedy of Oboram' only consists of a prelude and entr'acte
conversation between the king of the fairies and a cynical
Scotchman named Bohun, who is supposed to be the author
of the main story, But in thus introducing Oboram on the
stage, Greene again anticipates Shakspere.
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James IV.
The special merit of this play is the skill displayed in the
drawing of character. It has been aptly said that Greene, from
what we know of his life, is the last man from whose hand we
should have expected types of noble and chaste womanhood.
Yet such appear alike in his novels and his plays, and prominent
among them are Dorothea and Ida in James IV. The Queen,
whose love cannot be killed by her husband's infidelity and
cruelty, is a finely conceived character. When the nobles urge
her to avenge her wrongs, by summoning her father to punish
her husband, she makes a true wifely protest:
As if they kill not me who with him fight,
As if his brea t be touched, I am not wounded,
As if he wailed, my joys were not confounded;
We are one heart, though rent by hate in twain,
One soul, one essence doth our weal contain,
What then can conquer him, that kills not me?'
Her hesitation in assuming the disguise of a page, her true
womanliness showing itself when, like Rosalind, she forgets that
tears do not become a man,' her modesty in disclosing her true
sex, her frank and wholehearted forgiveness of the repentant
King all these are natural touches, making up a lifelike and
attractive picture. Equally well drawn is the high-souled Lady
Ida, akin to the heroines of Shakspere in her union of ‘rare wit,
fair face,' and resolute will. Very graceful is her comparison
between the varied show of the world and the needlework which
gives her occupation in her mother's house. We readily echo
her true lover's words when he speaks of her eye,
'In which is heaven and heavenliness,
In which the food of God is shut,
Whose powers the purest minds do glut.'
Several of the male characters are well drawn, especially the
King, whose unlawful passion, though too abrupt in its origin,
is powerfully portrayed, and the unscrupulous Ateukin, who is
really a notable villain of the Machiavellian type. His servant
Slipper is an amusing clown, and it is noticeable that he plays
a real part in the development of the plot. Thus the play
combines varied elements of interest, while the style ranges
agreeably from the rhymed couplet to blank verse or to prose.
G
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Not so powerful nor well-constructed, but in some ways even
more attractive, is Greene's other semi-historical play, Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay. It unites, though loosely, two
threads of interest, of which the one that gives the title is the
less important. It deals with the story of Friar Bacon, the
mediaeval Oxford conjurer, who outwits Friar Bungay, another
practiser of the magic art, and an arrogant German wizard,
Vandermast. But Bacon's necromancy is of a childish type, and
the scene in which he abjures it is without power. More inter-
esting than the Friar is his 'man' Miles. He has all the tricks
and doggrel snatches of the Vice, and in the end a devil comes
to take him to hell. Miles declares "'tis a place I have desired
long to see,' and having been assured it contains a 'good tippling
house where a man may have a lusty fire, a pot of good ale, and
a pair of cards,' he cheerfully goes off 'roaring' upon the devil's
back. But the real centre of interest is the story of the love
of Prince Edward (afterwards Edward I) for Margaret, the fair
maid of Fresingfield, who, however, gives her affections to
Edward's proxy wooer, the Earl of Lincoln, while the Prince
eventually accepts his father's choice of a bride in Eleanor of
Castile. Margaret of Fresingfield is another of Greene's charm-
ing miniature portraits of women.
He is successful in throwing
round the Suffolk lass a pastoral charm that has nothing of
pastoral conventionality. Prince Edward's description of her
in her dairy reminds us of Perdita, 'the queen of curds and
cream :'
Into the milk-house went I with the maid,
And there amongst the cream-bowls she did shine
As Pallas, 'mongst her princely housc-wifery.
She turned her smock over her lily arms,
And dived them into milk to run her cheese,
But whiter than the milk her crystal skin,
Checked with lines of azure, made her blush,
That art or nature durst bring for compare.'
And Prince 'Ned,' roaming about in disguise through the country
with his 'wags,' consorting with friars and dairy-maids, and
letting his own servant personate him for a time, is he not the
forerunner of Shakspeare's madcap Prince Hal? Indeed the
whole drama in its thoroughly national spirit, as in its changes
v]
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George-a-Greene.
from grave to gay, from court to street and homestead, antici-
pates Henry IV.
George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, is another story
of English country life interwoven with legendary incidents.
George-a-Greene, the hero, is keeper of the pinfolds, near
Wakefield, and is the ideal representative of all the excellences,
physical and moral, of the yeoman class. He is the stoutest
man of his arms to be found throughout the land, and is a 'true
liegeman' to his King Edward. Otherwise he is no respecter of
persons or of ranks:
'For stature he is framed
Like to the picture of stout Hercules,
And for his carriage passeth Robin Hood.
The boldest Earl or Baron of your land
That offereth scathe unto the town of Wakefield
George will arrest his pledge unto the pound.'
By his bravery and craft he quells the rebellion of the Earl of
Kendal, and sends him a prisoner unto the King, with the request
that his life may be spared. He afterwards worsts in fair fight
Robin Hood and two of his men, who have come on purpose to
try the odds with him, but on hearing the name of the foes whom
he has overthrown, he greets them with generous heartiness:
'Welcome sweet Robin, welcome, maid Marian,
And welcome you, my friends. Will you to my poor house?
You shall have wafer cakes your fill,
A piece of beef hung up since Martlemas,
Mutton, and veal.'
When the king, in reward for his valour and loyalty, offers to
endow him with lands and dub him knight, he pleads that he
may be let 'live and die a yeoman still': all he asks is that
Edward should further his suit with his true love Bettris, who has
given him her heart, but whose crabbed old father Grime frowns
upon a humble wooer. Needless to say the King's pleading is
successful, and the play ends with Edward's gracious announce-
ment that he will sup at the house of George-a-Greene.
Bettris, the heroine, forms a companion picture to Margaret.
of Fresingfield, though more slightly sketched and less idealized.
Our sympathies go out to the rural lass who rejects the advances
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of high-born swains, and flies in disguise to the house of her
lover, though she vows never to marry him without her father's
consent. Another type of feminine constancy is Jane-a-Barley,
who, in her husband's absence, resists the unlawful proposals of
the invading King of Scots, and will sooner see her boy butchered
than stain her chastity. The boy has the spirited temper of
Shakspere's children. While his schoolmaster is by he stirs not
from his book, but as soon as he is at liberty, he seizes his bow
and goes forth in quest of sport. When captured by the Scotch
King he speaks out boldly in defence of his mother's honour,
and he adjures Jane-a-Barley to let him die rather than do his.
father a wrong. Besides these incidents of rustic romance we
have diverting scenes at Bradford, where the shoemakers force
every traveller to'vail his staff,' a custom to which King Edward,
who visits the town in disguise, consents to submit. There is
also the inevitable clown in the person of George's man Jenkin,
whose drolleries are not unamusing. Thus the play is full of
varied interest. It moves with unflagging bustle and vivacity,
and it adapts to the service of Elizabethan patriotism thoroughly
racy national traditions.
In these pastoral plays Greene attains his highest level, but
his experiences of town-life have their dramatic record in the
curious work, A Looking Glasse for London and England,
written by him and Thomas Lodge. The scene is laid in
Nineveh during the reign of King Rasni, the conqueror of Jero-
boam, and a striking picture is drawn of a wanton and luxurious
Oriental Court. Rasni proclaims himself 'God upon earth,' and
being thus 'above nature's reach,' he sets her laws at defiance
by taking his sister Remilia to wife. When Remilia is struck
down by avenging lightning from heaven, he consoles himself
with an unholy passion for Alvida, Queen of Paphlagonia, who
poisons her husband with a drugged bowl of wine. The life of
the palace has its counterpart throughout the city, where biting
usury, judicial corruption, and all forms of violence and de-
bauchery are shown in full sway. These sinful scenes have
a witness in 'Oseas the prophet,' who 'is brought in by an angel
and let down over the stage in a throne.' He takes no part in
the dialogue, but acts as a kind of Chorus, noting the iniquities
VI.]
85
A Looking Glasse for London.
of Nineveh, and, with characteristic contempt for chronology,
pointing their moral to Elizabethan London:
'London, look on, this matter nips thee near,
Leave off thy riot, pride, and sumptuous cheer;
Spend less at board, and spare not at the door,
But aid the infant, and relieve the poor,
Else seeking mercy, being merciless,
Thou be adjudged to endless heaviness.'
Later in the play another prophet, 'Jonas,' appears at Nineveh
to preach repentance, and his exhortations are of such force
that all wrong-doers, from the King downwards, forsake their
evil courses and turn again into the path of righteousness.
London is solemnly warned to act in like manner, and the play
closes with a deft though extravagant compliment to Elizabeth,
whose virtues alone are said to delay the impending doom :
"O proud adulterous glory of the West,
Thy neighbours burn, yet dost thou fear no fire;
Thy preachers cry, yet dost thou stop thine ears;
Thy larum rings, yet sleepest thou secure.
London, awake, for fear the Lord do frown.
I set a looking glass before thine eyes,
O turn, O turn with weeping to the Lord,
And think the prayers and virtues of thy Queen,
Defers the plague which otherwise would fall.'
Many of the blank-verse passages are overloaded with imagery,
and there is the usual tasteless profusion of classical references,
but at times we have a sweet and silvery rhythm. The prose
scenes depicting the evils of usury and of judicial extortion are
written with graphic realism; the satire and the pathos both
ring true, and the characterization, so far as it goes, is vigorous
and firm.
As with Marlowe, so with Greene. He was cut down in the
fullness of his powers, and his name goes to swell the piteous
company of 'famous poets in their misery dead.' Of him, as of
his fellow, though for very different reasons, it may be con-
fidently said that even with a larger grace of years, he could
never have rivalled Shakspere. His genius had no massive
strength, no rich depths of thought and imagination. It could
not rise to the full height of the tragic argument, nor move the
springs of supreme passion and pity. Yet Greene has a claim
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to the title of Shakspere's predecessor' in a very special sense.
His art, though bounded in its range, is fundamentally akin to
that of the mightiest of the Elizabethans. It was he who, first
among our Renaissance dramatists, succeeded in vitally connect-
ing scenes of genuine comedy with the serious elements in his
plays. He thus gave a practical answer to the criticisms of
Sidney, and he set a precedent which, followed and infinitely
bettered by Shakspere, has become consecrated to all time.
Connected with this is his skill, which Lyly shared, in blend-
ing together different plots, as in Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay, and George-a-Greene. Here too the greater dramatist
trod in the same path with a far surer step, and the result is seen
in the complex structures of The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado
About Nothing, and King Lear. Greene's instincts as a novelist
clung to him even in his work for the stage, and the plots which
he so skilfully handled have rather the interest of a tale or
romance than of a complicated dramatic intrigue. He thus
greatly developed that species of comedy, of which Shakspere's
As You Like It is perhaps the most perfect specimen, in which
the story ambles along leisurely without momentous crises, and
where incident is less important than dialogue and characteriza-
tion. It was natural that in plays written by a novelist love
should be a leading feature, and we have seen with what purity
and delicacy of touch Greene treated the passion throughout.
It never falls with him to the sensuous level, and it is in exquisite
keeping with his noble conception of womanhood. All of
Greene's ideal women,' it has been well said, 'have a family
likeness. In their love there is neither passion nor egotism.
They love ideally. Their devotion is an uninterrupted self-
sacrifice.' It is perhaps the highest of all his distinctions that
his maidens and matrons have not only this family likeness,
but may claim a kinship, real though remote, with the glorious
sisterhood of which Portia and Rosalind, Hermione and Imogen
are members. Thus just where Marlowe's genius withers,
Greene's puts forth its finest flower. The difference is largely
due to moral contrast. By no art could Marlowe, out of
a multitude of insurgent desires, create a woman breathing
thoughtful breath.' But Greene had not to attempt so hopeless.
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Greene and Shakspere.
a task. In his dramas there is no glorification of passion,
ambitious or amorous, save when subdued to the service of
a higher law: self-sacrifice, purity, loyalty of soul unshaken by
danger or temptation, are with him the things above price. His
moral outlook is incomparably less wide and searching than that
of Shakspere, but the focus is essentially the same.
There is yet another point in which Greene has remarkable
affinity to his great successor. His best plays breathe a
thoroughly national spirit, and they are instinct with love of
English traditions, English virtues, and English familiar scenes.
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and George-a-Greene set before
us pictures of country life as natural and attractive as any in
Love's Labour's Lost or The Merry Wives of Windsor. A pure
and fragrant air ripples through their pages, blowing from over
homestead, and meadow, and stream. Here too we meet with
members of every social class, prince and peasant, earl and
shoemaker, philosopher and clown, all mixing in easy familiarity.
So it is in the world of Shakspere, where rank is never the
measure of merit, and where the ideal ruler wandering in disguise
among his soldiers declares to them that the King is but a man as
other men, with like senses and conditions. But Greene in his
popular sympathies goes further than Shakspere, who can never
be strictly called democratic, and of whose heroes and heroines
not one is taken from humble life. The portrait gallery of the
greater dramatist, wide and varied as it is, contains no such
figures as Margaret of Fresingfield or the Pinner of Wakefield.
The village maid, who is really what she seems, not, like Perdita,
a princess in disguise, and who yet may be worthy of an Earl's
love; the yeoman, with the sturdy independence of his class
united to genuine loyalty and ardour of heart-these are not
types over which Shakspere lingers lovingly. For them we are
indebted to Greene, who thus takes his place on the long list of
our writers headed by Langland, and numbering Burns, Crabbe,
and Wordsworth among its foremost names, who have found
their truest inspiration in the joys and sorrows of the poor.
Finally, we must reckon his services to poetic style in freeing the
verse of the stage from pedantry and overloaded diction, and
thereby, in Ward's apt phrase, helping 'to wing the feet of the
88
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
English dramatic muse.' Marlowe, Kyd, and Lyly surpass him
in the originality of their genius, yet in temper and method he
may claim a nearer kinship than any of them to the poet of
Stratford, whose early successes caused him death-bed pangs of
jealousy. Would not those pangs have been still bitterer could
he have foreseen that posterity, with something of uncritical and
ungenerous partiality, was to ratify so completely the 'upstart
crow's' conceit of being the only Shake-scene in the country'?
CHAPTER VI.
SHAKSPERE AT STRATFORD.
BROWNING, in his well-known poem At the Mermaid pro-
nounces judgement, in picturesque and forcible fashion, upon
a question which is raised at the very threshold of any inquiry
into Shakspere's career. The great dramatist is represented
as 'taking his ease at his inn' with Ben Jonson and other
kindred wits, and protesting to them, while the sherris goes
round, that his plays are no index to his real self.
'Here's my work does work discover
What was rest from work-my life?
Did I live man's hater, lover?
Leave the world at peace, at strife?
Blank of such a record, truly,
Here's the work I hand, this scroll,
Yours to take or leave: as duly
Mine remains the unproffered soul.'
Does the speaker in Browning's poem say truth? Is the
man, William Shakspere, something entirely apart from and
outside of his plays? Are they really 'blank' of any 'record' of
his life? Is the pursuit of his personality through their pages
only a wild-goose chase, from which every self-respecting student
will hold aloof? To these momentous questions diametrically
opposite answers have been given. Browning's view is strongly
upheld by Halliwell-Phillipps, who asserts that 'determined care'
must be taken to avoid the temptation of endeavouring to
illustrate [Shakspere's] history by his writings, or to decipher
his character and sensibilities through their media.' Dowden,
on the other hand, declares that if we could watch [Shak-
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
spere's] writings closely, and observe their growth, the laws of
that growth would be referable to the nature of the man, and to
the nature of his environment. And we might even be able
to refer to one and the other of these two factors producing
a common resultant, that which is specially due to each. For-
tunately the succession of Shakspere's writings is sufficiently
ascertained to enable us to study the main features of the
growth of Shakspere as an artist and as a man.'
Between these conflicting views there opens a via media,
possibly less attractive but more secure.
The denial of any
discoverable relationship between Shakspere's plays and his
life is unconvincing, when pushed to extremes. No writer,
be he dramatist or not, can cut himself entirely adrift from the
general influences of his age, and from his special personal ex-
periences. It is wholly inconceivable that his works should
not reveal something of his individuality, or that changes in
their general tone should be quite uncoloured by his own vicis-
situdes of mind and fortune. Thus it is obvious that comedies
like Love's Labour's Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor
contain reminiscences of country society and surroundings such
as would have been under the poet's eyes during his early days
in Stratford. Again, the remarkable difference between the
comedies written during the closing years of the sixteenth
century and the tragedies which belong to the first decade of
the seventeenth, suggests that Shakspere had at this period gone
through some bitter affliction of soul, and it will be shown that
there is strong confirmatory evidence of this. Or, once again,
the general political principles that underlie the whole group of
historical plays, the ardent patriotism, the zeal for monarchy
when worthily represented, the conservative distrust of violent
social change, the undisguised contempt for demagogues and
their dupes-all these are not only what we should naturally
expect in an Elizabethan citizen ancestrally connected with the
higher yeoman class, and brought in his professional capacity
into connexion with the Court, but they are further in complete
accordance with Sh.kspere's ambition to become a landowner,
as clearly evidenced by his repeated purchases of property at
Stratford. It is not too much to say that only literary partisan-
VI]
91
Shakspere's Biography.
ship can overlook the significance of these and, similar points.
of contact between Shakspere's writings and his personal
career. But are we, therefore, warranted in going further,
and endeavouring, by a combination of references from the
plays with our comparatively slight knowledge of the external.
facts of the dramatist's life, to recreate the history of his develop-
ment both as an artist and a man? Such attempts have an
abiding fascination, and when undertaken with scholarly judge-
ment they attain to results that certainly express a measure of
truth. But when so much has ungrudgingly been admitted, the
broad fact remains that these endeavours to reconstruct the poet's
biography from a mixture of external and internal evidence
must always be unsatisfactory. The links between the two sets
of data are so few and fragmentary that it is impossible to piece
them together in a consistent whole. Thus to say that the
man William Shakspere, the native of Stratford, the actor and
playwright, the purchaser of New Place, passed successively in
his own mental history through the experiences of a Romeo,
a Hamlet, and a Timon, may be quite conceivably true, but
in the comparative dearth of facts to throw light on such changes
of mood, a statement of the kind is of little service to the poet's
biography. Shakspere has left us no prose pamphlets like those
of Greene, giving a key to his inner history. Indeed, any reference
to the earlier dramatist should serve as a caution against hasty
deductions from Shakspere's works to his life. To judge from
the purity of Greene's plays and novels, and their delight in
innocent country joys, no one would take their author to have
been a debauchee of the Town, and there may well have been
similar points of antithesis between the writings and the per-
sonal career of his great successor.
It thus seems advisable, while recognizing the interest and
relative value of the alternative method, to state what is known
about William Shakspere, apart from any evidence that his
plays may be supposed to furnish. Exception may, however,
be made of a few passages which are introduced without any
special dramatic propriety, and which appear to have some
personal application. It is evident also that the plays must •
throw light on the poet's reading and general culture. The
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
authorities which remain for biographical purposes are
contemporary notices, later tradition embodied in various
'lives,' legal and other documents still extant bearing upon
his career, and, finally, his non-dramatic writings. The value
of the first and third groups of evidence is obvious: that
of the fourth will be discussed below. It therefore only
remains to say a few words upon those early memorials of
Shakspere's career which have formed the basis of all suc-
ceeding biographies. First in date come some entries in
a note-book of the Rev. J. Ward, who was appointed vicar of
Stratford-on-Avon in 1662, and who was thus in a position to
know the local traditions current in the poet's native town within
a comparatively recent period after his death. Less trust is to
be given to a narrative compiled about the same time by another
antiquary, John Aubrey, who visited Stratford, and left a some-
what gossipping account of what he heard, though he can scarcely
have been mistaken as to main facts. A further record of local
belief has been handed down by a traveller who made a pilgrim-
age to Stratford Church in 1693, and drew what information he
could from William Castle, the parish clerk and sexton. But
the first attempt at a detailed biography dates from the early
years of the eighteenth century. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe pub-
lished a life of the poet, the materials for which were contributed
chiefly by Betterton, the celebrated Restoration actor. 'I must
own,' says Rowe, a particular obligation to him for the most
considerable part of the passages relating to his life which
I have here transmitted to the public, his veneration for the
memory of Shakspere having engaged him to gather up what
remains he could of a name for which he had so great value.'
Thus Rowe's account claims to be based on special inquiry, and
though the accuracy of many of its statements has often been
questioned, it bears upon it intrinsic evidence of good faith, and
in several points it has been strikingly verified by modern
research. In the acceptance of tradition scepticism may be
pushed to a point where it is little less of a historical vice than
uncritical credulity, and because some of Rowe's anecdotes are
picturesque they are not therefore necessarily untrue. In any
case, for long afterwards, extremely little was added to the
VI]
93
Stratford-on-Avon.
scanty memorials of Shakspere's career, and, though during the
present century heroic efforts have been made to fill up the gaps
in our knowledge, yet their success has lain more in shedding
fresh light upon the state of the Elizabethan stage, and of society
in Stratford and London, than in substantially increasing our
information about the poet's personal history. This is indeed
a matter of rejoicing to the school of critics, with whom an
interest in Shakspere's private life ranks merely as an undesirable
form of inquisitiveness. Against such a view it is impossible to
argue: the all-sufficient answer is Honi soit qui mal y pense.
The majority of students will feel guilty of no irreverence in
their regret that so many secrets of the career of the greatest of
Erglishmen are drowned, like Prospero's book, 'deeper than did
ever plummet sound.'
He
Even the exact date of William Shakspere's¹ birth is uncer-
tain, but we know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564.
was the eldest son of John Shakspere, whose father was a farmer
of Snitterfield, a small Warwickshire village, but who had left
his home some time before 1552, and had settled in the ancient
and thriving borough of Stratford-on-Avon. The history of the
town is in itself of great interest, and some slight acquaintance
with its main features is essential to a thorough understanding
of the conditions among which the early life of the dramatist
was passed. Its origin dates probably as far back as 691,
when Ethelred, king of Mercia, granted the monastery of Strat-
ford with three thousand acres of adjacent land to the Bishop of
Worcester. This gift was confirmed by subsequent rulers in
781 and 845. Of the monastery nothing is afterwards heard,
but the township thus grew up in dependence on the midland
see, and became one of its most valuable manors, under which
head it is set down in the Domesday Survey. All the inhabitants
¹ On the spelling and pronunciation of the dramatist's name see Elze's
William Shakspere, Appendix I.
Of the two forms which can claim
authority, 'Shakspere' and 'Shakespeare,' I have chosen the former, as
the one used most frequently by the dramatist in the only unquestionably
genuine signatures of his that have come down to us, the three on his will
and the two on his Blackfriars conveyance and mortgage of 1613.
2 For the main facts in this and the following paragraph I am indebted to
Mr. Sidney Lee's Stratford-on-Avon from the earliest times till the dialk
of Shakspere.
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
were under the jurisdiction of the Bishop's steward, and were in
a condition of virtual villeinage, though this did not imply very
special material hardship. Their occupations were chiefly agri-
cultural, but by the close of the twelfth century various industries,
such as weaving and tanning, had sprung into existence, and
a weekly market had been instituted, while a little later leave
was obtained for a series of annual fairs. With this commercial
advance came an increase of independence, as traders were
allowed to commute their dues for a fixed payment, and thus
acquire the burgage tenure of land, with which went the title of
burgess. The purely agricultural members of the community
also gradually rose from the state of villeinage, and by the time
of Edward III, they had become for the most part freeholders.
From this class, about the middle of the fourteenth century,
sprang several men who attained to the highest places in Church
and State, and who so far anticipated Shakspere in that they
rose from humble origin at Stratford to distinguished eminence
in the outer world. Of these mediaeval notabilities the most
important is John of Stratford, who was Archbishop of Canter-
bury and Lord Chancellor during the early years of Edward III's
reign, and who showed himself a notable benefactor to his native
place. He enlarged and beautified the ancient parish church
by the river-side, adding to it several chapels, and founding
a chantry of five priests, which he richly endowed, and for
which he purchased the patronage of the living from the see of
Worcester. His nephew Ralph, afterwards Bishop of London,
built for these priests a 'house of square stone adjoining to the
church-yard,' which came to be known as the College of Strat-
ford. The warden of this college in the time of Edward IV,
a Dr. Balsall, added ‘a fair and beautiful choir' at his own
cost, and one of his successors, Ralph Collingwood, besides
making improvements in the edifice of the church, appointed
'four children choristers to be daily assistants in the celebration
of divine service,' and set aside lands for their support. Thus
the church attained its full splendour, but the period of its enjoy-
ment thereof was brief. The Reformation was at hand, and
with it came Cromwell's visitation of the Monasteries in 1535,
The Commissioners on their rounds did not overlook Stratford,
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The Guild of the Holy Cross.
and as the result of their investigations the chantry was shorn
of a considerable portion of its revenues. The priests were,
however, allowed to reside within the college till 1547, when all
chantries were suppressed. For some years the building was
unoccupied, but it was afterwards leased out to laymen, and in
Shakspere's time was tenanted by John Combe, a wealthy citizen
of the town. Thus the parish church, when the future dramatist
was brought to be christened at its font, had been stripped of its
stately surroundings and ceremonial, but the fabric itself still
stood, as it stands at this day, to link together the centuries of
Stratford life, and to whisper in the ear of the Renaissance poet
something of the last enchantments of the Middle Age.'
There was another bond between mediaeval and Elizabethan
Stratford, whose connexion with Shakspere's family history was
more intimate. The gradual progress of the town to indepen-
dence was greatly furthered by the rise of the Guild of the
Holy Cross. This institution dates at least as far back as
the twelfth century, and was originally, as its name implies, of
a religious character, the members being bound to aid one
another in the performance of certain rites, and to afford mutual
relief on numerous occasions. The affairs of the guild were
managed by its own elected officers-a warden, aldermen, and
a common council. As the wealthier members bequeathed to
it a portion of their property at death, it soon became rich in
houses and lands. By the time of Edward I it already possessed
a chapel and almshouses, and Edward III granted it a charter
confirming its right to all its possessions and to the full control
of its own business. It soon acquired considerable powers of
civil jurisdiction and administration, and thus helped to release the
burgesses from their old dependence on the Bishop's steward.
One of its most important acts in the fifteenth century was to
found a free grammar school for the children of the members.
But the Reformation dealt quite as hardly with the guild as with
the parish church. In 1547 the ancient organization was
dissolved by the king's commissioners, and its property went to
swell the royal treasury. In the same year the lordship of the
manor was transferred from the Bishop of Worcester to the
Duke of Northumberland, who was too much occupied with
96
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
affairs of State to attend to the exercise of such rights over the
district as still remained to him. Thus the town was left for
some years without any responsible government, but in June,
1553, on the application of the leading inhabitants, Edward VI
granted a charter, reviving the ancient guild under the form of
a municipal corporation, with only a slight change in the name
of some of the officers. The warden was transformed into the
bailiff, the aldermen retained their own title, the common council
met as before, in the guildhall, though with the addition of
ten 'capital burgesses,' and its edicts now governed the whole
town, and penetrated into every department of social life. The
estates of the guild became corporate property, and the
school, chapel, and almshouses were turned into institutions of
the borough. Thus the mediaeval municipal life was per-
petuated without any real break, and the poet in his boyhood
grew up under its shelter, and had every opportunity of familiar-
izing himself with its most intimate details.
In the surrounding district the continuity of the national
existence was equally manifest. Warwickshire, 'the heart of
England,' as Drayton named his own and Shakspere's native
county, abounded in memorials of the past. Conquerors and
settlers, from the dawn of history, had left their mark deep
upon its soil. It was here, in the very centre of the island,
that the two great Roman roads, Watling Street and the Fosse
Way, intersected, and near the point of junction remains of
military stations still recalled the period of imperial sway. The
names of prominent natural features, such as Avon and Arden,
bore witness to the permanence of Celtic influences in a dis-
trict where the Anglo-Saxon conquest had resulted rather in
a fusion of races than in the extermination of the original
inhabitants. Here at a later date the boundary line had run
between the kingdom of Wessex and the territory carved out
to the north-east by the Danish sword. The Norman invaders
had found in Warwickshire a district peculiarly suited to the
exercise of the feudal system of land-tenure. The river Avon
divided the county into two regions, Arden to the north, and
Feldon to the South. The former was a densely-wooded belt
of territory where the forest-laws were applied in their full
VI]
97
Warwickshire Traditions.
rigour, while Feldon was, for the most part, an open plateau
'with champains riched, with plenteous rivers and wide-skirted
meads.' This was an ideal neighbourhood for manorial
demesnes, and from the castles and parks of Warwickshire
came forth many of the leaders in the great mediaeval struggles.
Simon de Montfort, the head of the constitutional party in the
Barons' war of the thirteenth century, was the lord of Kenil
worth, and it was at Evesham that the contest was finally
decided. In the Wars of the Roses the mighty Earl of Warwick,
'the kingmaker,' had been for long the central figure of the
struggle; the midland shire had been the scene of incessant
march and countermarch by the rival houses, and the climax
of the strife occurred within its borders on Bosworth Field. It
is significant that in the patent of arms granted to Shakspere's
father mention is made of an ancestor who had fought for
Henry VII in the battle which set the house of Tudor upon
the throne.
Thus in Warwickshire every feature of the landscape was
eloquent of the past, from the grey vistas of a pre-historic era
to the gorgeous panorama of the age of chivalry. Yet the
floating mass of poetic material had never yet crystallized into
higher literary forms. Warwickshire had given birth to no
prominent verse-writer during the middle-English period, though,
not far to the west, Layamon, on the banks of the Severn,
had gathered into his epic Saxon, Celtic, and Norman elements,
and Langland, in the following century, had written his great
allegory under the shadow of the Malvern hills. Yet though
it lacked its vates sacer the midland district had been far from
wholly inarticulate. It was one of the chosen fields of the
middle-English ballad poetry, and among the popular heroes
canonized by this homely species of verse, Guy of Warwick
holds a foremost place. The Robin Hood cycle of legends
originated further to the north; but they, with the kindred tales
of Clym o' the Clough and William of Cloudesley, were rapidly
acclimatized in the congenial atmosphere of Arden and its
surroundings. Rustic festivals and pageants kept alive an
untutored spirit of poetry among the country-folk, and, above
all, as we have seen, in the ancient town of Coventry the popu-
H
98
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
lar drama of the Middle Ages had found a favourite abode, whose
fame reached far and wide.
Such was the condition of Stratford and its neighbourhood
about the time that John Shakspere settled in the town at
a house in Henley Street, and began business as a glover¹. He
must have been fairly successful, as he was able in 1556 to buy
two small freehold estates, though he did not make any change
of residence. But in the following year his fortunes took a rapid
advance through his marriage with Mary Arden, the youngest
daughter of a wealthy proprietor of Wilmecote who had died
a few months previously. The Ardens were an ancient and
distinguished Warwickshire family, which furnished during the
reign of Elizabeth several martyrs to the Roman Catholic cause.
Robert Arden, Mary's father, in addition to his Wilmecote
estate, known as Ashbies, and consisting of a house with nearly
sixty acres of land, owned a considerable property at Snitter-
field, part of which was leased to the Shakspere family. It was
probably this connexion that prepared the way for a match in
which all the material advantages seem to have been on the side
of the Stratford tradesman, for Mary Arden had inherited, under
the terms of her father's will, Ashbies in immediate possession,
and the reversion of a large portion of the estate at Snitterfield.
That the union had at once an advantageous effect upon John
Shakspere's position is evident from his election within the same
year as a 'capital' burgess on the Town Council, and as an
ale-taster, for the supervision of malt liquors and of bread.
From this time forward his rise to municipal honours was rapid
and unbroken. In 1558 he was appointed one of the constables
to direct the watch; in 1559 and 1561 he was an 'affeeror'
for the assessment of fines; in the latter year he was elected
chamberlain, an office which he held till 1564, presenting annu-
ally the municipal accounts, though he was unable to write his
own name, and could only sign with the glover's trade-mark.
In 1565 he rose to the rank of alderman, and, at Michaelmas,
1568, attained to the highest dignity that the Corporation could
bestow, by becoming bailiff. In 1571 he acquired the further
distinction of chief alderman.
¹ See, however, Elze, p. 19 (English translation).
Vi]
99
Shakspere at School.
At this date his eldest son was in his seventh year, the age at
which boys, who had learnt to read, were allowed to enter the
Free Grammar School of the town. That William Shakspere
received his early education there is practically certain, not only
from the testimony of Rowe, but from the fact that his father, as
a municipal dignitary, would naturally have sent his son to an
institution so closely linked with the history of the corporation.
The nature and degree of the learning which young Will
Shakspere acquired at the Grammar School have been matters
of endless discussion. His classical attainments, in particular,
have given rise to acrimonious debate, one set of critics,
like Farmer and Douce in the eighteenth century, striving to
show his complete ignorance of ancient languages, while another
rival band has as eagerly done battle on behalf of his 'scholar-
ship.' The controversy may really be said to take its origin
from the famous line in Jonson's memorial verses on his 'beloved
master,' in which, without a touch of disparagement, as the con-
text shows, he speaks of Shakspere as having had 'small Latin
and less Greek.' But considering Jonson's own encyclopaedic
erudition, the epithet 'small' may be only a relative term, and
may be quite compatible with fair classical proficiency. Fresh
light has recently been thrown upon the subject by increased
familiarity with the nature of the grammar-school curriculum in
Shakspere's time. Two educational reformers of the early
seventeenth century, John Brinsley and Charles Hoole, have
left important pamphlets which describe in detail the course of
studies in an Elizabethan grammar school. On this basis
Spencer Baynes has reconstructed Shakspere's probable school
career. In his first year he would be occupied with Latin
accidence, for which Lily's grammar was the usual text-book.
In his second year he would make further advance in grammar,
and be drilled in some manual of short phrases, like the Senten-
tiae Pueriles. In his third year he would take up Cato's
Maxims and Aesop's Fables; in his fourth he would begin Ovid
and Cicero and the mediaeval pastoral poet Mantuanus, whose
writings had a wide-spread popularity. In his fifth and sixth
years he would read parts of Virgil, Horace, Terence, Plautus,
and the Satirists.
H 2
100
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
If we turn to Love's Labour's Lost and The Merry Wives
of Windsor we shall find conclusive proof that Shakspere had
reached at least the standard of classical attainment expected
from grammar-school boys in their fourth year. In The Merry
Wives Sir Hugh Evans, the curate, puts little Will Page through
his accidence, and warns him that if he forgets his quies,
quaes, and quods' he 'must be preeches.' Holofernes, the
schoolmaster of Love's Labour's Lost, interlards his conversation
with scraps of Latin, and holds dialogues in the same language
with Sir Nathaniel, which are extracts from Lily's grammar
or from the Sententiae Pueriles. We have here evident reminis-
cences of the teaching in the school-room at Stratford, and the
same is probably the case with Holofernes' attempts to recall his
Horace, and his quotation of the hackneyed line, 'Fauste, precor,
gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra,' which begins the first
eclogue of 'good old Mantuan.' The pedant's criticism of
Biron's love-letter, with its technical distinction between 'inven-
tion' and 'imitation,' and its reference to Ovid as the pattern
poet, is an echo doubtless of the strictures which Shakspere him-
self had heard passed upon his own youthful attempts at Latin
verse. Here are only numbers ratified; but, for the elegancy,
facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret. Ovidius Naso
was the man and why, indeed, Naso, but for smelling out the
odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention! Imitari
is nothing.' The qualities here attributed to Ovid's verse, are,
as a matter of fact, those which specially distinguish it, and
Shakspere in his early days doubtless felt the spell of the
Augustan lyrist whose Muse strikes often so strangely modern
a note. A comparison of the Venus and Adonis, and the
Lucrece, with passages in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti,
brings out such striking points of resemblance, often in minute
detail, that Shakspere's debt to Ovid can scarcely be doubted¹.
¹ See Spencer Baynes' essay, What Shakspere learnt at School (Shakspere
Studies). Baynes, however, appeals to illegitimate testimony in favour of
the dramatist's familiarity with Ovid, when he quotes from plays like Titus
Andronicus, Henry VI, and The Taming of the Shrew, whose authorship
is partly doubtful. His argument from Holofernes' peculiar use of the
word 'intellect' in Love's Labour's Lost that Shakspere had been trained in
the art of rhetoric is extremely ingenious.
VI]
Shakspere's Classical Knowledge.
ΙΟΙ
On the other hand he shows little knowledge of the Roman
historians, for his classical plots are drawn from translations,
like North's version of Plutarch's Lives, or from mediaeval
settings of old-world legends. And it is quite evident that he
was completely ignorant of the antiquities of Greek and Roman
life, for his classical characters all appear in the attire, and adopt
the manners and customs of his own day. There are not many
allusions in his works to the Latin dramatists, though we are told
of the 'cry of players' in Hamlet that for them 'Seneca cannot
be too heavy nor Plautus too light.' Shakspere, if he com-
pleted the normal course of study at the grammar school,
would probably have read selections from these writers in
the original. But, in any case, their dramas were accessible
to him in translations, though the Menaechmi of Plautus, upon
which The Comedy of Errors is based, had not, as far as we
know, been rendered into English till after the production of
Shakspere's play.
Greek was not included in the ordinary grammar-school
curriculum, but Jonson seems to credit Shakspere with a know-
ledge of its rudiments, and without this he could scarcely have
made such curiously felicitous use of proper names taken from
that language. Ophelia has a bitterly ironical significance when
applied to the most helpless of heroines, and Desdemona is in
truth the most ill-starred of brides ¹. It is noticeable that
Shakspere is fond of references to the familiar tenets of several
Hellenic philosophers, especially Pythagoras and Epicurus, but
this is far from implying familiarity with their writings in the
original. There are critics who regard the whole question of
the dramatist's classical knowledge as trivial, but everything
depends on the spirit in which it is approached. To merely
make a pedantic inventory of Shakspere's educational attain-
ments or shortcomings is a congenial task to the Dryasdusts.
of literature. But a modest and loyal endeavour to discover
how far the mightiest genius of romantic art was familiar
with the classical masterpieces, whose supremacy in the sphere
of the drama he was the first to challenge with complete
¹ See 'Shakspere's Greek Names,' by Hales, in Notes and Essays on
Shakspere.
102
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
success, is not only entirely legitimate, but is of genuine
importance.
It is perhaps worth noticing that the 'schoolboy,' as described
by Shakspere, is far from being an enthusiast in the cause of
learning. Every one remembers Jaques' picture of
'The whining schoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.'
And Romeo cries,
'Love goes towards love, as schoolboys from their books;
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.'
It is impossible not to wonder if these passages are reminis-
cences of the poet's own boyhood, and it is, in any case, certain
that young Shakspere was by no means entirely given over to
study. He had his eyes and ears open, as the early plays and
poems abundantly prove, to all the Warwickshire sights and
sounds he angled in the Avon, and followed the hare, and
learnt to know the points of a horse and a dog¹, he attended
rustic festivals like harvest-homes and sheep-shearings, and he
took part in the games of the country-side, nine-men's morris'
and more sacks to the mill.'
But studies and pastimes were soon interrupted by the sterner
realities of life. In 1575 John Shakspere increased his property
by the purchase of two houses in Henley Street, including the
one which tradition, on very insufficient grounds, has identified
as the poet's birthplace. But by 1577 a reverse in his fortunes
had set in, for he was unable to pay his full share as a councillor
'towards the furniture of three pikemen, two billmen, and one
archer,' or to contribute the sum of fourpence for the relief of
the poor. To raise money he was obliged to sell to a nephew
his own and his wife's interest in the Snitterfield property, and
to mortgage the Ashbies estate to Edmund Lambert, who
was a connexion by marriage. Yet his difficulties increased,
for in 1579 borough taxes due from him are entered as unpaid,
and in 1586 the return to a writ to distrain goods on his land
was that he had nothing in which he could be distrained. This
¹ On Shakspere's intimate knowledge of natural history and of country
pursuits see Elze, pp. 391–398.
VI]
103
Shakspere leaves School.
financial bankruptcy, joined to continued absence from the
'hall,' led the corporation to deprive him of his alderman's
gown, and in 1587 he would even seem to have been arrested
by his creditors, for he is found suing out a writ of habeas
corpus, and as late as 1592 his failure to appear monthly at
church is set down to fear of 'process for debt.' The cause
of this complete reverse of fortune is not very clear. After his
marriage John Shakspere doubtless added to the glove-business
large transactions in the produce of the estates at Wilmecote
and Snitterfield. He dealt in sheep, meat, wool, leather, timber,
and corn, and his ruin would seem to have been caused by
unfortunate speculations in one or more of these commodities¹.
In consequence of these pecuniary difficulties, young William
Shakspere was withdrawn from school at an early age, probably
about fourteen, and was set to earn his livelihood. What precise
occupation he followed cannot be positively determined, but
there seems no good reason for doubting Rowe's statement that
he was placed by his father, who is described as 'a considerable
dealer in wool,' in his own business. Aubrey indeed, in his
somewhat earlier account, has scandalized the aesthetic suscepti-
bilities of posterity by asserting that the future poet was 'bound
apprentice to a butcher,' though he attempts to salve the blow
by adding that 'when he killed a calf, he would do it in a high
style and make a speech.' His statement, however, which is
supported by the assertions of the Stratford parish clerk in 1693,
is not necessarily at variance with that of Rowe, for John
Snakspere as a dealer in meat might easily be described by the
blunter title. If, however, we choose to reject this evidence
there is nothing to fall back upon, for all conjectures based upon
hints supposed to be furnished by the plays hang purely in the
air. One point alone calls for serious notice. There can be
no doubt that wherever and whenever acquired, Shakspere's
familiarity with legal technicalities is very remarkable, and many
critics have concluded that he must have spent some time in an
attorney's office. This is, of course, possible, but it is not
1 An ingenious and plausible estimate of John Shakspere's character will
be found in Baynes' essay on Shakspere in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
ninth edition.
104
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
supported by external testimony of any weight, and it should
be noticed that in the circumstances, public and private, of his
father's career, involving close and habitual contact with the law,
he had special opportunities for becoming acquainted with
judicial terms and procedures.
But, whatever his occupation, he did not succeed in mending
the fallen fortunes of his family, and it was not long before he
incurred additional grave responsibilities on his own account.
On November 28, 1582, a licence was granted by the Bishop
of Worcester for the marriage of William Shakspere and Anne
Hathaway upon once asking of the banns. The bridegroom
was rather over eighteen, and the lady was some seven years his
senior. She was the daughter of Richard Hathaway, a sub-
stantial yeoman of Shottery, a village about a mile distant from
Stratford. Her father had been dead a short time, but her
friends seem to have pressed on the match, not without sufficient
reason, for a child was born in May, 1583, six months after the
wedding. It has been urged on Shakspere's behalf by Halliwell-
Phillipps and others that a precontract had probably been
celebrated some months before the betrothal in church, and
that such a ceremony, as is plain from the poet's own words
in Measure for Measure, was recognized as giving complete
legal validity to a union. But the existence of a precontract
in Shaksperc's case is a pure supposition, and the point will
scarcely seem worth debating to those who see in the poet's
Sonnets an unmistakable confession of subsequent disloyalty
to his marriage vow. Such a confession also, if accepted as
genuine, goes far to answer the question whether the union,
so inauspiciously begun, was happy or the reverse. Flawless
¹ Nash's words, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, may apply to
Shakspere, 'It is a common practice nowadays 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 [i.e. that of an attor-
ney's clerk, so called because legal documents generally began_Noverint
universi] and busy themselves with the endeavours of art, that could
scarce Latinize their neck-verse, if they should have need.' (But see p. 62,
note.) The fullest account of Shakspere's knowledge of law is given by
Lord Campbell in his Shakspere's Legal Acquirements. Campbell, how-
ever, leaves it an open question whether Shakspere had ever been pro-
fessionally engaged in law-work. Elze maintains strongly that Shakspere
must have been in an attorney's office.
VI]
105
Shakspere and Sir Thomas Lucy.
it cannot have been, and the famous passage in Twelfth Night,
where the Duke declares with an emphasis uncalled for by the
special situation, 'Let still the woman take an elder than herself,'
has a ring that seems to come from the dramatist's own heart.
The fact that in his will he only left her his second-best bed,
and that apparently as an afterthought, supports the theory that
his marriage was unhappy. It is true that her dower in his free-
hold property was secured to her by law, but had he felt for
her the devotion of an affectionate husband, he would have been
at pains to secure for her more than the legal minimum of his
worldly belongings.
One fact at least is certain, that the marriage made it more
imperative than ever that Shakspere should secure an adequate
income. Within two years of the birth of his first child, who
had been christened Susannah, his wife bore him twins, baptized
as Hamnet and Judith in the parish church on Feb. 2, 1583.
It was probably these increased responsibilities that largely
determined him to seek his fortunes in a wider field than
Stratford, but there is no reason for absolutely discrediting
Rowe's circumstantial statement that the immediate cause of
his departure was a quarrel with Sir Thomas Lucy, the powerful
owner of Charlecote House. Rowe's story of the poaching
expedition ¹, of Lucy's prosecution of Shakspere, of the latter's
reprisal in a satirical ballad, ' which was probably the first essay
of his poetry,' and of Lucy's redoubled severity which drove
him from Stratford, need not be accepted in every detail, but it
is supported in its main features by the earlier authority of
Davies, vicar of Saperton, who wrote at the close of the
seventeenth century, and it has doubtless a kernel of truth.
Davies also states that Lucy is Shakspere's 'Justice Clodpate,'
and 'he calls him a great man, and that, in allusion to his
name, bore three louses rampant for his arms.' Justice
Clodpate is, of course, Justice Shallow, and the reference is
to the opening scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shallow
1 In his pamphlet, Shakspere no Deer-Stealer, Mr. Bracebridge has
sought to show that the scene of the adventure was not Charlecote Park,
but the neighbouring estate of Fulbrooke, which had been sequestered by
the Crown, and of which Sir Thomas Lucy may, without any legal right,
have constituted himself the guardian.
106
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
has come up from Gloucestershire to make a Star-chamber
matter of a poaching affray on his estates, in which Falstaff
is the chief culprit, and it is here worth noticing that Lucy
in 1585 introduced a bill into Parliament for the better
preservation of game. In a conversation with his cousin
Slender, Shallow enlarges upon his judicial functions and his
ancient lineage, and Slender in support of the latter claim
alludes to the 'dozen white luces' in his 'coat.' Luce is the
heraldic term for a pike, and the words undoubtedly refer to
the 'three luces hauriant argent,' which are the arms of the
Lucys and are engraved on their monuments in Charlecote
Church. Shakspere makes the conversation linger round the
topic, for Shallow replies, "It is an old coat,' and Sir Hugh
Evans makes the delightfully blundering comment, 'The dozen
white louses do become an old coat well.' Shortly afterwards,
when Falstaff enters, Shallow flings his misdeeds in his teeth,
'Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broken
open my lodge,' and he reiterates his resolve to bring the matter
before the Council. Here would seem to be a reminiscence of
incidents like those described by Rowe, and it is at any rate
certain that more than ten years after Shakspere had left
Stratford he still felt a sufficiently deep grudge against the
owner of Charlecote to satirize him in the only one of his
characters who can be successfully identified with an original '.
¹ The identification finds further support in Henry IV, Part II, where
Shallow is proud to call himself one of the king's justices of the peace, and
where, as commissioner of the muster, he helps Falstaff to review his ragged
regiment. Sir Thomas Lucy served in both these capacities, and Shallow's
officiousness tallies with what the Stratford archives record of his fondness
for the exercise of his legal authority.
CHAPTER VII.
SHAKSPERE IN LONDON. THE SONNETS.
He had had
It was almost certainly in 1586 or 1587 that Shakspere set
out for London and began his theatrical career.
frequent opportunities in Stratford of becoming familiar with
plays and players. His father, when bailiff in 1568, had
licensed two important companies to play in the town, and
between 1573 and 1581 performances had been given yearly in
the Guildhall. Shakspere can scarcely fail to have been present
on many of these occasions, and he may also have seen the
great Miracle cycle at Coventry on Corpus Christi Day. He
may even himself at festival times have played a part in rural
comedies, such as the 'pageants of delight,' of which Julia
speaks in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, or the show of the
'Nine Worthies' presented by Holofernes and his companions
in Love's Labour's Lost. The year 1587 was one of unusual
theatrical activity at Stratford, and Shakspere doubtless took
the opportunity of joining a travelling company, and so making
his way to the capital. But, if unanimous tradition is to be at
all trusted, he must have begun his connexion with the stage in
some very humble capacity. Johnson, writing in 1765, states
that after the poet's arrival in London he 'lived for a time by
very mean employments,' and he tells the well-known story that
his 'first expedient was to wait at the door of the playhouse,
and hold the horses of those that had no servants, that they
might be ready again after the performance.' According to
Castle, the parish clerk of Stratford, he was received into the
108
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
playhouse as a serviture' or attendant on the actors, and
Malone towards the close of the eighteenth century mentions
the stage tradition that his first office was that of prompter's
attendant. Fleay maintains that in all probability the com-
pany in which Shakspere enlisted was that of Lord Leicester
which visited Stratford in 1587¹. The earl's original body of
actors, together with that of Lord Warwick, had been broken
up in March, 1583, by the selection of twelve men to form the
Queen's players. But enough remained to compose a second
company, and in 1586, during the prevalence of the plague in
London, they travelled on the Continent, where they acted for
Frederick II of Denmark, who afterwards transferred five of
them to Christian I, Duke of Saxony. On their return to
England in 1587 they made a provincial tour, and it was during
this that Shakspere may be supposed to have joined them.
The company then included Kempe and Pope, two of the most
noted comedians of the day, and possibly the tragedian, Richard.
Burbage. On Sept. 4, 1588, Leicester died, and his players
soon afterwards found a new patron in Lord Strange. They
then settled in London and acted for a time at the Cross Keys,
but in February, 1592, they migrated to the Rose Theatre on
the Bank Side, built by the enterprising manager, Henslowe.
At this time or possibly earlier, Henslowe's son-in-law, Edward
Alleyn, joined the company, which on March 3 produced with
triumphant success (as we learn from Nash in his introduction
to Piers Penniless) Henry VI, Part I, in whose composition
Shakspere had a hand. That by this year Shakspere had
become sufficiently prominent both as actor and as dramatist
to excite professional jealousies is plain from the well-known
words of Greene in his valedictory Groatsworth of Wit, where
he warns Marlowe and other writers for the stage against
putting any trust in players. Yes, trust them not: for there
is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well
able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and
being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the
1 Fleay's Life and Work of Shakspere, pp. 8-26 and 90-125.
VII]
109
Shakspere as Actor.
only Shake-scene in the country.' The passage testifies to
Shakspere's multifarious activity, and to the bitter chagrin with
which University scholars saw themselves in danger of being
outstripped by a mere provincial, an upstart crow' from
Stratford. It is curious that this attack by Greene should
have been the cause of the earliest complimentary reference to
Shakspere that has come down to us, for Henry Chettle, the
editor of the Groatsworth of Wit, in issuing three months later
his own pamphlet, Kind-Harts Dream, apologized to the
Warwickshire poet for the insult that had been offered him:
'I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault,
because myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than be
excellent in the quality he professes: besides, divers of worship
have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his
honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his
art.' The term 'quality' in this passage alludes to Shakspere's
vocation as an actor, and shows that he had already acquired
a reputation on the boards.
From June, 1592, till the end of 1593 he can have had
practically no opportunity of appearing before metropolitan
audiences, for the London theatres were closed, with one
short interval, on account of the plague. Shortly after they
reopened, on April 16, 1594, Lord Strange died, and his
company found a new chief in Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Cham-
berlain. The patronage of this powerful official raised his
servants to the leading position in the theatrical world of
the day, though they lost one of their star actors, Alleyn,
who henceforward performed with the Lord Admiral's men.
Thus by 1594 Shakspere indubitably belonged to the chief
London company, and he must have held a distinguished
position in its ranks, for he is mentioned (with Kempe and
Burbage) in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber as
having appeared on December 26 and 28 in two several
comedies or interludes' before Elizabeth at Greenwich. Of his
further career as an actor but little is known, and it must, as
Rowe suggests, have been overshadowed by his growing
literary fame. Yet Aubrey records that he did act exceeding
well, and among the plays in which he is stated to have appeared
110
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
are his own Hamlet, where he took the part of the Ghost', and
Ben Jonson's Sejanus and Every Man in his Humour. It is at
any rate clear from Hamlet's address to the players, where the
Prince of Denmark is simply the poet's mouthpiece, that he
had fully mastered the true theory of acting, and that rant and
buffoonery were equally distasteful to him. Hamlet speaks
respectfully of the players as the abstracts and brief chronicles
of the time,' and orders them to be 'well bestowed.' Yet that
Shakspere at times felt an aversion to the profession into
which circumstances had forced him is plain from Sonnet III,
where he lays the guilt of his 'harmful deeds' upon Fortune,
That did not better for my life provide.
Than public means, which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand".
It may partly have been due to this feeling that in 1593,
while the playhouses were closed on account of the plague,
he made a bid for literary fame by publishing his poem Venus
and Adonis³. The volume was brought out by Richard Field,
1 Elze has well pointed out that the choice of the poet for this rôle shows
that he possessed the necessary physical appearance; above all things,
therefore, a stately and a noble figure, and a voice both good in tone and
capable of modulation.' It is to be noted that Sir John Davies, in his lines
addressed to our English Terence, Mr. Will Shakspere,' speaks of him as
having played 'kingly parts.' For a further discussion of the rôles in which
Shakspere may have appeared, see Kurz, Shakspere als Schauspieler, Shak-
spere-Jahrbuch, vol. 6.
2 With these lines we may compare the words addressed by Davies in his
Microcosmos to the players W. S. and R. B., i. e. probably Shakspere and
Burbage:
'Fell Fortune cannot be excused
That hath for better uses you refused.
And though the stage doth stain pure, gentle blood,
Yet generous ye are in mind and mood.'
There are indications in Shakspere's works that he travelled on the
Continent, and it has been plausibly suggested that the year 1593, when the
theatres were closed, would have been a natural time for him to go abroad.
Though we are without documentary record of any journey by Shakspere,
there is no a priori improbability in the supposition that he visited foreign
countries. Elizabethan literature testifies to constant intercourse between
our island and the Continent; and Italy, in especial, was the favourite
haunt of Englishmen of every class. That actors from London went abroad
in large numbers has been conclusively shown by A. Cohn in his Shakspere
in Germany. We have already seen that members of the Lord Chamber-
lain's company had been in Germany and Denmark, and in The Return
VII]
III
Shakspere and Southampton.
6
a native of Stratford, who had set up as a printer in London, and
it is interesting to have this proof that Shakspere kept up in the
capital his Warwickshire associations. But he was at the same
time seeking powerful friends and patrons at Court, and his
poem, which he calls the first heir of my invention,' is dedicated
to the Earl of Southampton, a young nobleman twenty years of
age. The extremely timid terms in which Shakspere addresses
the youthful earl make it doubtful whether there was as yet any
personal acquaintance between them; but the immediate success
of the Venus and Adonis must have drawn them together, for in
the following year, when Shakspere dedicated to the same patron
his second poem Lucrece, he speaks in a tone of confidence and
affection, 'The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end.
... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being
part in all I have, devoted yours.' There can be little doubt
that Southampton requited these ardent professions generously,
though we must look with the gravest suspicion upon Rowe's
statement that he made Shakspere at one time a gift of £1,000
'to enable him to go through with a purchase which he had
from Parnassus, Kempe is welcomed back 'from dancing the morris over
the Alps.' If Kempe wandered 'over the Alps' into North Italy, why may
not Shakspere have done the same? Indeed, as Elze has urged with great
force in his Essays on Shakspere, p. 262 seq., there are a number of
allusions in the dramatist's works which can scarcely be explained on any
other hypothesis. Even if we grant that imaginative genius alone enabled
him to throw round The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet so
marvellously vivid an Italian atmosphere, no power of intuition, however
transcendent, could impart to the poet a knowledge of positive facts. How
did he know that the common ferry' from the port at the mouth of the
Brenta to Venice was called the traghetto or 'traject'? How did he make
acquaintance with the works of the Italian artist Julio Romano, of whom
he speaks in The Winter's Tale in terms that are as appropriate as they
are enthusiastic? How above all did he know that Romano was a sculptor
as well as a painter-a fact of which posterity would have been ignorant
but for the evidence of a couple of Latin epitaphs preserved in Vasari's
Lives? It would appear that Shakspere must have either read Vasari in
the original, or, what is at least equally probable, have made acquaintance
with Romano's works at Mantua. But whether or not Shakspere ever
swam in a gondola, he acquired a fair knowledge of two or three European
languages. Several plays contain a considerable amount of French dialogue,
and both Italian and Spanish phrases are scattered here and there through
his works. Good reason has further been shown for crediting the dramatist
with the knowledge of works which he could only have read in the original,
e.g. those of Rabelais, Giordano, Bruno, and Montaigne (previous to the
publication of Florio's version in 1603).
112
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
a mind to.' But, apart from the favours of patrons, the success
of the two poems, which appealed to a wider circle than acted
plays, greatly improved Shakspere's position, and from this time
forward there are continued evidences of his increasing prosperity,
and of his resolution to turn it to account by establishing himself
as a landowner in his native town. Thus in 1596, John Shakspere
is found applying to the College of Arms for a grant of Coat-
Armour, though, as he was still in very poor circumstances, the
attendant expense must have been borne by his son. But if
the dramatist cherished the ambition of founding a family, his
pride as well as his affection suffered a great blow in the death
of Hamnet Shakspere at the early age of twelve, in August, 1596.
But, in spite of the loss of his only male heir, he pursued his
project, and in the spring of 1597 he bought for £60 New
Place, the most considerable mansion in Stratford, which had
long been popularly known as 'the Great House.' From
a letter written in the following year by Abraham Sturley,
a native of Stratford, to a friend in London, we learn that the
poet was 'willing to disburse some money upon some odd yard-
land or other at Shottery,' his wife's native village, and the
suggestion is made that he should be induced to buy the tithes
of the town. 'This obtained would advance him in deed, and
would do us much good.' Later in the year the same corre-
spondent, writing to Richard Quiney, the father of Shakspere's
future son-in-law, who was in London with the object of relieving
Stratford from the payment of a subsidy, in consequence of the
great dearth of corn, expressed a hope that 'our countryman,
Mr. William Shakspere, would procure us money. Perhaps
Quiney was chosen as agent in the matter, because a few weeks
previously he had made a like petition to Shakspere on his own
behalf in a letter of which the manuscript is still extant: 'Loving
countryman, I am bold of you as of a friend, craving your help.
with £30. You shall friend me much in helping me out of all
the debts I owe in London.' Thus Shakspere, who about ten
years ago had left Stratford as a penniless adventurer, had now
reached so prosperous a position that he was not only able to
acquire the most considerable tenement in his native town, but
was appealed to by his fellow-citizens as a powerful friend in
VII]
113
The Globe Theatre.
difficulties, public or private. In some quarters, however, his
rapid rise must have been viewed with jealous eyes. The author
of The Return from Parnassus speaks bitterly of the glorious
vagabonds who with mouthing words that better wits have
framed' purchase lands and are made esquires; and in Ratsey's
Ghost sarcastic allusion is made to the actors who when their
purse is well lined 'buy some place of lordship in the country'
where, when they have grown weary of playing, their money
may bring them to dignity and reputation.
To this year, 1598, belong further evidences of Shakspere's
dvance. Since 1594, the Lord Chamberlain's men had acted
chiefly at the Theatre.' But now, in consequence of a quarrel
with the ground-landlord, the Burbages pulled down the edifice
and rebuilt it as the 'Globe' on Bankside, joining to themselves,
as we learn from the document discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps
in the Lord Chamberlain's office, 'those deserving men Shakspere,
Heminge, Condell, Phillips, and others, partners in the profits
of that they call the house.' The concluding words mean that
Shakspere and the other deserving men received half the daily
profits from certain seats in the theatre, and they refute the idea
which long prevailed that the dramatist was an actual shareholder
in the 'Globe.' In the same year Francis Meres, a Cambridge
Master of Arts, resident in London, published his Palladis Tamia,
Wit's Treasury, in which he makes most favourable mention of
Shakspere both as poet and playwright; 'as the soul of Euphorbus
was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul of
Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspere, witness
his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among
his private friends. . . . As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the
best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakspere
among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the
stage.' And then he proceeds to give a list of twelve plays
whose importance will be discussed later. The passage is
conclusive as to Shakspere's position in the literary and dramatic
world of the day, and a very practical proof of his popularity
was given in the following year when an unscrupulous publisher
named Jaggard issued in his name a volume of poems, entitled
The Passionate Pilgrim, which was in reality a compilation from
I
[14
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
various sources, and which owed to its reputed author only a few
extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, and two of the sonnets
which Meres had spoken of as in private circulation.
Jaggard's piratical enterprise thus brings us face to face with the
general problem of Shakspere's Sonnets and their relation to his
career. Reasons have been given for making scanty use of the
poet's plays in telling the fragmentary story of his life, but these
do not apply to writings which are quite undramatic, and which, if
interpreted in their natural sense, are a record of real experiences.
Is the natural sense of the Sonnets the true one, and in reading
them are we brought face to face for a brief period with the real
man, William Shakspere, whose features so largely baffle our
scrutiny when hidden behind the dramatic mask? To these
questions very different answers have been given. Thus
Halliwell-Phillipps writes: 'There are no external testimonies
of any description in favour of a personal application of the
Sonnets.... If the only safe method, that of discarding all mere
assumptions, be strictly followed, the clearer the ideality of most
of them, and the futility of arguments resting on any other basis,
will be perceived.' Similarly Delius asserts that the Sonnets are
'the free outcome of a poetic imagination,' and looks upon them
as mere exercises in verse. Other students see in them some
profound allegory which they construe in strangely varied ways.
Opposed to all these critics is the large and growing school of
interpreters who take the Sonnets as what they purport to be—
genuine autobiographical confessions. Greatest of those who
have held this view is Wordsworth, who asserted that in these
poems the writer 'expresses his own feelings in his own person,'
and who claimed for the sonnet as its crowning glory that it
was the key wherewith 'Shakspere unlocked his heart.' Words-
worth's example is followed by Hallam, Swinburne, Dowden,
Furnivall, Tyler, and many others alike in England and abroad.
In favour of this view, as Dowden has well brought out, there is
the argument from analogy. In the sonnet, 'as in other forms,
the poetry of the time, which possesses an enduring vitality,
was not commonly caught out of the air, but, however large the
conventional element in it may have been, was born of the
union of heart and imagination: in it real feelings and real
VII]
115
Shakspere's Sonnets.
experience, submitting to the poetical fashions of the day, were
raised to an ideal expression.' And he points in proof to the
sonnets of Spenser and Sidney, both telling the tale of veritable
joys and sorrows. But far more cogent is the internal evidence
of Shakspere's poems themselves. It is inconceivable that such
intensity of passion as they reveal-the love, the jealousy, the
remorse, the strivings between sense and spirit-should spring
from no solid basis of fact. And the many personal touches that
bring before us so vividly the chief characters in the story, the
references to the poet's own occupations and circumstances, the
notes of time and place, all cry aloud that the Sonnets move in
the atmosphere of reality and not of fiction. In the face of such
evidence all amiable a priori assumptions that Shakspere's life was
as stainless as it was outwardly prosperous go for nothing.
The Sonnets being accepted as genuine self-revelations, what
light do they throw upon Shakspere's character and career?
They were published, in their completed form, in 1609, by
Thomas Thorpe, probably without the author's sanction, and
they consist of two series which are perfectly distinct, though
mutually related. The first series (1-126, ending with an
Envoi of twelve lines in couplets) is addressed to a man; the
second (127–154) to a woman. The man was young, ‘a tender
churl,' the world's fresh ornament'; he was high-born and
beautiful with inherited beauty (S. 3):
C
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.'
To this youth, who bore Shakspere's own Christian name of
'Will,' the poet gave away his heart wholly and without reserve,
and the first twenty-six sonnets tell of Shakspere's boundless
love for him, and his eager desire that he should perpetuate his
fairness by marrying and begetting offspring. Even when he is
absent from him (S. 26–32), wearied with travel and toil, prob-
ably on some provincial theatrical tour, the thought of his
friend is sufficient to console him for all the miseries of his
state. But during the period of separation a cruel blow fell on
Shakspere's short-lived happiness (S. 33):
'But, out! alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.'
I 2
116
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Will's affections were stolen from him by a woman whom the
poet loved, and thus a twofold truth' was broken, and Shakspere
suffered a double wrong. But he seeks to forgive the injury,
for his friend's fault was natural to his youth and beauty, and
he was a victim to the arts of a potent temptress. In spite of
all, the bond between them is Shakspere's most precious posses-
sion, and he promises to reward Will's favour by conferring upon
him an immortality in his verse. But gradually a sadder strain is
heard. The poet is weary of this 'vile world,' and his thoughts
often reach forward to death (S. 66-71). The principal cause
of his bitterness is that his young patron has lent an ear to
rivals who are seeking to oust Shakspere from his grace, and
chief among these is a learned poet, with singular skill in
flattery. He feels that Will's heart is alienated from him, and
he bids him farewell, though without a touch of reproach.
Then follows a period of separation and estrangement, lasting,
perhaps for nearly three years (S. 104), but finally Shakspere and
his friend come together again, and the last group of sonnets in
the first series (S. 100-126) celebrates the renewal of their love,
which by its very nature was eternal and changeless:
'Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Love's not 'Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.'
And now the fiery trials through which affection has passed have
left it surer and more intense than of old :
'O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.'
The second series of Sonnets is addressed to the woman who
stole Will's heart, and its connexion with the preceding series is
clearly shown in the key-sonnet, 144:
'Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman, coloured ill.
VII]
117
Shakspere's Sonnets.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.'
It thus appears that the heroine of the second series was dark
and far from beautiful, and this fact the poet dwells upon with
curious emphasis:
'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red.'
But those eyes that seemed to go in mourning for the pain.
that they wrought could sway the heart of Shakspere with
a strangely potent spell. This woman, dark of hue, and yet
more darkly stained in soul, was to him his 'music' in a far
deeper sense than the sweet concord of sounds which her skilful
fingers drew from the virginal. Even when she has robbed him
of his friend, he can only beg of her to include him also in her
love, for he too is Will. He knows that she is untruthful, false
alike to her vows of wedlock and her oaths to him. His devo-
tion to her is a madness which Reason, the physician, vainly
seeks to cure. But in his eyes her 'worst all best exceeds,'
and his passion for her forces him to 'betray his nobler part'
and wrestle down his better will. Thus the second series ends
in spiritual chaos, and it is natural to believe that these sonnets
to his mistress were completed by Shakspere before he wrote the
final group of poems to Will, with their tone of trust and hope,
and strengthened sense of moral order in the world.
Such are the unquestionable facts which the Sonnets reveal
from internal evidence. The further question remains: Can any
light be thrown upon them from outside enabling us to fix the
date of the events recorded, and to identify Shakspere's friend,
mistress, and rival? The question of date is an extremely
difficult one. It is certain that some at least of the sonnets
must have been written before September, 1598, when Meres'
Palladis Tamia was registered. These may only have been the
earlier poems to Will, to which the singular term 'sugared'
would most fittingly apply, but the two sonnets (138 and 144),
included in the Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, prove that by that
year Shakspere's friend had already become entangled with the
118
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
dark lady. On the other hand, even the earliest sonnets, from
their maturity of style and thought, must be later than the
Lucrece in 1594, and the fact that Shakspere throughout speaks
of himself as old, though probably only in contrast with Will's
extreme youth, is an additional argument against setting the
date too far back. Thus all the evidence tends to show that
the beginning of Shakspere's intimacy with his friend, and the
troubles that so quickly followed, must be placed about 1597 or
the spring of 1598. Sonnet 104 proves clearly that between
the poet's first meeting with Will and their final reconciliation
a period of at least three years must have elapsed. This would
give 1601 as the date which brings the incidents referred to in
the poems to a close. Without aiming at an impossible pre-
cision it may be confidently urged that the renewal of Shak-
spere's affectionate relations with Will coincides with the opening
years of the seventeenth century.
The more important problem of identification follows. Who
was Will? Many answers have been given to the question, but
there is only one name supported by tangible evidence—that of
William Herbert, who became Earl of Pembroke in January,
1601'. It was to him, together with his brother, that Heminge
and Condell dedicated the folio edition of Shakspere's works in
1623, on the ground that he had 'prosequnted' their author
living with so much favour. His Christian name corresponds
with that of the friend in the Sonnets. Moreover Thorpe, the
publisher of the poems, prefixed to them a dedication in which
he wished to the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets, Mr.
W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-
living poet.' The begetter of the Sonnets is best interpreted as
the friend who inspired them, and whom the poet assured of
immortality through his verse. The initials W. H. thus appear
to have belonged to Will, and they are those of Herbert's name.
¹ Drake, Gervinus, Kreyssig, Fleay, and others have argued that the
young man to whom the first group of sonnets is addressed was Lord
Southampton, but it is inconceivable that the Earl, whose name was Henry
Wriothesley, could be spoken of over and over again as Will.'
6
2 Others interpret begetter' as the person who obtained the MSS. for
the publisher. On this basis Neil and Philarète Chasles have identified
W. H. with William Hathaway, Shakspere's brother-in-law. Elze inclines
to endorse this view.
VII]
'Will' probably William Herbert.
119
Further, in every characteristic Herbert answers with curious
fidelity to Shakspere's picture of his friend. He was young,
accomplished, and remarkable for his beauty of person, which he
inherited from his mother, the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, who
might truly be said in him to recall 'the lovely April of her
prime.' He was, as Clarendon records, 'immoderately given
up to women, but he was not so much transported with beauty
and outward allurements, as with those advantages of the mind
as manifested an extraordinary wit, spirit, and knowledge.'
Such a man would be peculiarly liable to be fascinated by
Shakspere's dark mistress. But Clarendon also bears witness
that Herbert, in spite of his licentiousness, 'was the most uni-
versally beloved and esteemed of any man of that age.' This
completely accords with the ardour of devotion which Will
inspired not only in Shakspere, but doubtless also in the rivals
who sought to supplant him in his patron's grace.
Against this cumulative evidence for the identification of
Herbert and Will two principal objections have been raised.
It is urged that the last lines of Sonnet 13, written about 1598,
'Dear my love, you know
You had a father: let your son say so,'
imply that Will's father was dead, while Herbert's lived till 1601.
But a consideration of the context shows that such an inference
is unnecessary, and that Will is simply being exhorted to do
as his father had done before him, by begetting a son. It
has also been maintained that, as Herbert was born in 1580,
Shakspere could have had no motive in pressing marriage upon
a youth of eighteen. But an interesting correspondence pre-
served in the Record Office, and recently brought to light,
disposes of this objection. Letters from the Earl and Countess
of Pembroke in 1597 to Lord Burleigh show that they were
eager to forward a match between Hebert and Bridget Vere,
daughter of the Earl of Oxford, and Burleigh's own grand-
daughter. The negotiations proceeded favourably for some
time, but eventually they were broken off, and if the reason was
Herbert's unwillingness to marry, there is nothing strange in
Shakspere having addressed to him the series of petitions with
which the Sonnets begin, possibly by the desire of the Countess
120
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of Pembroke herself. Thus a cumulative mass of evidence
points to the identity of Will and Herbert.
Similarly the dramatist's chief rival for Will's favour has been
shown to correspond in striking particulars with George Chap-
man. The rival is described at length in Sonnet 86, where,
after speaking of the 'proud full sail of his great verse,' the
poet proceeds:
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast.'
Now in 1594 Chapman published a poem, The Shadow of the
Night, in the dedication to which he censures the vulgar searchers
after knowledge who 'think skill so mightily pierced with their
loves that she should prostitutely show them her secrets, when
she will scarce be looked upon by others, but with invocation,
fasting, watching, yea not without having drops of their soul
like a heavenly familiar.' In the poem itself he consecrates him-
self to 'the black shadows and desolation of night,' and he
calls upon his compeers to do the same. All this exactly cor-
responds with the strange expressions in the sonnet, which
would otherwise be entirely incomprehensible. Moreover the
words, the proud full sail of his great verse,' apply entirely to
the long swelling fourteen-syllable metre in which Chapman's
translation of the Iliad was written. The first portion of this
work was published in 1598, and the date suggests that it may
have helped to draw Herbert's notice away from Shakspere to
the more learned author. Such a view is supported by the
fact that a later edition of the translation contains a dedicatory
sonnet to Herbert.
(
Far greater mystery enshrouds the dark lady. An attempt
has recently been made to identify her with a Mary Fitton,
maid of honour to Elizabeth, with whom Herbert had an
intrigue about 1600. The references to her in contemporary
letters show that she had certain qualities corresponding to
those of Shakspere's mistress-a ready wit, artistic accomplish-
VII]
I2I
Shakspere and Essex.
ments, and unfeminine boldness. She was acquainted with
Kempe, who dedicated a book to her, and a play upon her name
has been detected in one of the sonnets in the second series.
But as there is an entire absence of external evidence connecting
her with the poet, and as there is nothing to show that she
was a brunette in complexion, the endeavour to identify her
with the woman coloured ill' is far from convincing, and is
at best an ingenious speculation.
<
In the Sonnets we see, as through a glass darkly, a central
episode in the poet's life, yet only an episode, and for the latter
part of his career, as for the beginning, we have to fall back
upon the external chronicle. Meagre though it is, it adds
something to the record of Shakspere's friendships. Even in his
passionate devotion to Will, the author of the Lucrece cannot
have entirely forgotten his other noble patron Southampton,
to whom he had promised a 'love without end.' The Earl was
an adherent of Essex, and accompanied him on his ill-starred
expedition to Ireland in 1599. This explains Shakspere's special
interest in the campaign for whose speedy and successful
termination he goes out of his way to express a wish in a chorus
to Henry V. He must have been correspondingly mortified
at its failure, and yet more deeply concerned at Southampton's
participation in the reckless outbreak of 1601, which cost him
imprisonment in the Tower till the Queen's death'. How far
Shakspere came into personal relations with Elizabeth herself it
is impossible to tell. Ben Jonson speaks of her as being
'taken' by his flights, and Chettle declares that she
'Graced his desert,
And to his lays opened her royal ear.'
It is certain that many of his dramas were performed at Court,
and there is an early tradition that The Merry Wives of Windsor
was written at the express desire of Elizabeth, who wished to
see Falstaff in love. But there is no evidence, except a statement
1 It will be shown later that the play, Richard II, which the conspira-
tors caused to be acted in the streets, was in all probability Shakspere's.
Fleay connects with this the temporary disgrace at Court of the Lord
Chamberlain's company during 1601, and their consequent tour in Scotland,
evidenced by the presence of Laurence Fletcher, one of the company, at
Aberdeen in October.
122
[ci.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of Rowe, that the Queen showed Shakspere any exceptional
favour, and the references to her in his works are, as is well
known, surprisingly few. In the chorus to Henry V spoken of
above she is styled 'our gracious empress,' and she is without
doubt the fair vestal throned by the West' of Oberon's vision
in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the profuse compli-
ments of Greene and Peele are lacking, and it is noticeable that
Chettle complains that on the Queen's death 'the silver-tongued
Melicert,' as he calls Shakspere, did not 'drop from his honied
muse one sable tear.'
A poet will number among his friends other followers
of the Muse, and among literary intimacies few are more
interesting than that between Shakspere and Ben Jonson. The
latter's comedy Every Man in his Humour was brought out in
1598 by Shakspere's company, and, according to tradition,
at the request of the elder dramatist, who played one of the
parts. But when in 1599 Jonson's Every Man out of his
Humour was produced at the Globe Theatre, Shakspere did not
appear in it.
He may have disliked the bitter personal attacks
which the play contained upon contemporary dramatists, and
which gave rise to what is known as 'the war of the theatres,'
in which Jonson, Dekker and Marston were the principal figures.
The Lord Chamberlain's company evidently did not favour
Jonson's cause, for he had to migrate to the Blackfriars Theatre,
then tenanted by a troupe of boy-actors, who produced for him
The Case is altered, Cynthia's Revels, and The Poetaster. Dekker
and Marston retaliated in several plays, the most important
of which is Satiromastix, acted by the Chamberlain's company
in 1601. Shakspere himself took part in the quarrel, and for
a time he must have been in antagonism to Jonson; for in
The Return from Parnassus, acted at St. John's College, Cam-
bridge about 1602, Burbage and Kempe are introduced, and
the latter makes use of these remarkable words: 'Few of the
university pen plays well, they smell too much of that writer
Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of
Proserpina and Juppiter. Why here's our fellow Shakspere
puts them all down, aye and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben
Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the
VII]
123
Shakspere and Ben Jonson.
poets a pill, but our fellow Shakspere hath given him a purge
that made him bewray his credit.' The reference in Jonson's case
is to The Poetaster, where he introduces Horace, who represents
himself, offering pills to rival poets to cure them of tumorous
heats. But in what way Shakspere administered a purge to
Jonson we do not know, for Fleay's attempt to find allusions
to this controversy in Troilus and Cressida is far from con-
vincing. In any case the breach must soon have been healed,
for in 1603 Shakspere acted in Jonson's Sejanus, which was
produced at the 'Globe.' We do indeed find hits in Bartholomew
Fair and elsewhere at incidents in some of Shakspere's later
plays, but, in speaking of the dramatist after his death to Drum-
mond, Jonson uses words of warm and generous affection.
'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
free nature, had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle
expressions.' And in the verses 'To the memory of my beloved
master, William Shakspere,' he uses terms of equal tenderness:
'My gentle Shakspere, sweet swan of Avon, thou Star of Poets."
Strong indeed must have been the personal fascination which
could charm such expressions from rugged Ben.
But however complex during the last years of Elizabeth's
reign the inner life of Shakspere may have been, with its loves
and jealousies, its crises of mind and heart, his outward worldly
success was uninterrupted, and he adhered steadfastly to his
purpose of returning to Stratford as a man of property.
By his
father's death in September, 1601, he inherited the two houses
in Henley Street, and in the May of the following year he bought
from William and John Combe for £320 one hundred and seven
acres of arable land in the parish of Old Stratford. Some
months later he purchased a cottage adjoining New Place, and
a messuage with two orchards, gardens, and barns. By this time
he is described in legal documents as generosus or gentleman, an
epithet which doubtless gave him much gratification. Shortly
afterwards a significant testimony was given to his high position
in the theatrical world. James I issued a warrant, within a few
days of his accession, to the Lord Chamberlain's servants
licensing them to continue their performances at the 'Globe' and
1.24
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
elsewhere; and among the company who henceforward took the
title of the King's Players, Shakspere's name is mentioned
second, preceding even that of Richard Burbage. At a subse-
quent date, which cannot be exactly fixed, Shakspere, together
with Heminge and Condell, the future editors of his works, was
placed by his manager at the Blackfriars Theatre, which had
hitherto been leased out to a troupe of boy-actors, but which
was now turned into a second house for the King's servants.
An attractive glimpse of the relations between the members of
the company is given in the will of Augustine Phillips, who on
May 4, 1605, leaves, among other legacies to his fellows,
a thirty shilling picce in gold to Shakspere. In the following
July the dramatist carried out the suggestion made to him in
1598 by buying for £440 the unexpired term of a lease of the
tithes of Stratford, Bishopston, and Welcombe, and the pur-
chase proved a very profitable one. To his speculations in real
estate he had added trade in agricultural produce, for early in
1604 he is found suing one Philip Rogers in the local Court for
the balance of a debt on malt sold and delivered to him. In
1608 he attempts to recover another debt from a John Adden-
brooke, and obtains a verdict which however was rendered barren
by the flight of the defendant.
During these years his visits to Stratford were, no doubt,
increasingly frequent, and he was drawn there not only by
material interests but by family joys and sorrows. On June 5,
1607, his eldest daughter Susannah was married to John Hall,
a Stratford physician in large practice. In the same year, on
December 31, he lost his brother Edmund, who had followed
him in the career of a player, and who was buried in the church
of St. Saviour's, Southwark. A heavier blow came in Sep-
tember, 1608, in the death of his mother, and it is probable
that he followed her to the grave, for a month later he was at
Stratford and stood godfather to a friend's child.
It cannot have been long afterwards that he retired from the
stage and the society of the capital to take up his permanent
abode in New Place. The house had been let to a Thomas
Greene, town clerk of Stratford, who claimed to be a cousin
of the poet, and who states in a letter of 1609 that he perceives
VII]
125
Shakspere returns to Stratford.
he may stay another year. This would tend to fix the date of
Shakspere's final return to his native town about 1610, and it
must have been with a feeling of genuine delight that he turned
his back upon the fever and fret of London life to spend the
evening of his days, as he had spent their morning, amid War-
wickshire meadows and lanes and streams. Yet he cannot have
entirely severed his connexion with the capital. Several of his
last plays were in all probability written at Stratford, and he
must have followed with interest their fortunes on the boards of
the 'Globe,' till the famous house was burnt down on June 29,
1613, during a performance of Henry VIII. Earlier in the
same year he bought for £140 a property near the Blackfriars
Theatre. He only paid down £80 of the purchase money, the
balance remaining on mortgage, and immediately leased the
house to John Robinson for ten years.
It is noticeable that he made no attempt to follow in his
father's footsteps as a candidate for municipal honours, partly,
perhaps, because of the sympathy which the Town Council of
Stratford was beginning to show with the Puritan movement.
Twice in the early part of the seventeenth century it had taken
into consideration' the inconvenience of plays'; and in February,
1612, it resolved that they were unlawful and not to be tolerated
in well-governed boroughs. Such a measure must have been
very distasteful to Shakspere, though, strange to say, record
remains of the entertainment at New Place in 1614 of one
of the Puritan preachers whom the Council was in the habit of
inviting to deliver discourses, and for whom it provided a pottle
of wine and a quart of sack at the municipal expense. The
preacher's host may, however, not have been the poet but his
son-in-law Dr. Hall, who had Puritan leanings. In the same year
Shakspere came into conflict with the Corporation over another
matter. In 1614 the wealthy proprietor John Combe died,
leaving the dramatist five pounds in his will. His heir,
William Combe, on his succession to the estate, attempted to
enclose the common fields at Welcombe, part of whose tithes
belonged to Shakspere. The Corporation hotly resisted
Combe's design, and formally invited the proprietor of New
Place to help them in the struggle, while Greene, the Town
126
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Clerk, sent him 'a note of the inconveniences that would happen
by the enclosure.' But Shakspere had been assured by Combe's
agent that his interests would not be allowed to suffer by the
contemplated invasion of the townsmen's rights, and his sympathy
was given to the unpopular side¹. The Corporation finally
gained the victory, but the dramatist did not live to see it. On
February 10, 1616, he witnessed the marriage of his second
daughter Judith to Richard Quiney, a vintner of Stratford, whose
father had formerly been bailiff. Little more than two months
afterwards, on Tuesday, April 23, he died at the comparatively
early age of fifty-two. Tradition asserts that the cause of his
premature end was a fever contracted at a 'merry meeting'
with Drayton and Ben Jonson, where the trio of wits drank too
hard. The story must be taken for what it is worth, though
modern inquirers have suggested a more probable origin of the
malady in the unsavoury condition of the streets bordering on
New Place. On April 25 he was buried in the chancel of the
ancient parish church of Stratford amidst every sign of respect
from his neighbours, who, while eager to pay fittingly the last
honours to a distinguished and successful fellow-citizen, were
most certainly unconscious that they were carrying to his rest
the one man who was to make the history of the little Warwick-
shire town of supreme interest to all nations and for all time. On
the flat stone that covers the grave an inscription is carved:
'Good friend, for Jesu's sake forbeare
To dig the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.'
The lines are ascribed, on the doubtful authority of Ward, to
Shakspere himself, and they are said to be due to his fear that
his remains might be moved to the neighbouring bone-house.
They have, in effect, prevented any such sacrilege, and they
still hedge with a peculiarly solemn awe the modest sepulchre
that holds the precious dust of England's Star of Poets.'
Such was William Shakspere's life, so far as it can be pieced
together from fragmentary records. Fresh discoveries may yet.
1 The misinterpretation of an entry in Greene's diary has led soine
writers to wrongly represent Shakspere as the champion of popular rights
on this occasion. But see S. Lee's Stratford on Avon, &c., p. 281.
VII]
127
Shakspere's Career.
conceivably be made to throw new light upon minor points, but
it is safe to say that the radical enigma of that life will never fail
to perplex, and, in some degree, irritate posterity. Philistinism
has at all times been wont to partially console itself for the
homage which it is fain to pay to genius with the comforting
assurance that poets and philosophers, and the race of idealists
generally, prove but poor masters of the art of living amid the
actual conditions of this present world. Moreover, students of
the Elizabethan age are impressed with the strangely consistent
ill-fortune that dogged the careers of its most brilliant and
fascinating personalities: Leicester, Essex, and Raleigh; Greene,
Marlowe, and Spenser; Francis Bacon and Ben Jonson; all
alike closed their days amid disaster or disgrace. Yet in
defiance alike of general probabilities, and of the special circum-
stances of his age, Shakspere, from the time of his arrival in
London, advanced steadily in prosperity, bought houses and
land, engaged in business, retired to enjoy the fortune and
position that he had won, died in his bed surrounded by
sorrowing kinsfolk and neighbours, and left behind him a will
clearly proving his ambition to found a family. So paradoxical
do such achievements and aspirations appear in the author of
Hamlet and Othello, that preposterous modern theories have
striven to cut the knot by denying to Shakspere the credit of
his own writings. Saner criticism will recognize that the spec-
tacle is strange, but will seek a partial explanation of it in the
dramatist's early circumstances and surroundings. It is in some
degree misleading to speak of Shakspere, as is almost uniformly
done, as a pure product of the Renaissance era. Stratford and
its neighbourhood were, as has been shown, singularly eloquent
of the English mediaeval spirit, of its religion, its land system,
ts municipal organization, its drama. Prominent among the
characteristics of that spirit were an ingrained conviction of the
difference between social classes, a keen sense of the power
attaching to the possession of land, a jealous desire of local
influence and prestige, a reverence for custom, prescription, and
law. These are the very qualities in Shakspere which excite
surprise, and they may be fairly put down in part to inherited
tendencies and early associations. Moreover, his father's pecu-
128
[сн.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
niary reverses, with their immediate effect upon his own career,
must have developed these latent instincts, and have inspired
him with the ambition of repairing the fortunes of his family.
But while it is thus right to recognize the practical element in
Shakspere's personality, it is a profound mistake to give it undue
prominence. The Stratford poet, though not so completely
a child of the Renaissance as Marlowe or Spenser, yet felt to
the full its ardours of passion and emotion. He was, as Ben
Jonson has told us, 'of an open and free nature,' quick to offer
boundless affection, and craving an equally boundless return.
To Southampton he dedicates 'a love without end': the devo-
tion that he lavishes upon Will is feminine in its tenderness and
forgetfulness of self, and the breach in their friendship means
for him a hell of time.' So, on the other hand, he must have
prized at its full worth the reverent love, 'this side of idolatry,'
which Ben Jonson, and doubtless others, freely rendered to him.
And as he was sensitive beyond measure to human affections,
so he had a soul open to all influences of nature, and swayed
by every art, especially music, of which, in plays and poems
alike, he speaks again and again with the enthusiasm of a true
votary'. But such a temperament has its peculiar dangers, and
these Shakspere in no way escaped. The heart that was quick
to the promptings of love was swift also to feel the pang of
jealousy, and the Sonnets tell us of the torture with which rivals
could rack its strings. And they tell us too of graver fallings
away from the highest ideal of manhood, of sullied purity, of
criminal surrender to the baser instincts, of dark and turbulent
spiritual chaos. Yet throughout all the poet never falters in his
conviction of what is right, never takes evil to be his good :
sense wins victories over soul, but the battle is always renewed.
Among the Knights who gather at the Round Table of the
Muse Shakspere is no stainless Galahad. Rather may he be
likened unto Lancelot, false for a time to his higher nature, too
weak to break the bonds that defamed him, and yet, in his agony,
'groaning with remorseful pain.' As Lancelot's mood was often
like a fiend driving him into the wilderness, so Shakspere knew
1 On Shakspere's attitude towards music and painting, see Elze, William
Shakspere, pp. 411-421.
VII]
129
Close of Shakspere's Career.
what it was to be 'frantic-mad with evermore unrest': and the
parallel may be carried a stage further. To Lancelot, in spite
of his guilt, it was given to see the Holy Grail, though through
blasting and blinding fires, and at the very last to die a holy
man. So Shakspere, as the final sonnets to Will sufficiently
show, after a fierce struggle gained the conquest over his baser
self. And of all the theories that seek to read his personal history
in his plays, none is more attractive or has greater inherent
plausibility than that which traces the serene tone of the closing
dramas, so sharply contrasted with the storm and stress of the
tragedies, to a corresponding change in the poet's own mood.
The season of suffering and shame had passed for ever, and
when the sun of Shakspere's life dipped to its fall, it was not
amid driving cloud-rack, but the hushed and solemn loveliness
of a tranquil eventide.
CHAPTER VIII.
SHAKSPERE'S DRAMATIC APPRENTICESHIP.
In the investigation of Shakspere's personal career critical
inquiry will readily be allowed, but when we turn to speak of
him as a dramatist the legitimacy of such a method may be
challenged at the outset. There
There is a venerable prejudice which
clings to the idea that poetic genius is something entirely unac-
countable and wayward, subject to no law or rule. To search
for its secret is merely to profane a mystery; and of Shakspere, as
the supreme poet of all time, this, it may be said, holds especially
true; he is a stupendous phenomenon, to be accepted with awe
and thanksgiving. His plays should be read in any and every
order, each for its own inherent beauty, and all attempts to
arrange them in groups, and thence to infer the development of
their author's mind, are an offence against true aesthetic
principles.
Such a view has in it a kernel of truth that cannot be disre-
garded; it calls to remembrance that after all the play's the
thing,' and that critical knowledge is dearly bought at any
sacrifice of pure and spontaneous delight in the creations of art.
It also pushes home the fact that the ultimate secret of genius
defies the most rigid analysis, and that no study of antecedents
and environment, no skilful classifications and chronologies will
ever make it clearer why Shakspere was what he was, and not
merely a Marlowe or a Greene. But Ben Jonson himself, in those
memorial lines which are the first, as they are one of the best, of
commentaries on Shakspere, declares that 'a good poet's made
as well as born.' It is this process of making' through which
even the inspired singer must pass that justifies the application of
Order of Shakspere's Plays.
131
the critical method to the dramatist's writings. The distinguish-
ing mark of that method is its endeavour to arrange the plays in
the order of their production, to note their mutual points of con-
tact or of contrast, and to interpret them as a progressive revela-
tion of their author's genius. From this point of view the dramas
cease to be a mechanical aggregate, and shape themselves into
an organic whole. But just as in an organism the individual
members gain instead of lose by their union in a higher life, so
each separate play adds to its interest and significance when
seen in its relation to every other. The passion of Romeo and
Juliet, the charm of As You Like It, the mystery of Hamlet, the
terror of King Lear are one and all enhanced when we realize
that they are not due to accident, but form the stages in a con-
tinuous mental growth. It is true, of course, that the results of
such a method of inquiry cannot be all equally definite and
dogmatic, and that criticism sometimes cuts an ungainly figure
as it toils along, with its club foot, in the track of creative art.
But when all deductions are made, the study of Shakspere's
works in their natural sequence must approve itself to every
lover of literature by its pre-eminent interest and fruitfulness.
A preliminary question, however, at once starts up: Can
the order of the plays be determined with sufficient accuracy for
chronological criticism to be anything better than ingenious
guesswork? Upon the main issue an affirmative answer may
be confidently given, though in details there is considerable
doubt. The evidence for fixing the dates of the dramas may be
divided broadly into two classes, external and internal¹. Under
the former head comes first the entry of certain of Shakspere's
works in the register of the Stationers' Company. The first
complete collection of his writings (with the exception of parts
of Pericles and possibly of The Two Noble Kinsmen) was the
folio of 1623 edited by his fellow actors Heminge and Condell.
But during his lifetime seventeen of the plays and all the poems
were issued in quarto form, and they were registered either on
¹ Dowden, in his Primer, adopts a triple classification: (1) wholly
external, (2) partly external, partly internal, (3) wholly internal. The
whole of his chapter on the chronological evidences, pp. 32-46, should
be consulted.
K 2
132
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
or shortly before publication¹. We thus get a downward limit
before which these works must have been written, and a similar
limit is fixed by the other branch of external evidence, which
consists in contemporary allusions to the dramas. Far the
most important of these is the well-known passage in Meres'
Palladis Tamia, 1598. Meres there mentions as already existing
six of Shakspere's comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The
Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Love's Labour's Won,
A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice; and
six of his tragedies, Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King
John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet. As Meres cites
these works with the express purpose of proving Shakspere's
excellence as a writer for the stage, it is very unlikely that he left
out any play of importance, and the inference is almost certain
that all the dramas not mentioned by him were later than 1598.
Minor references in other contemporary writings help to fix the
date of Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale,
and King Henry VIII.
Under the head of internal evidence we may place first the
few allusions in the plays to contemporary historical events.
Of these the most important is the reference to Essex's Irish
expedition, 1599, in a chorus to Henry V, while in the prologue
to the same drama mention is made of the recently built Globe
Theatre as 'this wooden O.' Other less precise allusions do
something to help to place The Comedy of Errors, The Merry
Wives of Windsor, and Romeo and Juliet. Similar to these
historical references are those to books issued during Shakspere's
life. Thus, in As You Like It, a line is quoted from Marlowe's
Hero and Leander published in 1598, while King Lear and
The Tempest show debts respectively to Harsnet's Declaration
of Popish Impostures, and Florio's Translation of Montaigne's
Essays, both belonging to 1603. In all these cases an up-
ward limit is established after which the plays must have been
written.
1 For a complete list of the quarto editions, with their printers and
publishers, see Fleay's table in New Shakspere Society's Transactions,
1874, reprinted in his Manual. For the relative value of the quarto and
folio texts, see his Manual, pp. 61-63, and Elze, William Shakspere,
PP. 275-297.
VIII]
133
Metrical Evidences.
The other more strictly internal evidence is less concrete,
but, if cautiously handled, furnishes sufficiently definite results.
It consists in the changes that Shakspere's dramatic style under-
went during his long career of authorship. Of these the most
unmistakable are the various gradual alterations in the charac-
ter of his verse¹. In the earlier dramas it has an even, and
often monotonous, flow; there is a pause at the end of nearly
every line, and the movement of the longer passages is lacking
in variety and freedom. But, as he continued to write, Shak-
spere felt his way to more intricate and subtle rhythms; he
varied his pauses, and ran on the sense without a break from
verse to verse. This tendency grew upon him with constantly
increasing force, so that in the latest plays the periods are often
extremely prolonged and complicated. Closely connected with
this change are others of a subsidiary kind. When the sense
pauses with each verse, the final syllable will naturally be
strongly accented; but when one line runs on to combine with
its successor, it more naturally terminates with some unim-
portant word which is no obstacle to union. And thus, in the
later plays, an increasing number of lines have 'weak' endings,
i.e. they close with some trifling monosyllable which leans for
support on the opening word of the following verse. Ingram
distinguishes between the 'light endings,' consisting of auxiliary
verbs and pronouns (e.g. am, do, I), on which the voice can to
a small extent dwell, and the 'weak endings,' including con-
junctions and prepositions (e.g. for, if, in), on which the reader
cannot pause at all. Light endings appear frequently first in
Macbeth, and weak endings in Antony and Cleopatra. Allied to
the weak endings are the double, or feminine endings. In the
earlier plays the lines consist almost uniformly of ten syllables,
but as Shakspere's style progressed to greater freedom, an
extra syllable was frequently added to give variety to the
1
For the history of the gradual application of different portions of the
verse-test by Malone, Hickson, Spedding, Bathurst, Craik, Furnival, Fleay,
and Hertzberg, see Ingram's paper on 'Light and Weak Endings' in New
Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874. The latest monograph on the
subject is G. König's Vers in Shakspere's Dramen (Trübner, 1888).
2
See Spedding's letter on 'The Pause-Test,' New Shakspere Society's
Transactions, 1874.
134
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
rhythm, so that in the closing dramas almost one verse in three
is distinguished in this way.
With these changes is connected the gradual disuse of rhyme.
At first he often employed it, especially in his comedies, but, as
his art matured, he discarded it by degrees for blank verse or
for prose, except in certain passages where he introduced it
for a special purpose. Thus the proportion of rhyme in a play
is a test which, if discreetly applied, helps to decide whether it is
early or late. With the decrease of rhyme there disappeared
the sonnets, quatrains, and snatches of doggrel which at first
had found their way into the dialogue'.
Other immaturities, besides those of versification, cling to the
earlier plays; they abound in conceits, puns, overwrought
imagery, and excessive classical allusions. As yet, thought and
imagination lagged behind fancy and power of expression. But
gradually they came to the front, and took their rightful place
in the dramatist's work; language, instead of being racked and
stretched for want of matter, is found at the last staggering
along under a burden of ideas almost beyond its power to
bear.
These evidences furnish a basis for the division of the plays
into groups.
No such division can be completely authoritative
or final, but recent criticism has, for the most part, agreed in
recognizing four leading stages in the development of Shak-
spere's genius and art. His literary career, beginning about
1588, extended over a period of rather more than twenty years.
Of these the first five or six (1588-1594) were years of dramatic
apprenticeship. He started with theatrical hack-work, touching
up old plays, and collaborating with writers of established repute
in stagecraft. He next began to test his independent genius in
various spheres, trying, in turn, comedy, historical drama,
narrative verse, and tragedy. Much of what he produced during
this early period is of enduring interest and beauty, but every-
where there are the marks of youth. The style is often crude
and artificial; the power of characterization is still rudimentary;
* See the metrical table on p. 123 of Furnivall's Introduction to the
Leopold Shakspere. On the reservations with which the rhyme-test'
must be accepted, see Dowden's Primer, PP. 44-46.
VIII]
Shakspere's Periods of Authorship.
135
the wit is sparkling and vivacious rather than subtle and refined;
the pathos of life is recognized, but not its terror or its mystery,
Shakspere is as yet in his adolescence. Thence he passes
onward to the second stage of his career (1595-1600). His
powers have now ripened, and to this period belongs much of
his most flawless workmanship. His joyous strength and energy
flow forth without stay or stint, and Falstaff and Prince Hal,
Beatrice and Rosalind, spring into superb and radiant exist-
ence. Instead of imperfect sketches we have full-length portraits,
showing a grasp of life and of character in deeper and more
complex aspects than before. The splendid panorama of
national history is unrolled before our eyes, and its moral
issues are exhibited in clear and comprehensive working.
Shakspere is in his full manhood, but his outlook is as yet
not without limitations. Life still attracts him chiefly on its
practical, mundane and material side. His world is one of
sane and strenuous activities, of sweet and loyal affections,
which find their foil in cowardice, vanity, deceit, and hardness
of heart. It is not till he enters upon his third period (1601-
1608) that he begins to handle the problems of the deeper
spiritual life, and to face the tragic riddles of human sin and
agony. This is his 'hell of time,' during which, under the
pressure of personal suffering, he sounded the lowest abysses
of our mortal lot, and gazed unappalled upon the awful
spectacle of the guilty and the guiltless involved in a common
doom, and of Nemesis following as relentlessly upon error as
upon crime. Hamlet, Brutus, Othello, Desdemona, Lear, Cor-
delia, Edmund, Macbeth, Timon, all alike die the death, and
'the rest is silence.' For seven years that grim vision floated
before the poet's eyes, and the terror and pity of it would have
driven weaker natures to despair. But Shakspere was too
strong to succumb even to the stress of such an ordeal, and at
the last he struggled upwards once more to light and calm. It
is this final mood which is reflected in the plays of the fourth
period (1607-1612), and nowhere in literature is there a more
startling contrast than that between Shakspere's closing group of
dramas and the tragic series that precedes it. The fell images
of sin and death vanish almost entirely from the scene, and the
136
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
hand of the avenger ceases to claim its victims. The funeral
notes of the dirge are hushed, and the air is filled with sweet and
tender melodies whose themes are repentance, forgiveness,
and reconciliation. Instead of a King Lear we have a Prospero,
and Hermione and Imogen replace Cleopatra and Lady Mac-
beth. The spirit of these last plays cannot find fitter expression
than in the words, 'At eventide it shall be light.'
But while we thus note the changes through which Shakspere's
art and genius and temper passed, the converse fact must never
be forgotten that his work throughout has a marvellous stamp
of unity. Except a few plays, belonging chiefly to the beginning
or end of his career, when he was collaborating with other
writers, or was touching up older materials, there is no one of
his dramas which could conceivably have been written by any
other man.
This distinctively Shaksperean note depends upon
a combination of characteristics, partly of style, partly of thought
and motive, but its dominant feature is a majestic common-
sense, an unfaltering eye for the true proportion of things, a fidelity
as constant as it is unobtrusive to the eternal, underlying
principles of morality. Shakspere is supreme and unique, not
because he lacks every fault or possesses every excellence, but
because the circle of his vision is so completely concentric with
the orbit of the world's forces: he seems to stand at the core of
circumstance, and to touch truth at its source. Shakspere,' as
Goethe said, has identified himself with the spirit of the
Universe. He penetrates it as the spirit itself does: to both
nothing is unrevealed.' Herein lies the secret of his individuality,
for no man was ever less at pains to be original in the ordinary
sense. He had in him nothing of the spirit of the reformer or
the pioneer, and, instead of attempting to create new methods
or instruments, he accepted those which he found current, and
was content to follow in the paths which his predecessors had
marked out. When he began his career of authorship, Romantic
drama in all its leading types of tragedy, comedy, and history-
play had already been popularized by Marlowe, Kyd and Greene,
and Shakspere threw himself into the prevailing fashion. Neither
in subject-matter nor in treatment did he aim at novelty, and,
as has been shown, hints of many of his leading incidents are
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Titus Andronicus.
scattered through the works of his immediate forerunners.
Thus Shakspere became a Romantic dramatist, not, as is some-
times represented, from conscious choice, and after deliberately
rejecting classical precepts, but simply because his creative
activity flowed into the nearest and most natural channels. He
was a poet and playwright, not a doctrinaire, and he did not
do battle on behalf of the Unities, or against them; in the
majority of his dramas they are violated, but in The Comedy of
Errors and The Tempest they are scrupulously observed.
It is this complaisance of Shakspere towards the dramatic
status quo that creates the difficulty of deciding at what exact
point his own work begins. In his earliest productions he
appears as the imitator or collaborateur of the leading play-
wrights of the time, and aesthetic tests can never conclusively
determine how far these works are from the pen of Marlowe,
Greene, and others, or of Shakspere copying their style. This
question of authenticity confronts us at the outset in the case of
TITUS ANDRONICUS. The external evidence is entirely in
favour of the play being by Shakspere. It was included by
Heminge and Condell in the first folio, and it is mentioned by
Meres in his list of 1598. It dates almost certainly from 1587
or 1588, for in the introduction to Bartholomew Fair, 1614, Ben
Jonson declares that any man' who will swear Jeronimo or An-
dronicus are the best plays yet, shows that his judgment hath
stood still these five and twenty or thirty years. Thus external
evidence pronounces that Titus Andronicus was written by Shak-
spere immediately after leaving Stratford, and the chief German
critics (e.g. Kreyssig, Ulrici, and Heitzberg) accept this view.
English commentators however, almost without exception, have
refused to recognize the play as genuinely Shaksperean, and
have at most admitted that it was touched up by the poet.
A stage tradition dating from 1687 affords slender support to
this theory, which, otherwise, rests purely upon aesthetic con-
siderations arising out of the nature of the plot and its treat-
'It is, however, not till 1594 that we find an entry of the play in the
Stationers' Register. In the same year Henslowe mentions a performance
of Titus Andronicus by the Earl of Sussex' men. The first extant edition of
the play is 1600; the name of the author is not given.
138
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
ment. The incidents, though fictitious, are supposed to be
drawn from the annals of the later Roman empire, and are
marked by all the characteristics of that degenerate epoch.
Titus Andronicus, the general of the Romans, conquers the
Goths in battle, and takes captive their Queen Tamora with
her three sons, the eldest of whom he sacrifices at the tomb of
his ancestors. He is chosen by the people to fill the vacant
imperial throne, but he declines in favour of Saturninus, son of
the preceding ruler. Saturninus is anxious to marry Lavinia,
the daughter of Titus, but has a successful rival in his own
brother, Bassianus, who carries her off in spite of the opposition
of her father, who, in his fury, slays his son Mutius for taking
his sister's part. Saturninus then weds Tamora, by whose
charms he has been captivated, and the rest of the play is
occupied with the details of the Gothic Queen's revenge upon
Andronicus and his family. Her husband, her sons, and her
paramour, Aaron the Moor, all in turn, become accomplices in
her scheme, which includes the murder of Bassianus, the
mutilation and rape of Lavinia, and the execution of two
children of Andronicus, whose mind is crazed by these accumu-
lated ills. Yet, with the craft of a madman, he lures Tamora
and her sons into a trap and kills them with his own hand, at
the same time putting an end to Lavinia's wretched life. He
immediately falls himself beneath the sword of Saturninus. The
latter, in his turn, is slain by Lucius, the only surviving son
of Andronicus, who has put himself at the head of the invading
Goths, and who is now chosen emperor.
The plot is thus a tissue of horrors, and they are accentuated
unsparingly throughout. It is this repulsive realism that has led
English critics to deny that the play is a genuine specimen of
Shaksperean tragedy, which wellnigh uniformly shuns all that is
barbarous or gross. In Titus Andronicus the worst excesses
of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy are reproduced, combined with the
most unnatural horrors of classic fable. The ghastly legends.
of Atreus and Thyestes, of Tereus and Philomela directly
suggest incidents in the play, while other episodes are borrowed
from the stories of the Tarquins, of Virginius, and Coriolanus.
The running fire of classical allusion throughout every act,
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139
Titus Andronicus.
united to occasional quotations from Latin authors in the
original, has been urged as an additional proof that the play
was not written by Shakspere. But it is far from impossible
that the Stratford poet may have poured out, in this early work,
his stock of grammar-school reminiscences, and have drawn
upon them for the materials of a blood-curdling tragedy of the
approved type. In any case neither this peculiarity of style, nor
the loathsome nature of so many incidents in the play, justifies
the attitude which English criticism has adopted. External
evidence ascribes the play to Shakspere, and the conjecture
that he merely added revising touches to it finds no support in
the character of the work. For, whatever its demerits are, it has
an unmistakable stamp of unity. The plot is clear and compact,
and the versification is singularly homogeneous throughout.
Moreover, a close examination reveals certain characteristics of
style and spirit, which temper the horrors, and which anticipate
the later methods of the Stratford dramatist. A breeze from the
Warwickshire glades blows fresh at times through the reeking
atmosphere, and amidst the festering corruptions of a decadent
society we have glimpses of nature that make us less forlorn.
The constant allusions, however, to animals and birds in Titus
Andronicus, as in other of the early plays and poems, are due
not only to Shakspere's familiarity with the country, but to the
influence of Euphuism, one of whose most notable features is
the persistent use of illustrations from the natural world. Other
passages anticipate speeches or situations in the dramatist's
later works, and afford strong confirmation of the Shaksperean
authorship of the play'. But yet weightier evidence is to be
1
Among these passages the following may be mentioned :—
(a) i. 1. 'Romans, friends, followers, favourers of my right.'
Cp. Friends, Romans, countrymen' (Antony's speech in Julius Caesar).
(b) i. 2. 'Wilt thou draw near the nature of the Gods?
Draw near them then in being merciful:
Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.'
Cp. Portia's 'mercy' speech in The Merchant of Venice.
(c) i. 2. Titus at the tomb of his sons:
'Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no damned drugs, here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep.'
140
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
found in the character-drawing where, amidst much that is
intolerably crude, there are already signs of the master-hand.
Titus for cits our sympathies in the first act by his tyrannical
attempt to separate his daughter from her betrothed, and by
his hot-headed murder of the son who stands forth in her
defence. But as the action proceeds he becomes a man more
sinned against than sinning, and he atones for his misdeeds in
the scene where he sacrifices his hand in the vain hope of saving
Quintus and Martius from their doom. Thus, like Lear, he
expiates his crimes by suffering, though his horrible revenge
upon his enemies at the close proves that his moral purga-
tion has been but superficial, and Nemesis justly claims him
as a victim. More noteworthy, however, than Titus is Aaron
the Moor, the arch-villain of the drama. In the cynical
effrontery of his wickedness, he resembles some of Marlowe's.
creations, especially Barabas. But he further displays, though
in rudimentary form, two leading characteristics of Shakspere's
criminals: he has an acid humour, and he has the faculty of
adroitly turning to his own purposes the vicious desires of his
fellow-men. A redeeming touch, that keeps him within the pale
of humanity, is his affection for his bastard child; but otherwise
he is an incarnation of motiveless malignity, thus prefiguring,
Cp. Macbeth's words-
'Duncan is in his grave.
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further.'
(d) ii. 1. She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd;
She is a woman, therefore may be won.'
These lines are repeated, with slight alterations, in Richard III.
(e)
The hunt is up, the morn is bright and grey,
The fields are fragrant, and the woods are green.
Uncouple here, and let us make a bay,
And wake the emperor and his lovely bride.'
Cp. the hunting-scene in Midsummer Night's Dream, iv. 1.
(ƒ) ii. 5.
Cp. Sonnet 128.
(
Those lily hands
Tremble like aspen-leaves upon a lute,
And make the silken strings delight to kiss them.'
How oft when thou, my music, music play'st,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand.
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Titus Andronicus.
strangely enough, Iago, who ruins a very different type of the
Moorish race.
Among the crowd of repellent figures the boy
Lucius forms an attractive picture, with his combined nervous-
ness and high spirit, his precocious intelligence, and his tender
memories of the loving mother who left him his Ovid's Mela-
morphoses. He is of the same kin as the two young princes in
Richard III, and one hand must have created them all. But
the most distinctively Shaksperean feature of the play is its close.
It is a uniform law in the dramatist's tragedies that, however
terrible be the catastrophe in which they culminate, they never
end in unmitigated gloom. Individuals may perish, the victims
of their own or others' misdeeds, but their fate has in it some-
thing of sacrificial efficacy, and beyond the darkness we foresce
the dawn of a new social order. So here the choice of the
valiant soldier Lucius, the sole surviving son of Titus, to be
emperor is of good omen for the future, and gives hope of
a sounder era when Rome shall no longer herself be bane unto
herself.'
The three Parts of HENRY VI, with Richard III, form a
tetralogy, giving a complete picture of the dissensions between
the Houses of Lancaster and of York, till the victory of a nobler
and more catholic spirit in the person of Henry Richmond.
The links between the various portions of this history-cycle are
evident, alike in the reappearance and development of numerous
characters, and in the unity of moral drift throughout the series.
There can thus be no reasonable doubt that Shakspere, who
was indisputably the author of Richard III, had a share in the
three parts of Henry VI, which stage by stage lead up to it, and
which are included by Heminge and Condell in the first folio.
It is however highly probable that they are not his work alone,
and this would seem to account for their omission by Meres
from his list in 1598. Part I is, almost without doubt, chiefly
by other hands. It displays a reckless disregard of facts which
is found in none of Shakspere's genuine historical plays. It is
one thing to slightly alter the perspective of events for dramatic
purposes, and quite another to outrage all chronological truth.
Thus the coronation of the Dauphin at Rheims is represented
142
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
as taking place before the appearance of Joan of Arc, instead of
being the climax of her career. The death of Talbot takes
place in the fourth act, and in the fiſth act we hear of the revolt
of Paris from the English, though, as a matter of fact, Talbot
survived this event for twenty-two years. In addition to such
glaring blunders, the play is disfigured by violent national
partisanship. Shakspere's ardent patriotism does not prevent
him being magnanimous to his country's foes, but here there is
no trace of this loftier spirit. The play combines in no very
skilful fashion several independent threads of interest, of which
the most prominent is the progress of the war in France, and
the loss of the English dominion there. A salve is given to the
national sense of honour by representing all defeats as due to
treachery or witchcraft, and by dwelling with enthusiasm upon.
the exploits of valiant Talbot, 'great Alcides of the field,' who
is the real hero of the piece. That he was accepted as such by
Elizabethan audiences is plain from an allusion in Nash's Piers
Penniless, 1592, 'How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the
terror of the French, to think that after he had been two
hundred years in his tomb he should triumph again on the
stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten
thousand spectators.' These battle-scenes are written with
a lusty vigour, which accounts for their popularity. On the
French side La Pucelle (Joan of Arc) is the most prominent
figure, but her character is drawn in such crude colours that
it is a relief to have warrant for feeling satisfied that she has
no claim to a place among Shakspere's portrait-gallery of
women.
The other leading interest in the play lies in the quarrels
between the nobles who surround the young king. In the
opening scene the Duke of Gloster and the Bishop of Winchester
break into strife round the dead body of Henry V, and through-
out the drama their enmity waxes in bitterness. But a yet
more fatal feud begins to make head between the partisans of
the reigning line and those of the rival house of York. It
bursts into open rupture in the Temple Gardens, where
Richard Plantagenet, the Yorkist representative, after pleading
the justice of his claim, challenges the bystanders, as they
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143
Henry VI, Part I.
hesitate to speak, yet to proclaim their thoughts in 'dumb
significants':
'Let him that is a true-born gentleman,
And stands upon the honour of his birth,
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,
From off this briar pluck a white rose with me.'
Somerset, a Lancastrian supporter, rejoins in kind:
'Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer,
But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.'
This scene (Act ii. 4) with its swift verbal thrust and parry, and
its striking imagery, may almost certainly be attributed to Shak-
spere, and it is possible that touches from his hand are to
be found in the character of the young king, who from the first
shows himself unfit to control the unruly elements that surge
around his throne. When Winchester and Gloster break into
violent quarrel before his face, instead of quelling them by his
authority, he merely utters the feeble lament, O how this
discord doth afflict my soul,' and moralizes on the evils of civil
dissension. So again, when a broil arises between partisans of
Somerset and York, he thinks to restore peace by a few smooth
words, not realizing that his action in fastening a red rose on
his breast gives deep offence to his aspiring rival. But it is, above
all, in the matter of his marriage that he gives proof of his
incapacity for rule. When Gloster announces that the Earl of
Armagnac offers him his daughter, in order to knit France and
England in amity, he at first protests:
Alas! my years are young,
And fitter is my study and my books
Than wanton dalliance with a paramour.'
But soon he declares himself
'Content with any choice.
Tends to God's glory and my country's weal.'
Yet at the instigation of the Duke of Suffolk, who has his
own purposes to serve, he violates his contract and takes as his
bride Margaret of Anjou, whose imperious spirit is to prove
a main agent of his fall. It is with Suffolk's fateful mission to
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[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
bring Margaret overseas to England that Part I of Henry VI
comes to a close.
Parts II and III are the recasts of two older plays, The First
Part of the Contention, and The True Tragedie of Richard,
Duke of York. The mutual relation of these four dramas is
a most difficult problem, but careful study of the internal
evidence goes far to prove that Marlowe and Greene, with
possibly some assistance from Peele or Shakspere, wrote the
old plays, while the revision was effected by Marlowe and
Shakspere conjointly. Part II contains much fine dramatic
material in the guilty love of Suffolk and Queen Margaret,
their alliance with York and Winchester (now raised to the rank
of Cardinal) for the overthrow of Gloster, Suffolk's fall and
death, the popular rising under Jack Cade, and the first armed
encounter of the rival Houses at St. Albans. The character of
Suffolk is quite in the vein of Marlowe, and presents striking
points of similarity to that of Young Mortimer in Edward II.
Amorous passion and ambition are his sole motives; he wins
the affections of Margaret from her lawful lord, and with her
aid he seeks to 'weed' the nobles who are obstacles to his
rise. He plans the murder of Gloster, and is careless what
means are used:
'Be it by gins, by snares, by subtlety,
Sleeping or waking, 'tis no matter how,
So he be dead.'
When the deed is done he can affect a hypocritical grief, but
the popular instinct fastens upon him as the culprit, and Henry
is forced to banish him. Yet even in the moment of defeat he
plays the lover with all his old ardour, and takes a lingering
farewell of the queen:
"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?'
And when in his flight he is captured by pirates, and threatened
with instant execution, his 'imperial tongue' disdains to plead
for life to 'vulgar grooms,' and he meets his fate with haughty
¹ See Appendix A.
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145
Henry VI, Part II.
insouciance, consoled by the thought that he is faring like the
heroes of old.
'Great men oft die by bold Bezonians;
A Roman sworder and banditto slave
Murdered sweet Tully; Brutus' bastard hand
Stabbed Julius Caesar; savage islanders
Pompey the Great; and Suffolk dies by pirates.'
Margaret of Anjou is also probably a creation, in the main, of
Marlowe. She has the outward, but none of the inward graces
of her sex. Haughty, vindictive, treacherous, and of iron will, she
hesitates at no deed that furthers her own supremacy and that
of her paramour; even her lawless love has not the tender note
that wins a measure of sympathy, while for her husband with his
mind bent to holiness she has only the scornful wish that the
college of cardinals 'Would choose him pope, and carry him to
Rome.' The sole feminine quality which she exhibits is her
spiteful jealousy of the Duchess of Gloster, whose imperious
temper vies with her own, and whose costly display so mortifies
her that she boxes her ears for not stooping to pick up her fan,
though she pretends that it was by mistake.
Another figure after Marlowe's heart is that of 'dogged York'
with his arm that reaches at the moon' and his fixed resolve:
to raise aloft the milk-white rose, 'With whose sweet smell
the air shall be perfumed.' With politic foresight he accepts the
governorship of Ireland, which his enemies thrust upon him, for
he thus obtains command of an armed body of men to support
his designs, while in the interval he suborns Jack Cade to head
a revolt of the Commons against Henry's rule. Thus with daring
astuteness he takes advantage alike of the king's weakness, the
selfish wrangles and jealousies of the nobility, and the popular
discontent, till he feels sufficiently secure to challenge Henry face
to face, and to deny his right of sovereignty. York's ambition is
not without excuse, for Henry displays with pitiable clearness the
incapacity of the moralizing devotee for the high duties of king-
ship. He has saintly aims, but his goodness never goes further
than pious aspirations and utterances, and under his nerveless
rule confusion becomes ever worse confounded. When the furious
peers around him break into fierce quarrel, instead of coercing
them into silence, he has only feeble appeals, and unctuous reflec-
L
146
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
tions on the blessings that attend on peacemakers. At the news
of Cade's revolt he resolves to send a holy bishop to argue with
the rebels,
"For God forbid so many simple souls
Should perish by the sword,'
and when the captured conspirators are brought to him with
halters round their necks, he pardons them and dismisses them
unpunished to their homes. When York lands with a mighty
array from Ireland, he sends an envoy to ask 'the reason of
these arms,' but not too roughly,' and while he is thus parleying,
the White Rose partisans have time to bring up their forces, and
to strike their first victorious blow at St. Albans. He has not
even sufficient worldly wisdom to fly when defeated. His wife
urges him to hasten to London to repair his fortunes, and he
answers, 'Can we outrun the heavens? Good Margaret, stay.'
The one idea about the heavens which never suggests itself
to Henry is, that they help those who help themselves.
The picture of the mob-leader, Jack Cade, is either due to
Shakspere or, at least, harmonizes with his attitude towards
demagogues in his undoubted works. Cade claims to be of
royal descent, and vows reformation when he is king. '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
--there shall be no money: all shall eat and drink on my score.'
As the first step to this liberty all lawyers, scholars, and gentle-
men are to be put out of the way, and those only to be spared
who go in clouted shoon. The Clerk of Chatham is hung with
his pen and inkhorn about his neck, because he can write his
own name, and Lord Say is beheaded for that he has most
traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting
a grammar school,' and has men about him 'that usually talk
of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no
Christian ear can endure to hear.' For a time Cade prospers
and enters Southwark in triumph, but his followers desert him
on the offer of a free pardon, and he comes to an inglorious
end.
Part III of Henry VI was less thoroughly revised than
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147
Henry VI, Part III.
Part II from its original, and is inferior in dramatic interest.
It deals in chronicle fashion with the varying fortunes of the civil
war, and depicts the overwhelming ruin in which the House of
Lancaster expiates the weakness of its head. But it also fore-
shadows the Nemesis that awaits the Yorkist family for its lust
and criminal violence, and young Henry Richmond is already
prophetically hailed as England's hope,' destined to bless
a regal throne. Throughout the play Henry and his Queen
act their accustomed parts, and each is placed in a situation
in which their characters are glaringly exposed. During the
temporary triumph of her party after the battle of Wakefield,
when the Duke of York falls captive into her hands, Margaret
shows herself a very she-wolf of France,' gloating over her
prisoner's woes, offering him a napkin red with the blood of his
murdered son, crowning him in mockery with a paper crown,
and finally with her own hand helping to stab him to death.
By this outburst of ferocity she alienates in advance such
sympathy as she might otherwise have gained at a later period
of the drama, when the butchery of her son, Prince Edward,
leads her to a display of genuine mother-feeling. But this
tenderness does not extend to her husband. During the battle
of Towton, while the issue of the fight is still uncertain, Henry
is seen sitting on a molehill afar from the battle, whence he has
been chidden by his Queen. So while his crown, his liberty, and
his very life are at stake, he remains a passive spectator, content
to acquiesce in the decree of heaven: To whom God will, there
be the victory.'
With such a chief the Lancastrian cause is doomed. Henry's
followers are defeated, and he has to fly into retirement, and
adopt disguise. But the change is no hardship to him; he is
still a 'king in mind,' and when questioned Where is thy
crown?' he answers,
My crown is in my heart, not on my head,
C
Nor to be seen my crown is called "content."
A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy.'
What Henry never realizes is that a man is entrusted with
the high responsibilities of kingship not to secure 'content'
for himself, but to further by strenuous action the well-being
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148
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of the people over whom he is set as ruler. And thus his
merely negative virtue, his impotent aspirations after holiness,
prove a curse instead of a blessing, and he who yearns above
all things to be a peacemaker among men, has to see his
kingdom rent by intestine strife, and to grow familiar with war
in its most cruel and unnatural shape.
The Nemesis that overtakes the House of Lancaster entails
the temporary rise of the Yorkist party, but violence and craft
are as little the true elements of kingship as feeble inactivity,
and they too must have their reward. In the fortunes of various
members of the White Rose faction the working out of this
truth is exemplified, but its cardinal illustration is shown, with
intense dramatic effect, in the career of its most notable repre-
sentative, Richard, Duke of Gloster. He first appears upon
the scene in Henry VI, Part III, and the original lines of his
character were without doubt drawn by Marlowe, to whose
heroes he is in many points akin. The youngest son of the
murdered Duke of York, he concentrates in his own person in
pre-eminent degree the abilities and vices of his House. Circum-
stances have helped to develop the evil in his nature. He is
a hunchback,
'Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,'
born amid every evil omen, and with teeth in his head, to signify
he came to bite the world. Thus marked off even in his cradle
from the rest of his fellows, he holds that the ordinary human
ties do not exist for him, that he is not called upon to deal in
the soft laws of love. He tramples under foot those primary
ties of kinship and society without which man is not man; he
claims to stand pedestalled, solitary and secure, upon the basis
of self:
'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.'
Thus he views the world merely as so much space for that
self to bustle in, as so much material which it may mould to its
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Richard III.
Self-
own purposes and upon which it may wreak its will.
development, as the phrase is ordinarily used, implies moral
progress to Richard it simply means the uncontrolled expan-
sion of the energies which chafe, as it were, within the shrunken
compass of his withered frame. This imperious instinct is some-
thing more colossal and comprehensive than ambition, yet it
includes ambition in its capital form, the lust to wear a crown,
'Within whose circuit is Elysium,
And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.'
The sense of his physical disqualifications for sovereignty is
to him only an additional, piquant incentive never to rest till
his 'misshaped trunk be round impaled with a glorious crown.'
To all that stand between him and the goal of his desire, he is
as pitiless as some destructive force of nature. The daggers
of his brothers, as well as his own, smite down the young
Prince Edward, heir to Henry VI, but it is Richard alone who
offers to kill Queen Margaret by the side of her son, and who
posts off to the Tower to make a 'bloody supper' by the murder
of the imprisoned and helpless king. The line of Lancaster is
no longer a barrier to his aspirations; henceforward his foes are
of his own household.
It was to this point that Shakspere, with his fellow playwrights,
brought the fortunes of Gloster in Henry VI, Part III. Fired by
the interest of the theme he carried it forward, probably after
the death of Marlowe and Greene, in RICHARD III, the first
historical drama which can be ascribed wholly to his hand.
Its date is probably 1593 or a little later¹. About the same
1 The first quarto appeared in 1597, without Shakspere's name, which is
found in the second quarto in 1598. Seven quartos were issued before the
first folio. There is a wide divergence between the quarto and folio texts.
See on this subject the introduction to the play in the Cambridge edition,
the papers by Spedding and Pickersgill in the New Shakspere Society's
Transactions, 1875, and Delius' essay in the Shakspere Jahrbuch, vii. The
Cambridge editors take the quarto as their standard, and look upon many
of the corrections in the folio as the work of a 'nameless transcriber.'
Pickersgill supports this view, which is rejected by Spedding, who pro-
nounces in favour of the folio, and considers that the revision was effected
entirely by Shakspere, though the text is corrupted by the printer's blunders.
Delius also adopts the folio, which he considers to represent the original
text, the quarto being an imperfect pirated edition.
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
time appeared an anonymous play, The True Tragedy of
Richard III, of which however Shakspere made no use.
With a Latin drama on the same subject by Dr. Legge,
performed at Cambridge in 1579, he was not likely to be
familiar, and his play is thus almost entirely based upon the
Chronicle of Holinshed, who had drawn his narrative from Sir
Thomas More's History of Richard III. The drama, when
compared with any of the parts of Henry VI, shows a great
advance, due in large measure to its unity of authorship. A
series of loosely connected scenes is replaced by a compact
structure, and a concentrated interest. Indeed, the mighty
figure of Richard so dominates the drama that we are reminded
that Shakspere, though now working by himself, was yet under
the influence of Marlowe's methods. At a later period he
learnt to combine in a single play the most varied contrasts of
character. Other tokens of immature art appear in the over-
strained rhetoric of numerous passages, and in the shrill
monotony of lamentation by the female characters, which pro-
duces a lyrical rather than a strictly dramatic effect. Similarly
artificial in its crude balance is the arrangement by which
the ghosts in Act v alternately curse and bless Richard and
Richmond: the supernatural loses its plausibility when it stands
out in such jagged outline, instead of shading insensibly away
into the dim unknown. Yet, whatever its faults, the work is
strangely impressive in its sombre power, and of all Shaksperc's
historical plays it holds most securely its position on the stage.
This is chiefly due to the masterly development of the principal
character, the outlines of which had been firmly laid, as has
been seen, in Henry VI, Part III. Richard's opening soliloquy
is a restatement of his confession of faith made in the earlier
play, while it emphasizes, at the same time, a change of con-
ditions to which he adapts his methods. The stern alarums
and dreadful marches of the civil war, in which his turbulent
spirit had found a ferocious joy, have been replaced by fair
Well-spoken days which give him no occupation save to see his
shadow in the sun. Thus for the achievement of his ends he is
how thrown entirely upon his intellectual resources, especially
upon that gift of dissimulation in which he can outdo his master
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Richard III.
'Machiavel' himself. It is seldom that a nature so unbridled
and vehement can wear the hypocrite's mask with success, and
in this very fact Richard finds his safeguard, while the con-
sciousness of his triumph fills him with the most intense scorn
of the simple gulls' who are his dupes. This cynical con-
tempt of humanity gives a relish to his villainies quite apart
from their usefulness to his ends; he exults in them for their
own sake, he has all the joy of an artist in the perfection of his
work. Thus the mock commiseration of his dialogue with
his unsuspecting victim Clarence changes, the moment he is
left alone, to the chuckle of sardonic glee :
'Simple, plain Clarence !-I do love thee so,
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven.'
This light-hearted mirth in a fratricide appals us, but to
Richard the moral aspect of the situation never presents itself,
he is simply tickled by its irresistible humour. So, too, with his
next exploit, the wooing of the lady Anne, widow to Prince
Edward of Lancaster: it is a necessary step in his designs, but
what enchants him is the paradoxical humour of the thing :
'What though I killed her husband and her father!
The readiest way to make the wench amends
Is to become her husband and her father.'
The whole process of this wooing is a masterpiece, and
a cardinal illustration of Richard's methods. With complete
confidence in his powers he makes no attempt to smooth away
difficulties, but lays siege to Anne under what seem wantonly
unfavourable conditions, while she is following the corpse of
Henry VI to burial, and while curses upon his murderer are
thick on her lips. At first he meets her terrible denunciations
with mere tongue-fence, till her declaration that he is fit for no
other place than hell gives him the opportunity of adroitly slipping
in as alternative 'your bed-chamber.' Then, seeing that the
mesmeric force of his nature is working upon Anne in spite of
herself, that the weak will is yielding to the fascination of the
strong, he abandons his word-play, and with magnificent audacity,
using his very crimes as an instrument of courtship, declares that
the motive of them has been her beauty, which can draw tears from
152
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the eyes that pity or sorrow had never dimmed. Though she
gazes on him with scorn, though she even spits at him, he knows
that inwardly she is giving way, and confident in his irresistible
spell he ventures neck or nothing by laying bare his breast and
lending her his sword to strike at it. As the uplifted blade falls
from her irresolute hand, we know that Richard has triumphed,
and her acceptance a few moments later of his proferred ring is
the outward sign of the completeness of her submission. Dis-
simulation as a fine art cannot go further than in this scene,
and Richard may well, as soon as Anne's back is turned, break
into ecstatic self-congratulation:
'Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won?'
The consummate achievement is to have overcome stupendous
obstacles by sheer technical mastery in evil :
'What! I that killed her husband, and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate;
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit withal
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!'
It should be noticed that Richard's success as a wooer tears
away the shred of justification for his evil courses, as it proves
that love might after all be a force in his life as in that of other
men, that nature has not penalized him irretrievably. Yet he
presses forward without halt in his fell designs. His agents do
Clarence foully to death in the Tower, and this crime Richard
with characteristic strategy turns to a two-handed engine for the
destruction of other enemies. Bursting into the presence-
chamber where Edward, stricken with sickness, is attempting
a reconciliation of all family feuds, he drives the blood from
every cheek by the calculated brusqueness of his announcement
that 'the gentle duke is dead.' The startling news comes with
a fatal shock to the enfeebled king, who is led out merely to
breathe his last, while Richard takes cunning advantage of the
consternation on the faces of the Queen's kindred, by pointing
to their paleness as evidence of guilt. In this faculty of turning
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Richard III.
every opportunity to instant account, of wasting no resource,
we see again the tact of the consummate craftsman in evil.
But Richard's fertility of resource is equalled by the unhesi-
Edward is
tating promptitude and decision of his action.
scarcely in his grave before Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan are
seized and hurried to their doom, while Hastings, weakly credu-
lous, like Clarence, till undeceived by the peremptory 'off with
his head,' follows his rivals to the block, just in time for the
news of his execution to add an extra flavour to Richard's dish
of strawberries at dinner. What matters the spilling of a little
more blood to one who has passed unmoved through the
carnage of the civil war? Yet even the case-hardened criminal
may be melted by the sight of helpless innocence and youth.
Such a spectacle in its most moving form is presented by
Gloster's nephews, the Prince of Wales and his brother of York.
There are no more delicate strokes in the play than those with
which Shakspere in a single scene has individualized these two
boys. The elder brother, as befits an heir to the throne, has
a quiet dignity which disdains the insinuation that his maternal
uncles were false friends, and which rebukes York's petition for
Richard's dagger with the laconic query, 'A beggar, brother?'
His meditations upon fame and upon the character of Caesar
give proof of intellectual powers beyond his years, while his high
spirit is shown in his declaration that when he is a man he will
win back 'our ancient right in France,' or die in the attempt.
York is more wayward, pert, and quick of tongue: he bandies
repartees with his uncle, and shows a sharp-provided wit,'
which with high-bred tact he can at need exercise upon himself
in order to blunt the sting of too unmannerly a gibe. But though
precocious in his speech, he has the childish love of playthings,
and the childish dread of the supernatural in the shape of his
' uncle Clarence's angry ghost,' which he fears to meet within
the Tower. Boyhood could take no more attractive and appeal-
ing form than in this royal pair, yet to Richard they are merely
bastards, 'two deep enemies,' to be knocked on the head like
vermin. Tyrrell's ready consent to be their butcher touches his
sensibilities—it is a sound of sweet music in his ears--and the
recital of the deed of horror which draws tears from the fleshed
154
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
villains who have been its agents is reserved by him as ‘a bonne-
bouche after supper ¹.
19
With Richard's peculiar constitution it affords him a special
pleasure, on the very eve of this tragedy, to enact an elaborate
piece of hypocrisy which degrades religion to the office of
a decoy. The preliminaries of the plot concerted with Buck-
ingham, by which the citizens are to acclaim Gloster as king,
having somewhat missed fire, though Richard has not scrupled
to blacken his mother's honour to serve his ends, a clever piece
of stage business is arranged for the edification of the Lord
Mayor and his companions. Richard is found by them,
prayer-book in hand, with a right reverend father on either side,
deep in the devotional exercises which impress the bourgeois
sense of piety. With well-feigned reluctance, as of one dragged
down from holy contemplation to earthly things, and with pro-
testations of unfitness, he accepts as a scarcely endurable burden
the crown for the proffer of which his confederate gives so
urgent a cue. The stratagem is wholly successful, and Richard,
besides gaining his end, has the added zest of outraging what
humanity holds most sacred.
Thus villainy has prospered in superlative degree, and the
brows of the arch-criminal are bound at last with the glittering
circle within which he had looked to find Elysium. And the
spectacle, as we gaze on it, provokes the troubled query, Is
Richard right, and can evil be made the law of life? But just as
the suspense becomes intolerable, Shakspere gives us a hint that
the Powers above are delaying, not forgetting, and in the very
hey-day alike of Richard's fortunes and crimes, the warning note
of the Nemesis to come is struck in Stanley's brief announce-
ment that 'Dorset is fled to Richmond.' Here for the first time
in the play the name of the destined avenger falls on the new
king's ear, and the effect is seen in the brooding reverie over
prophecies forgotten till that moment into which Richard falls,
and which betrays to us that, like other irreligious natures, he is
superstitious at bottom. And when he is aroused from this mood,
it is only to vent himself in bitter and contemptuous mockery of
1 Moulton's Shakspere as a Dramatic Artist, chapter iv. I owe several
suggestions to this study of Richard's character.
VIII]
155
Richard III.
Buckingham, which turns him into an enemy. Richard's genius
for hypocrisy for the first time fails him at a crisis. And hence-
forward, except that in his suit to Elizabeth for the hand of her
daughter he achieves a tour de force similar to the wooing of
the ill-starred Anne, he shows signs of failing power. In
preparing for the expedition against the revolted Buckingham,
which is afterwards turned against Richmond, he gives contra-
dictory orders, changes his mind, strikes a messenger before
waiting to hear his news, and lets himself be outmatched by
Stanley with his own weapon of hypocrisy. These are tokens
of an inward trouble which Richard gives up the attempt to
conceal, when on the eve of Bosworth, whilst issuing orders with
feverish rapidity, he suddenly confesses to a subordinate
'I have not that alacrity of spirit,
Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have,'
and seeks for stimulus in a bowl of wine. As long, however,
as he can find in action scope for the exercise of will, the dogged
force of his nature keeps him from entirely giving way, but
when his will is fettered in sleep, then at the crisis of his fate
those primal human instincts which he has outraged, rising with
rebellious power, fling before his gaze the awful vision of his
victims, and fill his ears with the dread reiteration of their 'despair
and die.' And as Richard starts from his slumber, with drops
of sweat cold upon his brow, there is wrung at last from his lips
the agonized cry of homage to the might of moral law:
'My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.'
The horror of his isolation from humanity falls upon him, and
echoing, as it were, the grim burden of the spectral chorus, he
shrieks aloud-
'I shall despair :-There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul will pity me.'
He to whom love had been only foolishness clutches at it
convulsively as he hangs over the darkness of the abyss, and,
with the imploring cry for pity from his fellows, his scheme of
self-centred life crumbles into the dust. That is the
< true
156
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
tragedy' of Richard III, the real and significant Nemesis of
which his death in battle at the hands of Richmond, God's
representative, is only the outward, though dramatically and
historically imperative, confirmation.
While the figure of the hunchback king throws all other
characters into a subordinate place, the full intent of the drama
is missed, unless Richard's fate is seen as the climax of a series
of Nemeses upon the guilty House of York. Clarence, King
Edward, the Queen's kindred, Hastings, Buckingham, follow
one another to their doom, and in each case, as will be evident
on careful study of the play, there is a turn of the wheel with the
result that those who triumph in one Nemesis become the
victims of the next.' But each incident, in addition, goes to form
a chain of triumph for Richard, while the catastrophe of his fate,
as the gathering of the ghosts testifies, is the retribution for them
all. Yet further, alike he and his victims suffer in common
expiation of the sins of York against Lancaster, so that a com-
plicated law of Nemesis controls the issues of the play. So
uniform indeed is its working that it runs a risk of appearing
automatic, and thus losing something of its moral significance.
In view of this danger Shakspere varies the action by a number
of devices, of which the most striking is the introduction upon
the scene, in weirdly impressive contrast, of the two women, the
Duchess of York and the Lancastrian Queen Margaret, who
epitomize, as it were, the whole story of crime and its retribution.
They are less human personages than monumental figures,
embodiments of suffering and of doom. The aged Duchess,
widow of the great Duke of York, mother of Edward, Clarence,
and Richard, grandmother of the boy princes, gathers up into
her own breast all the spear-points of penal destiny; as she
herself exclaims:
'Alas! I am the mother of these moans:
Their woes are parcelled, mine are general,'
and Queen Margaret, like some Fury of old, chants over her the
wild paean of sated, or all-but sated, revenge:
'Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward;
Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward;
Young York he is but boot, because both they
Match not the high perfection of my loss:
VIII]
Richard III.
Thy Clarence he is dead that stabbed my Edward;
And the beholders of this frantic play,
The adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey,
Untimely smothered in their dusky graves.
157
One last victim is still due, 'hell's black intelligencer,' Richard,
but that culminating debt is at length paid, and the account
between the Houses made even. Then, and not till then, may
the White Rose mingle with the Red, and 'fair prosperous days'
once more dawn over a re-united land. If, as is probable,
Richard III was Shakspere's first serious play, it gave convincing
proof that the new dramatist, however tolerant in some ways,
held rigidly to the doctrine that evil-doing, whether in the
individual or in the State, is dogged by a Nemesis that wrings its
penalty, even to the uttermost farthing.
CHAPTER IX.
SHAKSPERE'S POEMS.
THE EARLY PERIOD OF
COMEDY.
IT has seemed desirable to deal first with Shakspere's early
historical plays, as in them we see most plainly how intimate
was his relation to his predecessors, and by what gradual stages
he rose to independent effort in the domain of serious drama.
But meanwhile he had been putting forth his powers in other
and, for the most part, lighter spheres, where the distinctive
nature of his genius was from the beginning more unmistakably
shown, and where the influences of his youthful surroundings.
helped to give special colour to his art. Del'ghting, as it would
seem, in making varied trial of the faculties that he felt unfolding
within him, and urged forward as yet by no single dominating
impulse, he experimented, in these early days, here, there, and
everywhere, turning his hand with dexterous rapidity to narrative
verse, comedy of manners, comedy of incident, fairy comedy,
and lyrical tragedy. His output at this period is thus extremely
diversified, but in every branch it bears the broad stamp of
adolescence.
The two poems VENUS AND ADONIS and LUCRECE
may be conveniently spoken of at the outset, though they were
preceded by some of the plays. The circumstances of their
publication and dedication to Southampton have been already
described. In them Shakspere challenged a place among the
descriptive poets of the Elizabethan age, and the claim was
Venus and Adonis.
159
willingly allowed by his contemporaries. It was by them that
his fame was at first widely spread, and that he won the title of
'mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspere.' Yet by posterity
these works have been, for the most part, neglected, and it must
be allowed that some of the very points which made them so
popular in Shakspere's own time strike modern taste as blemishes.
The subject of Venus and Adonis is taken, though with consider-
able modifications from Ovid's Metamorphoses ¹. It tells the tale
of how Venus woos the beautiful boy Adonis, how he disdains
her love, and, in spite of her warnings, goes to the hunt where
he is slain by a boar, and turned, as he lies dead on the ground,
into a violet. Such a theme may be effectively handled in two
ways. There may be a frankly pagan treatment, a revelling in
sensuous beauty, a glorification of passion which, to be convincing,
must itself be passionate. This is the method which has given
such superb results in Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Or there is
the method employed, for instance, by Spenser in his description
of Acrasia's bower in The Faerie Queene, where a voluptuous
picture of the Temptress is drawn to typify the snares of carnal
sin. But between these two modes of treatment the youthful
Shakspere is found halting. He does, indeed, put into the
mouth of Adonis an outburst on the difference between love
and lust, and the episode of the 'jennet' is doubtless intended
as an illustration of the same theme. Yet he lingers with un-
affected relish over the details of Venus' charms, and elaborates
with minute realism every incident in her amorous strategy.
The result, however, is not to call into life a glowing, if luscious,
Renaissance figure. There are superb touches, as when the
hand of Adonis in the grasp of Venus is likened to
'A lily prisoned in a gaol of snow
Or ivory in an alabaster band,'
but the general air is one of ingenious and laboured analysis.
This is due in part to the technique of the poem, wherein
Shakspere adopts unreservedly the prevalent fashion, of sym-
¹ For a detailed comparison between passages in Venus and Adonis
and Lucrece and Ovid's Metamorphoses and Fasti, see Baynes' essay,
What Shakspere learnt at School.
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Shakspere and is Predecessors.
metrical balance, quaint metaphor, and antithesis strained to
cracking point. The following verse may serve as specimen:
'O, what a war of looks was then between them!
Her eyes, petitioners, to his eyes suing:
His eyes saw her eyes as they had not seen them;
Her eyes woo'd still, his eyes disdained their wooing,
And all this dumb play had his acts made plain
With tears, which, chorus-like, her eyes did rain.'
Similar is the couplet in which Venus speaks of Adonis' dis-
dainful words as
'Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh-sounding
Ear's deep-sweet music, and heart's deep-sore wounding.'
Modern criticism, as it contrasts such verbal sword-play with the
light and music of Marlowe's lines, cannot echo the encomium of
Cripple in Heywood's The Fair Maid of the Exchange on Venus
and Adonis, as 'the very quintessence of love.' But the Stratford
poet, if he failed to irradiate his theme with the glow of a living
passion, has done much to freshen the loaded atmosphere by
vivid and wholesome touches which waft with them the breath
of the Warwickshire fields and glades. The detailed study of
the 'points' of Adonis' courser, the pathetic history of the
hunting of 'poor Wat' the hare, the picture of the 'fawn hid in
some brake' whom the milch-doe hastens to feed, the lovely
description of the lark, weary of rest, mounting from his moist
cabinet' to greet the sun,
'Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnished gold,'
-all these and similar images are reminiscences of that sweet
and pure country life, whose air blows so often over Shakspere's
pages, and preserves them from the more tainted influences of
the Renaissance. And under the healthy charm of such scenes
we are scarcely disposed to regret that the poet's attempt to
portray the Goddess of Love, in her debased aspect, must be
pronounced, on the whole, a splendid failure.
The Lucrece is probably the 'graver labour' with which
Shakspere, in his dedication to Venus and Adonis, had promised.
to honour Southampton. It is longer than the earlier poem by
just above a third, and is written, not in a six-lined stanza, but
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161
Lucrece.
in the more complicated rhyme-royal.' In the choice of theme
and in its handling there are further signs of a 'graver' temper
and a maturing art. The exact source upon which Shak pere
drew cannot be determined, but the story of Lucretia had
already been told by Livy and Ovid in Latin, and by Chaucer,
Gower, Lydgate, and Painter in English. It doubtless attracted
the poet as offering the materials for a companion study to
Venus and Adonis. The picture of woman's lust and man's
chastity needed for its foil the contrasted picture of woman's
chastity and man's lust. Thus the two poems naturally present
many similar characteristics. Lucrece repeats the balanced and
often paradoxical antitheses of Venus and Adonis, and, like it,
subordinates action almost entirely to pictorial effect, and to
declamation. Nothing could be dramatically more inappropriate
than the long-drawn rhetoric of the heroine upon the themes of
Night, Opportunity, and Time, while she is yet in the first agony
of her hideous wrong, and the detailed description of the paint-
ing 'made for Priam's Troy' stops the movement of the main
story for a couple of hundred lines. Yet Lucrece shows un-
mistakable signs of advance upon its predecessor. The ethical
tone is more consistent, and there is far greater reserve in dealing
with the physical details of passion: even the somewhat over-
heated picture of the charms of the sleeping Lucrece is tempered
by touches of sweet and fresh fancy:
'Without the bed her other fair hand was,
On the green coverlet: whose perfect white
Show'd like an April daisy on the grass
With pearly sweat, resembling dew of night.
Her eyes, like marigolds, had sheathed their light,
And canopied in darkness sweetly lay,
Till they might open to adorn the day.'
The character of Lucrece is drawn in firm and vigorous
outline. Her perfect loyalty to her lord, and unsuspicious
courtesy to the guest who is alike his friend and king, her
appeal to Tarquin not to dishonour his princely name by
outrage, and her resolve to die by her own hand, and so 'bail'
her soul from its 'polluted prison,' all combine to form the type
of the ideal Roman matron, and show the early cunning of the
M
162
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
hand that was hereafter to create Brutus' Portia and Volumnia.
Tarquin also is forcibly conceived, struggling for a time be-
tween conscience and desire, then hardening his heart as a mill-
stone, and finally, after the accomplishment of his fell purpose,
jaded and self-loathing with the horrible recoil of surfeited
passion. The stanzas that tell of his torturing remorse, of the
bitter cry of the spotted princess,' his soul, are the most
powerful in the poem and strikingly anticipate some of the
Sonnets of the second series. Interesting in a different way
is the account of the picture of Troy besieged by the Greeks.
Though introduced somewhat inaptly, it is the most detailed
study of a painting that Shakspere has left us, the most
elaborate attempt to translate into words 'pencilled pensiveness.
and coloured sorrow,' and it proves that the young poet had
already been attracted by the incidents which were to form the
basis of his Troilus and Cressida, and of the first player's
recitation in Hamlet.
It will be convenient here to deal briefly with the other poems,
apart from the Sonnets, which have come down to us under
Shakspere's name. In 1599 William Jaggard published a col-
lection of verse, The Passionate Pilgrim, ascribed on the title-
page to Shakspere, but in reality a miscellany of the familiar
Elizabethan type, containing two of Shakspere's Sonnets, three
rhymed extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, poems by Marlowe,
Barnfield, Griffin, and others uncertain in origin, three of which
deal with the subject of Venus and Adonis. It is to be noted
that the Sonnet (No. 8) in which the praises of Spenser's 'deep
conceit' are sung, is certainly by Barnfield and not by Shak-
spere. Thus The Passionate Pilgrim added nothing to the
stock of undoubtedly Shaksperean verse, and when the piratical
Jaggard, in a later edition of 1612, included further two
'epistles' by Thomas Heywood, the Stratford poet, as Hey-
wood himself states, was much offended with Mr. Jaggard
that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold
with his name.' The Phoenix and the Turtle appeared in
Chester's Love's Martyr or Rosalin's Complaint, 1601, and is
there attributed to Shakspere. It would seem to have an
allegorical, possibly a personal, reference, which cannot now be
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163
Love's Labour's Lost.
solved, but the fine verses describing the 'mutual flame' of the
two birds,
'Two distincts: division none:
Number there in love was slain,'
with their ingenious antitheses and conceits are quite in
Shakspere's early lyrical manner. A Lover's Complaint was
printed at the end of the Sonnets in 1609, and there is thus no
reason for doubting its authorship. It is written in the same
seven-lined stanza as the Lucrece, and is the lament of a maiden
who has been betrayed by a beautiful and fair-spoken youth,
not unlike Will' of the Sonnets. Like the other poems, it
consists chiefly of declamation, but it shows a very marked
decrease in the use of antithesis and verbal paradox, and so
far points to a refinement in taste. There is, however, nothing
very striking in the treatment of the subject, and the maiden
is left at the end in a curious state of uncertainty as to whether
under the same temptation she would not succumb a second
time. Thus, except under the pressure of private grief which
gave birth to the Sonnets, Shakspere after 1594 wrote very
little independent verse, finding sufficient exercise for his lyrical
faculty in the matchless songs strewed up and down his plays,
those magical and entrancing snatches of melody which in
a special sense are his 'native wool-notes wild.'
But, as the examination of Richard III has already partly
shown, Shakspere's early dramas have points of kinship in style.
with his poems, and this is yet more evident when we turn to
the first group of comedies from his pen.
of comedies from his pen. It is impossible to fix
their order with absolute certainty, but metrical tests point to
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST as heading the list. It has two
rhymed lines to every one in blank verse, it is almost entirely
free from 'run-on' lines and double endings, it introduces
stanzas of various arrangement into the dialogue, and it contains
a far greater proportion of doggrel than any other play. These
evidences of immaturity are all the more striking because the
comedy, as we have it, is not in its original form, having been
'newly augmented and corrected' according to the first quarto
of 1598, when 'presented before her Highness this last Christmas.'
The additions must be to some extent matter of conjecture, but
M 2
164
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
they, no doubt, occur chiefly in the first, fourth, and fifth acts,
which, especially the last, are much longer than the second and
third¹.
The play has very little action or intrigue, and it seems,
almost alone amongst Shakspere's dramas, to be purely of his
own invention. In the main-plot Shakspere covers with ridicule
an attempt to defy the ordinary laws of life, not criminal like
that of Richard III, but equally impossible. The King of
Navarre has resolved to turn his court into a little academe,'
and with his principal lords has vowed for three years' not to see
¹ Evidences of revision, apparently in hasty fashion, are seen in Biron's
fine speech at the close of Act iv, where lines 296-301 are repeated with
slight verbal changes, and with considerable additions in the passage
317-351. And similarly in Act v, Scene ii, Rosaline's rebuke of Biron,
in lines 808-812, is afterwards worked up more fully in the speech
beginning at line 831.
A hint of the framework may, perhaps, be found in a passage of
Monstrelet's French Chronicle, which tells that, for the Duchy of Nemours,
and a promise of 200,000 crowns, Charles, King of Navarre, surrendered
certain territories to the King of France. It is of interest to note
that Shakspere borrowed the names of contemporary personages for his
leading male characters. The year 1590, about which the play is to be
placed, saw the victory of Henry of Navarre over the League at Ivry.
Amongst his chief lieutenants were Biron, Longueville, and the Duc de
Maine (Dumain), and these titles, then on every lip, were used by the
dramatist for his purposes. It was under Biron, whose later career
furnished tragic materials to Chapman, that the English allies of Henry
served, and it is related of him, that he was a brave soldier, but of
uncontrolled tongue, given to rhodomontades, jactances, and vanités.'
In these characteristics he is a prototype of the Biron of the comedy, and
his curious saying, 'Je sais bien que je ne mourrai qu'à l'hôpital, may
well have furnished the hint for the singular penalty inflicted upon the
mocking lord at the close of the drama. It is further possible that
the interview between a King of Navarre and a Princess of France,
may have been suggested by a historical meeting in 1586, between Henry
and Catherine de Medici, who was accompanied on the occasion by
a bevy of ladies, and that the wooing in Russian masquerade may be
founded upon a real incident of the year 1583, when an ambassador of
the Czar paid suit on behalf of his master, with quaint ceremonial, to
Lady Mary Hastings a relative of Elizabeth. The memory of this latter
fact must, in any case, have lent an additional interest to the Christmas
performance before the queen and her court. Finally, in regard to con-
temporary references, Don Adrian de Armado, who is termed a phantasm,
a monarcho,' and again, 'a fanatical phantasm,' cannot but be identified
with a well-known character of the day who went by the title of 'Phantas-
tical Monarcho.' His representation as a Spaniard with the name 'Armado'
is the only allusion by Shakspere, a strangely indirect one, to the momentous
crisis of 1588. On these points, see further the essay on Love's Labour's
Lost, by S. L. Lee, in The Gentleman's Magazine for 1880.
IX]
165
Love's Labour's Lost.
ladies, study, fast, not sleep.' The idea of these statutes in
defiance of affection may have been developed by contrast from
the statutes of those mediaeval 'Courts of Love,' which flourished
especially in that district of Provence where Shakspere has laid
the scene of his play. By the King, Longaville, and Dumain
the oaths are taken without misgiving, but Biron only signs
under protest, prophesying the failure of the scheme, and pointing
out that one of its articles must be broken immediately, for
the Princess of France is expected on an embassy of state.
The King's confession that this was quite forgot,' shows at
once that abstract theories and practical necessities will not
square, and the rigour of the oath goes by the board when the
Princess and her suite are received in audience, though denied
entrance within the palace gates. So far we have deft work-
manship, but the grouping of the Princess with her three ladies
over against the King with his three lords is too obvious and
mechanical, and the instantaneous violation of their vows by the
latter, upon the first meeting, is without plausibility. There is,
however, fun of a genuine, though not very subtle, kind in the
scene where they are in turn discovered to be hypocrites, the
King, Longaville, and Dumain, through their overheard avowals
and recitations of love-odes, and Biron, through the miscarriage
of his amorous missive to Rosaline. A way of retreat has to be
found, and the quick-witted Biron is besought by his companions
to find 'some salve for perjury.' His answer is the fine
speech, far transcending in diction the rest of the play, wherein
be maintains that 'the only books are women's looks,' which
teach the lore of love, and that this, as shown by its effects, is
the one 'study' worthy of the name.
'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.'
The dynamic quality of love, its power of transforming the
whole nature, as opposed to the comparative barrenness of merely
166
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
intellectual advance, could find no more splendid expression,
and the underlying quibble is let pass, as also that of the still
more audacious plea founded on a perversion of a scriptural
text:
'It is religion to be thus forsworn,
For charity itself fulfils the law;
And who can sever love from charity?'
Their scruples thus set at rest, the gentlemen resolve to 'lay
these glozes by' and win 'the girls of France.' But the wooing
is, it must be confessed, a little wearisome. The Muscovite
masquerade has lost its special attraction, and the device of
'mistaken identity,' upon which Shakspere relies so much for
the fun of his early plays, takes the elementary and somewhat
pointless form of an interchange of the ladies' masks. But the
salient feature is the civil war of wits,' the swiftly bandied set
of repartee between wooers and wooed. As the secondary
object of the play-more particularly, the underplot—is to
ridicule affectations of speech, there can be no doubt that these
verbal passages of arms are satiric in intention, but the cure
is decidedly homoeopathic, and as has been well said, 'the
poet has scarcely yet attained the art of exhibiting tediousness
to amuse and instruct, without becoming tedious himself.' It
is thus a relief when Biron, whose native good sense never quite
deserts him, bids at last farewell to
'Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,'
and trusts for success in his suit to 'russet yeas and honest kersey
noes.' But that success is neither for him nor for his companions
to be too swift or easy. In the midst of fun and frolic there rings
a sudden discordant note: the news is brought of the French
king's death, and in the serious and 'new-sad' temper begotten
of such tidings the Princess cannot be beguiled to surrender at
discretion. The lords, however they seek to brave it out, have
perjured themselves, and for this they must do penance. The
king is to retire for a year to a forlorn and naked hermitage,
Biron for a similar space to a hospital, where his wit is to bate
its mocking edge in the fierce endeavour to enforce the pained
IX]
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Love's Labour's Lost.
impotent to smile.' Those who have lightly embraced, and
lightly abjured, a fantastic asceticism, are now to be constrained
to face some of life's harder realities. The comedy is not to end
'like an old play' with weddings: 'Jack hath not Jill'; in this
sense 'love's labour's lost.' But the time of probation will wear
itself out at last, and beyond it there is heard the tinkle of bridal
bells.
Such is the youthful Shakspere's handling of a theme, which,
in one form or other, is as old as life itself. In our own day
it is generally women rather than men whom the poet or the
satirist depicts as rebellious against nature's decrees, and intent
upon the reversal of the primary social conditions. Foremost
among such pictures is Tennyson's Princess, which seems
to owe some of its machinery to Shakspere's play. The
Princess herself with her two chief ladies set over against the
Prince and his companions reminds us of the grouping of
characters in Love's Labour's Lost, the College' corresponds to
the 'Academe,' and the oath of renunciation is in either case
taken for three years. Of course, Tennyson, with 'sweet girl-
graduates' as his theme, has opportunities for dainty vignettes,
for piquant contrasts between the flush and glow of budding
womanhood and the grey tones of academic life, which are denied
to Shakspere, but the underlying ideas of both poets that love is
greater than learning, and that the one sex cannot do without
the other, are absolutely the same.
While thus the main plot of Love's Labour's Lost deals with
a subject of permanent interest, the underp'ot ridicules certain
affectations of speech peculiar to Shakspere's age. No doubt
this satire was as much appreciated by an Elizabethan audience
as burlesques of similar crazes have been in our own day, but
for us it has lost much of its savour. It is important to
notice that Euphuism, in the strict sense, is not caricatured
in the play, the mockery being reserved for other, though
kindred, diseases of style¹. Thus Armado, with a mint of
phrases in his brain,' 'a man of fire-new words,' despising
'the base and obscure vulgar,' represents the pompous diction
1 See on this subject Landmann's paper on 'Shakspere and Euphuism,'
New Shaks. Soc. Trans. 1882.
168
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
and hyperbole affected by the imitators of the Spanish fashion.
Holofernes, the schoolmaster, is the pedant delighting in the
display of his scraps of Latin¹, and of his alliterative faculty.
'I will something affect the letter: for it argues facility.' Sir
Nathaniel, the Curate, is a weaker replica of Holofernes, and of
them all the quick-witted little page Moth may truly declare,
'They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the
scraps.' The king and his lords make the mistake of exalting
learning at the expense of still nobler realities; Armado and
Holofernes, with far more contemptible aim, would substitute
for even the realities of learning the chaff and husk of barren
verbiage.
The underplot, besides its special elements, also includes an
intentionally grotesque variation upon the main theme. Don
Armado and the 'child of nature,' Costard, in their relations to
Jaquenetta, afford a reductio ad absurdum of ascetic regula-
tions, and at the close of the play Armado announces that he
too has his probation to endure : 'I am a votary; I have vowed
to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three years.'
Moreover, such slight entanglement as occurs in the drama is
due to a complication between the two plots. Costard is
entrusted with love-letters from Armado to Jaquenetta, and
from Biron to Rosaline, and by transposing them in delivery he
causes Biron's hypocrisy to be found out. Finally the underplot
introduces a pleasant element of rustic merrymaking, as in the
comedy of The Nine Worthies,' and the songs of Hiems,
winter,' and 'Ver, the spring,' which round off the play with so
sweet a note.
The COMEDY OF ERRORS was, in all probability, written
about the same time as Love's Labour's Lost. It is plain that
Shakspere still had Henry of Navarre in his mind, for the allu-
sion in Act iii. Scene 2 to France 'armed and reverted making
war against her heir,' refers to the struggle between the Huguenot
king, 'heir' to Henri III, and the Roman Catholic League,
which continued from 1589 to 1594. The play must therefore
have been written between these dates, and probably not long
1 Cf. what has been said on page 100.
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169
The Comedy of Errors.
after the earlier of them, as the style shows marked signs of
immaturity. Stanzas of alternately rhymed lines occur in the
dialogue, doggrel is abundant, as also, though in less propor-
tion than in Love's Labour's Lost, passages of bandied repartee,
while the blank verse is tame and unvaried in rhythm.
1591 may be set down as the approximate date of the play.
With regard to source there is no difficulty. The Comedy of
Errors is founded upon the Menaechmi of Plautus, and following
its model it preserves the classical unities. It is possible that
Shakspere may have read the Menaechmi in Latin, or he
may have seen some English translation, though we know of
none before 1595, or he may have worked upon some earlier
stage-version, perhaps The Historie of Error, acted at Hampton
Court in 1576. In any case, he has dealt with his materials in
a very independent way, taking the hint for the amusing incidents
in Act iii. Scene I from another comedy of Plautus, the Amphi-
truo, and making important additions on his own account. The
net result of these changes is to transform a purely farcical
comedy into a play of varied interest, still farcical in the main,
but crossed by threads of sentiment, and woven upon a sombre
background. Instead of plunging us at once into a merry
imbroglio due to the mistaken identity of twin brothers, Shak-
spere lifts his curtain upon the pathetic figure of Aegeon, the
father of the two Antipholi, standing in peril of his life. He,
a merchant of Syracuse, has been discovered at Ephesus, and
owing to a quarrel between the two cities, is bound by the law
of Ephesus to die unless he can pay a ransom of 1000 marks.
There is a special propriety in laying the scene of the drama at
Ephesus, instead of at Epidamnum, as had been done by
Plautus. Ephesus was notorious as a centre of witchcraft and
every kind of juggling art, and thus visitors when confronted
by bewildering incidents would naturally believe that enchant-
ment was at work. The dignified narrative of Aegeon before
the Court, which practically serves the purpose of a classical
Prologue, unfolds before us the strange story of the birth of the
twin Antipholi and the twin Dromios, their dispersal in infancy,
the search of the Syracusan pair of brothers for the other pair,
and the merchant's own quest of the seekers, whereby he has
170
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
been brought to so perilous a pass. The Duke is touched by
the tale, but like all Shakspere's constitutional rulers, he will not
wrest the law from its course, though he grants a respite of a day
for the merchant to try to find the necessary sum.
Thus by
a stroke of consummate art the ensuing scenes of farcical
entanglement are made the pivot upon which turns a deeply
tragic issue. For, unknown to Acgeon, all his family are
gathered within the walls of Ephesus, his long-lost son as
a resident, his searching son as a visitor, and his wife Aemilia
as abbess of a convent, and while we make merry over their
ludicrous adventures, we are continually haunted by the thought,
Will Aegeon cross their path and be saved? Humour and
pathos could scarcely be combined more effectively, and the
comparison of The Comedy of Errors with the Menaechmi
illustrates admirably the advantages of Shakspere's over Plautus'
method.
The incidents which make up the body of the play need not
be dwelt upon.
Farce can be only seen in its true features by
the glow of the foot-lights, not by the solitary student's lamp.
Yet even the reader cannot but be impressed by the verve and
vivacity with which the comic 'business' is sustained, and by
the natural entanglement of the incidents. The introduction of
twin servants, as well as twin masters, is due to Shakspere, who
saw rightly, on this and later occasions, that two improbabilities
buttress each other and have a greater plausibility than one.
The device, of course, helps to make confusion worse con-
founded, and the fun never flags for an instant till Antipholus of
Ephesus is treated for madness by Dr. Pinch, and thrown with
his servant, in chains, into the cellar of his own house, while
Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse have to seek shelter from
a similar fate in the abbey presided over by Aemilia.
But interwoven with singular skill into these incidents is
a domestic drama, which shows that Shakspere's thoughts still
lingered over Love's Labour's Lost, though now in the special
form of the relation between husbands and wives. Adriana, who
is married to Antipholus of Ephesus, is of a jealous nature,
chafing at what she considers the undue liberty allowed to men,
and convinced that her husband puts it to improper use. Re-
IX]
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The Comedy of Errors.
proaches on this head have been 'the copy of their conference
since long, though Adriana's headstrong temper is rebuked by
her gentle sister Luciana, who interpreting, without doubt,
Shakspère's own feeling, declares that in the animal world the
males bear sway, and that a fortiori
'Men, more divine, the masters of all these,
Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls,
Are masters to their females, and their lords.'
But philosophy is no salve for Adriana's grievances, which
through a confusion of the two Antipholi, soon find further
apparent warrant, while she herself, through a repetition of the
confusion, entertains her brother-in-law at dinner, and bars the
door against her husband, thus driving him, out of revenge, into
the very conduct of which he had been unjustly suspected. Her
passion reaches its climax when she finds that her supposed
husband is making love under her very eyes to her sister, and
hence springs the spiteful harshness of her remedy for his alleged
lunacy, of which, by the turn of the plot, her real husband becomes
the victim. She is put out of countenance for a moment by the
reproaches of the abbess, assuring her, in words that seem to
quiver with more than merely dramatic intensity, that she is
herself the cause of her husband's malady, and that
'The venom clamours of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.'
But the real cure of her fault is due to the final unravelling of
the 'errors,' when the two Antipholi meet face to face. Adriana,
who at heart loves her husband, sees that her charges have been
baseless, and henceforward, we feel sure, keeps her tongue and
temper under stricter control. Thus farce is made to subserve
a moral end in the reconciliation of husband and wife, while it
further leads to a family reunion on a wider scale. Aegeon, whose
period of grace has run out, as he passes by on his way to execu-
tion, catches sight of one of his sons, and feels sure that in the
very jaws of death he has found a deliverer. But the son, who
is Antipholus of Syracuse, not of Ephesus, fails to recognize the
father from whom he has been parted in infancy, and Aegeon's
bewildered anguish is set down to dotage. Thus by a masterly
172
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
stroke the identity of appearance in the brothers, which has
hitherto been the mainspring of boisterous merriment, is here
productive of the purest pathos. But the agony is only for
a moment. Antipholus of Ephesus appears, and mutual recog-
nition takes place, followed by the general reunion of parents
with children, brothers with brothers, and husband with wife.
Far less significance, however, is given to this scene than to
similar episodes in Shakspere's last group of plays, and while in
neatness of construction and skill in transforming old materials
The Comedy of Errors shows splendid dramatic power, the
poverty of its dialogue and the thinness of its portraiture prove
the hand of the immature artist.
The date of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, which first
appeared in the Folio of 1623, is one of the most difficult problems
in Shaksperean criticism. It is not mentioned by Meres, and
if we accept his summary as a complete list of the dramatist's
works before 1598, it must necessarily fall after this date. It is
possible, however, that Meres, who 'affects a pedantic parallelism
of numbers,' in his desire to balance six comedies against six
'tragedies,' may have passed over one of the former, especially if
it was not entirely written by Shakspere¹. That The Taming of
the Shrew is not a completely original work is at once evident
when it is compared with The Taming of a Shrew, an older play
printed in 1594, and written by an imitator of Marlowe, who
embodied in it a number of passages from his master's writings.
This play contains the Induction with Sly as the central figure,
the plot of Petruchio (here called Ferando) and Kate, and the
underplot of the wooing of Kate's sister by a stranger to the city
who courts her in disguise. Here we have the three main
motives of The Taming of the Shrew, and though the older play
¹ Hertzberg gets over the difficulty by identifying The Taming of the
Shrew with Love's Labour's Won mentioned by Meres, but not found in the
folio edition of Shakspere's works. The majority of critics have thought
that Love's Labour's Won is an earlier version of All's Well that Ends
Well, but, as will be shown later, this is a very doubtful theory, and
Hertzberg's view is the more plausible of the two. I ove's Labour's Won
is a title that suits both plots in The Taming of the Shrew excellently, and
in the final scene emphasis is laid throughout on Petruchio's success in
'winning' his wager, and his wife's obedience.
(x]
173
The Taming of the Shrew.
may have been in existence some little time before it was printed,
Shakspere's adaptation may with sufficient certainty be placed
after 1594.
When we turn to internal evidence of metre as an
aid to fixing the date more definitely we find a further com-
plicating element in the doubts that have been raised whether
Shakspere is the sole adapter of the old play or whether a third
hand is to be detected, especially in the recast of the underplot.
Even if we accept the theory that Shakspere wrote only the
revised Induction and the scenes in which Petruchio and
Katharine appear, we cannot even from these portions of the
work get anything but conflicting metrical evidence. The slight
proportion of unstopt lines would suggest a very early date,
while the ratio of rhyme to blank verse points to the close of the
sixteenth century.
Amidst these uncertainties the safest plan is to judge the play
by its general spirit and structure, and these tests are without
doubt in favour of an earlier rather than a later date, and point
to a place among the first group of comedies and not the
second. To The Comedy of Errors, in especial, it shows a close
kinship in its combination of classical and romantic methods,
its use of the motive of mistaken identity, and its treatment of
the relation of husband and wife. The latter theme is, of course,
made much more prominent in The Taming of the Shrew than
in The Comedy of Errors, but the underlying conception is
the same in both cases. The Lord with his hunting-dogs in the
Induction resembles Theseus and his hounds in A Midsummer
Night's Dream, and the way in which the student Lucentio
falls in love at first sight with Bianca is very similar to the
proceedings of the courtiers in Love's Labour's Lost. The
characterization, too, is that of Shakspere's earlier period.
Apart from the personages in the underplot, who are closely
modelled on classical types, Petruchio and Katharine cannot claim
to rank among Shakspere's mature comedy figures. Bold and
vigorous as they are, and admirably effective for stage purposes,
they lack the complexity, the mellow, rich humour of the later
creations, and it is practically inconceivable that they should
belong, as some critics would have it, to the same period as
Beatrice and Benedick. Grumio's fooling is akin to that of
174
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the Dromios and has no touch of the finer wit of Touchstone or
Feste. Into his mouth is put almost all of what little prose
there is in the play, and this is of a colourless, jingling kind. If
the work belongs to the end of the sixteenth century, how are
we to account for the absence of the brilliant, highly-polished
prose which distinguishes the comedies of that period?
On grounds such as these we seem warranted in placing the
play as soon after 1594 as possible, though even the less mature
hand of Shakspere already shows its transfiguring power. This
is clearly seen in the Induction, whose story-the trick played
upon a drunken beggar by which he is persuaded that he is
a rich lord-is as old as The Arabian Nights. The chief im-
provement made by Shakspere upon the corresponding portion
of the earlier play is in the character of Christopher Sly, the
victim of the practical joke. In The Taming of a Shrew he is
a shadowy figure, who says little, and accepts without demur
the assurance that he is a lord. Shakspere's Sly is a thoroughly
racy type, with genuine Warwickshire blood in his veins, and
a glib tongue in his head. He has his own family pride: 'The
Slys are no rogues: look in the chronicles, we came in with
Richard Conqueror'; and he protests for a time energetically
against the titles with which he is saluted:
'Am not I Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton Heath, by birth
a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and
now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife
of Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on the
score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in Christendom.'
Besides the heightened vigour of the portraiture of Sly, the
Induction, as revised by Shakspere, gains throughout in melody
and refinement of imagery, while the interview between the
Lord and the travelling players gives a hint of the infinitely
more memorable interview between Hamlet and the tragedians
of the city at the castle of Elsinore. But on one important point
the older writer may claim the advantage of Shakspere, for
having brought Sly upon the scene to witness what is technically
'a play within a play,' though it swells completely out of pro-
portion to its environment, he represents him as commenting
at intervals upon the performance till he falls into a drunken
IX]
175
The Taming of the Shrew.
stupor, and in this state is cast out again into the street, so that
when he wakes all that has passed seems to him only a dream,
but with a useful lesson which he hurries off to apply in practice
to his own wife. In The Taming of the Shrew, on the contrary,
as soon as the main story begins, we hear nothing more of Sly,
and the Induction is thus left hanging completely in the air.
Of the two parts into which this main story falls, the one
relating to the courtship of the Shrew's younger sister under-
goes the fuller transformation in the revised version. In fact
instead of the simple wooing of Phylemon by the disguised
Aurelius, we have a complicated intrigue taken directly from
the fourth and fifth acts of Ariosto's Gli Suppositi, which
Gascoigne had already translated into English prose.
Who-
ever the adapter of this underplot was, whether Shakspere
or another, he did his work well¹. He transferred the scene
from Athens to Padua, probably because the latter was better
known to an Elizabethan audience as a 'nursery of arts.'
Hither comes Lucentio, who in his opening words proceeds to
inform his servant Tranio that he is the son of the wealthy
merchant Vincentio of Florence, and that he proposes in Padua
to study that part of philosophy
'that treats of happiness
By virtue specially to be achieved.'
1 Fleay ascribes the revision of this underplot to another hand than
Shakspere's, on the following grounds. Shakspere takes every opportunity
of introducing a duke or a lord, and yet the Duke of Cestus of the old play
is here replaced by Vincentio, an old gentleman of Pisa. Metrical pecu-
liarities occur frequently in these scenes, which are rare in Shakspere's
undoubted writings, e. g. lines deficient in various ways, lines in which one
syllable forms the first measure, doggrel lines of four feet instead of five or
six, and lines in which stress is laid upon unemphatic syllables. We have
also an unusually large number of classical quotations, and many words that
are not found elsewhere in the dramatist's works, or are employed in
a different sense. But the metrical peculiarities are not confined to the
underplot, though they are specially frequent there, the classical quotations
may be paralleled from Love's Labour's Lost, and äwag λeyóµeva occur in
even larger proportion in undoubtedly genuine works. Thus the attempt
to detach the scenes of the Bianca' intrigue, and to assign them to an
anonymous third hand, gives us by no means conclusive results, and in any
case Shakspere himself is not likely to have left this part of the play
completely untouched. See Fleay's paper and the subsequent discussion in
New Shaks. Soc. Trans., 1874.
176
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
The
Lucentio's speech, addressed to a retainer, who had no
need to be informed of such facts, is a transparent substitute
for a classical prologue, and it is from the drama of Italy
that all the personages in the underplot are drawn. Thus
Tranio, less a dependant than a comrade, who warns Lucentio
not to become a stoic or a stock in his pursuit of virtue,
and who at a moment's notice can, by the mere change of
dress, play his master's part in society, is a purely Southern
type, quite distinct from the Northern clownish servant like
Grumio or the Dromios. To the conventionalities of the Italian
drama belongs also the rivalry between the senile suitor Gremio
and the younger Hortensio for the hand of Baptista's second.
daughter Bianca. But the sudden impulse of 'love in idleness'
which adds Lucentio, a mere casual onlooker, to the list of
the fair one's victims is akin to the similar instantaneous
assaults of Cupid, through the eye rather than the heart, in
Love's Labour's Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
ensuing complications are in the wildest spirit of the Southern
comedy of intrigue. The 'narrow-prying father,' Baptista,
anxious to make as much profit as possible out of the rivalry for
Bianca's hand, requests the wooers to furnish him with school-
masters for his daughters in instruments and poetry, whereupon
Hortensio has himself presented in the disguise of a musician
by the hero of the main plot, Petruchio, while Lucentio, in the
character of a learned student of the Muses procures an intro-
duction to the fair one through the unsuspecting Gremio himself.
Thus a lesson in construing Ovid is turned into a declaration of
love by one suitor, and this is matched by an exposition of the
gamut in similar terms by another. Meanwhile Tranio, per-
sonating Lucentio, announces himself as an additional wooer,
and in this capacity helps to outwit both his master's rivals.
When Hortensio is disgusted at Bianca's evident preference for
her teacher of poetry, Tranio affecting to sympathize with his in-
dignation at the lightness of women, draws him on to a mutual
pledge that they will both forswear so inconstant a mistress.
When Gremio seeks to dazzle Baptista by a glowing account of
the riches that he is ready to pour forth at his lady's feet,
Tranio, drawing upon the still more inexhaustible treasures of
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The Taming of the Shrew.
177
imagination, easily outbids him, and gains old Minola's sanction
for his suit, on condition that he procures his father's pledge for
this magnificent dowry. Once more the ready-witted factotum
is equal to the emergency. He waylays a 'Pedant’---another
type taken direct from Italian comedy-who has just arrived
from Mantua, and assures him that by order of the Duke it is
death for a Mantuan to be found within Padua. On this plea,
which forms an additional link with The Comedy of Errors, he
persuades him to personate, during his stay, Vincentio of
Florence, and Baptista, having gained from this 'deceiving father
of a deceitful son,' the desired pledge in the all-important matter
of dowry, arranges that the legal formalities of affiance shall take
place at Tranio's lodgings, whither the disguised Lucentio is
bidden bring Bianca. But instead he slips with her into a church,
where a priest, who is in readiness, makes them man and wife,
and thus united they reappear, only to find that the real Vincentio
has arrived at Padua, and that he is about to be haled off to gaol
as a madman for claiming, in opposition to the Pedant, to be
his true self, father of his own son, and master of the servant
who to all appearance has murdered him and usurped his place.
Again the situation has its parallel in the imbroglio at the close
of The Comedy of Errors, but, here as there, the clue to the
mystery is quickly supplied. Lucentio, having attained his aim,
throws off his disguise and begs forgiveness, which his father,
overjoyed to find him alive after all, is readily persuaded to grant.
In both the old play and the Shaksperean adaptation the
point of contact between the major and the minor plot is that
Baptista will not hear of his younger daughter being married
till her shrewish elder sister has been provided with a husband.
The earlier dramatist however introduces Ferando on his way
to woo Kate, simply because her father has promised him six
thousand crowns in case of success. Shakspere more artistically
represents Petruchio, just left heir to his father's property,
arriving at Padua in search of a rich wife, and catching readily
at his friend Hortensio's proposal that he should lay siege to the
young, beautiful, and wealthy, though 'intolerable curst' Katharine
Minola. In the older play we get no hint of Ferando's ante-
cedents, but Shakspere, with admirable judgement, shows us that
N
178
[CII.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Petruchio's previous career has exactly fitted him for the task of
mastering an unruly woman.
He has faced danger in every
form by land and sea, on battlefield and in wilderness, and the
spice of adventure in the suggested courtship attracts him far
more than the love in idleness which overpowers a young student
like Lucentio. If Kate is to be won, the wooer must be no
languishing victim of passion, but a man who can master others,
because he is completely master of himself. Katharine is taken
over from the old play with less elaboration, but in her case too
touches are added which give us clearer insight into her character.
She is a spoilt child of fortune, with all the advantages of youth,
beauty, and wealth. She has been brought up as best becomes
a gentlewoman' by an over-indulgent father, without a mother's
guiding hand, and in the company of a younger sister whose
gentle nature makes her completely subservient. Under these
conditions her inborn high spirit hardens into a domincering
temper, and this in turn defeats its own end, for it prevents
Katharine from exercising authority, where a handsome and
clever woman would most wish to do so, over the hearts of men.
Thus she has the mortification of seeing Bianca, who is really her
inferior in qualities both of head and of heart, surrounded by
wooers, while she is apparently confronted with the doom of
perpetual maidenhood, or, as the Elizabethan phrase went 'of
leading apes in hell.' The result is that she goes from bad to
worse, using downright physical violence to her sister, whose very
silence under insult she takes as a flout, and accusing Baptista,
who is in fact imperilling Bianca's future on Kate's behalf, of
showing an unjust favouritism towards his younger daughter:
'She is your treasure, she must have a husband,
I must dance barc-foot on her wedding-day.'
Of these preliminary incidents there is nothing in the old play,
which makes Kate first open her lips when brought face to face
with Ferando, and Shakspere adds a further improvement by
altering the position of the scene in which she breaks her lute
over the head of her music-teacher. In the original this takes
place, without special appropriateness, after the wooing, but in
the revised work it is introduced just as Petruchio is on the point
of seeing the lady, and he thus becomes witness that her nickname
Ix]
179
The Taming of the Shrew.
But he is only em-
of Kate the Curst does her no injustice.
boldened to proceed with his enterprise, the plan of which he
arranges with the cool decision of an experienced strategist. To
the headstrong temper of Katharine he resolves to oppose a will
even more peremptory than her own, on the principle that
"Though little fire grows great with little wind
Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all.'
The self-willed girl, who has hitherto terrified all around her into
either submission or flight, is at last to meet with a man who will
neither move from her side nor yet give way to her moods. But
to dogged stubbornness Petruchio, with the tact of a man of the
world, adds finer weapons. Among these is the impudent
assumption of an easy familiarity expressed in his first salute,
'Good-morrow Kate.' The haughty rejoinder, They call me
Katharine, that do talk of me,' is met with the lie direct and
a rattling word-play upon the name Kate,' followed by a
breathless passage of arms which the lady seeks to end by
making her exit. But Petruchio seizes her and varies his mode
of attack by a speech of ironical compliment, contrasting her
gentleness with the slanders of the world. She is not indifferent
to his praises, which call up before her the picture of what in her
heart of hearts she knows that she might be. This is clearly
shown when Petruchio goes on to add that report maligns her
by declaring that she limps, though she is in truth as straight as
a hazel-twig, for she strides up and down the room that he may
see her stately gait. This gives occasion for a deft comparison
to Dian, and we note its effect in the part-perplexed, part-
pleased query, 'Where did you study all this goodly speech?'
Grasping his opportunity he boldly asserts that he intends to
marry her, and when her father re-enters, to see how this strange
wooing speeds, Petruchio, assuming the girl's consent as a
matter of course, announces that they have 'greed so well
together that upon Sunday is the wedding day.' Katharine
retorts that she will see him hanged on Sunday first, but she is
secretly flattered that, having hitherto fought the world single-
handed, she has found some one to claim an intimate alliance
with her, and she makes no protest while Petruchio unfolds
imaginary details of her kisses and caresses, and of their bargain
N 2
180
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
that she shall still be curst in company.' The old play
represents her as explicitly declaring that she will marry him
because she has lived too long a maid, but Shakspere, with
infinitely finer psychological insight, makes her give consent only
by silence, and it is he who adds the touch whereby Petruchio
throws a sop to her feminine weakness, when he announces that
he is off to Venice to buy apparel for the wedding day.
All the incidents connected with the marriage-Petruchio's
failure to appear till the last moment, his fantastic manner of
dress, and his immediate departure with Kate after the ceremony,
without waiting for dinner, are borrowed from the old play.
But again the art of the greater dramatist shows itself in a
number of delicate strokes. We feel how admirably effective is
the wooer's plan of keeping the bride in suspense, when we see
her weeping with vexation at his absence, and the consequent
taunts that she foresees:
'Now must the world point at poor Katharine,
And say-Lo there is mad Petruchio's wife,
If it would please him come and marry her.'
Under such circumstances she is prepared to welcome him in
however outlandish a garb, and to go through the ceremony
in spite of his madcap behaviour at church, of which Shakspere
alone gives the richly humorous details. Kate once made his
own, Petruchio drops the strain of flattery with which he has
hitherto leavened his vehemence, and confines himself to the
most drastic methods. The scenes laid at his country house are
those in which Shakspere most closely follows the earlier play,
adopting at times its text practically unaltered. He enforces
and expands the idea of the older dramatist that Kate must be
tamed in exactly the same way as a falcon, though he makes it
clearer that all is done in reverent care' of her, and thus
reconciles us to what otherwise might seem excessive outrages,
even in the sphere of farce. It is through his wife's physical
nature that Petruchio begins his attack. Kate's high stomach is
brought down by fatigue, starvation, and want of sleep, and to
exasperate her further, all this is done in an overstrained spirit of
anxiety about her well-being. So, too, in the scarcely less
primary necessity of dress she is tantalized by the sight of caps
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181
The Taming of the Shrew.
and gowns of the newest cut, only to see them rejected on the
plea that they are not worth the wearing. Through the body
the spirit is quickly subdued, and we know that the field is won
when on the return journey to Padua we find Katharine ready,
at Petruchio's bidding, to call the sun the moon, and to embrace
the aged Vincentio as a young, budding virgin. This grotesque
incident forms a point of contact between the major and the
minor plots, which are effectively merged in the closing scene
of the play, where Petruchio, confident of the absolute sway that
he has won over his wife, challenges Lucentio and Hortensio
(who has consoled himself with a shadowy figure called the
Widow) to a trial of marital authority. When the other new-
made brides have proved recalcitrant, the Shrew not only
amazes the company by her complete docility, but, at Petruchio's
bidding, proceeds to read her sister and the widow a lecture on
the duties of wives to husbands. Her speech, which points the
moral of the story with a definiteness unique in Shakspere's
writings, has its basis in the old play, where, however, the
Scriptural narrative of the Fall is dragged in to justify woman's
subjection. Shakspere characteristically prefers to found his
doctrine of the relation of the sexes on their physical natures,
though it is noticeable that several of the expressions which he
uses are almost identical with those found in the marriage service.
This doctrine is set forth by Katharine with something of the
blunt vehemence which formerly marked her assertion of her own
rights, but it is in essence the traditional principle that man
should labour, and woman share the fruits of his labour,
rendering in return the tribute of 'love, fair looks, and true
obedience.' The present age, with its acute susceptibilities on
the question of woman's sphere of influence, will shake its head
over so naïvely trenchant a solution of the most complex of
problems, but the student will value the play, and the original
upon which it is based, less as a brochure upon matrimonial
duties, than as a unique and highly instructive combination
of four different elements-the refined southern comedy of
intrigue, the old English rough-and-tumble farce, the Marlowesque
style in strangely perverted shape, and the Shaksperean dramatic
method in its vigorous infancy.
182
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is the crowning
comedy of Shakspere's youthful period. Its date is doubtful,
but Meres' list places it at least before 1598, and the evidence of
style pushes it further back. Titania's speech (Act ii. 2) upon the
recent disastrous effects of fog and flood is very probably a refer-
ence to the tempestuous seasons of 1593 and 1594, and it is
to the latter year that the play may be plausibly assigned. The
plot is mainly of Shakspere's own invention, though he may
have found the figures of Theseus and Hippolyta in North's
translation of Plutarch, or in Chaucer's Kright's Tale, which was
afterwards to furnish the subject of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Pyramus and Thisbe may be taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses,
and Oberon, as has been seen, had already appeared in Greene's
James IV; but it was doubtless from the Stratford folk-lore that
the young poet drew the hints for his fairy-world, as a whole,
while Stratford too may well have supplied originals for Bottom
and his companions. But of greater interest than questions of
date or source is the fact that the play has a unique character
among the dramatis's writings. With its songs and dances and
spectacular effects it is almost more of a masque or opera than
a comedy in the strict sense, and it makes the impression of
having been written in honour of the marriage of some great
noble, in which case the bridal blessings with which it closes
were doubtless intended to have more than a merely dramatic
significance. The Queen herself would seem to have been
present at the performance, as otherwise it is difficult to understand
why Shakspere, usually so sparing of flattery, should have paid
magnificent tribute, through the lips of Oberon, to 'the fair vestal
throned by the West,' who, unhurt by Cupid's shaft, passes on 'in
maiden meditation fancy free.' Equally significant is the passage
in the first scene of the play, where Theseus declares to Hermia
that those are thrice blessed' who can master their blood to
undergo 'the maiden pilgrimage,' even if their wedded sisters be
'earthlier happy.' Nowhere else does Shakspere display any
favour to the ascetic ideal for women: Isabella in Measure for
Measure abandons the life of the convent in order to marry the
Duke, and it is only in the bitterest mockery that Hamlet orders.
Ophelia to a nunnery. Thus, when we find an encomium upon
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183
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
virginity inserted with curious inaptness in a bridal play, we may
fairly conclude that Shakspere's 'hedging' was due to a desire
to propitiate the Maiden Queen'.
In its main plot the play is akin to The Comedy of Errors, for
in both cases a humorous entanglement is created out of mistakes.
Already, however, Shakspere shows his extraordinary skill in
devising variations upon a given theme, for here the mistakes
are those of a night and not of a day, and instead of being
external to the mind are internal: 'in The Errors the feelings of
the actors remain constant, but the persons towards whom they
1 While thus recognizing the play as a marriage-masque, and believing
that the transparent compliment to Elizabeth indicates her presence at its
production, I consider that the attempts to identify the noble in whose
honour it was written, and to interpret the details of Oberon's vision, cannot
rank higher than ingenious guesswork. The theory of Tieck, Ulrici, and
Massey that the play was composed for the marriage of Southampton-that
convenient deus ex machina for the solution of this as of other Shaksperean
problems may be entirely rejected. Southampton's marriage with Eliza-
beth Vernon was celebrated secretly, through dread of the Queen s displeasure,
and was not at all likely to have been accompanied with festivities. More-
over, it took place in the latter part of 1598, and Meres' reference, apart from
characteristics of style, presupposes an earlier date for the play. Elze's
theory, in his Essays on Shakspere (accepted and developed by Kurz in the
German Shakspere Society's Jahrbuch_iv.) that A Midsummer Night's
Dream was written for the marriage of Essex, might have more in its favour
but that it, on the other hand, pushes the play too far back. Essex's
marriage to the widow of Sir Philip Sidney took place in 1590, and as the
bride's father had recently died, and as, moreover, the ceremony (as in
Southampton's case) was secret, it scarcely seems a suitable occasion for an
elaborate theatrical display. But, apart from these considerations, the
evidences of metre and style, will not allow us to put A Midsummer Night's
Dream so early, unless we accept Elze's arbitrary hypothesis that Shak-
spere's dramatic career began and ended carlier than has been hitherto
supposed. Elze founds his theory chiefly on Halpin's ingenious explana-
tion of Oberon's vision. In Lyly's Endymion Cynthia may plausibly be
identified with the Queen, Tellus with the Countess of Sheffield, Floscula
with the Countess of Essex, mother of the young Earl, whom Leicester
married after her husband's death. and Endymion with Leicester himself.
Halpin, on this analogy, interprets the Moon in Oberon's vision as Elizabeth,
the Earth as the Countess of Sheffield, 'the little western flower' as the
Countess of Essex, and Cupid as Leicester. He further sees in the allusions
to ‘a mermaid on a dolphin's back,' and to the 'stars shooting madly from
their spheres,' reminiscences of Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth, where these
were amongst the attractions. Elze accepting Halpin's speculations as
'proved,' argues that these allusions to past love affairs could have had no
interest 'except for the families concerned, above all, the Essex family.' He
therefore makes the young Earl's marriage the occasion of the play's pro-
duction. But no such series of conjectures can be allowed to outweigh
the internal evidence in favour of a later date.
184
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
are directed take the place, unobserved, one of another; here
the persons remain constant, but their feelings of love, indiffer-
ence, or dislike are at the mercy of mischief-making incident.'
As in The Comedy of Errors, also, the scene is nominally laid
amid classical surroundings, but the whole atmosphere of the
play is essentially English and Elizabethan.
Thus Theseus, whose marriage with Hippolyta forms the
setting of the story, is no Athenian 'duke,' but a great Tudor
noble. He is a brave soldier, who has wooed his bride with his
sword, and, strenuous even in his pleasures, he is up with the
dawn on May-morning, and out in the woods, that his love may
hear the music of his hounds, 'matched in mouth like bells,' as
they are uncoupled for the hunt. He is a true Tudor lord also
in his taste for the drama, as shown in his request for masques
and dances wherewith to celebrate his marriage. He exhibits
the gracious spirit common to all Shakspere's leaders of men in
choosing, against the advice of his Master of the Revels, the
entertainment prepared by Bottom and his fellows:
'I will hear that play
For never anything can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it';
and though tickled by the absurdities of the performance, he
checks more than once the petulant criticisms of Hippolyta, and
assures the actors at the close, with a courteous double-entendre,
that their play has been 'very notably discharged.' But it has
been urged that Theseus shows the limitations of nature which
are found in Shakspere's men of action. Though dramatic
performances serve to while away the time, even at their best
they are to him but shadows,' and it is he who dismisses the
tale of what the lovers have experienced in the wood as 'fairy
toys,' and is thus led on to the famous declaration that
'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.'
Only the practical common-sense Theseus, it has been said,
would think of comparing the poet or lover to the lunatic, and
Shakspere, by putting such words into his mouth, shows by
a side-stroke that the man of action fails to appreciate the
idealist nature. But such an inference from the passage is
IX]
x]
185
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
hazardous: there is a sense in which Theseus' statement is true,
for the artist and the lover do collide, like the madman, with
what 'cool reason' chooses to term the realities of life. The
eloquent ring of the words is scarcely suggestive of dramatic
irony, while the description of the poet's pen as giving to 'airy
nothing a local habitation and, a name,' applies with curious
exactness to Shakspere's own method in A Midsummer Night's
Dream.
Contrasted with the serene fortunes of Theseus and Hippolyta
is the troubled lot of humbler lovers, due, in its origin, to purely
human failings. The fckle Demetrius has shifted his affections
from Helena to Hermia, whose father Egeus favours the match,
but Hermia is constant to Lysander, while Helena still 'dotes in
idolatry' upon her inconstant wooer. The Athenian law as
expounded by Theseus (for here again law is seen presiding
over personal issues), enforces upon Hermia obedience to her
father's wishes on pain of death or perpetual maidenhood. But
Lysander suggests escape to a classical Gretna Green,' seven
leagues from the town, where the sharp Athenian law does not
run, and fixes a trysting-place for the following night within the
neighbouring wood. That Hermia should reveal the secret to
Helena, and that she in her turn should put Demetrius on the
fugitive's track, merely to 'have his sight thither and back again,'
is a transparently clumsy device for concentrating the four lovers
on a single spot, which betrays the hand of the immature play-
wright. Within the wood the power of human motive is sus-
pended for that of enchantment, and at a touch of Puck's magic
herb, Lysander and Demetrius are translated,' and ready to
cross swords for the love of the erewhile flouted Helena. Thus
all things befall preposterously, and reason holds as little sway
over action as in a dream, though it is surely overstrained to
find, with Gervinus, a definitely allegorical significance in the
comic entanglement, the more so that the dramatic execution is
at this point somewhat crude. Lysander and Demetrius are
little more than lay figures, and the only difference between
Helena and Hermia is that the latter is shorter of stature, and
has a vixenish temper, of which she gives a violent display in the
unseemly quarrel scene. But at last, by Oberon's command,
186
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Dian's bud undoes on the eyes of Lysander the work of Cupid's
flower, and the close of the period of enchantment is broadly
and effectively marked by the inrush at dawn of exuberant,
palpable life in the shape of Theseus' hunting party, whose
horns and 'halloes' reawaken the sleepers to everyday realities.
But, as in The Errors, out of the confusions of the moment
is born an abiding result. Demetrius is henceforward true to
Helena the caprice of magic has redressed the caprice of
passion, and the lovers return to Athens with league whose
date till death shall never end.'
Deep reflective power and subtle insight into character came
slowly to Shakspere, as to lesser men, but fancy has its flowering
season in youth, and never has it shimmered with a more delicate
and iridescent bloom than the fairy-world of A Midsummer
Night's Dream. Through woodland vistas, where the May-
moon struggles with the dusk, elfland opens into sight, ethereal,
impalpable, spun out of gossamer and dew, and yet strangely
consistent and credible. For this kingdom of shadows repro-
duces in miniature the structure of human society. Here, as on
earth, there are royal rulers, with courts, ministers, warriors,
jesters, and, in fine, all the pomp and circumstance of mortal
sovereignty. And what plausibility there is in every detail,
worked out with an unfaltering instinct for just and delicate
gradation! In this realm of the microscopic an acorn-cup is
a place of shelter, and a cast snake-skin, or the leathern wing of
a rear-mouse, an ample coat: the night tapers are honey-bags
of humble-bees lit at the glow-worm's eyes, and the fairy chorus,
to whom the third part of a moment is a measurable portion of
time, charm from the side of their sleeping mistress such terrible
monsters as blindworms, spiders, and beetles black. Over these
tiny creatures morality has no sway: theirs is a delicious sense
life, a revel of epicurean joy in nature's sweets and beauties.
To dance by paved fountain or by rushy brook,' to rest on
banks canopied with flowers, to feed on apricoks and grapes,
and mulberries, to tread the groves till the 'eastern gate all fiery
red' turns the green sea into gold-such are the delights which
make up their round of existence. In Puck, 'the lob of spirits,'
this merry temper takes a more roguish form, a gusto in the
Ix]
187
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
topsy-turvy, in the things that befall preposterously, and an elfin
glee in gulling mortals according to their folly. With his zest
for knavish pranks, for mocking practical jokes upon 'gossips'
and wisest aunts,' this merry wanderer of the night is indeed
a spirit different in sort from the ethereal dream fairies, and it is
natural that Oberon's vision of Cupid all armed should be hid
from his gross sight. Moonlight and woodland have for him
no spell of beauty, but they form a congenial sphere in which
to play the game of mystification and cross-purposes. Thus
his very unlikeness to the other shadows marks him out as the
ally and henchman of Oberon in his quarrel with the fairy
queen and her court. For the love troubles of mortals have
their miniature counterpart in the jealousy of the clfin royal
pair, springing in the main, as befits their nature, from an
aesthetic rivalry for the possession of a lovely Indian boy,
though by an ingenious touch, which unites the natural and
supernatural realms, a further incitement is the undue favour
with which Oberon regards the 'bouncing Amazon ' Hippolyta,
balanced by Titania's attachment to Theseus. And as the human
wooers are beguiled by the power of Cupid's magic herb, the fairy
queen is in like manner victimized. But with correct instinct
Shakspere makes her deception far the more extravagant. Fairy-
land is the world of perennial surprise, and it must be a
glaringly fantastic incongruity that arrests attention there. But
the most exacting canons of improbability are satisfied when
Titania, whose very being is spun out of light and air and dew,
fastens her affections upon the unpurged 'mortal grossness' of
Bottom, upon humanity with its asinine attributes focussed and
gathered to a head. To attack his queen in her essential
nature, to make her whose only food is beauty lavish her endear-
ments upon a misshapen monster, is a masterpiece of revenge
on Oberon's part. And so persuasive is the art of the dramatist
that our pity is challenged for Titania's infatuation, with its
pathetically reckless squandering of pearls before swine, and
thus we hail with joy her release from her dotage, her recon-
ciliation with Oberon, and the end of jars in fairyland, celebrated
with elfin ritual of dance and song.
In designedly aggressive contrast to the dwellers in the
128
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
shadow world is the crew of hempen homespuns headed by
sweet bully Bottom. Among the many forms of genius there is
to be reckoned the asinine variety, which wins for a man the
cordial recognition of his supremacy among fools, and of this
Bottom is a choice type. In the preparation of the Interlude in
honour of the Duke's marriage, though Quince is nominally the
manager, Bottom, through the force of his commanding per-
sonality, is throughout the directing spirit. His brother crafts-
men have some doubts about their qualifications for heroic
ôles, but this protean actor and critic is ready for any and
every part, from lion to lady, and is by universal consent selected
as jeune premier of the company in the character of Pyramus,
'a most lovely gentleman-like man.' Bereft of his services, the
comedy, it is admitted on all hands, cannot go forward: 'it is
not possible: you have not a man in all Athens able to discharge
Pyramus but he.' Fostered by such hero-worship, Bottom's
egregious self-complacency develops to the point where his
metamorphosis at the hands of Puck seems merely an exquisitely
fitting climax to a natural process of evolution. And even when
thus translated,' he retains his versatile faculty of adapting
himself to any part; the amorous advances of Titania in no
wise disturb his equanimity, and he is quite at ease with Pease-
blossom and Cobweb. A sublime self-satisfaction may triumph.
in situations where the most delicate tact or the most sympathetic
intelligence would be nonplussed.
<
But Shakspere, in introducing his crew of patches into his
fairy drama, had an aim beyond satirizing fussy egotism or
securing an effect of broad comic relief. It is a peculiarity of
his dramatic method to produce variations upon a single theme
in the different portions of a play. Love's Labour's Lost is an
instance of this, and A Midsummer Night's Dream is a further
illustration, though of a less obvious kind. For in the
rehearsal and setting forth of their comedy, Bottom and his
friends enter a debateable domain, which, like that of the fairies,
hovers round the solid work-a-day world, and yet is not of it.
There is a point of view from which life may be regarded as the
reality of which art, and in especial dramatic art, is the 'shadow,'
the very word used by Theseus in relation to the workmen's
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A Midsummer Night's Dream.
play. Thus in their grotesque devices and makeshifts these
rude mechanicals are really facing the question of the relation
of shadow to substance, the immemorial question of realism
in art and on the stage. The classical maxim that 'Medea
shall not kill her children in sight of the audience' lest the
feelings of the spectators should be harrowed beyond endurance,
finds a burlesque echo in Bottom's solicitude lest the ladies
should be terrified by the drawing of Pyramus' sword, or the
entrance of so fearful a wild-fowl as your lion. Hence the
necessity for a prologue to say that Pyramus is not killed
indeed, and for the apparition of half Snug the joiner's face
through the lion's neck, and his announcement that he is not
come hither as a lion, but is a man as other men are.' Scenery
presents further difficulties, but here, as there is no risk of
wounding delicate susceptibilities, realism is given full rein.
The moon herself is pressed into the service, but owing to her
capricious nature, she is given an understudy in the person
of Starveling carrying a bush of thorns and a lanthorn. It is
only the hypercriticism of the Philistine Theseus that finds
fault with this arrangement on the score that the man should
be put into the lanthorn. 'How is it else the man in the
moon?'
The 'tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love
Thisbe,' is a more elaborated specimen of those plays within
plays, of which Shakspere had already given a sketch in Love's
Labour's Lost, and for which he retained a fondness in all
stages of his career. It is a burlesque upon the dramas of the
day, in which classical subjects were handled with utter want
of dignity, and with incongruous extravagance of style. The
jingling metres, the mania for alliteration, the far-fetched and
fantastic epithets, the meaningless invocations, the wearisome
repetition of emphatic words, are all ridiculed with a boisterous
glee, which was an implicit warrant that, when the young
dramatist should hereafter turn to tragic or classical themes,
his own work would be free from such disfiguring affecta-
tions, or, at worst, would take from them only a superficial
taint. And, indeed, what potency of future triumphs on the
very summits of dramatic art lay already revealed in the genius.
190
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
which, out of an incidental entertainment, could frame the
complex and gorgeous pageantry of A Midsummer Night's
Dream; and which, when denied, by the necessities of the
occasion, an ethical motive, could fall back for inspiration on
an enchanting metaphysic, not of the schools but of the stage,
whose contrasts of shadow and reality are shot, now in threads
of gossamer lightness, now in homelier and coarser fibre, into the
web and woof of this unique hymeneal masque.
The date of THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
cannot be fixed with exactitude. It is mentioned in Meres' list
of 1598, but otherwise we have only internal evidence. So
inconclusive are the results derived from this, that it has been
placed in almost every year between 1590 and 1595'.
Whatever its exact chronological position, it may fitly close
this chapter, for while reproducing motives from the youthful
comedies, it throws out hints of situations or types elaborated
later in dramas like Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant
of Venice. In style, also, it marks a transition stage. The
doggrel and verbal quibbles of Love's Labour's Lost, the
rhetoric of Henry VI and Richard III, the sonnets, quatrains,
and rhymed couplets which have hitherto been abundant, are
all more sparingly introduced, and Shakspere attains for the
first time, to blank verse of sustained and even sweetness, suited
to the sentimental nature of his theme. But the metre is
monotonous in its silvery regularity of cadence, and bears
evident marks of the laborious workman's file.
The plot of The Two Gentlemen of Verona corresponds in
its main features with the story of the Shepherdess Felismena
in the Spanish prose pastoral Diana by Montemayor. Shak-
spere may have had access to a manuscript copy of Yonge's
translation of the tale, not printed before 1598; or he may
have drawn upon an earlier dramatic handling of the subject,
Felix and Philomena, mentioned in 1584. In favour, perhaps,
Delius, Elze, Malone, Furnivall, and Hales are in favour of an early
date, 1591, or before; Drake, Fleay and Chalmers of 1595: Fleay more suo
thinks that Acts i and ii were written between 1593 and 1594, and the other
three about 1595; Hertzberg gives 1592 as the date; Dowden suggests
1592-93.
IX]
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
of the more second-hand source of inspiration, is the fact that
the play makes no attempt to reproduce Italian surroundings.
What little there is of scenic detail is English, and Verona and
Milan, like Navarre, Ephesus, and Athens are merely dramatic
spellings of Stratford. Thence are drawn the allusions to the
'uncertain glory of an April day,' to the current that gives
a gentle kiss to every sedge,' to the schoolboy sighing at the
loss of his 'A, B, C,' to the robin red-breast that relishes
a love-song, to the 'pageants of delight' played at Pentecost.
But this frank absence of local colour is the more venial in
that the theme of the story, love and friendship in a variety of
shifting relations, is not of local but of universal significance.
It is in effect a stock subject of the novelist and dramatist in
every age, and it cannot but be embodied in certain stock
characters. The lover and friend who is faithless in both
capacities, the man of the world who mocks at passion, but who,
when subdued to its sway, is true as steel, the brainless and
repulsive but wealthy suitor, as odious in the eyes of the lady as
he is acceptable in those of her father, the tender-hearted maiden,
loyal to her fickle wooer and forgiving to a fault, the high-
spirited girl, single-hearted in her affection and yet with a trace
of coquettish pride in the spectacle of rival swains at her feet-
all these are familiar types, and they are grouped with the
somewhat obtrusive parallelism of Shakspere's early method.
But the touch of the master-hand, though yet in its noviciate,
makes itself felt in the delicacy with which these types are
developed up to a certain point, in the tender grace of the
sentiment which steeps the main story, and in the dexterous
comic relief.
Decidedly foremost in interest among the characters is Proteus,
whose name, in accordance with a device which Shakspere now
first used and which he affected till the last, betokens the
fickleness of his nature. He is eminently the product of the
new age of culture: as described by his friend,
'He is complete in feature and in mind,
With all good grace to grace a gentleman.'
But it is a culture which in his case has developed the sensi-
blities while relaxing the moral fibre, and has made of him
192
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
"
a Renaissance Werther, swept along in pure abandonment of
feeling. Whilst uncertain of Julia's answer to his suit, he is
plunged in a self-pitying melancholy, 'Poor forlorn Proteus:
passionate Proteus': her message of affection draws from his lips,
ecstatic invocations, Sweet love, sweet lines, sweet life,' but he
conceals its contents from his father with a faint-hearted piece of
duplicity which only lends itself to Antonio's scheme for sending
him to join Valentine at Milan. Even the sentence of separation
from his mistress draws from him no manly protest, though he
is not at a loss for graceful images to describe his change of
state, and though he takes farewell of Julia with exaggerated
vows of constancy.
But the moment that he reaches Milan and beholds Silvia,
who has taken the heart of Valentine captive, a more novel and
intense sensation drives out the sensation that has hitherto been
true love's counterfeit within his breast. He is not whirled
along by a headlong current of passion which sweeps away the
distinctions of right and wrong, nor does he defiantly trample
upon moral law.
He knows, and indeed with a certain naïveté
confesses, that he is playing the traitor, and he would shun
temptation, could it be done without effort. But it is just from
the needful effort that sentimentalism recoils; it is so much
pleasanter to drift with the stream.
'If I can check my erring love, I will:
If not, to compass her I'll use my skill.'
And thus he is found shortly afterwards arguing with sophistical
dialectic that his treachery is justifiable, for Love, in whose name
he has sworn, prompts his perjury, and there is, moreover,
a sacrifice of self which friendship cannot claim: 'I to myself
am dearer than a friend.' So the soft outer husk of the
sentimental nature is peeled away, and only the hard, bitter
kernel is left, and in the spirit of this declaration Proteus pursues
his course. He reveals to the Duke Valentine's plan of elope-
ment with Silvia, and thus procures his banishment, while by
engaging to slander his friend in the interest of Thurio he
dexterously gains a vantage-ground for pressing his own suit.
But his schemes are shattered against the true-hearted constancy
of Silvia, who, loyal to her own love, scorns unfaithfulness in
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
others. The utmost that his abject entreaties can wring from
her is her picture, the shadow of herself, and at last she seeks
relief from persecution in flight after Valentine. Chance,
however, places her for a moment in Proteus' power, and the
selfish passion of the sentimentalist is unmasked in its naked
hideousness, when he seeks by force to make her his victim.
The scene is crude in execution, but it is not wanting in
psychological truth. This cannot, however, be said of Proteus'
sudden and forced repentance, and his reconversion to love of
Julia. The concluding act of the play bears throughout marks
of imperfect workmanship, and thus, whether through haste or
through incapacity as yet for absolutely finished portraiture, the
dramatist blurs in his closing touches the most powerfully
conceived character, outside the historical field, that he had
hitherto attempted.
Morally and intellectually Valentine is the strongest contrast
to his friend. His is the plain, soldier nature that 'hunts after
honour,' and sees in love only 'shapeless idleness,' and waste of
good days. Youth, with its intoxicating vitality, thrills through
his every nerve and limb, as Speed reminds him later, in his
mournful glance backwards over this happy time: 'You were
wont, when you laughed, to crow like a cock when you walked
to walk like one of the lions: when you fasted it was presently
after dinner, when you looked sadly it was for want of money.'
It is, however, precisely such a buoyant and self-confident nature
that falls in most headlong defeat before some unexpected
assault of love, and thus Valentine, when transplanted to the
novel surroundings of the Milanese Court, is 'metamorphosed'
by the first glance of Silvia's eyes. But he retains the simplicity
of his character and the somewhat obtuse perception that goes
with it. His own servant Speed has to interpret to him the
transparent device by which Silvia volunteers a confession of
her love for him, and he falls readily into the trap which the
Duke sets for exposing his scheme of elopement. It never
crosses his mind that Proteus, his confidant, kas broken faith, for
when banished from Milan he accepts his offer to be the letter-
carrier to his mistress. It is only when, as captain of a band of
peculiarly high-toned outlaws, he is a witness of the dastardly
0
194
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
attempt on Silvia's honour that he realizes that Proteus is
a 'common friend, that's without faith or love,' and renounces all
trust in him for ever in words of manly and sorrowful indignation.
But a few words of penitence on the part of the wrongdoer
disarm his wrath, and with an incredibly quixotic sacrifice of the
claims of love to those of friendship, and with airy indifference
to the feelings of Silvia, he hands her over to the man who has
just offered her the grossest outrage.
The crudity of the situation is heightened by the character of
Silvia, which is as far as possible from lending itself to such
a summary disposal. 'Holy, fair, and wise is she': so sing the
company of serenaders at her window, and her bearing
throughout the drama testifies that it is no idle praise. She is
the first and most lightly sketched member of a favourite
Shaksperean order of womanhood, which unites outward fairness
and transparent purity of soul to keen intellect and resolute will.
With good reason do all our swains commend her,' and her
treatment of the rivals for her hand illustrates her tact and
firmness of purpose.
To Valentine, the man of her choice, she
tenders a proof of her favour which, without compromising her
maidenly dignity may give him a hint whereon to speak: Thurio
she skilfully keeps at a distance, though she offers him no direct
incivility, and listens with seeming impartiality to the volleys of
wit between Valentine and him: Proteus, in spite of his outward
gallantry and skill in the game of love, she sees in his true
colours, and repulses with cutting words of scorn. Difficulties
are with her only a spur to action, and as she assents to the
elopement with Valentine, in order to checkmate her father's
scheme for thrusting her into the arms of Thurio, so she
afterwards conceives the plan of following her lover in hist
banishment, and with discriminating eye picks out Sir Eglamour
as her fittest companion and helper. That a woman of such
high spirit should, in the closing scene, stand by in dumb
resignation, while the man whom she has risked all to find turns
her over to the traitor from whom she has fled, is the crowning
absurdity in a tangle of psychological impossibilities.
The threatened wholesale catastrophe is averted by Julia's
self-revelation. She too has braved danger to follow her beloved,
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
but otherwise she is a complete contrast to Silvia, and belongs
to a class of women which occupies a relatively subordinate place
in Shakspere's gallery of the sex. The fact that in pursuit of
Proteus she dons masculine disguise-a device here used by
the dramatist for the first time-suggests a likeness between her
and Portia or Rosalind. But the resemblance is superficial, for
she entirely lacks the commanding spirit and gaiety of heart of
these heroines, and with her pensive, dependent nature is akin
in certain aspects to Viola, but finds her true sister in the
Euphrasia of Beaumont and Fletcher, who, like her, takes service
as a page with the man whom she loves. Self-sacrifice is the
law of her being, as self-love is that of Proteus, and though cut
to the very core by his perfidy she can endure, in the strength
of her devotion, to be his messenger to her rival, and even to
bear between them the ring that had been the pledge of her
own troth. The spectacle of such humiliation awakens in us
a pity not untouched with contempt, and it is a relief to find
that she has yet enough womanly instinct left to draw com-
parisons, by no means to her own disadvantage, between Silvia's
face and hers. Truly feminine, too, is her analysis of her rival's
picture, and the consoling reflection that 'the painter flattered
her a little,' while even her instinct to scratch out the unseeing
eyes' on the canvas is natural under the circumstances. But
she refrains from such an outrage, for Silvia's loyalty and sweet-
ness have won her tender heart, and buoyed her up with the
belief that Proteus' perfidious suit must fail. Thus the crowning
blow comes when she sees Valentine himself surrender his
betrothed to this perjured wooer, and she sinks fainting to the
ground. Then follows the confession that she is Julia in the
habit of a page, and Proteus' sudden relapse to his original
attachment; and if he wins her pardon on far too easy terms,
this is a dramatic flaw which marks not only the hurried close
of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but which clung, as will be
seen, to Shakspere's method even in the most matured period
of his art.
Parallel to the romantic interest, but not so interwoven with
it as in The Comedy of Errors, runs a humorous underplot,
which introduces for the first time the Shaksperean Clown in the
0 2
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
:
stricter sense. The class has here two representatives. Speed
and Launce, akin and yet contrasted, as each is contrasted
further with the master whom he serves. To the slow-witted
Valentine is attached the nimble-tongued Speed, whose plays
upon words, repartees, and snatches of doggrel sparkle upon
the surface of the main action without stirring its current. Of
greater significance is Launce, the attendant on Proteus.
is a richer, more pensive humour, which discharges itself mainly
in soliloquies, with his dog Crab as auditor. Round this dumb
companion, 'one that I brought up of a puppy,' the thoughts
of Launce steadily revolve: we hear, indeed, of a milkmaid'
who has won his heart, and whose 'items' he discusses with
Speed, but her highest praise is, 'She hath more qualities than
a water-spaniel, which is much in a bare Christian,' and this
does not imply an equality to so unique an animal as Crab.
It is only grief over any imperfection in one who is beloved that
leads to the assertion, 'I think Crab, my dog, to be the sourest
dog that lives,' because 'he sheds not a tear nor speaks a word,'
while Launce's household is plunged in lamentation at his de-
parture for Milan. And Launce's affection is ready to stand the
severest test, that of suffering on behalf of its object: 'I have
sat in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen: otherwise he had
been executed: I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath
killed, otherwise he had suffered for 't.' Yet even this friend,
for whom he has endured so much, Launce offers to sacrifice
in order to do Proteus a service, though he has an instinct that
things are not what they shou'd be, 'I am but a fool, look you,
and yet I have the wit to think my master is a kind of knave.'
And this knavery of the highly-gifted Proteus finds an emphatic
though unobtrusive condemnation in the fidelity of his simple
servant to the poor cur that has shared his life of hard words
and still harder knocks. Thus here, again, the main plot and
the underplot, without dovetailing in an elaborate manner, play
round the same theme, and embrace, in an unbroken network of
relationships, the entire dramatis personae from 'the two gentle-
men' down to poor dog Crab.
CHAPTER X.
SHAKSPERE 'ITALIANATE.'
ROMEO AND JULIET
AND THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.
THE first group of comedies, amidst their varieties of source
and theme, have one feature in common. Whether the plot
be laid in Navarre, Ephesus, Athens, Padua or Verona, the
atmosphere is unmistakably English. It is true, of course,
that in The Errors and in The Taming of the Shrew, typical
characters from Latin or Italian comedy are introduced, but
they are set amidst surroundings which suggest London or
Stratford. In The Two Gentlemen Shakspere even makes the
elementary geographical blunder of representing Valentine as
journeying from Verona to Milan by sea. It is therefore
startling, when we turn to Romeo and Juliet (drawn, like The
Two Gentlemen, from the annals of Verona), to find it steeped
in distinctively Italian colour, and yet more amazing to see in
The Merchant of Venice intimate knowledge of the city of the
lagoons and its neighbourhood. The most satisfactory way of
accounting for the contrast is, as has already been stated, to
conclude that Shakspere had in the interval visited the North of
Italy¹. Never again did he so magically reproduce the atmosphere
of the South as in these dramas, the fruit, it would thus appear,
of his Wanderjahre, as the early histories and comedies were
¹ See note to pp. 110-111.
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[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of his Lehrjahre. So, in later years, Macbeth, there is good
reason to hold, was written after a recent visit to Scotland.
In an age of universal travel, why should Shakspere, of all
men, be confined within the narrow seas, and be supposed to
have never crossed the Alps or 'swum in a gondola '?
The date of ROMEO AND JULIET cannot be exactly
determined. It was first published in quarto in 1597, with the
inscription 'as it hath been often (with great applause) plaid
publiquely by the right Honourable the Lord of Hunsdon his
Servants.' The word 'often' opens up an indefinite vista
backwards, and makes it certain that the play had been written
and acted in some form for an appreciable period before it was
printed. How long was that period? Some inquirers base
their answer upon the Nurse's words, "'Tis since the earthquake
now cleven years,' which in all probability refer to the earth-
quake of 1580. If the garrulous old lady's chronology is to be
trusted, this would give 1591 as the date of the play, and it
contains without doubt passages written in rhyme and full of
conceits, rhetoric, and verbal quips in the dramatist's earliest
manner. But, on the other hand, Shakspere is not likely to have
visited Italy at so early a date, and moreover there are features
in this first edition of the tragedy, such as the elaborated por-
traiture of the chief characters and the beauty of much of the
blank verse, that point to a period of comparative maturity.
The presumption, therefore, is that Shakspere was occupied with
his theme during a number of years, and that it took definite
literary shape about 1595-6, not long after a continental
journey ¹.
1 The further question arises: Does this quarto of 1597 do justice to the
play as it stood in that year, or is it an imperfect version?
For in 1599
appeared a second quarto edition, 'newly corrected, augmented, and
amended,' which forms the basis of our present text of the play. In many
passages the two quartos are absolutely identical, in others the later edition
gives in expanded form speeches which the earlier had only outlined, and in
a few scenes, such as the marriage of Romeo and Juliet at the Friar's cell,
and the lamentation over Juliet's supposed dead body, they essentially differ.
At first sight the inference would be that Shakspere, having put into print
in 1597 the result of his labours up to that date, had been still attracted by
the theme, and had given it further elaboration, which took final form in
1599. But various passages which occur only in the second quarto are not
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Romeo and Juliet.
The story over which the young dramatist thus lingered so
lovingly was one which had for already more than a century
touched the hearts of men'. It had been first told, with Mariotto
and Gianozza of Siena as hero and heroine, and with some
harshness and extravagance of detail, by the novelist Masuccio
of Salerno in 1476. Some sixty years later Luigi da Porto
retold the tale in altered and heightened form, introducing for
the first time the names of Romeo and Giulietta, and making
them children of the rival Veronese houses, Capelletti and Mon-
tecchi. In its essential features his romance resembles Shak-
spere's play, but it differs in one important detail. Romeo, at
Juliet's tomb, drinks the poison, but before he is cold in death,
his bride awakes, and they have a last passionate dialogue, while
folded in each other's arms. In 1554 another novelist, Bandello,
included the story in his collection of Novelle, and added to it
fresh features. He brings into prominence the 'Rosaline'
episode, he uses the name Paris for Romeo's rival, and above all
he is the first to mention the Nurse as the lovers' go-between.
A French translation of Bandello's romance was issued in 1559
by Pierre Boisteau, who originated the close of the tale after-
wards followed by Shakspere, wherein Romeo dies before Julict
awakes from her trance, only to end her life, not through the
violence of her grief, as in the earlier versions, but through the
self-inflicted stroke of her husband's dagger. Boisteau's tale
was soon made familiar to English readers by Arthur Brooke's
metrical paraphrase Romeus and Juliet, 1562, and William
Painter's prose translation, in his collection of novels, The Palace
such as Shakspere's more mature hand would have been at all likely to add.
Among these is Lady Capulet's fantastic description of Paris in rhyming
couplets (Act i. Scene 3). On the other hand, several of the very finest
scenes, such as the dialogues between Romeo and Juliet after the ball and at
their last interview, are substantially the same in both quartos. There
is thus great plausibility in Daniel's conjecture, in his edition of the parallel
texts, that the quarto of 1597 is a pirated version 'made up partly from
copies of portions of the original play, partly from recollection and from
notes taken during the performance.' The quarto of 1599 gives the true
representation of the play, though it had 'received some slight augmenta-
tions, and in some few places' (those where there is a broad difference
between the two versions) 'must have been entirely rewritten.'
¹ An account of the earlier versions of the story is given in Dowden's
essay on Romeo and Juliet in his Transcripts and Studies, to which I am
indebted.
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of Pleasure, 1567. Brooke declares that he had seen the same
argument lately set forth on the stage, and there would thus
appear to have been some early dramatic version of the theme
which has not come down to us, though it may have been
known to Shakspere. and used by him. In any case, Brooke's
own poem must have furnished the basis for Shakspere's
crowning treatment of the story. It was Brooke who first gave
prominence to the character of the Nurse, and put into her
mouth speeches which the dramatist followed in parts with
curious fidelity. It was Brooke also who invented the scene of
Romeo's despair in the Friar's cell after the murder of Tybalt,
and it was he who called Friar Lawrence's messenger John
instead of Anselm. Nor was Romeus and Juliet an unworthy
model. It was a well-proportioned narrative, in long flowing
couplets, consisting of an Alexandrine followed by a Septenar.
This metre, which Surrey had made fashionable, was skilfully
handled by Brooke, and in spite of overdone antithesis, and
of occasional luxuriance of sensuous description, balanced by
a vein of sententious moralizing, the poem was warmed with
true pathos, and showed an eye for dramatic types and
situations. But dominating every other personality is that of
Fortune, who sports with her victims as she pleases, lifting them
to a height only afterwards to cast them down in her rage. The
same conception of Fortune was inspiring at almost the same
date The Mirror for Magistrates, and it should certainly be borne
in mind in the consideration of the play.
The story, which had run throu:h so many channels before
it reached Shakspere, throbbed in every vein with the life of Italy.
There alone amorous passion shot up with lightning swiftness into
fever heat; there alone the family vendetta drenched the streets
with blood; there alone the stiletto and the poison-phial were
weapons of daily use. In Shakspere's version this atmosphere is
faithfully perpetuated. The season is midsummer, and the fiery
sun beats down from a cloudless heaven upon street and square,
setting the mad blood astir in the brawler's veins, and making
pedestrianism on romantic errands a weariness of the flesh to ladies
of ripe years, in spite of attendant fan-bearers. The nights are
only softer days, not made for sleep, but for masque and dance,
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Romeo and Juliet.
or for lingering in moonlit gardens, where the fruit-tree tops are
tipped with silver, and the nightingale pants forth her song
from the deep pomegranate bower. The one hour of coolness
is the dawn, when flowers and herbs are still dank with heavy
dew, and hermit or lover, who fears the garish eyes of noon,
may steal forth into the fields or the sycamore-grove. Under
such skies life is lived with an intensity which may compress the
passion of years into a few hours. And thus Shakspere, with
a masterly innovation upon Brooke and the novelists, shortened
the action of the story to little more than four days, from Sunday
morning but new struck nine' to the dim dawn of Thursday.
During that brief tract of time events stride on in such preci-
pitate sequence that we are fain to follow them breathlessly, and
it is only when all is over that we pause to ask the meaning
of the play as a whole. As soon as we do so, we realize that
Romeo and Juliet leaves upon different minds the most opposite
impressions. By the majority of readers it is regarded as a
unique offering laid by the poet on the shrine of Cupid, at once
the most musical of paeans over the triumphant glory of love,
and the most musical of elegies over its brittleness and briefness
in a cold and cruel world. To others the play is a record,
pitiful yet inexorable, of the disasters wrought by ill-regulated
passion, whether of love or hate, and one more warning that
the undèv ayar is the true guiding principle of life. Let us en-
deavour, by an examination of the drama, to trace these conflicting
impressions to their source.
It has been seen that in several of Shakspere's plays there is
an enveloping political plot. The peculiarity of Romeo and
Juliet is that the political plot does not merely form the back-
ground to the main action, but is one of its integral elements.
The rivalry of the Montagues and the Capulets gives a tragic
bias to what would otherwise be a story of youthful love, and it
is therefore rightly made the subject of the opening scene. The
biting of thumbs by the serving-men, pugnacious within the safe
limits of the law, prepares the way for the entrance of Tybalt,
the champion of the Capulet claims, the professional duellist
with the lore of the fencing school at his finger-tips, who fights
as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion:
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rests me his minim rest, one, two, and the third in your bosom.'
To such a swashbuckler even the mild Benvolio's presence is
a call to arms, and the result is speedily a general fray swollen
by partisans of either house, and by citizens who hate both
equally, till the entrance of the Prince stops the tumult on pain
of death. Thus the rival families are marshalled face to face at
the very outset of the action, and the chief of the state, though
he is seen for only the briefest interval, launches the edict which
is to have fateful consequences hereafter.
From the ranks of the Montague swordsmen there has been
one remarkable absentee. The aged head of the house has
flourished his blade in defence of the family honour, but Romeo,
the son and heir, is nowhere to be seen. His mother's anxious
inquiry elicits the news that he has been espied before dawn,
stealing alone towards a grove of sycamore, and we further learn
that such is his wont, and that at the first streak of light he
creeps home to his chamber where he pens himself in artificial
night. We are thus warned, before Romeo appears in person,
that he is apart from his kinsmen in nature and sympathies.
There is a sentimental strain in his character, and at the out-
set he and Proteus, though they develop so differently, have
a certain likeness. His entrance gives the key to his strange
humour. He is in love with the lady Rosaline, but his suit is
in vain. Hence his passion for solitude, his sighs, and his tears.
But neither the love nor the misery, we are persuaded, can
be very deep that finds its vent in unmeaning fantastic antithesis,
the reductio ad absurdum of the numbers that Petrarch flowed
in.' A heart that is really breaking does not explode in verbal
fireworks about anything of nothing first created.' This calf-
love of Romeo is adopted by Shakspere from Brooke, and it
is probably a mistake to invest it with too great significance.
That there enters into Romeo's character a vein of weakness,
of volatile emotion, cannot be denied, but it is important to
notice that whenever Shakspere gives it prominence he is
following closely in the wake of Brooke, and that in the scenes
due to his own invention the more sterling and genuinely
impassioned side of his hero's nature is developed. The
retention of the Rosaline episode is very possibly due to the
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fact that it prepares the way for one of those instances of the
irony of fortune which stud the drama. Benvolio bids Romeo
attend the feast of the Capulets that he may forget his mistress
in the light of other eyes, and Romeo, though he assents, does
so with protestations of unswerving fidelity to Rosaline. But
even while he is on the way to the palace of the rival house, he is
haunted by presentiments that his fate is not in his own hands:
'My mind misgives
Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars,
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels.'
And so it proves: Romeo has but to change eyes with Juliet,
and his love in idleness for Rosaline is annihilated, only to give
place to a far more absorbing passion. Benvolio's well-meant
panacea becomes the root of a direr malady than it was devised
to cure.
Of Juliet and her surroundings we have had glimpses
before this fateful meeting, sufficient to show that she too is
apart in temper from her kindred, and that love is something as
yet outside her experience or even her vision. She has reached
the age where under southern skies girlhood is trembling into
womanhood, and those around her are eager to hasten the
process. Her father indeed, for the present, looks upon her as
a child, a stranger in the world'; but her budding beauty has
attracted the gaze of the handsome and well-born County Paris,
who is anxious to make her his bride. He finds ready allies
in Juliet's two female companions, her mother and her nurse.
Lady Capulet is the very type of the starched and conventional
woman of quality, who having gone through the duties of matri-
mony and maternity at the regulation age for ladies of esteem,'
propounds to her daughter 'in brief' that a similar opportunity
is now offered to her. But the thin phrases that trickle from
her lips are drowned in the torrent of the Nurse's loquacity.
The admirable sketch of this personage given by Brooke is
developed by Shakspere with the richest humour. Plebeian to
the core she has yet caught by long association with people
of rank a surface air of importance, and she is given a place in
the family council. She is not without enuine affection for her
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youthful charge, but this is subordinate to a singular interest
in Juliet's enjoyment of pleasures that are now beyond her own
reach. Her tongue rambles here and there, backwards and
forwards, but always dropping concrete phrases of the most
suggestive kind. But to the promptings alike of convention
and of sensuality Juliet turns a deaf ear. Marriage, even with
'a man of wax' is an honour that she dreams not of; the
utmost that she will offer is the non-committing promise: 'I'll
look to like, if looking liking move.' Thus if Romeo's false
sense of security before the critical moment of his fate is due to
his heart being already occupied, Juliet's springs from exactly the
contrary reason, that hers is absolutely vacant. They meet, and
from that moment they live only in and for each other.
It is
useless to criticize the plausibility of this instantaneous passion;
the reality of love at first sight is an axiom in the Shaksperean
drama. That Romeo should at once salute his new mistress
with a kiss is in accord with the fashion of the time, as is
also the lyrical form and imagery of their opening dialogue,
which falls almost into sonnet shape. But the graceful phrases.
of compliment die down under the horror of the mutual discovery
that Romeo is a Montague and Juliet a Capulet. And instead
there rise the passionate protests against the cruel irony of fate:
Is she a Capulet?
Rom.
O dear account, my life is my foe's debt.
Jul. My only love sprung from my only hate,
Too early seen unknown, and known too late.'
But destiny, that has produced 'this prodigious birth of love,'
is determined to further its growth. Romeo, when the ball is
over, takes shelter in the garden of the Capulets, beneath
Juliet's window, and under the screen of darkness hears his
mistress confess her love for him in a soliloquy to the night-air.
With a nature such as Juliet's, passionate in the depths, but
proud and steeped in maidenly delicacy on the surface, the first
avowal of affection, above all to a hereditary foe, would be hard
to make, and could only be the result of long effort. It was
thus a stroke of the most delicate insight on Shakspere's part-
for the device is his own-to represent Juliet as betrayed by
unforeseen chance into the revelation of her new-born feeling.
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Romeo and Juliet.
:
But her confession once taken by surprise, she is too nobly sincere
to draw back she covers her confusion with some charmingly
arch sallies, and the protestation that she'll prove more true 'than
those that have more cunning to be strange.' And the playful tone
soon deepens into that of passionate, unmeasured self-surrender:
'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.'
But again the presage of woe to come overshadows the scene:
'Although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightni g, which doth cease to be,
Ere one can say it lightens.'
Yet, in spite of forebodings, Juliet knows that there is only
one way now by which she and her lover can be united, and
this, with quiet resolution, she determines to take. Let him
send her word to-morrow where and what time he will marry
her, and she will come to him, and be his for evermore.
The simplicity and directness of Juliet's bearing in this
scene have been often contrasted with the more brooding
emotion of Romeo. His language is certainly fuller of imagery,
recalling sometimes in softened form his earlier utterances,
and he abandons himself more unreservedly to the luxury
of sentiment while forgetting the practical dangers of his
situation. But it is surely going beyond Shakspere's purpose
to look upon Romeo as a 'study' in over-luxuriant, half-unreal
emotion. The more such a point is pressed, the less justification.
is there for Juliet's self-surrender, and the less productive of
'pity and terror' is the collision in the drama between the two
passions of love and hate. The primary aim of the poet in
this his earliest tragedy is neither to give elaborate studies of
character, nor to point morals, but to tell in moving fashion an
old-world tale of 'star-crossed lovers' and their 'misadventured
piteous overthrows.'
It is important to bear this in mind in turning to the scene
in Friar Laurence's cell. Of the abrupt transitions that mark
the play throughout, the most striking is the change from the
passionate interview between the two lovers in the moonlit
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garden, to the solitary figure of the hermit, with the grey
dawn breaking over him, as he sets out, osier cage in hand,
to gather weeds and flowers. These products of the earth
suggest to him an analogy in human nature:
'Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power.
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part,
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed Kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs-grace and rude will,
And when the worser is predominant
Full soon the canker death eats up the plant.'
Kreyssig and Gervinus find in these words the keynote of
the drama, and look upon the Friar as playing the part of the
classical chorus, which was the mouthpiece of the poet's own
sentiments. Shakspere, according to this interpretation, censures
the lovers for yielding to 'rude will' or passion instead
of being regulated by 'grace' or gentle moderation. But
adherents of the Romantic school from Schlegel onwards,
have refused to see in the Friar's words anything more than
a suitable dramatic utterance. The problem is, without
doubt, perplexing. Though Shakspere never identifies himself
absolutely with any single character, yet certain of his
creations make the impression of representing him more
fully than others, and it must be allowed that the hermit's
moralizing phrases are introduced and repeated with what
sounds like deliberate emphasis. But this doctrine of modera-
tion in love is nowhere else found in Shakspere's writings.
Bassanio, Orlando, and Ferdinand offer whole-hearted, enthu-
siastic devotion to their mistresses, and no moralist rebukes
them for their want of circumspection. Is not the pathetic
failure of Ophelia's life owing to her obedience to a shallow
worldly wisdom rather than the dictates of her own heart?
Why then should Romeo and Juliet, the glowing creations.
of the dramatist's youth, alone be condemned out of his
own mouth? There is another interpretation which in some
degree reconciles the opposing views. All through the drama.
there runs the note of tragic predestination. It has had
utterance from the lips of Romeo and Juliet, but merely as
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a vague presentiment. In the friar's mouth it naturally takes
a moralizing form and is made the occasion of a sermon on
man's unruliness. As the hero and heroine repeat time after
time their apprehensions of evil to come, so, after his own
fashion, does the Friar. Hence the prominence given to his
warnings they are part of the ever-swelling burden of the
drama that the ecstasies of love are brief and brittle: they
must not be simply set aside as prosy commonplaces, but
they cannot be accepted as the full and final judgement upon
love and life by Shakspere, the Shakspere of the Sonnets to
Will. And indeed, if Romeo and Juliet, swayed by passion,
become the victims of an ironical destiny, is this less true of
the cautious Laurence with all his saws and maxims? Romeo
bursts into the cell, his tongue on fire with the exciting news
of his last night's fortunes. He cannot stop to give details,
but blurts out breathlessly his main object:
'When, where, and how,
We met, we wooed, and made exchange of vow
I'll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray
That thou consent to marry us to-day.'
The churchman blames the young waverer's precipitancy,
but thinks to bring good out of evil: a match between a
Montague and a Capulet may turn the households' rancour to
pure love. Is not this amiable confidence as bitterly mocked
by the sequel as the hopes of the wooers, who that very
afternoon are made man and wife? The scene is brief but
intensely significant. Romeo's joy utters itself, as usual, in
highly-wrought phrase, while Juliet's is too deep for words.
Both alike are thrilled in every vein with the passion that
speaks in Romeo's adjuration:
'Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.'
And again in sharpest contrast rings out the Friar's warning:
'These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die: like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.'
And even as the prophecy is uttered events are taking place,
not far off, which are to hasten their fulfilment. In the town-
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square, under the noonday sun, there is gathered a crowd of
Montague retainers, with Benvolio and Mercutio at their head.
Mercutio has already made his appearance on several occasions,
but now he first becomes a real factor in the plot. For his
character Shakspere found the slightest hints in his originals.
Brooke simply speaks of him as 'courteous of speech and
pleasant of devise,' with an ice-cold hand. Out of such meagre
materials Shakspere created the brilliant figure who forms as
admirable a foil to Romeo as, after a different fashion, the
Nurse to Juliet. The brooding, emotional temperament of
the heir of the Montagues finds its complete antithesis in the
sparkling vivacity of his friend, in whom we may detect a touch
of likeness to Valentine, while as yet he crowed like a cock
and was not 'metamorphosed with a mistress.' But Mercutio's
flashing wit and nimble tongue are all his own, and every form
of affectation, or what he deems to be such, gets a volley from
him in turn. Dreams and omens, over which Romeo ponders,
are to him 'the children of an idle brain' to be quizzed away
as old wives' tales of Mab and her antics. And as his estimate
of dreams thus resembles that of Theseus, so he takes much
the same view of the relation of lovers, poets, and madmen,
though he throws it into the form of a jest, and not of serious
reflection:
"Romeo, humours, madman, passion, lover!
Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh:
Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied.'
But Mercutio's very mockery is not without its poetic note,
as his brilliant arabesque of fancies about Queen Mab' is
sufficient to show. A splendid zest in real life, an ingrained
scorn of all affectation, a somewhat distant bowing acquaintance
with the proprieties, give salt and savour to his wit, though it
be a trifle over-pungent for delicate ears. A 'French slop' and
a French salutation equally stir his derision, but what absolutely
sticks in his throat is the fantastic etiquette of the fencing-school,
of which Tybalt is the professional representative. It is the
grudge borne by the mettlesome swordsman against the tactician,
the villain that fights by the book of arithmetic,' that throws
Mercutio, who belongs to neither house, upon the Montague
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side. Thus when Tybalt appears, he attempts to pro-
voke him into open quarrel, but the Capulet champion is
seeking Romeo, who enters immediately afterwards fresh frʊm
his marriage with Juliet, and determined not to be drawn into
combat with any one of the Capulet name. His refusal to take
up the challenge which Tybalt throws in his teeth so incenses
Mercutio that his rapier is out in a moment and crossed with
his foe's, and when Romeo seeks to beat the weapons down,
Tybalt lunges under his arm and gives Mercutio the wound.
that, though not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church
door,' makes of him 'a grave man.' And so, game to the last,
with jests and maledictions mingling on his lips, the gallant
spirit 'aspires the clouds,' and the scene darkens as he dis-
appears. Once again, and the episode is Shakspere's own,
fate has made mock of Romeo, but her fury is yet far from
spent. Tybalt re-enters in triumph, and Romeo, maddened
by the thought of Mercutio slain in his quarrel and through
his intervention, turns on the murderer and sends his soul
to keep company with his victim's. Then the horror of the
situation flashes upon him, and he rushes off with the
agonized cry on his lips, 'O, I am fortune's fool.' And, as
after the earlier fray, the Prince again enters, with Capulets
and Montagues on either hand. Death is too heavy a penalty
for so provoked an offence, but the stern alternative is perpetual
banishment, and that to Romeo is very death in life.
From the hurtle of steel under the open sky we pass to
Juliet's solitary watch-chamber, whence she leans out with eyes
fixed on the westward sloping sun, that seems to sink so slowly
to his grave. And as she gazes, there floats from the lips of
the maiden wife the epithalamium, the marriage hymn which no
voice save her own could sing over her strange and stolen
bridal. Passionate is her invocation, passionate as the blood
bating in her cheeks, but pure-pure as her own stainless
maidenhood. Love with Shakspere rose from the first high
above the level of sense where Marlowe had held it down, but
it never floats away into a bloodless abstraction. It is the
travail of one being to be united to another in body, soul, and
spirit, and this complex longing is frankly made articulate in
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Juliet's lyric to Night. A heart,' it has been finely said,
'may be as pure as snow or as pure as flame, and Juliet's is of
the latter kind.'
The reverie is abruptly broken by the entrance of the Nurse
with conſused babble of lamentation, whence at last there surges
to the surface the news of Tybalt's death and Romeo's banish-
ment. In fierce revulsion of feeling Juliet for the moment
launches forth reproaches against her husband, but the frigid
chain of meaningless antitheses that issues from her lips proves
that her anger has as little pith as Romeo's early love which
found similar expression. The instant that the Nurse begins to
follow her lead, she recants, and eagerly catches at the proposal
to send to him where he is hid at Laurence's cell.
There Romeo lies with his own tears made drunk' in the
very luxury of woe, hugging, as it were, his sentence of banish-
ment deliriously to him, and battening on its stored up misery.
He is utterly unmanned; and those who, like Kreyssig, see
in the play a scientific diagnosis of emotion, point to Romeo
as the example of the ruin wrought in a life which makes the
blunder of taking love as the sum total of existence. But in this
scene Shakspere follows Brooke with unusual closeness, and the
original responsibility for the not very edifying picture of Romeo
in his collapse rests with the poet rather than the dramatist.
Indeed Shakspere, as compared with Brooke, takes a more
sympathetic view of Romeo's distracted mood, and the Friar's
conventional counsels and proffer of philosophy' as a balm
for the heartache are met with the pregnant rejoinder, 'Thou
canst not speak of that thou dost not feel.' But what
philosophy cannot do is effected by the thought of a last
meeting with Juliet. Over that meeting itself, which Brooke
reports in full, Shakspere with fine reticence draws the
veil at the threshold of the marriage chamber his muse ever
stays her foot. All that is made known to us, and all that we
need to know is the ineffable sorrow of the parting at dawn.
Here again Shakspere has chosen a lyric mould, borrowing,
perhaps unconsciously, the favourite Provençal dawn-song
wherein two lovers debate whether the daylight hour of parting
be already come. But though the form be one of Shakspere's
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many debts to mediaevalism, his alone is the magical melody
of lines, which distil at once love's quintessential rapture
and its infinite sum of pain. But the bitter-sweet parting
is over at last, and Romeo climbs down the rope-ladder.
As he touches the ground, again from Juliet's lips rises the
presaging cry:
'O God, I have an ill-divining soul:
Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.'
But vague presentiments soon sink in present fear. Lady
Capulet enters with the news that Juliet is to be consoled
for Tybalt's death by being made the joyful bride of Paris
on Thursday next. Barely has the girl-wife time to answer in
words of double meaning that when she marries
'It shall be Romeo, whom you know I hate,
Rather than Paris,'
when her father bursts in to hear how she has received his
'decree.' Capulet has hitherto shown no lack of tenderness to
his daughter, and the device of the marriage has been well-
intentioned enough, but resistance inflames his autocratic
temper into almost frenzied irritability. With volley upon
volley of coarse abuse he shouts down the girl, the pallor on
whose cheeks earns for her the epithets of 'green-sickness
carrion' and 'tallow-face.' In vain Juliet pleads at his feet for
mercy; equally in vain she appeals to her mother whose stony
silence is as cruel as the lash of Capulet's tongue. Only one
friend is left to her, the Nurse, and to her she turns in words of
simple, imploring earnestness,
'O God, O Nurse, how shall this be prevented?'
But the sensuous element in the Nurse's affection for her
young mistress betrays her at the critical moment; the thought
of a second marriage with a lovely gentleman, to whom Romeo
is a 'dishclout,' has an irresistible fascination for her; the first
husband dead or useless, it is the very height of luck to get
another. The Nurse has indeed given Juliet marvellous much
comfort the gross proposal teaches her the secret strength
of her own stainless love, and with a solemn 'Amen' she
isolates herself from the whole Capulet household for ever.
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At a single shock the girl is transformed into the heroic
Woman.
Her instinct guides her to the Friar for help: he who has
made her Romeo's wife can surely teach her how to keep this
new wooer at bay. At the cell she meets the County himself,
who has come to make preparation for the marriage rite, and
who with confident familiarity salutes her as 'my lady and my
wife.' Steeled to perfect outward self-control she answers with
incisive badinage, but the door once shut on Paris, she utters
the agonized cry of one 'past hope, past cure, past help.' The
breakdown is only for a moment, and the Friar's plan for her
salvation, desperate though it be, rekindles her dauntless spirit.
Eagerly she grasps the phial with the opiate that is to lull her
into the very counterfeit of death. 'Give me, give me! O tell
not me of fear.' And with the same unfaltering resolve, in the
solitude and silence of her own chamber, she drinks the strange
draught. For a brief space her courage falters as she conjures
up a vision of the charnel-house and its horrors, but there flashes
before her gaze t'e image of Tybalt's ghost ranging for revenge.
on Romeo, and she empties the vial with a confused sense
that she is rushing to her husband's aid :
'Stay, Tybalt, stay.
Romeo, I come: this do I drink to thee.'
So when the Nurse enters to wake Juliet on Wednesday
morning for the bridal with Paris she is found lying in seeming
death. And from lips lately so cruel or so perversely kind there
rises a chorus of hollow lamentation, couched in that inter-
jectional verbiage which Shakspere uses throughout the play to
mark unreal emotion of whatever kind. Amid such a mockery
of sorrow Juliet is borne forth to her mock funeral in the vault
of the Capulets.
The Friar's plans have been skilfully laid, but it is now his
turn, for all his craft, to become 'fortune's fool.' His messenger
to Romeo is accidentally delayed, and meanwhile Balthasar
hastens to Mantua. Once again, as on the eve of his first
meeting with his love, Romeo has had a dream, but now—
and it is fortune's most satiric stroke-it presages joyful news
at hand. In answer to this presage comes Balthasar's an-
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Romeo and Juliet.
nouncement that Julict is well,' for her body sleeps in Capulet's
monument, and her immortal part is with the angels. The
malice of fortune has dealt its most exquisite blow, and the
wretched man whom it has hunted from point to point now
at last turns to bay: 'Is it e'en so? then I defy you, stars!'
To-night he will lie with Juliet: a poison phial will invalidate all
decrees of banishment. But Fortune does not leave her victim':
challenge unanswered. At the door of the Capulets' monumeni
(and again the episode is Shakspere's addition) Romeo chances
upon Paris, who has come to strew flowers by his lady's bier.
Gentle appeals to fly are met with violence, and again Romeo
is fain to redden his sword with an adversary's life-blood.
has come to offer Death a second victim, but its detestable maw
has claimed a third. The young, the fair, the loving-these are
they for whom its jaws gape widest, and as Romeo turns to gaze
on the face of his bride, with 'beauty's ensign' yet crimson in
her lips and in her cheeks, one last gorgeous flash of the old
fancy leaps up in the thought that Death, not Paris, is his rival
for Julia's hand:
'Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
He
Juliet had drained her phial, that she might hasten between
her lover and Tybalt's angry ghost; so Romeo tosses off the
poison to shield his wife from the caresses of the grim power
that reigns in 'this palace of dim night.' The drugs are quick,
and with but one kiss Romeo shakes off 'the yoke of inauspicious
stars' for ever.
Yet his death itself is a counter in Fortune's malignant game,
which a few added moments of life would have spoilt. Juliet
awakes only to hear from the lips of the Friar the confession
that old heads as well as young hearts may be baffled in their
purposes:
'A greater Power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents.'
Her husband indeed lies in her bosom, but his immortal part
has gone the way that she had only feigned to go. She has
wakened to find the world empty of all that gave it glory; there
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is nothing left but to sink back into sleep, the self-sought ever-
lasting sleep of death. And when all is over, as the grey dawn
begins to glimmer in the sky, again and for the last time,
Montagues and Capulets meet face to face, and gaze upon the
ruin that the hate of the houses has wrought. In the infinite
pity of the spectacle even mourning is hushed: the fiery
greybeards bow the head in silence, while the Prince sternly
upbraids them with the tragic issue of their strife. The friar
too, when he has briefly told his tale, is dumb; moralizing
maxims can avail nothing in the sight of those fair young bodies
stretched in death. But sentimental elegiacs would be equally
out of place. The story unfolded has been one of destiny. No
a priori ideas that Shakspere is pre-eminently the poet of free
will as opposed to necessity should prevent us recognizing that in
Romeo and Juliet, following the steps of Brooke, and treating
a characteristically mediaeval theme, he has given to Fate a
prominence unique in his writings. The lovers have been 'star-
crossed,' and in their 'misadventured piteous overthrows' they
merit neither blame nor praise. Still less does Shakspere ex-
plicitly strike the transcendental note of the modern poet that
Love is all, and Death is nought.' Yet he does not leave us
bowed in barren sorrow. Over the dead bodies of their children,
Montagu and Capulet clasp hands, and the family vendetta is
stayed for ever. The love of 'true and faithful' Julet and her
Romeo has been the love spoken of in A Midsummer Night's
Dream.
'Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, Behold !
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.'
But lightning, the elemental force, though it carry death and
terror with it, purges and pur fies the world's atmosphere. So
is it with the equally elemental force of love.
The date of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE has not been
accurately fixed. Two quarto editions were printed in 1600,
and Meres mentions the play in his list, so that it must be
earlier than 1598. Henslowe, in his diary, mentions under the
x]
215
The Merchant of Venice.
date August 25, 1594, The Venesyon Comedy, but the mere title,
when so many dramas dealt with Italy, does not warrant
the inference that this was Shakspere's play. The internal
evidence is inconclusive. There is a considerable percentage
of rhyming lines, including one quatrain and a few cases of
doggrel, but they are used in almost every case with a specific
purpose, and are by no means necessarily signs of immaturity.
They occur chiefly in the 'scrolls' hidden within the caskets,
and in the short staccato speeches which these suggest to the
wooers, or in the epigrammatic utterances which bring a scene
to its close. The play is allied to The Two Gentlemen of Verona
in the prominence given to the theme of friendship between
men, as also in the resemblance of Launcelot and Nerissa to
Launce and Lucetta, while the dialogue between Portia and her
waiting-woman about the suitors is a wittier and more elaborate
version of that between Julia and her maid. But the style
marks a considerable advance upon that of The Two Gentlemen,
for the blank verse is fuller in tone and more varied in cadence,
and for the first time prose is used in serious scenes. The
play, moreover, is almost entirely devoid of the interest of
'mistaken identity' which distinguishes the earliest group of
comedies. Instead of this somewhat primitive device, we have
a highly elaborate plot, or combination of plots, introducing,
besides minor figures, two full-length portraits, conceived and
executed with masterly insight and vigour. If we assume further
that the play was written after a visit to Venice, and that
incidents in the year 1594, of which we shall have to speak,
influenced its composition, we can scarcely be far wrong in
dating it about 1595.
The story, or rather the group of stories, which Shakspere
used in The Merchant of Venice had had a long literary
history'. Probably Shakspere found them already combined
1 The tale of the Bond, with a pound of flesh as the forfeiture, has been
variously traced back to Eastern, Teutonic, and Roman sources. It had
entered English literature as early as the thirteenth century, for Miss Toulmin
Smith has pointed out a version of it in the Cursor Mundi, the Northumbrian
religious poem of that date. The usurer is a Jew, who, however, is forgiven
his offence on promising to point out where the Holy Rood is hid. The
story is found at the end of the fourteenth century in the Anglo-Latin (not
£16
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
and worked up in dramatic form; for Gosson, in his Schole of
Abuse, 1579, excepts from his splenetic criticisms a few plays,
including 'The Jew, shown at the Bull, representing the greediness
of worldly chusers, and the bloody minds of usurers.' This
brief précis of the plot proves that the work must have included
the two main stories found in The Merchant of Venice, and, to
earn Gosson's admission that it was 'tolerable at some time,' it
must have had unusual merits. Had it been preserved we
should have very possibly found that it bore somewhat of the
same relation to The Merchant of Venice as The Taming of
a Shrew to The Taming of the Shrew, or the old King John
to Shakspere's play of like name. But however this may be,
there can be no doubt that in Marlowe's Barabas he found the
literary prototype of the main figure in the play. Of the relation
between Barabas and Shylock something has been already said',
and here therefore it is chiefly necessary to emphasize the fact
that the whole episode of Jessica and her Christian lover, of
which there is no hint in Il Pecorone, is obviously modelled upon
that of Abigail and Don Matthias in The Jew of Malta.
But Shakspere was probably influenced by other than purely
the somewhat earlier original Latin) version of the Gesta Romanorum, the
great mediaeval collection of tales, translated into English about 1450. In
this the usurer, instead of a Jew, is a merchant at Rome, but we have a lady
introduced, who by her pleading saves the victim. It is, however, in another
collection of romances, Il Pecorone, by Ser Giovanni, a notary of Florence,
about 1378, that we find the version of the story most akin to that used by
Shakspere. Here the usurer is a Jew of Venice; it is a lady from Belmont
who devises the plan for avoiding the forfeiture, and the incident of the ring
is introduced. A ballad of uncertain date, 'showing the cruelty of Gernutus
a Jew,' makes no mention of a lady, but in some minor details, e. g. the
representation of the bond by the usurer as a jest, the allusion to the debtor's
ships as being all at sea, and the sharpening of the knife, it shows such a curious.
resemblance to The Merchant of Venice that some critics have supposed
that it was suggested by the play. The story of the caskets is first found in
the mediaeval romance Barlaam and Josaphat, written in Greek by Joannes
Damascenus, about 800. The device is there used by a king to teach his
courtiers the vanity of appearances. In Gower's Confessio Amantis, and
likewise in Boccaccio's Decamerone, there is a story of a king who uses
caskets to point a moral, but merely that of the capriciousness of fortune.
The Gesta Romanorum contains the version which Shakspere adopted with
modifications in his play. An emperor of Rome, in order to test the
character of the lady whom his son is to marry, makes her choose one
of three caskets, of gold, silver, and lead, with inscriptions almost the same
as those in The Merchant of Venice.
¹ See pp. 50–52. See also Elze's Essays on Shakspere, pp. 72–79.
x]
217
The Merchant of Venice.
1
literary precedents. The long-prevalent tradition that Jews
were unknown in England between the time of Edward I and
the Protectorate, and that thus Shakspere must either have been
entirely unacquainted with them, or have met them abroad, has
been completely disproved from examination of the State papers
and other authoritative sources. A tract written between 1600
and 1625 expressly declares a store of Jewes we have in
England; a few in court; many i' th' Citty, more in the
countrey.' Furthermore, as has been shown by Mr. S. L. Lee ¹,
during the earlier years of Shakspere's London life, a Jewish
doctor-Roderigo Lopez by name-held a very prominent posi-
tion in the capital, and must have been well known to many
members of the theatrical profession. He was physician to
Lord Leicester, and at a later date to the Queen herself. He thus
formed an intimacy with the general body of the courtiers,
among whom the young Earl of Essex was the rising leader.
Essex, with whom Shakspere's friend Southampton was SO
closely connected, employed Lopez, who was a master of foreign
languages, as interpreter in his communications with Antonio
Perez, a Portuguese refugee at the English court. Perez was
a pretender to the throne of his native land, which Philip of
Spain wished to annex to his dominions, and he naturally
received support from the Queen and her advisers. He showed,
however, little capacity for his part, and Lopez gradually became
estranged from him and his patron Essex. The doctor even
agreed with agents of Philip to poison Perez, and overtures
were made to him to put Elizabeth out of the way by similar
means. This he emphatically refused to do, but Essex, dis-
covering that a plot against the Queen was in progress, succeeded,
by threats of torture, in implicating Lopez, who was tried before
a special commission in the Guildhall, and executed amidst the
jeering execrations of the city crowd at Tyburn in the spring of
1594. Even after his death the popular excitement was kept
alive by the publication of five official accounts of his treason.
It can therefore be no mere chance that Henslowe, in his diary,
mentions no less than twenty representations, between May,
1594 and the end of the year, of Marlowe's Jew of Malla. The
1 In The Gentleman's Magazine, Jan. 1889.
218
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
'groundlings,' with the execution of Lopez fresh in their minds,
would appreciate with more than usual zest plays which intro-
duced members of his race in an odious light, and it is in the
highest degree probable that it was under these influences that
Shakspere began The Merchant of Venice. There is furthermore
great plausibility in Mr. Lee's ingenious conjecture that the name
Antonio for Shylock's victim, which is not found in the earlier
stories, and which is Portuguese rather than Italian, was taken
from Antonio Perez, who after the execution of the doctor
became a popular hero. But even if this be considered doubtful,
it is perfectly certain that Shakspere had opportunities of
acquiring first-hand knowledge of Jewish life without leaving
England, and it must assuredly be counted as part of the tragic
inheritance of the Hebrew race, that it should have attracted
Shakspere's gaze at the moment of its deepest degradation,
when for it alone the Renaissance was in no sense a 'new
birth,' and when Luther himself had only sought to rivet faster
its chains; and it is perhaps the most convincing proof of
Shakspere's almost superhuman plastic power that for the
majority of modern readers Shylock, a product of the dramatic
imagination, has supplanted the great historical figures of law-
givers and prophets as the type of the sons of Israel.
The play, which has had so transcendent an influence on the
popular mind, presents a problem of the utmost difficulty to
critical students. It has already been shown that there runs
through many of Shakspere's dramas a leading theme which.
appears, with variations, in the several sections of the plot.
Thus there is nothing a priori inadmissible in the many attempts
that have been made to discover such a theme in The Merchant
of Venice, and thereby to fix a central point round which the
whole action revolves. But each of these solutions has been in
turn found inadequate, for it has failed to embrace some im-
portant element in the play. Thus Ulrici, Horn, Simrock, and
Rötscher base the ideal unity of the work on the maxim Summum
Jus Summa Injuria, i. e. abstract legal right, when pushed to its
extremity, becomes heinous moral wrong. Of this they find
illustrations in Shylock's insistence upon the letter of his bond,
and in the arbitrary exercise by Portia's father of his testamentary
x]
219
The Merchant of Venice.
10
powers, while conversely Jessica, in her flight from Shylock,
commits a breach of legal obligation, which is in reality the
assertion of a moral right. From this point of view Portia's
speech, magnifying mercy at the expense of abstract justice,
strikes the keynote of the play. But, as a matter of fact, the
designs of Shylock are defeated by a no less rigid insistence
upon the le ter of the law than his own, nor are we made to feel
that the strange provisions of the will by which Portia is bound
inflict upon her any real injury. Another view of the play
is that which, with some modifications in detail, is supported by
Gervinus, Hebler, and Elze. This finds in Bassanio's speech,
when he is choosing the casket, the fundamental idea of the
play, namely, the contrast between appearance and reality, and
above all, between the inward things of true price and the god
of this world, the symbol of all external things-money. Thus
in Gervinus' pithy phrase the aim of the poet was to delineate
'the relation of man to property,' and this he illustrates
by the different methods in which Antonio, Shylock, Portia,
Bassanio, and Jessica handle wealth. But we do not think of
Portia primarily in relation to her possessions; in the underplot
of the elopement the idea of wealth and its true use is entirely
subordinate, and in the episode of the Rings it is completely
absent. Kreyssig, who emphasizes the inadequacy of all attempts
to sum up the doctrine of the play in a formula, yet lets himself
be drawn into the statement that the most constant and definite
underlying idea is that 'lasting prosperity, sure and practical
success, can only be attained by moderation in all things, by
the skilful employment and cheerful endurance of given circum-
stances, equally removed from defiant opposition and cowardly
submission.' Such an interpretation is too much of a truism
to be very enlightening, and a study of the rival theories leads
to the conviction that while each throws light on important.
aspects of the play, not one of them covers, nor, from the
nature of the piece could cover, the whole of its complex issues.
To borrow an illustration from the work itself, many of the
commentaries on The Merchant of Venice are as caskets over
which flourishes the scroll of Summum Jus Summa Injuria, or
The relation of man to property, or µndèv äyav, but when enticed
220
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
by the inscriptions we open the caskets expecting to find therein
the 'heavenly picture' of the genius of the play, we suffer
disappointment. Warned by this experience, let us proceed
after another fashion. Let us recognize that in this drama,
which introduces semi-mythical incidents and carries us to the
very borderland of the possible, Shakspere has cared less than
usual about unity of design, and has expended his power upon
brilliant portraiture of character, whereby he has minimized
the inherent improbabilities of the story, and upon equally
brilliant technique, in the manipulation of an intricate series of
far from ductile plots.
In the forefront of the play stands the figure from whom it
takes its name, and who is the hero of the Bond-story, Antonio,
the Merchant of Venice. His character is summed up in the
words applied to him at a later period by Bassanio; he is one
in whom
(
The ancient Roman honour more appears
Than any that draws breath in Italy.'
He is a member of one of those patrician families in which still
ran the blood of the republican rulers of the world, and, though.
bowing to the circumstances of his age, he has embarked in
commerce on a princely scale, he carries into the financial
sphere the spirit of the senate-house or the forum. In the
most material of occupations, it has been aptly said he remains
an idealist, a Brutus of the counting-house and the exchange.'
In him, even before the era of the Roman plays, Shakspere
shows his power o grasping the essentials of the 'antique
Roman' character-its power and its weakness. Antonio,
conscious of his lofty standard of rectitude, exhibits from the
first that fault of self-sufficiency which is the besetting temptation
of the righteous. It appears in every word of his opening
dialogue with the two young fashionable loungers, Salarino and
Salanio, who are suggesting reasons for the fit of sadness'
from which Antonio admits himself to be suffering. It is in
reality one of those hypochondriacal seizures to which the
favourites of fortune are at times subject, though here it serves
as a presentiment of evil to come.
The foppish young gentle-
men, whose own financial cares are doubtless confined to the
x]
221
The Merchant of Venice.
problem of making two ends meet, naturally enough set down
Antonio's seriousness to anxiety about the safety of his world-
wide ventures, and they draw fancy-pictures of what tremors
they themselves would go through under similar conditions.
But Antonio stiffly repels the suggestion :
'Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it,
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.'
Such a haughty assumption of unassailable solidity by a mer-
chant, who, above all other men, is exposed to constant risks,
has in it the ring of a challenge to destiny, which, we in-
stinctively feel, will sooner or later be taken up. In a similar
spirit of grave disdain he sets aside, with a curt 'fie, fie,' the
suggestion that love is the cause of his melancholy, and indeed
this dignified man of affairs is the most unlikely of victims to
sentimental passion. Emotion with him-and in this again he
is a true type of the antique Roman-takes the more masculine
and solid form of friendship, especially for his kinsman Bassanio,
who at this moment appears on the scene with two of his
intimates, Lorenzo and Gratiano. With deferential flourishes
the pair of satellites bow themselves out of the presence of their
superiors, and the topic of Antonio's 'sadness' is now taken up
by Gratiano, a typical society humourist, who, with good-natured
badinage, seeks to rally the merchant into a more cheerful mood.
Antonio listens with dignified composure while he runs on, but
makes no answer to his exhortation,' and is manifestly relieved
when the garrulous wag goes off with Lorenzo, for he at once
turns to Bassanio, and broaches an entirely new subject. We now
learn that Bassanio, though he stands within the eye of honour,'
and thus satisfies Antonio's lofty moral standard, is the very
antithesis of his friend and kinsman in temperament and manner
of life. A man of fashion and a spendthrift, to repair his broken
fortunes he has determined to venture for the hand of Porta,
the wealthy heiress of Belmont. Though he gives Antonio
to understand that there have been previous passages of love
between them, and extols the lady's virtues and beauty, Bassanio's
scheme, as he unfolds it, is rather too much of a financial
222
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
enterprise to quite suit our taste. Like other speculations it
reeds capital, and for this he now appeals to Antonio, on the
plea that it will be an investment which may recoup the merchant
for former losses. Antonio, with limitless generosity, places at
his friend's disposal his purse, his person, his extremest means;
but after his lofty protesta ions to Salarino and Salanio it is
surprising to hear him confess that all his fortunes are at sea,
and that he cannot himself furnish the money. Thus to serve
his friend he has to stoop from his pedestal of financial purity,
which forbids borrowing or lending, and to send Bassanio forth
to raise a loan upon his credit. The young nobleman goes at
once to the most notorious money-lender in the city, Shylock,
the Jew.
Had Bassanio been as familiar with the Rialto as with the
haunts of the gay world, he would have sought relief in some
other quarter. For between Antonio and Shylock there was an
ancient grudge, rooted in deep-seated antipathies, national, re-
ligious, and professional. The Italian patrician, a native of the
mighty Venetian republic, would naturally scorn the alien,
admitted into the state only on sufferance, confined to his
ghetto, and marked off from the rest of the community by
a peculiar dress. The orthodox Christian, belonging to that
well-defined type of prospe.ous men of the world who have in
all ages tended to be more clerical than the clergy, loathes the
misbeliever. The member of la haute finance, exporting valuables
to all quarters of the globe, despises the local money-lender who
locks up his savings in cash or precious stones. This feeling is
intensified by the attitude of the age towards usury, which was
condemned as sinful by the Church, and confined to those who
like the Jews were outside its pale. Antonio, prodigal in hate,
as in friendship, has showered upon Shylock every form of insult
in the most public fashion, and the latter has borne it outwardly
with a patient shrug. But within him too there burns the scorn
of the Jew, the member of the sacred nation, for the Gentile,
and of the shrewd bargainer for the simple-minded man who
'Lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.'
It is thus a moment of keen personal triumph to Shylock when
x]
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The Merchant of Venice.
Bassanio's impulsive action puts his enemy for the first time.
within his power, and disregarding the young nobleman's
impatience to have the business settled out-of-hand, he makes
the most of this unexpected advantage, slowly pondering over
the nature of the security offered, and emphasizing the risks to
which Antonio's seemingly solid fortunes are exposed.
juncture the merchant himself enters, and like his kinsman tries
to drive matters at once to a point, but all the more Shylock
persists in prolonging the interview. Every word that he speaks
flashes a light upon some national peculiarity: his affection for
his 'tribe,' his distinctive diet, his familiarity with the Old
Testament. And with marvellous skill Shakspere makes one
of the Jew's scriptural allusions the starting-point of a discussion,
which helps to account for the proposal of such an unheard-of
forfeiture as a pound of flesh'. Shylock, in defence of usury,
cites the patriarchal example of Jacob, and the profit that by his
clever trick he made out of Laban's flock. Antonio's retort
'Is your gold and silver ewes and rams?' is entirely in the
spirit of his age, whose hostility to usury was based on the idea
that metal, unlike living creatures, had no natural power of
increase. Shylock does not vex himself with such metaphysical
distinctions: he only knows that he can make money breed as
fast as cattle. But the ironical query has suggested to him
a grimly humorous form of retaliation, which however he
prefaces by a contrast between Antonio's former persecution
and his present appeal for money. Stung out of his self-control
the merchant turns upon him fiercely:
I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends; for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy;
Who if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty.'
Thus once again, and yet more defiantly than before, Antonio
in his self-sufficiency throws out a challenge to fortune, and in
the very moment of borrowing denounces anew the iniquity of
¹ See Moulton's Shakspere as a Dramatic Artist, pp. 61 64.
£24
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
making barren metal 'breed.' But Shylock is ready with the
soft answer that turns away wrath: he will adopt the merchant's
principles, and take no 'doit of usance,' but instead, 'in a merry
sport,' Antonio must agree, in case of default, to the forfeiture
of a pound of his flesh-flesh, on his own showing, being the
only legitimate form of interest. The financial purist cannct
well demur to conditions which by ironical logic spring from
his cherished precepts, and, in spite of Bassanio's protests, the
momentous bargain is struck.
To fill up the interval between the signature of the bond and
its forfeiture, Shakspere has introduced the underplot of Jessica
and Lorenzo, which further serves to throw a harsh light upon
Shylock's domestic relations. Though the dramatist had, as
has been shown, opportunities for studying Judaism from the
outside, it is unlikely that he can have known much of its family
life, and his picture of it is strangely untrue to facts. Through
the centuries of persecution the Jewish home maintained much
of its scriptural beauty, and was the focus of affections all the
more intense because confined to this narrow radius. It has
been argued that Shakspere was aware of this, and that he
purposely represented Shylock as devoid of the distinctive
virtues of his race, in order to heighten the impression of his
villainy. But this seems an over-refinement of criticism, and
had such been the dramatist's aim, he would scarcely have
admitted the one saving touch of tenderness in the reference to
Leah and her cherished gift of a turquoise ring. But however
Shylock may have treated his dead wife, to his daughter and his
servant he makes his home a 'hell,' and they are both preparing
to give him the slip. Launcelot, whom his master grudges food,
clothing, and sleep, transfers his services after a comical exercise
in casuistry to the open-handed Bassanio, while Jessica makes
an assignation with Lorenzo, a member of the same fashionable
set. When she asserts, in defence of her conduct to Shylock,
that though she is a daughter to his blood she is not to his
manners, she doubtless speaks a truth. But in her own way
Jessica is no less distinctively Jewish than Shylock. She
belongs to the artistic type of the Hebrew race, which has
given so many poets and musicians to the world, and she is
]
225
The Merchant of Venice.
steeped in Oriental opulence of sensibility and dreamy volup-
tuous charm. Such a nature recoils instinctively from the harsh
surroundings of a home, unsweetened by feminine influences,
darkened by the spirit of mistrust, and bare of every element
of beauty. Yet modern sentiment finds it more difficult than
Elizabethan prejudice to condone her filial breach in the elope-
ment with Lorenzo, and even if her flight be excused, the theft
of her father's stones and ducats jars unpleasantly with pre-
conceived ideas of the conduct proper to a heroine of romance.
It has been said that the episode of the elopement was inserted
in order to create a partial revulsion of feeling in favour of the
Jew. Jessica at home makes us hate Shylock with Jessica
lost we cannot help pitying him.' But we believe that no such
effect was intended by Shakspere, and that, in any case, it would
have failed with an audience of his day. The groundlings were
far more likely to yell with vociferous laughter as they listened
to Salanio's account of the dog Jew flying through the streets,
with all the boys of Venice at his heels, and lamenting with
' confused passion' the double loss of his ducats and of the
daughter whom he ranks on the identical level of a property.
It is to be noticed that Shylock at this crisis at once puts the
law in motion against the runaways, and that the Duke, on his
appeal, hurries to the harbour to seek for them on board of
Bassanio's ship. This procedure naturally reminds Antonio's
friends that in case of his default, the same engine of the law
will be at Shylock's service, and that the Jew has now fresh
reason for seeking revenge upon his Christian foes. Salanio
murmurs anxiously,
'Let good Antonio look he keep his day,
Or he shall pay for this';
and Salarino's answer contains the first hint of the merchant's
losses at sea. In a subsequent conversation between the two
quidnuncs we hear more definitely of the wreck of one of
Antonio's ships on the Goodwins, and we are prepared for yet
further disaster in Salarino's ejaculation, 'I would it might prove
the end of his losses.' All the more short-sighted is it of the
pair at this juncture to irritate Shylock into fury by taunting
him with Jessica's elopement, and then to question him about
Q
226
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Antonio's misfortunes. Writhing under the sense of accumu-
lated insults and wrongs, the down-trodden man may well glut
himself with the prospect of a terrible revenge, should the
merchant fail to meet his bond. And in justifying that revenge
by Christian example Shylock rises to the dignity of a well-nigh
tragic figure. The magnificent outburst in which he vindicates.
against a brutal fanaticism the essential equality of human con-
ditions in Jew and Christian is born of the blood and tears of
centuries of martyrdom: it is the exceeding bitter cry, not so
much of the solitary usurer as of the entire Hebrew race turning
on its bed of pain. It is wrung forth not only by the taunts of
Antonio, but
'By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel's heritage,
By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,
By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship.'
It must have sounded strangely in the ears of those who had
shricked, as the noose tightened round the neck of Dr. Lopez,
'He is a Jew.' Indeed it scarcely harmonizes with the general
impression which the character of Shylock is intended to leave,
or with his treatment at the close of the play. But the incon-
sistency is the measure of Shakspere's greatness. Marlowe and
others found it easy to fall in with the standard of their age,
and to draw Jews who were monsters in human form. Shakspere
too was sufficiently a man of his time to gratify the popular
taste by the spectacle of a Jewish villain, but, as is the case
with consummate genius, he was carried beyond himself by the
irresistible sway of his own creation. Shylock is no automaton,
but a being of flesh and blood, and the fierce pressure of his
agony forces to the surface from depths still unpetrified by
wrong done or suffered this swollen gush of elemental human
passion.
With the entry of Tubal however, and the announcement
that Jessica has not been overtaken at Genoa, Shylock sinks
back into the stony-hearted usurer, and the sympathy that has
been aroused by his majestic vindication of Judaism is quenched
by the unutterable horror of his imprecation: 'I would my
x]
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The Merchant of Venice.
daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!
Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her
coffin!' Tubal, who for no very apparent reason enjoys
torturing Shylock as much as his avowed enemies, keeps him
swaying between hysterical grief and joy as he plies him
alternately with anecdotes of Jessica's wanton extravagance and
news of fresh disasters to Antonio. The mention of divers of
the merchant's creditors that swear he cannot choose but break,
prepares us for his complete ruin, and Shylock's commission to
his tribesman to fee him an officer a fortnight before the day,
with the savage declaration that he will have the heart of
Antonio if he forfeit, shows us the Jew battening on the prospect
of the bloody revenge that is all but within his grasp.
At this point it is necessary to turn back and trace briefly the
progress of the other main plot. Hitherto the two stories have
rather run side by side than been blended, yet Antonio's danger
springs directly out of Bassanio's scheme to win Portia, the heiress
of Belmont, and heroine of the tale of the caskets. Portia, like
the merchant who, on her account, though without her know-
ledge, has been brought to the edge of destruction, is the owner
of vast wealth. But while the commercial magnate has to risk
his treasure on the high seas, the mistress of a landed estate can
encircle herself with all the visible emblems of wealth—a stately
palace, spreading gardens, the refinements of music and of art.
Amidst such surroundings Portia's nature has expanded into
a rich and rounded fullness which draws tributes of admiration
from all who behold her. Bassanio compares her to Cato's
daughter, Brutus' Portia ; Morocco speaks of her as this shrine,
this mortal breathing saint, and Jessica protests that the poor
rude world hath not her fellow. Throughout the drama she
shows that she is worthy of these lofty eulogies. To other
women Shakspere has given in larger measure some single
quality of head or of heart, but none unites so many and such
opposite gifts in harmoniously balanced perfection. She is
cverflowing with light-hearted mirth, and yet rises to the
full height of the most solemn issues. She combines deep
sensibility with stately reserve, and incisive wit with poetical
ardour of imagination. She has the shrewdness of a woman of
Q 2
228
LCH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the world, and the bashful delicacy of a maiden. She is equally
unfaltering in passive submission to an arbitrary decrce, and in
the energetic action that cuts the knot of an unexampled crisis.
A woman so favoured by fortune and of such rare parts would
naturally draw many suitors to Belmont, even if by the strange
terms of her father's will every wooer had not an equal chance
of winning her. For the future of this incomparable creature.
has been seemingly placed at the mercy of capricious fate.
Whoever can choose aright among three caskets of gold, silver,
and lead, is to have her to wife. Such a decree seems the very
climax of lunacy, and yet Nerissa is the poet's interpreter when
she speaks of it as an inspiration of a holy man before his death.
There can be little doubt that Shakspere, as Romeo and Juliet
shows, was more affected by the mediaeval idea of the influence
of fortune upon human affairs than has generally been allowed.
Nerissa is again his mouthpiece in the words:
The ancient saying is no heresy :-
Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.'
This idea appears in contrasted forms in the two main plots.
Antonio defies fortune and is punished for his presumption:
Portia bows cheerfully to her authority, and has an ample
reward. Yet the goddess is not here represented as acting.
in arbitrary defiance of the laws that govern human conduct.
Rather we are shown how a result, apparently dictated by mere
chance, may yet, when narrowly tested, prove to be due to the
working of permanent moral principles. The choice of the
suitors for Portia's hand, though the element of luck is allowed
to count for something, is regulated in the main by their
characters. A large group of them, in fact, never go so far as
to risk the choice at all. Of these we hear in the opening
dialogue between Poitia and Nerissa. They are representatives
of six different nations, and in every case they are merely types
of the peculiar foibles of their countrymen. Not one of them
has enough of manly resolution to venture on an experiment
which, in case of failure, debars them from marriage for ever.
Morocco is made of sterner stuff and is not daunted by these
stringent conditions. With the characteristic disdain of a Sultan
for 'shows of dross' he turns hurriedly from the leaden casket;
x]
229
The Merchant of Venice.
he pauses long before the silver, with its motto, 'Who chooseth
me shall get as much as he deserves,' and barbarian pride is
just turning the scale against a lingering relic of modesty, when
his eye is caught by the gold with its offer of 'what many men
desire.' At once his glowing Oriental imagination is captivated by
the vision of Portia as the world's desire, and with grandiloquent
figures upon his lips he unlocks the casket, only to learn that.
'all that glitters is not gold.' Arragon is the typical Spanish
Don steeped in the prejudices and pride of his class. He too at
once sets aside the leaden casket, and instead of being fired by
the wish to possess what many men desire, he scorns 'to jump
with common spirits,' or to bow before the idols of the crowd.
He loftily decides to 'assume desert,' and opens the silver
casket, to find in it a fool's head. Both these suitors are treated
by Portia with calm and stately courtesy, but when Bassanio, who
has already won her heart, arrives at Belmont, she cannot hide
her agitation. Though she does not swerve an inch from her
rigid fidelity to the terms of the will, her appeals to her lover to
delay his choice, her partial confession of her feelings, and her
excited play's upon words are all significant of her inward tumult.
The music that she calls for, though she is at pains to defend it
on other grounds, is really meant to allay by its soothing strains
the riot of her own heart, during the interval of suspense. But
her trust that the character of the chooser dictates the choice
finds expression in the words: 'If you do love me, you will
find me out.' Bassanio's meditations are partially drowned by
the music, but, from what we overhear, the gold suggests to him
the deceitfulness of 'outward shows' or ornament in every
sphere of life. The silver is rejected for the not very cogent
reason that it is a 'pale and common drudge 'tween man and
man.' But the meagre lead appeals to the plain, straightforward
soldier who, in spite of superficial follies, is sound at heart, and
whose professional instinct is stirred by the threatening challenge
to give and hazard all he hath. Portia's trust proves to be not
misplaced, and she is at last free to bestow herself, and all that
is hers, upon Bassanio. Her speech might serve as the 'great
charter' of that conception of married life according to which
woman stoops to conquer, and secures most complete eman-
230
[CII.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
cipation by submitting herself to her husband to be directed
'as from her lord, her governor, her king.'
In this ideal self-surrender the 'caskets' episode reaches its
climax, and at this crisis it is brought into direct relation with all
the other stories combined in the play. It puts forth the germ
of a fresh underplot, which is to be developed later, in Portia's
gift of her ring to Bassanio, and it annexes, as it were, the earlier
underplot of the elopement through the arrival at Belmont of
Lorenzo and Jessica. But, above all, it enters into the closest
union with the other main plot of the Pound of Flesh, for at
this moment the news is brought of that complete ruin of Antonio
to which we have been so skilfully led up. All his ventures have
failed; his bond to the Jew is forfeited, and his only wish is to
see Bassanio before his death. Thus Bassanio's love for Portia
has been the cause of Antonio's downfall: it is therefore in the
strictest poetic justice that Portia's love for Bassanio should be
the means of his salvation. In the ecstasy of that new-born
joy, which is wont to deaden the ear to all echoes from the
outer world, she has the rare self-forgetfulness to realize that
there are crises in which the call of friendship is imperious,
and she bids Bassanio hasten to his friend's side, with gold
to pay the debt twenty times over.
But the woman upon
whom the law of inheritance had laid so inexorable a hand,
who, in her own phrase, had stood for sacrifice' while her
fate was being decided, is impelled by a passionate feeling
of sympathy for another victim of the law to throw herself in
person between him and his doom In her execution of this
enterprise she shows to the full the perfect balance of her
qualities. She enters with zest into the fun of the adventure in
her wager with Nerissa, that when they are accoutred like young
men she'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, but she lays her
plans in the most business-like spirit when she fortifies herself
by an opinion on the case from Bellario, the learned jurist of
Padua.
Yet Antonio is, to all appearance, beyond help. The Duke,
who had already, on Shylock's demand, attempted the arrest of
Lorenzo and Jessica for theft, is equally bound, as a constitutional
ruler, to entertain his plea against the merchant. The founda-
x]
231
The Merchant of Venice.
tions of Venetian prosperity, based upon international traffic,
would be shaken, if partiality were shown in a suit between
a native and an alien. Appeals to mercy, offers of twice the
principal, are in vain. The passion of revenge has triumphed
over the meaner passion of avarice in Shylock's breast, and
with the inbred Jewish worship of legalism he takes his stand
with fanatical tenacity upon the city's charter. He has the law
upon his side, and that is enough. The only reason that he
will condescend to give for his eagerness, to have a weight of
carrion flesh,' is that it is his 'humour,' which is an unaccount-
able element in all men. There is nothing, he claims, to choose
between him and those who appeal to him for mercy: slave-
owners are estopped from raising objections to the doctrine/
of property in dearly bought human flesh. The Duke has no
answer to this overwhelming argumentum ad hominem, and
Antonio shows that he has given up all hope. The merchant
is an apt illustration of Bacon's dictum, that 'prosperity doth
best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.'
The weight of his misfortunes has crushed out of his nature the
arrogant self-sufficiency that was its single blemish, or rather
this has been softened into dignified readiness to meet his fate.
What a change from the supercilious tone of the merchant's
earlier speeches to the humble confession :
I am a tainted wether of the flock,
Meetest for death: the weakest kind of fruit
Drops earliest to the ground; and so let me.'
It is at this stage that Portia enters the court in disguise,
with her letter of recommendation from Bellario. She knows
that she is mistress of the situation, and she does not precipitate
the dénouement. On the contrary, she multiplies Shylock's
opportunities of retreat from the position that he has taken up.
She renews the appeal for mercy in a strain of majestic
eloquence whose echoes have swelled throughout the world.
She tenders him thrice the value of his loan. But Shylock is
inflexible, and Portia, after searching the bond for a possible
flaw, declares that the law must take its course.
Yet even
after this she still prolongs the strain of suspense, and the
treatment of the whole situation, as Moulton has well pointed
232
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
out, is highly characteristic of Shakspere. The dramatist.
never emphasizes in his tragedies the physical horrors of death,
or harrows the audience with the spectacle of long-drawn agony..
But in the present case the result is not to be tragic, and thus
Portia is allowed to linger over the details of the judicial murder
in a way that would be intolerable were the crime actually
committed. She bids the merchant lay baie his bosom for the
knife; she asks if there are balances ready to weigh the flesh,
and a surgeon to stop the wounds. She calls upon Antonio for
his last speech-a noble expression of contentment with his
fate and unfaltering love to his friend. But with marvellous art
the exquisite pathos of the merchant's words is made the
source of a humorous relief. For Bassanio is so affected by
Antonio's farewell that he protests his readiness to sacrifice
everything, even his wife, in order to save his friend. The
mock-lawyer catches at the opening for a piece of unprofessional
merriment,
'Your wife would give you little thanks for that
If she were by, to hear you make the offer.'
And Nerissa follows suit in respect of a similar declaration by
Gratiano. But these gay sallies have a reflex serious effect.
They deepen Shylock's distrust of Christian husbands, and recall
the bitter memory of his daughter's flight. Impatiently he
demands sentence. With due legal formality Portia awards him
the pound of flesh, but as he swoops upon his victim, knife in
hand, she stays the uplifted stroke by the condition that he must
not shed a drop of blood. Shylock had appealed to the letter,
and by the letter he shall be judged.
The tables are thus completely turned, and the dramatic
effect is overwhelming. But the plea is so transparent a quibble
that it has been by no means universally upheld in posterity's court
of appeal. To maintain that Shylock's defeat is the triumph of
Christian conciliatory love, of mediating mercy over law, is absurd.
Rather it may be said that the issue over the body of Antonio is
fought out between the two great legal systems of antiquity.
Shylock's claim is urged in the stubborn spirit of the narrowest
Jewish legalism; Portia's saving plea is grounded upon the equally
slavish letter-worship of the Roman law, though, as Simrock
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233
The Merchant of Venice.
has pointed out, this verbalism pushed to the extreme of
jus strictissimum' was often made, as in the case before us, the
agent of aequitas in opposition to jus strictum. Further, it is in
the spirit of Roman law, and not of Christianity, that as Shylock
is about to leave the court, without either his forfeiture or his
principal, Portia confronts him with the statute, doubtless un-
earthed by Bellario in his legal researches, which enacts that an
alien convicted of an attempt against the life of a citizen incurs
the forfeiture of all his goods and the capital penalty. Nor is
the 'mercy' extended to Shylock such as to convince him of
a fundamental difference of spirit between the old and the new
dispensations. His life is indeed pardoned, but he has to hand
over one half of his fortune to Antonio 'in use' for Lorenzo and
Jessica, and further to record a gift in their favour of all that he
leaves at death. Yet more cruel is his enforced immediate
conversion to Christianity. This,' as Elze has well said, 'is no
longer poetic justice or tragical retribution, it is mental and
moral annihilation, the inevitable consequences of which must
lead to physical death as well.' In including this among the
articles of Shylock's pardon, Shakspere has shown himself
scarcely at all in advance of his age, whose average attitude is
faithfully reflected in Gratiano's brutal jeers and suggestion of
a halter gratis' as the only mercy fit for the Jew. The crowd
in the Globe theatre doubtless roared hilariously as the baffled
wretch slunk out of the court, but Shakspere has had to pay the
penalty of what can be at best called a concession to the bigotry
of the day. His other villains, Richard III, Iago, meet, as all
the world acknowledges, no more than is their due, but in the
case of Shylock there are many who agree with the young lady
who, according to Heine, cried out at the end of this act, The
poor man is wronged.' To adopt a phrase lately used in
a different connexion, Shylock stands at the bar of poetic
justice half-way between a martyr and a criminal,' and in the
unsatisfactory impression left on modern readers at the close of
the trial-scene, Shakspere has suffered the nemesis which in the
long run always overtakes the artist who from conviction or
opportunism ministers to the prejudices of his age.
(
The relief needed after the prolonged tension of the battle
234
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
for the merchant's life, has been provided in the merry episode.
of the rings which Portia and Nerissa wheedle out of their
husbands, as reward for their legal services. The ban-
tering reproaches that follow, on the return to Belmont, bring
into prominence again the lighter side of Portia's nature,
repressed during the solemn crisis in the court-house. The
heroine drops again into the gay girl-wife, and the perfect.
balance of her character is thus preserved. But even more
restful than the silvery ripple of Portia's laughter is the lyrical
softness of the moonlight confidences between Lorenzo and
Jessica in the gardens of Belmont. It would almost seem as if
in The Merchant of Venice Shakspere was intent on drawing
materials from every race and epoch. From the passionate strife
between the spirit of Jewish and Roman codes, he bears us
into the very heart of Greek romance, flinging its choicest
secrets, like waters from a classic fountain, into the spiced air of
the Italian night. And when music, breathed to the stars, adds
the last touch of enchantment to the scene, it is the voice of
Greek philosophy in its most sublime flight that speaks through
Lorenzo's lips:
'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-eyed cherubims.'
The discords of human life are heard no more, as we linger on
the moonlit bank at Belmont, and seek to catch the faint echoes
upon earth of the choral music of the spheres.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CHIEF GROUP OF CHRONICLE-HISTORY PLAYS.
DURING the years that Shakspere had been elaborating into its
final shape the tragedy of the Veronese lovers, he had been
engaged also on other work, demanding different powers. The
closing period of the sixteenth century saw the development to
a brilliant climax of the branch of dramatic art in which he had
made his first tentative efforts. It has been shown how in con-
junction with other playwrights, or under the inspiration of their
methods, he had completed the tetralogy dealing with the Wars
of the Roses. Fired with the patriotic interest of the theme, he
now turned back to the period whence the issues, decided at so
dear a cost of English blood and treasure, had taken their rise,
and he included in his survey a single more remote epoch which
presented similar dynastic problems. Thus there came into
being, the second tetralogy of Richard II, Henry IV (Parts I
and II), and Henry V, and the play of King John, which is
a self-contained whole. Towards the close of his career
Shakspere began, but had to hand over in unfinished form to
Fletcher, a final historical drama, Henry VIII, one of whose
motives was to glorify the Tudor monarchy, and the blessings of
concord in the State. Thus, viewed in one aspect, the whole of
Shakspere's historical plays form, in Schlegel's phrase, a great
'dramatic epopee,' tracing the current of the national life
through the mingled storms and sunbursts of the later Middle
Ages to the steady splendour of the Renaissance. Of this
epopee no Richard or Henry is the true protagonist, but England,
an omnipresent and immortal figure, with the divine ichor,
though often spilt and wasted, never exhausted in her veins, and
bubbling up afresh in a perpetual renewal of youth.
236
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
But while the historical dramas, from this aspect, form a
whole, there are aesthetic considerations which mark off the group
which we have now reached, and give it exceptional significance.
Shakspere's share in the three Parts of Henry VI can only be
surmised by the aid of plausible, but never quite conclusive,
internal evidence, and in Richard III the special nature of the
theme, and the dominating influence of Marlowe's method, led to
a treatment bordering upon the purely tragic. For King John
and the Lancastrian tetralogy Shakspere partly used old plays
as models, but he was no longer overshadowed by a mighty
personality, and his individual genius had full scope. It is
therefore this group that gives the clearest evidence of the mode
in which he considered that historical material could be used for
artistic purposes. He never confounded the functions of the
poet and the annalist. He accepted the traditions given in
Holinshed's Chronicle without any inquiry into their truth, and
he did not scruple to add or alter in matters of secondary
importance. Schlegel therefore was far from accurate when he
asserted that 'in Shakspere's Histories the leading features of
events were so faithfully conceived, their causes and even their
secret motives so clearly penetrated, that the truth of history
might be learned from them.' In order to disprove such a
statement it is only necessary to contrast Shakspere's Henry V,
overflowing with gracious bonhommie, the Tudor type of
monarch lovingly idealized, with the actual historical prototype
whose orthodox zeal in sending Lollards to the stake had won
a cordial encomium from the contemporary poet, Occleve, in
his De Regimine Principum. On the other hand, Shakspere,
with characteristic sobriety and respect for realities, did not
interweave with his historical groundwork purely imaginary
incidents, and represent them as affecting the actual connexion
of events. The comedy scenes in Henry IV do not confuse the
historical perspective of the main action, in so far as this is in
itself correct.
The function of the dramatic poet in dealing with history was,
in Shakspere's eyes, not to fabricate or falsify, but to interpret
and select. From the mass of details preserved by the chroni-
cler he disentangled and emphasized those which carried.
XI]
237
Shakspere's History Plays.
forward the true life of the nation, as he conceived it. If,
in certain important aspects, his conception differed from
ours, this depended upon differences between the Elizabethan
and the present age.
But while events chiefly required skilful
grouping in order to make their full impression, historical
characters offered a more difficult, but also more attractive
problem. In endowing these figures with renewed vitality,
Shakspere sought to make each representative of some
normal human type. The personages in the historical plays
are wanting in the infinite complexity of the tragic crea-
tions. They are conceived,' as Dowden has said, 'chiefly with
reference to action;' they are measured by 'positive achieve-
ments and results.' Their dramatic dignity and value spring
rather from the width of radius within which they operate than
from their own inherent force. The aphorism of Matthew
Arnold, 'Not deep the poet sees, but wide,' misleading in its
general application, defines accurately enough Shakspere's atti-
tude in the historical plays. He does not peer with microscopic.
gaze into the penetralia of individual hearts, but he surveys
energies for good or evil radiating from the throne to the
extreme confines of the national life. The shifting of the centre
of gravity in the body politic since the Elizabethan era must
modify the application of Shakspere's philosophy of history to
modern circumstances, but the fundamental conviction that
inspires his glowing pages, that individual character reacts with
potent effect upon the life of the State, is true for every age and
country.
But while Shakspere's historical plays are thus a unique
memorial of his patriotism and political insight, from a purely
artistic point of view they are not without shortcomings. Facts
are stubborn things, and the effort to subdue them to the
service of the Muse is seldom entirely successful. It is true that
in handling the material supplied by the national annals the
dramatist gradually purged his imagination of those frothier
elements that had floated to the surface in the early comedies.
His verse gained in volume and stateliness, and ran with a richer
music. But his fidelity to historical fact, or what he took to be
such, handicapped him in one direction, and that of capital
238
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
importance. The besetting danger of Romantic drama, the
danger that Sidney had sought to avoid by a still more danger-
ous remedy, is its tendency to become invertebrate. In the
Chronicle-history play this tendency is aggravated by the nature
of the theme, which adapts itself more easily to epic than to
dramatic treatment. It must be admitted that Shakspere failed
as signally as smaller men to overcome this stumbling-block.
The Aristotelian canon that every drama must comprise an
entanglement and its solution, applies with equal force to
Romantic and Classical plays, and Shakspere's Histories do not
satisfy this test. Nor has this violation of cardinal dramatic
laws gone unpunished. Neither patriotism nor poetic eloquence
can propitiate, in the long run, the inexorable demand of the
theatre for a carefully articulated plot, and thus, while Shak-
spere's chief tragedies and comedies still hold the stage, the
Histories, for the most part, have been banished to the library,
where their exceptional popularity has largely fostered the
prevalent idea that a dramatist, whose finest plots are miracles
of constructive genius, was lacking in the playwright's special
faculty. Literature has its Nemeses no less than history.
The date of KING JOHN, and its place in the historical
series, cannot be exactly determined. It was first printed in the
folio of 1623, but is mentioned by Meres in 1598. How long
it had been then in existence is matter of conjecture, but it is
reasonable to suppose that it was written between the two
tetralogies. In its main subject it recalls Richard III, while
the character of Constance anticipates that of Richard II. It
resembles Richard III also in the prominence given to rivalries.
of women, but the grouping is less studiously monumental, and
the curious strophic balance of lamentation has disappeared.
The blank verse is still overloaded with rhetoric, which has
however lost the peculiar lurid tinge of the earlier play. Rhyme
is almost entirely confined to the pithy rejoinders and epigrams
of the Bastard, in whose person the element of popular humour
enters for the first time an entirely Shaksperean historical
play. There is as yet, however, no hint of the use of prose as
the fittest vehicle for this humour. Thus the internal evidence
XI]
239
King John.
stamps King John as a link between the earlier and later
Histories, and it may be assigned to about the year 1595.
The eventful reign of John had already been utilized for
dramatic purposes. It had been the subject of a play by Bishop
Bale, written probably in Edward the Sixth's reign, which is
a singular mixture of a Chronicle-history and a Morality. This
was followed, at a considerable interval, by The Troublesome
Raigne of King John, a work of unknown authorship, the first
extant copy of which dates from 1591. This play was taken
by Shakspere as the original of his own drama, and it was not
unworthy of the distinction. It contained the outlines, sketched
with a good deal of vigour, of all the principal characters, and it
was inspired by a genuinely national anti-papal and anti-French
feeling. But divided, as it was, into two Parts, it was rambling
and loosely jointed, and Shakespere rightly compressed the
subject-matter into the bounds of a single piece. He omitted
altogether several scenes, including one which represented
Faulconbridge's spoliation of a monastery, and which ridiculed
in not very seemly fashion the abuses of life within the cloister
walls. In other cases he condensed into a phrase or passing
allusion what had been set forth in the earlier work with tedious
prolixity, and he remedied a number of inconsistencies in
characterization. But though the play thus gains in symmetry,
pathos, and poetical depth, it still falls short of being a rounded
dramatic whole. The threads of personal and political interest
run, to some extent, crosswise, and the central theme of the
story, the murder of Arthur, is not in sufficiently organic con-
nexion with either the opening or the closing scenes. An
examination of the character of King John will reveal the chief
of these inconsistencies, while throwing light on Shakspele's
patriotism and on his psychological insight.
It is evident from the first that John, though his situation
bears some resemblance to that of Richard III, is designed on
no similar scale of lonely grandeur in crime. He has usurped
the throne belonging by right to his nephew Arthur, but he has
been instigated to the step by his mother Elinor, who realizes far
more energetically than John himself that what force has seized
force alone can hold. To the French ambassador's challenge
240
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
on Arthur's behalf he opposes 'our strong possession and our
right,' but Elinor is prompt with her whisper in his ear :---
'Your strong possession much more than your right:
Or else it must go wrong with you and me.
>
Well may Chatillon speak of her as an Ate, stirring him to
blood and strife.'
For a time, indeed, John plays the part of a vigorous and able
soldier. He crosses to France with a speed that disconcerts his
enemies, and the fact that he is followed by a brave choice of
dauntless spirits' shows that he can attract supporters to his
cause. Shakspere himself, fully alive to the national dangers
involved in the succession of a minor, is inclined to weigh in
cqual balance the claims of uncle and nephew. If John has
an evil angel in his mother, so has Arthur, for the hysterical.
passion of Constance is as dangerous as Elinor's unscrupulous.
ambition, and her appeal to foreign aid in support of her son's
rights estranges from her all national sympathies. The equality
of the rival claims is dramatically set forth in the scene before
the walls of Angiers, where, after a debate in which neither side
has the definite advantage, Philip of France calls upon the
citizens of the besieged town to declare whose title they admit
as king of England, and is answered that they will open the
gates to him who can prove himself king. But even the ordeal
of battle is invoked in vain: neither side can prevail over the
other, and the citizens of Angiers still stoutly man the walls,
and proclaim their oracular allegiance to 'the king of England,
when we know the king.' Threatened, however, by a com-
bined attack from the two opposing powers they suggest
a league of peace, by which Blanche, the niece of John, shall
marry the French Dauphin, and to this they win the sovereigns'
assent. Thus John betrays the interests of his country, of
which he has hitherto posed as the zealous champion. Con-
scious of the weakness of his claim, he seeks to buy off the
hostility of Philip by surrendering all England's possessions in
France to her hereditary foe. As Faulconbridge declares,--
'John, to stop Arthur's title as a whole,
Hath willingly departed with a part.'
But the 'mad composition,' as Shakspere is careful to empha-
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King John.
size through the Bastard's mouth, is equally dishonourable to
Philip, who having been brought into the field by 'zeal and
charity' is turned aside by the promptings of 'commodity'
from a resolved and honourable war' to a base, self-interested
peace. But a league cemented on the one hand by the
surrender of national territory, and on the other by the sacrifice
of a widow's and an orphan's rights, is too unstable to stand the
severe strain to which it is at once subjected. A third power
appears on the scene in the person of Pandulph, the Papal
Legate, who charges John with contumacy against the Holy See
in refusing to ratify the appointment of Stephen Langton as
Archbishop of Canterbury. Once again the king is given an
opportunity of playing a patriotic rôle, and his spirited protest
against the claim of 'an Italian priest' to tithe or toll in
England, his denunciation of the system of pardons, and his
vigorous assertion of the regal supremacy in Church as well as
in State, all express the attitude of the Tudor monarchy even
more decisively than that of the Angevin. That they reflect
in the main Shakspere's own sentiments, as those of every
Protestant Englishman of the Elizabethan era, is scarcely open
to doubt. Yet no religious partisanship blurs the masterly
presentation of the Papal envoy. Shakspere in Romeo and
Juliet had proved his power of interpreting sympathetically the
life of the cloistered devotee. Here, with equal power, he
portrays a Churchman of a diametrically opposite type, the
ecclesiastical statesman who meets kings on equal terms, and
awes them into submission. With practised skill Pandulph
wields the various weapons in his armoury; now he hurls at
John the bolt of excommunication, now with hair-splitting
casuistry he proves to Philip that in breaking his oath or
alliance he will not be forsworn, now he threatens him with
a curse unless he takes up arms in the Church's cause. Balanced
between conflicting interests, the French king at last obeys the
Papal mandate, and a battle follows, in which he is defeated,
and Arthur taken prisoner. Philip and the Dauphin are
overcome with shame and despair at the disaster, but the
cool sagacity of Pandulph foresees ultimate advantage in the
present loss. John, with Arthur once in his power, will be
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242
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
driven by his fears to put him out of the way, only to find
that
'He that steeps his safety in true blood
Shall find but bloody safety and untrue.'
The people, outraged by this deed of violence, will revolt
from their allegiance, and the Dauphin will find them eager in
his support, if, in virtue of his marriage with Blanche, he stands
forth as heir to Arthur's claim.
Pandulph's prophecies are speedily fulfilled. But the por-
traiture of John in the earlier scenes of the play, where in spite
of duplicity and self-seeking he shows a certain soldierly
dignity, scarcely prepares us for the revelation of craven cruelty
in his dealings with his captive nephew. This partial inconsis-
tency, however, overlooked, John's attitude in his interview with
Hubert is portrayed with wonderful subtlety. In a similar
situation Richard III had blurted out his purposes to Tyrrel
with almost cheery frankness. John stealthily approaches the
theme of Arthur's murder by tortuous paths, advancing and
retreating by turns; he pauses just long enough at his goal to
drop monosyllabic hints of death' and 'a grave,' and then,
as if terrified at the sound of his own voice, slinks hurriedly
away. Thus, when the report of Arthur's death by violence
is noised abroad, alienating the nobles and stirring the popu-
lace to disaffection; when the conscience-stricken king realizes
that 'there is no sure foundation set on blood,' he can turn
upon his agent with base reproaches for having translated
a momentary hint into a fixed warrant for the fatal deed. The
discovery that the child's life has been spared lights up his
terrified soul with a ray of hope, but the disastrous conse-
quences of his purpose are beyond recall. The air is full of
caught up in the
strange rumours and prophecies greedily
streets; the Dauphin with a French army sets foot in Kent, and
is joined by the revolted English lords, with the patriotic Salisbury
at their head. John, bereft of his ablest counsellor—for his
mother is dead-grasps at feeble expedients. He has himself
recrowned, and he orders the execution of a wandering prophet
of ill.
But it has attracted universal notice that Shakspere passes
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King John.
very lightly over those misdeeds of the king which have given
him so sinister a prominence in history. His extortions from
clergy and laity are merely touched upon incidentally, and not
the faintest allusion is made to the constitutional struggle which
ended in the grant of the Great Charter. Startling as it sounds
to modern ears, it is almost certain that Shakspere had small
knowledge of that document, and a very inadequate sense of its
importance. A strong monarchical rule was the ideal of the
Tudor period, and the power of the Crown was limited not by
strictly defined clauses, but by hearty popular sympathies in the
sovereign. It was only under the Stuarts, when this communion
of feeling between ruler and ruled ceased to exist, that the
champions of national liberty were forced to entrench themselves
behind their traditional rights, and drag again into prominence
the parchment-scrolls wherein these were embodied. Thus
the significance of John's reign for Shakspere lay far less in
constitutional struggles than in foreign relations, and its supreme
event was not the signing of the Charter, but the surrender of
the English crown, when the recreant king, eating all his brave
words of an earlier date, resigned the symbol of royalty into the
hands of Pandulph, to receive it back again as a vassal of the Pope.
As the price of this submission, the Holy See orders the
Dauphin to lay down his arms; but the French prince, in
patriotic contrast to John, defies the ecclesiastical mandate, and
continues his advance. Faulconbridge seeks to stir up the king
to bold resistance, but his soldierly skill and activity are now
outworn, and the Bastard has virtually to supplant him as chief
of the English forces. While the issue yet hangs in the balance,
he is called upon to make a second and more irrevocable sur-
render of his crown. Poisoned by a monk, he dies at Swinstead
Abbey, in torturing pain which wrings from him agonized cries
unworthy of a soldier and a king. But the scene would make
a deeper impression were it in more organic connexion with
what has gone before. In the old play, where so much promi-
nence had been given to the attack upon the religious houses,
the death of John at the hands of a monk was a dramatically
fitting Nemesis. But one of the very few mistakes made by
Shakspere in working up older materials was that he here
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244
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
retained the original version of John's murder, while omitting all
that had led up to it. We feel that the king's ignoble end should
have had more intimate relation to his design upon Arthur, or
some other misdeed emphasized in the play.
Thus the intermixture of historical and political considerations
with those of a purely dramatic kind makes Shakspere's picture
of John the least consistent in his gallery of English kings. He
was more unfettered in his treatment of lesser personages, at
whose head stands Constance, mother of the rival claimant to
the throne. Constance is drawn with far more delicate insight
than any of the women in Richard III, and is the most highly
elaborated female figure in the historical plays. She is another
of that numerous company in Shakspere's earlier dramas
whose sensibilities are developed to an extravagant degree.
Her instinct of maternal affection is not chastened by reason
into a moral principle, but is inflamed by an imagination of
hectic brilliance into an abnormal passion that swallows up
every thought and energy. It is this exaggerated imagination,
as Mrs. Jameson has rightly insisted, that is the controlling
force in the nature of Constance. The impetuous ardour of
her fancy gives a special quality to her maternal love. The very
attribute that is wont to be the source of all that is tenderest in
womanhood breeds in her ambition, scorn, and hysterical
passion, till at last it consumes her in its fires.
But her imaginative sensibility, though the deepest element in
her nature, is not made prominent at first. In the quarrel scene
between her and Elinor she figures as a genuine vixen, whose
bitter rush of invective amply earns the abusive epithets of her
foes, and even irritates her friends. Her imperious temper on
this occasion augurs ill for her future bearing in the event of
fortune favouring her cause, but the disappointment of her hopes
turns her emotion into a more seductive, though no less vehe-
ment course. When she hears from Salisbury that Philip has been
false to his oath, there sweeps over her the overwhelming sense
of her powerlessness, shaking her as a reed before the wind:
'For I am sick, and capable of fears;
Oppressed with wrongs, and therefore full of fears;
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears.'
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245
King John.
The
Yet out of this weakness is born a strange grandeur.
imagination of Constance playing upon her misery wraps her, as
it were, in a haze whence she looms large upon our view. The
unadvised scold' of the earlier scene rises to wellnigh tragic
stature as she flings herself on the ground and cries aloud:
'To me, and to the state of my great grief,
Let kings assemble; for my grief's so great
That no supporter but the huge firm earth
Can hold it up: here I and sorrows sit:
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.'
In a similar vein, half-tragic, half-grandiose, is her appeal to the
heavens to be the widow's husband, and to arm against the
perjured kings. And when the heavens are deaf to her cries,
with still more daring luxuriance of imagery she invokes
' amiable lovely Death' to be her mate, whom she may 'buss'
as wife.
It is remarkable throughout these speeches how seldom the
thoughts of Constance are turned directly towards Arthur; it is
her own widowed lot which forms the centre of her exuberant
riot of fancy. This is in itself proof that her maternal impulse
does not well up, pure and strong, from unfathomable depths in
her being. How largely it is fed from merely æsthetic sources
is shown by her own declaration that had Arthur been ugly,
'slanderous' to her womb, she would not have loved him, or
deemed him worthy of a crown. And when the fortune of war
tears him from her arms, her grief at his loss is strangely
mingled with the fantastic thought that sorrow will so despoil
him of his beauty that she will not know him when they meet
in heaven. King Philip's rebuke, 'You are as fond of grief as
of your child,' is well deserved, but Constance catches in self-
defence at the implicit personification of sorrow and expands it,
with pathetic rhetoric, into the picture of grief filling up the room
of her absent child, and acting his every part. But the
vehemence of her passion, powerless against others, reacts with
deadly shock upon her frail nature, and the spectral bridegroom
whom she has so passionately invoked, claims her as his own.
In the world of intrigues, ambitions, and passions Arthur
shines forth as a being from another sphere. In depicting the
boy, Shakspere was met with the difficulty that in the young princes
246
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
in Richard III he had already drawn types of youthful innocence
cruelly done to death. But his exquisite tact in the variation of
details prevents all monotonous repetition. The nephews
of Richard were marked by an ability and spirit beyond their
years, and the elder already bore himself with a true touch
of regal dignity. Arthur is of an essentially different nature.
He is a saintly, gentle child, without a spark of worldly
ambition. The passionate altercation between his mother and
grandmother draws tears from his eyes, and forces from his lips
the plaintive murmur that he is not worth the coil that is made
for him. So when Constance is heaping frenzied reproaches
upon those who have broken faith with her, Arthur beseeches
her to be content, and, when he is taken captive, his one
thought is that his mother will die of grief. Prison itself would
have no terror for him, were it not for fear of some feller evils
lurking in the background, and if he covets freedom, it is only
that he may keep sheep. His gentle heart goes out to his
gaoler Hubert, and shows its love in numberless tender offices.
It is the memory of these that pleads most powerfully on his
behalf against the savage warrant for the branding of his eyes.
The boy's recital of his past deeds of lovingkindness, his terror
at the entry of the attendants bearing the instruments of torture,
his entreaty not to be bound, his offer to sacrifice his tongue,
if so he may keep his eyes, are all touches of the purest, deepest
pathos which have lost no jot of their moving power. But less
happy in the eyes of an age more realistic than the Elizabethan,
are those appeals of Arthur, in which, showing himself a true
son of his mother, he speaks in metaphors and figures unsuited
to his years or to the fierceness of the crisis. Thus, when
Hubert prepares to heat the iron, he declares that the fire is
dead with grief, and that to revive its glow will be but to make
it blush with shame of these proceedings. The innocence of
boyhood does not need to borrow such weapons from the
rhetorician's armoury; it has a more potent advocate in its own
inherent charm. Arthur escapes the cruel doom of blinding,
but we feel instinctively that he is one of the saintly creatures
who are not long for this world. Thus Shakspere showed his
usual fine tact in choosing the tradition which represented him
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247
King John.
as perishing in an attempt to leap from his prison walls. With
a last flash of precocious fancy he finds his uncle's spirit' in the
stones upon which he sinks in death.
How cheerless a panorama has been unfolded before us
On the one hand a group of highly-placed personages, John,
Philip, Pandulph, Constance, swayed by passion or self-interest;
on the other an innocent child crushed beneath the iron forces
of the world. Is there no middle path in which the man of
sturdy morality and truth may walk with safety? The answer
is given in the elaborate portrait of the Bastard, Faulconbridge.
From the purely dramatic point of view his figure is scarcely
necessary, but morally he is the very salt of the play. At first
that salt would seem to be of somewhat coarse savour. The
scene in which he discusses the question of his legitimacy in
the presence of John and the Queen-mother is undeniably
pungent, though Shakspere, with greater delicacy than the elder
dramatist, excludes the lady whose honour is at stake. It is
characteristic of Faulconbridge that he decides to reject
legitimacy and the material advantages that go with it, in order
that he may claim descent from the heroic Richard. He dis-
dains a father who can only transmit a half-face' like his
brother's instead of his own 'large composition,' even though it
be derived something about, a little from the right.' Thus
throughout he prefers what is substantial and genuine, even if it
will not stand the most delicate scrutiny, to all that smacks of
conventionality or artifice. His character is in entire accord
with the origin to which he lays claim. His royal blood gives
him his daring in battle, and his stern fidelity to duty in the
crisis of his country's fortunes; while from his mother's side he
draws his hearty, practical common-sense, and his thoroughly
popular turn of humour. The latter qualities are shown
especially in his soliloquies, as when after being dubbed knight
he moralizes on his unfitness for this new honour, because he
doth not smack of observation' according to the prescribed
standard of fashion; or when he rails against the 'mad kings,'
John and Philip, with their 'mad composition' against Arthur's
interests. It is here that he unfolds his practical political
philosophy, in which he traces all errors in the well-peised world
!
248
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to the 'vile-drawing bias,' the 'daily break-vow,' commodity.
With bluff sincerity he admits that, with similar temptation, he
would similarly fall, though we feel that in this he does himself
a wrong. He would never compromise his honour, though his
morality is far from thin-skinned. He proposes to the kings
a combined assault upon Angiers, because its scroyles flout
them, and he makes no scruple of carrying out John's behest to
shake the bags of hoarding abbots. But that he has at bottom
a tender heart is shown in his words to Hubert, as they stand
together over Arthur's body:
'Knew you of this fair work?
Beyond the infinite and boundless reach
Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death,
Art thou damned, Hubert.'
This crowning catastrophe, and the revolt of the nobles for
which it gives the signal, perplex the honest soldier. This
child of nature loses his way amidst the thorns and dangers of
the world. He is confronted by intricacies which demand an
intellect more subtle than his. He feels darkly that all is not
well with John and the English cause, but he has too much
patriotism to imitate the nobles and join his country's foes.
Rather, the blacker the dangers that threaten, the higher does
his spirit mount, till in the end he fills the rôle, vacated by
John's poltroonery, of national leader and hero. It is he who
seeks to stir the recreant king to be 'great in act,' in face of the
invader, and who bids him away and glister like the god of
war.' It is he who, giving voice to the popular instinct, pours
contempt upon the 'inglorious league' which John makes with
Pandulph, in order to buy off the assault of a beardless boy.
And when the Dauphin refuses to be bound by the compact
made over his head, it is the Bastard who, clothing the king in
attributes borrowed from his own high-souled temper, describes
him as an eagle towering o'er his aiery, 'to souse annoyance
that comes near his nest.' The 'pigmy arms' of the French
he ridicules with much of the old saucy insolence, and for the
revolted lords he has epithets of burning indignation. How far
his sturdy patriotism transcends their disloyalty, springing
though it does from a moral motive, is made palpable when on
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249
Richard II.
the field of battle the dying Count Melun reveals the treacherous
doom with which the Dauphin purposes to reward their
treacherous aid. Under such sharp stimulus they rally again to
the cause which the Bastard has so gallantly upheld, and,
though John pays the last penalty of his misdeeds, the nation
renews its youth. The foreigner retreats; unity is re-established,
and the accession of the young Prince Henry marks the dawn
of a nobler era thrilled by the spirit of the Bastard's closing
words, which strike the very keynote of the whole group of
historical plays.
This England never did, nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Naught stall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
RICHARD II cannot be dated with absolute accuracy. It
must have been written at least before 1597, when a quarto edition
appeared, and we cannot be far wrong in assigning it to about
1594. In spite of its containing a larger number of rhymed.
lines, it almost certainly comes after Richard III, for it shows
a finer car for 1hythm, and is free from luridly melodramatic
touches. Like Richard III, however, it shows the influence of
Marlowe, for if the hunchback king resembles the earlier
dramatist's Tamburlaine and Barabas, his Edward II, as has
already been shown, supplied hints for the picture of Richard II.
Whether the play is to be placed before or after King John is
doubtful. It is designed on a slighter scale; it is wanting in the
humorous element supplied by Faulconbridge, and it contains
several immature episodes. These indications point to its being
the earlier of the two diamas, but, on the other hand, the por-
trait of Constance seems to be a preparatory sketch for that of
Richard II, and the play, as a whole, is linked indissolubly to
the other portions of the Lancastrian tetralogy.
The material of the drama is taken almost entirely from
Holinshed, with some additional hints from Stowe, though a few
episodical scenes such as the death of John of Gaunt and Richard's
250
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
last interview with his Queen are of Shakspere's own invention'.
The period covered by the drama extends from September,
1398 to February, 1400. Its stirring events had influenced
the contemporary poetry of Gower, Langland, and others, but
of this Shakspere was doubtless ignorant. The subject attracted
him because it offered another opportunity of dealing with the
problem of hereditary claim versus personal fitness as a title to
sovereignty. We are shown, as in King John, the fatal results
of weak government, but here internal discontent is emphasized
rather than foreign humiliation; while the failure of the ruler has
its root not in a criminal, but a diseased, will. The sentimen-
talist, in Shakspere's view, is always a dangerous factor in society;
in Richard II we see him enthroned, and the result is national
disaster, till a deliverer arises in Bolingbroke, the iron-willed
man of affairs. In the detailed contrast of character between
the two men lies the cardinal interest of the play.
1
¹ Dr. Forman mentions in his diary the performance at the Globe on
April 30, 1611, of a Richard II whose incidents were taken chiefly from
the early years of the reign, and thus differed essentially from those handled
by Shakspere. Gervinus is therefore probably wrong in identifying this play
with the one performed by order of the friends of Lord Essex in the streets
of London, on the afternoon preceding his revolt. Bacon describes the
picce bespoken by the conspirators as 'the play of deposing Richard II,' and
this applies better to Shakspere's drama than to the one seen by Forman.
Moreover, as is clearly shown in the Calendar of State Papers 1591-1601,
p. 578, the actor with whom Essex' supporter, Sir Gilly Merrick, negotiated,
was Augustine Phillips, servant to the Lord Chamberlain and one of his players,
i. e. the member of Shakspere's company. It is therefore highly plausible
that the play performed by Phillips and his associates was the one written
by their fellow-actor and already presented by them on the boards. To this
it has been objected that the lines 154-318 in Act IV, Scene 1, describing
the deposition of Richard, are absent in the quartos of 1597 and 1598, and
only appear in the third edition of 1608. But the words of the abbot,
a woeful pageant have we here beheld,' which appear in the earlier
quaitos, have no meaning apart from the deposition scene, and the inference
is that the missing lines were, from the first, part of the play, and were
spoken on the stage, but were omitted from the versions published during
Elizabeth's reign, as likely to give offence at Court. Another objection has
been founded upon the avowed reluctance of Phillips and his fellows to
perform the play because it was so old, and so long out of use that they
should have a small company of it.' But actors might well hesitate to
revive a piece which had first seen the light about seven years ago, and
which can scarcely ever have had the elements of great success on the
stage. It would be going too far to say that the play commissioned by
Merrick was undoubtedly Shakspere's, but there is more reason for thinking
so than a good many critics allow. See Hales' Notes and Essays on
Shakspere.
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251
Richard II.
This contrast is made prominent in the opening episode.
There is no more decisive test of a king's quality than his
method of dealing with the great subjects who stand nearest to
the throne. The fierce party-struggles among the nobility which
had marked Richard's entire reign culminate in a violent out-
break between Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, Duke
of Norfolk. In the royal presence Bolingbroke appeals '
Mowbray of peculation, treason, and the main share in the
death of the Duke of Gloucester, Richard's uncle, who had been
mysteriously murdered. But Richard himself, as appears from
subsequent words of John of Gaunt, was believed to have
instigated the crime, and Bolingbroke in bringing the charge
against Mowbray gives the first proof of his far-sighted
diplomacy, for his blow is in fact aimed at the king, and is
intended to stir up the popular fury less against Norfolk than the
real author of the deed of blood. That Richard is alive to the
true issue is proved by his troubled aside How high a pitch his
resolution soars,' and his anxiety to hush up the matter is shown
in his endeavour to reconcile the opponents. He bids each
throw down the other's gage, and his command takes the form
of a picturesque metaphor, 'Lions make leopards tame.'
Those few words are an index to Richard's whole habit of
mind. His effeminate outward beauty, which wins for him the
title of 'sweet lovely rose,' is matched by a puerile grace of
fancy that tinges the facts of life with an unreal, pseudo-poetic
glow. Instead of grappling with its stern necessities, he takes
an æsthetic delight in the 'situations' which it provides. His
whole attitude is that of an onlooker, a dilettante whose will has
never been braced to mould and fashion circumstances; he is,
as Dowden has summed it up, 'an amateur in living, not an
artist.' Thus, on an occasion which requires the resolute exer-
cise of authority, he is satisfied with making a grandiloquent.
comparison, while he suffers his command to be defied, and is
forced to fix a day for the ordeal of battle between the rival
lords. But in the lists at Coventry he gives more signal proof
of impulsive weakness. Before the combatants can close, he
flings down his warder, stops the tourney, and banishes Boling-
broke for six years and Mowbray for life. This act, as
252
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Mowbray's son asserts at a later period in Henry IV, Part II,
was the beginning of all the evils that beſell him later :
'O when the king did throw his warder down,
His own life hung upon the staff he threw,
Then threw he down himself:
For Richard, alarmed at the popular manifestations in Boling-
broke's favour, sends to perpetual exile the man whom he
loves, and who would have proved faithful to him, while he
inflicts a lighter and yet exasperating penalty upon the aspiring
lord whom he secretly fears. Amid the prayers and blessings
of the multitude, and with patriotic sighs of farewell to the
'sweet soil' of England, Bolingbroke departs to bide his time.
beyond the seas.
It is the natural mistake of a weak nature to think that it is
enough to banish a dangerous enemy without striking at the
real source of his power, which lies in the wide-spread popular
disaffection. A vivid glimpse into Richard's maladministration
is given in his interview with the parasites, Bagot and Green,
before he sets out for the Irish war. The realm is let out to
farm; blank charters are issued for the levy of 'benevolences';
the news of John of Gaunt's approaching death is hailed with
delight as making his coffers, private property though they be,
an easy prey. But before the head of the house of Lancaster,
the last survivor of the great age of Edward III, passes away,
he lifts up his voice in a final paean over England, 'this other
Eden, demi-Paradise,' and in a prophecy of impending doom
upon her degenerate lord who, to feed 'his rash fierce blaze of
riot,' has leased her out like to a tenement or pelting farm.'
But Richard, though he quails before the lofty words of rebuke,
which, as he complains with a characteristic flourish, chase 'the
royal blood' from his cheek, gives no ear to their stern signifi-
cance. He dismisses them as the vapourings of
A lunatic lean-witted fool
Presuming on an ague's privilege,'
and his practical retort, the moment the breath is out of the old
hero's body, is to seize
The plate, coin, revenue, and movables
Whereof our uncle Gaunt did stand possessed.'
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253
Richard II. -
Such a wanton invasion of the rights of inheritance is too much
for even the pliant York-last left of Richard's uncles-who
plucks up heart to point out that he is setting a suicidal precedent
by his violation of 'fair sequence and succession,' upon which
his own royal title rests. But again Richard is deaf to good
counsel, though with singular lack of judgement he appoints this
very York, unstable as water, and chagrined by his nephew's
contempt for his warning words, to be governor of England
during the Irish campaign. Thus, with a mere figurehead
presiding over the realm, with the Commons alienated by
oppressive imposts, and the nobles alarmed at the illegal
outrage upon the rights of one of their order, England, during
Richard's absence, lies at the mercy of a bold aspirant to the
throne. With characteristic promptitude Bolingbroke seizes his
opportunity. He lands at Ravenspurgh with a convoy from
overseas, and is at once joined by Northumberland, Worcester,
and other powerful English lords. He advances southwards,
announcing that he comes but to claim in person the title and
property of which he has been unjustly deprived, and York,
powerless to cope with such a crisis, virtually submits to the
invader, whose ultimate aims are clear enough to him, by
deciding to 'remain as neuter.' But Bolingbroke preferring to
keep so impartial a personage under his own eye, carries him
in his train to Bristol, where he gives proof that his objects
are not merely private by sending to their death Richard's
favourites, Busby and Green, or, in his own phrase, weeding the
commonwealth of its 'caterpillars.' In executing such summary
justice Bolingbroke is already exercising the functions of an
uncrowned king.
Meanwhile the titular king has remained overlong beyond
the seas on his fruitless Irish expedition. He leaves his friends
at home without tidings, and the superstitious Welshmen who,
on news of Bolingbroke's invasion, had rallied to the royal
cause, are alarmed by portents in the sky into a belief in
Richard's death, and carry over their forces to his rival. When
at length he sets foot again on English soil, he does not follow
the advice of Aumerle and the sagacious Bishop of Carlisle by
making an energetic dash upon Bolingbroke, and seeking to
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
crush him before he can consolidate his power. It suits him
better to delay, while his fancy runs its extravagant riot. He
has not in him a spark of true patriotism, but his return to
English soil excites him to a hysterical outburst of smiles and
tears, and of 'favours,' as he terms them, to the ground from
his 'royal hands.' There is, in his opinion, no need for him to
deal vigorously with the foe. As robbers are aghast at the
light of day, so Bolingbroke will tremble when he sees Richard
rising in sunbright majesty :
'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 soldier of Bolingbroke
'God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel.'
But, while he is buoying himself up with these fancies of
celestial succour, prosaic tidings begin to pour in of the loss of
earthly auxiliaries. Salisbury enters to tell of the defection of
the Welsh, and ere the blood which the news drives from
Richard's cheek can return, Scroop announces the general
uprising of the Commons, and the execution of the favourites at
Bristol. Richard's mercurial sensibility now rushes down to
the lowest depths of artificial despair. He would fain have all
'sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings,'
and he revels in every gloomy detail with which he can trick
out the theme. Again the Bishop of Carlisle warns him that
wise men do not 'sit and wail their woes,' and Aumerle suggests
that his father York has a force at the royal service. Then the
heaviest blow falls, for Scroop tells that York has joined
Bolingbroke. Once more Richard's spirits, which had momen-
tarily swept upward, sink to the very nadir of depression. He
abandons all hope, discharges the forces under him, and sets
out for Flint Castle, where he can pine away and submit himself
to'kingly woe.'
But this mood is as transient as all others, though its practical.
consequences are beyond recall. Bolingbroke with his followers
appears before the Castle, and when Richard shows himself on
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255
Richard II.
the walls, the grace and charm of his bearing force an eloquent
simile even from his austere rival's lips, while York, anxious to
show that his sympathies are not all in one camp, cries with
enthusiasm:
'Yet looks he like a king; behold, his eye,
As bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth
Controlling majesty."
Richard indeed can always look like' a king: to borrow
a theatrical phrase which fi.s his theatrical nature, he can dress
the part' of sovereign to perfection, and he delights in its cere-
monial show. Thus when Northumberland is sent by Boling-
broke as envoy, Richard flares up in indignant rebuke because
he omits the fearful bending of his knee to his lawful king, con-
secrated of God, Who is mustering armies of pestilence' on his
behalf. But a few moments afterwards, with kaleidoscopic shift
of emotions, this very king by divine right is suggesting his own
deposition, and the exchange of his
'Large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave.'
And stimulated by the incontinent imagination which revels in
every possible detail of abasement, Richard commits the incred-
ible folly of bestowing the ironical title of King Bolingbroke'
on his rival, who has hitherto claimed only his private rights, and
who, when Richard descends to the base court of the castle,
meets him with bended knee, and with the dutiful declaration' My
gracious lord, I come but for mine own.' To Richard's irrita-
ble fancy the words are pregnant with meaning, and he replies
with undignified repartee, 'Your own is yours, and I am yours,
and all!' And when Bolingbroke puts a courteous gloss upon
this retort, Richard expands the idea with infatuated emphasis:
'They well deserve to have,
That know the strong'st and surest way to get.
Cousin, I am too young to be your father,
Though you are old enough to be my heir.
What you will have, I'll give, and willing too.'
Thus he lays down a doctrine of possession which entirely invali-
dates his own right, and hands over his inheritance, though
with ironical intent, to this cool, reserved rival. Even had
256
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Bolingbroke's original aims been simply those he avowed,
Richard himself would have helped to thrust him into the
kingly seat.
At the opening of Act IV we see Bolingbroke already practi-
cally enthroned, and the situation is a designed counterpart to
the earliest scene of the play, that the contrast may be enforced
between the new rulers and the old. A number of lords accuse
Aumerle, as Bolingbroke had formerly accused Norfolk, of hav-
ing had the chief hand in the death of Gloucester. As Aumerle
had been Richard's most faithful follower, it would have been to
Bolingbroke's interest to let him fall beneath the swords of the
accusers, but he is determined that full justice shall be done.
Norfolk has been adduced as a witness of Aumerle's guilt, and
Bolingbroke decrees that no further step shall be taken till the
banished Duke can be recalled: even when he learns that his
ancient adversary is dead, he orders that all differences shall
'rest under gage' till due day of trial can be appointed. Such
a spectacle of justice, clemency, and firmness awes the turbulent
assembly into obedience. The usurper at this crisis displays
the kingly qualities which are so wanting in him who is still in
name the king. But the outward patent of power is no longer
to be separated from its reality. York, to whom the office of
go-between naturally appeals, enters to formally announce
that 'plume-plucked' Richard surrenders his sceptre to
'Henry, fourth of that name,' and, with a laconic appeal to
Heaven, Bolingbroke mounts the regal seat. But one voice
rises in protest. The Bishop of Carlisle, careless of his own
safety, boldly denies the right of subjects to sit in judgement on
their prince, and foretells that, if this foul traitor Hereford is
crowned, intestine war with all its horrors will sweep over the
land, till it be called 'the field of Golgotha and dead men's
skulls.' This prophecy of the civil strife, consequent on the
Lancastrian accession, is so explicit that it cannot be dismissed
as merely a dramatic utterance. It is true that in Shakspere's
eyes the cardinal title to kingly rank is the possession of kingly
qualities. He lays bare, as with a surgeon's scalpel, the fatal
defects, moral or intellectual, which unfit a lineal holder of the
sceptre for his high vocation. Neither Henry VI nor Richard II
XI]
257
Richard II.
escapes a damning indictment. But the poet with his instinctive
reverence for inherited rights, his tenacious grasp of the prin-
ciple of stability in the social order, could not view without the
gravest concern the overthrow of an established dynasty, how-
ever deeply at fault, by rebellious subjects. Such a revolutionary
course, though prompted in the main by patriotism, would
necessarily have an alloy of the baser motives of self-seeking
and ambition, and these would entail a righteous Nemesis. Of
the divine right of kings in the Stuart or Legitimist sense Shak-
spere could never have been the champion, but he was keenly
alive to the 'seamy side' of rebellion, and through the lips of the
brave Bishop of Carlisle, on whom Bolingbroke with generous
statesmanship takes no revenge, he sets forth its disastrous con-
sequences.
While the misdeeds of the new master of England arouse this
voice of eloquent protest, Richard is left to a more merciless
condemnation out of his own mouth. Summoned before
Bolingbroke, that in the very presence of the usurper he may
formally resign the crown, he runs through the whole range of
feelings for which the situation can be made to give the cue.
He revels in epigrams, and imagery. To his adversary's cold,
sharp queries, whether he is willing to resign, he gives in
a breath contradictory answers, 'Ay, no; no, Ay,' words which,
as Kreyssig has suggested, form the motto of his character. At
one moment he renounces the emblems and prerogatives of
kingship with legal amplitude of detail, setting the seal thereto
by the cry 'God save King Harry'; at another he calls himself
a traitor for making such a surrender, and bewails that he has
now 'no name, no title,' not even that given him at the font.
This final touch of exaggeration expresses Richard's feeling that
his very personality is oozing away under the pressure to which
it is subjected; a feeling which finds utterance in the fantastic
outburst:
'O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke
To melt myself away in water-drops !'
Northumberland harshly seeks to cut short Richard's riot of
fancy by urging him to read a list of accusations framed against
S
258
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
him, but Bolingbroke saves him from this indignity, and grants
with imperturbable calm his request for a mirror wherein to view
his face. The glass reflects the old outward beauty, for it takes
a heartfelt grief to write wrinkles on the brow, while Richard's
is but a phantom sorrow; and cheated of the æsthetic satisfac-
tion of poring over the outward marks of woe, the petulant man
dashes the mirror to the ground, crying, as it shivers :
'Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.'
And Bolingbroke, who has hitherto watched Richard's parade of
emotion with speechless disdain, at last utters a retort of pregnant
irony:
'The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed
The shadow of your face.'
Even at this tragic crisis Richard's passion is without substance;
it is a mere mirrored reflex of true grief, suited to some brittle
image-world, not to the sphere of stern and solid fact.
While Richard's bearing earns the contempt of the practical
statesman, it is not without a certain wistful charm that appeals
especially to those of his nearer private circle. At intervals
during the progress of the drama the Queen has been shown in
the background, and her tender feeling for her 'sweet' lord
proves his attractive power. As she sees him pass on the way
to confinement, by Bolingbroke's order, she weeps to see her
'fair rose wither,' though mingled with her sorrow is an
indignant feeling that pupil-like' he takes his correction mildly,
and kisses the rod. But it is impossible to shame Richard
out of his luxury of grief into manly self-reproach, and it is with
conceits and flourishes on his lips that he takes his last farewell
of his faithful bride. Faithful too is the poor groom who visits
him in prison, though his loyalty towards his master is strangely
mingled with affection for roan Barbary, his master's horse.
But even captivity cannot quench the pyrotechnic blaze of
Richard's fancy. He peoples his prison with thoughts, each
resembling some dweller in the world; a strain of music
played out of time jars on his sensitive ear and forces him to
reflect how he failed to note 'broken time' in the concord of
XI]
259
Henry IV.
the State, and then, with an abrupt turn of the metaphor, he
sees in himself time's 'numbering clock,' and revels in an
ingenious elaboration of this idea. It may truly be said that,
to Richard, 'stone walls do not a prison make'; the feverish
working of his fancy shuts out all sense of actual hardship.
But his dream is rudely shattered. Bolingbroke, though he
has no personal malice against him, feels his seat unsteady
while Richard lives. He lets fall hints which find ready inter-
preters, and the captive king, fighting with one strange flash of
latent valour, dies by a murderer's hand. The deed arouses no
unseemly exultation in Bolingbroke's breast; he protests, and
without hypocrisy:
'My soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.'
He is already beginning to feel the first strokes of Nemesis. An
abortive conspiracy is formed at Oxford for his overthrow, and
he has to sentence his brother-in-law to death for taking part
in it. Nor is this his only domestic trouble. He is cut
to the heart by the riotous conduct of his 'unthrifty son,' the
haunter of taverns and stews, though he sees in him
sparks of better hope.' Bolingbroke has won the wished-for
crown, but it has brought him no truce from care, and with
a grave heart he turns to the thought of a voyage to the Holy
Land, to appease the wrath that is yet to come.
some
HENRY IV, Parts I and II, forms in reality one play
in ten Acts, which directly continues Richard II. Part I was
registered with the Stationers' Company on February 25, 1598,
and Part II, though not registered till August 23, 1600, was
evidently written before the earlier entry, for the name of the
fat knight which had originally been Oldcastle in both Parts,
already appears as Falstaff. Meres mentions Henry IV in 1598,
and in the same year a quarto edition appeared of Part I, which
was followed by several others, Part II being published in similar
form in 1600. In 1599 Ben Jonson, in Every Man in his Humour,
mentions Silence, who first appears in Part II. The date of the
two parts must thus lie between 1597 and 1598. Shakspere found
$ 2
260
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
his materials almost exclusively in Holinshed's Chronicle, which
he followed with great fidelity, even in its errors. For the comic
scenes he drew hints from an old play, The Famous Victories
of Henry V, which dealt in rough fashion with Prince Hal's
youthful escapades and suggested the names of Eastcheap,
Gadshill, and Sir John Oldcastle. That the fat knight was
originally called Oldcastle is evident. In the quarto edition
of Part II the prefix Old (i.e. Oldcastle) occurs before a speech
of Falstaff. In Part I, Act i, Scene 2, Prince Henry calls
Falstaff 'my old lad of the castle,' and in Part II, Act iii, Scene 2,
Shallow speaks of Falstaff having been page to Thomas
Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, a post which had been held by the
historical Oldcastle. This Sir John Oldcastle, better known as
Lord Cobham, had been burnt for Lollardry under Henry V,
and the use of his name by Shakspere delighted the Roman
Catholic party, who saw in the reprobate knight a portrait of the
detested heretic. Cobham's descendants were equally incensed
at the apparent insult to their relative, and with characteristic
good feeling, and desire to lift the drama above the region of
controversy, Shakspere in the Epilogue to Part II formally
repudiated the identification: 'Oldcastle died a martyr, and this
is not the man.' He changed the name of his knight to
Sir John Falstaff, modified probably from Sir John Fastolfe, who
had been introduced as playing a cowardly part in Henry VI,
Part I. But even this did not entirely allay the feeling that had
been aroused, and controversial passion certainly contributed to
the unprecedented popularity of Henry IV. Like Tamburlaine,
about ten years before, Falstaff took the dramatic world by
storm, and furnished a type upon which succeeding playwrights.
produced numerous variations. Shallow and Pistol were also
hailed with enthusiastic appreciation, and became stock humorous
characters. The originality and breadth of Shakspere's genius
were universally recognized.
•
Part I covers a period of rather less than a year, from the
battle of Holmedon, September 14, 1402, to that of Shrewsbury,
July 21, 1403. It thus is fairly compact, and leads up to
a catastrophe of some moment. Part II comprises the remaining
years till Henry's death in 1413, and includes no events of first-
XI]
261
Henry IV.
rate importance. Thus the ten-act play, instead of working to
a climax, dwindles as it proceeds in purely dramatic interest,
and has a decidedly tame ending. At first sight it seems also
lacking in any principle of unity. Historical and comic scenes
alternate, without apparent connexion, and the presence of
Falstaff, an offspring of the dramatic imagination, amidst the
figures of national tradition, is a puzzling problem.
But on a closer view we recognize the underlying unity of the
whole. It has been shown that Shakspere in his historical plays
deals with two themes, interrelated yet distinct-the development
of individual character, and the progress of the national life.
In King John the political interest tended to overshadow the
personal; in Henry IV, on the other hand, it is subordinate.
The unity of the play does not lie in incident nor in political
tendency, but in the relation of the leading personages to certain
elementary principles of life and action. What is their idea.
of 'honour' and its value? This is the chief touchstone by
which the various characters are tried. As the embodiment
of Shakspere's own view stands Prince Henry, with Falstaff in
glaring opposition; while Hotspur and Glendower,-the King,
Northumberland and Prince John, -and even Shallow, Silence
and Pistol, form intermediate groups.
Thus the King, though the titular hero, is not the dramatic
centre of the play. He claims precedence, however, as the
main link with Richard II, and how close Shakspere meant the
connexion between the two pieces to be is shown by the fact
that the one opens, as the other closed, with Henry's avowal
of an intended crusade. Under the royal robe and crown we
see the figure of the old Bolingbroke, in all essentials unchanged.
But while hitherto he has been shown in contrast to characters
who threw his higher qualities into effective relief, henceforward
he is tried by harder tests. Diplomacy and determination
enabled him to wrest the crown from Richard's feeble hands,
and they enable him to keep it firmly in his grasp. But they
cannot make him successful in the highest sense, either as a man
or as a king; and they cannot, above all, yield him the inward
peace for which he sighs. The usurper has to suffer a Nemesis
in no wise arbitrary, but the inevitable result of his own nature
262
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
crown.
and actions. As he confesses on his death-bed, it was by 'by-
paths and indirect crook'd ways' that he 'met' his crown, orly
to find it sit troublesome upon his head. Richard's prophecies
of woe to come are fulfilled. The shrewd, self-reliant politician
cannot blossom into a benignant sovereign, loving and beloved.
With all his talents and virtues, he lacks the integrity of nature
and the personal magnetism which rivet permanently the attach-
ment of men. The opening scene shows him already at fault
both as a father and a king. The pragmatic man,' as Gervinus
has said, 'knows only his own ratio: he knows not how to
estimate natures which lie beyond his range of vision.' Thus
he completely misunderstands his eldest son, and we hear him
lamenting that unkind fate has given him as heir his young
Harry instead of Hotspur. But, in spite of this, he treats
Hotspur with almost equal lack of insight. To him and to his
father, Northumberland, Henry had in great measure owed his
Nor have their services ended there. The play opens
with the account of Hotspur's victory over a formidable Scotch
invading force, headed by the valiant Douglas. Henry has
every motive to treat the Percys, and especially this gallant
scion of the house, with whole-hearted trust and gratitude. But
he is a prey to the fear that those who have set him up in place
of their lawful lord may at any moment turn against the ruler
of their own making. Hence he seizes on what seems a favour-
able opportunity for humbling their pretensions. He peremp-
torily orders Hotspur to deliver to him his Scotch prisoners, but
the Percy refuses, till Henry has ransomed his brother-in-law.
Mortimer, Earl of March, who has just been captured by the
Welshman, Owen Glendower. Mortimer, however, is another
object of suspicion to Henry, for Richard had proclaimed him
his heir; and Hotspur is stirred to frenzy, as he hears the king
denounce his kinsman as a rebel and a traitor. With a last
significant threat Henry quits the council-chamber, and the
Percys, father and son, are left alone, to be speedily joined
by Northumberland's brother, Worcester, who had been dis-
missed from the royal presence for wearing the moody
frontier of a servant brow.' Well may they contrast the
insults of this arrogant master with the 'candy deal of
x+]
263
Henry IV.
courtesy shown to them at Ravenspurgh.
foolishness
To put down Richard, that sweet, lovely rose,
And plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke?'
Was it not
Will this king of smiles' ever be content till he has answered
all the debt he owes them, 'even with the bloody payment' of
their deaths? To forestall this there is no way but the sword.
Thus Henry's own conduct stirs up the formidable rebellion
which unites against him the Percys, the Archbishop of York,
the Welsh under Glendower, whose daughter Mortimer has
married, and the Scots headed by Douglas, whom Hotspur has
converted from friend to foe. But if the king is to blame that
the rising should take place at all, he displays in coping with it
all his former skill and resolution. He concentrates his forces
against Hotspur without a moment' delay; but, anxious as ever
to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, on the eve of the battle at
Shrewsbury he offers a pardon and friendship to the rebels, if they
will lay down their arms. When his offer is rejected, he fights
bravely amidst his troops, though with characteristic 'policy' he
sends into the field a number of counterfeit kings. The battle
won, he shows clemency to all but the chief offenders; and at
once divides his army to encounter fresh foes in the North and
West. The dauntless, unwearied spirit of the man rings in his
cry to Warwick :
'Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities.'
But he is not called upon for further personal effort against
the rebels. The death of Glendower brings the Welsh rising to
a close, and the archbishop with his allies in Yorkshire is
opposed by Prince John, who procures their submission by
a disgraceful act of treachery. This young prince is a charac-
teristic product of the atmosphere of Henry's court. He has
his father's bravery and reserve, but he is more unsympathetic
and limited in range. His very likeness to the king throws the
grander outlines of the latter into relief. An even more effective
foil to Henry is provided in Northumberland, who should have
been the directing head of the rebellion, but in whom caution
and policy degenerate into selfish cowardice. He contributes
264
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
in large measure to Hotspur's defeat by failing to join him on
the plea of sickness, and he afterwards deserts the Archbishop
of York and his allies by fleeing to Scotland, whence he sends
pious hopes for their success.
The rebellion is thus crushed, and Henry sits more firmly
than ever on the throne. But not for one moment has he the
ease of mind which might have been the portion of either
a better or a worse man. Throughout the political convulsion
he has been haunted by the bitter thought of his eldest son's
misdoings, which his irritable conscience interprets as the retri-
bution upon his own sins. And what rankles most is the
apparent similarity of Prince Henry's conduct to that of Richard,
while in Hotspur he sees the image of his younger self. The
view is short-sighted but natural, and Henry, whose own claim
to the throne is founded upon personal fitness and not upon
descent, mourns that his son is merely 'the shadow of succes-
sion.' The statesman trembles for the future of his kingdom
under such keeping, but the father's heart bleeds with a yet
keener pang; for deep down in that stern nature, and forming
one of the factors in its strength, there is a vein of tenderness,
which gushes forth in the yearning cry:
'Not an eye
But is aweary of thy common sight,
Save mine, which hath desired to see thee more:
Which now doth that I would not have it do,
Make blind itself with foolish tenderness.'
Yet, a moment afterwards, he shows his complete misjudgement
of the prince by charging him with a desire to fight under
Percy's pay, and even after being rescued from death by him
at Shrewsbury, he cannot yield him perfect trust. The strain of
the situation is more than he can bear. His health gives way;
sleep forsakes his wearied eyelids; he has periods of depression,
when an inert fatalism seems the only wisdom. The news of
the final overthrow of the conspiracy finds him sick, with failing
sight and giddy brain, and the cry of disappointment rises from
his lips, Will fortune never come with both hands full?' At
last the hour had arrived when he was free to carry out the long
meditated crusade, but his trembling frame needs support even into
the neighbouring chamber. There he undergoes one last trial.
XI]
265
Henry IV.
Prince Henry entering sees him in a sleep that is apparently the
sleep of death, and hastens to place the crown upon his own
head. The king awakes to find the emblem of royalty filched
from him by his son, and to see in this a proof of his worst
suspicions:
'Thy life did manifest thou lov'dst me not,
And thou wilt have me die assured of it.
Thou hid'st a thousand daggers in thy thoughts.
Which thou hast whetted on thy stony heart,
To stab at half an hour of my life.'
A
But the prince's tearful prayers for pardon and protestations of
a 'true and inward duteous spirit' bring about a reconciliation,
and, now that they are about to be separated for ever, father
and son for the first time seem to stand truly face to face. The
dying king, looking back upon his own troubled career, predicts
for his heir a more unruffled lot, and, steeped in statecraft to the
very last, gives the shrewd counsel 'to busy giddy minds with
foreign quarrels.' With this characteristic legacy he passes
from the scene where he has been so masterful a figure.
man of the world in the fullest sense, he has known how to
wield worldly forces and to win worldly rewards. Not honour,
but self-interest has been his guiding principle, yet the interest.
of the sagacious statesman has coincided at many points with
that of his country. The usurper has been in no way a tyrant,
yet his heart has been lacerated by not a few of those unseen
stripes and scars which, according to the famous Tacitean
description, are the tyrant's portion. For it is one of Shak-
spere's great though unobtrusive triumphs to have shown in
Bolingbroke's career that material success, exclusively pursued,
turns to bitterness even in the hands of those best equipped to
achieve it.
When we turn from the court to the camp of the conspirators
we plunge into a strangely different atmosphere. The soul of
the rebellion is the youngest of its leaders, Harry Percy, the
'Hotspur' of the North. His picture is drawn for us in
affecting words by his wife after his death. His honour
'Stuck upon him as the sun
In the grey vault of heaven: and by his light
Did all the chivalry of England move
To do brave acts.'
266
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Honour is to Hotspur the end and aim of life; honour
blazes on his brow, and makes him the lode-star of all the
noble youth of the time. Henry enviously speaks of him as
'the theme of honour's tongue,' and Douglas addresses him as
'the king of honour.' He himself bids danger come from the
east unto the west, so honour cross it from the north to south.'
He thinks it an easy leap to pluck honour from the palc-faced.
moon, or from the bottom of the deep. Honour is thus the
very law of his being, and it becomes essential to understand in
what sense he conceives of it, and how it affects his actions.
That it implies personal heroism is shown in the opening
scene, where we hear of his victory over the redoubtable
Douglas, and throughout the play he is the very model of
gallantry in all his actions. Prince Henry does him no more
than justice when he cries:
'I do not think a braver gentleman,
More active-valiant, or more valiant-young,
More daring or more bold, is now alive,
To grace this latter age with noble deeds.'
His spirit inspires the very peasants in the rebel camp, and as
he rides into the battle at Shrewsbury in all the prodigal exuber-
ance of early manhood, with the thrilling watchword of the
Percys, Espérance, upon his lips, he is the very ideal of a knight
sans peur et sans reproche. How is it then that his death at the
hands of Prince Henry does not jar upon our sense of poetic
justice? The answer is that Hotspur's honour is based upon
a selfish principle, which never hesitates to sacrifice the general
good to his sense of personal dignity, while this sense is apt to
be constantly inflamed by the play of an impetuous imagination.
After the victory at Holmedon he refuses to deliver up his Scotch
prisoners till Mortimer has been ransomed. The king's charge.
of treachery against his kinsmen rouses him to a white heat of
rage. He must ease his heart, though at hazard of his head.
He chafes at the thought that he and his relatives should have
brought a blot upon their name by helping this 'king of smiles'
to the throne, and that they should now incur the further infamy
of insult from his lips. He is thus easily won over when his
uncle proposes the conspiracy, though, with his imagination all
XI]
267
Henry IV.
on fire, he gives at first no ear to the details of the plot, but
revels in 'a world of figures' conjured up by his own brain.
The rebukes of his father and uncle at last compel his attention,
and this knightly Paladin does not scruple, for the sake of aveng-
ing private wrongs, to enter into a league with his country's
hereditary foes. He consents to see England broken up, and
claims a third share of the booty; he even gives way to one of
his ungovernable transports, because he thinks that Glendower's
slice of territory is larger than his own. The quarrel is soon
made up, but Hotspur is never really in harmony with his con-
federates. Though there is in his own nature a highly imagina-
tive vein, it plays round the one subject of honour, and for all
that is sentimental, exaggerated, and artificial, he has a soldier's
contempt. This appears in the first words that he utters, giving
the account of the 'popinjay' courtier, who pestered him with
'holiday and lady terms' as he leant breathless on his sword
after the fight at Holmedon. The dialogue with Lady Percy at
Warkworth shows how he dislikes all outward signs of emotion,
or tender confidences between husband and wife. To Lady
Kate's anxious queries about his projects he has only jesting
answers there is no lady closer-but the only secrets that she
is safe not to utter are those that she does not know; he loves
her not, yet let him but have his roan, and when he is o' horse-
back, he will swear he loves her infinitely. This scene excites
enthusiasm in certain German critics, who see in the attitude of
Percy and his wife a healthy contrast to the sentimentality of
Wertherism. But though beneath the banter there is full proof of
genuine affection, can it be supposed that Shakspere, the writer
of the Sonnets, intended this decidedly Philistine relationship to
be the ideal of married intercourse?
With this disdain of sentiment and unreality Hotspur is utterly
unfitted to be a confederate of Glendower. Even the bond of
common interest cannot stifle the instinctive antipathy of the
Anglo-Saxon and the Celt. Glendower is not without consider-
able mental gifts and culture, but these are made to minister to
a diseased vain-glory, which seems almost a caricature of
Hotspur's exaggerated passion for honour without its ennobling
effects. The countryman of Merlin, fed from his birth on
268
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
•
legends and prophecies, covets above everything the reputa-
tion of supernatural powers. He boasts, and probably has
brought himself to believe, that at his nativity the heavens were
on fire, and the earth trembled; that he can raise spirits from
the deep, and even command the devil himself. All this
'skimble-skamble stuff' meets with merciless derision from
Hotspur, who gives rationalistic explanations of the Welshman's
portents, and bids him seek not to command but 'shame the
devil' by telling truth. Equally unbearable to the hot-headed
youth is the overstrained refinement of Glendower's surround-
ings. For himself he prefers the sound of a brazen canstick
turned' to mincing poetry, and he mocks at the sentimental
passages between Glendower's daughter and Mortimer, who,
having no common language, are fain to make tears, and kisses,
and music the messengers of love.
Hotspur has, in the sequel, good cause to rue Glendower's
vapourings about his supernatural powers, for the Welshman lets
himself be 'o'erruled by prophecies,' and does not bring up his
forces to join the rebel army at Shrewsbury. Northumberland
also, as has been seen, fails at the rendezvous, and Hotspur's
shrewdest advisers counsel delay. But the fiery Percy will not
listen. He hazards the success of his enterprise to gratify his
personal eagerness for an encounter with the sword-and-buckler
Prince of Wales, of whom he is so jealous that in a fit of
ungenerous spleen he had wished to have him poisoned in a pot
of ale. Too much must not be made of such an outburst, but
it is a singular comment on Hotspur's idea of honour, and when
the two Harries at last meet, hot horse to horse, on the battle-
field, we feel that victory rightly rests with the champion whose
heroism is less highly coloured, but substantial and selfless to
the core. Hotspur is the principal figure drawn by Shakspere
from that world of chivalry, which was still furnishing Spenser
with ideal types of manhood. But while the poet of The Faerie
Queene fixed his gaze solely upon those elements in the feudal
standard of life which tended to fashion a noble person in
virtuous and gentle discipline,' the dramatist, while recognizing
these elements, and in no way undervaluing the brilliant, high-
souled figures which they produced, yet laid bare the fatal flaw
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Henry IV.
of the medieval system - its glorification of individual ‘honour'
The
and prowess at the expense of national well-being.
champion of chivalry fascinates all eyes, but the moral order
of society demands that he should go down before the patriot
prince.
Yet when we turn our attention to the victor in this decisive
contest, we may at first be inclined to question his superiority
over his vanquished foe. Prince Henry's career has hitherto for
the most part appeared a deliberate defiance of that principle of
honour which had animated Hotspur's whole being. The first
action reported of him (at the close of Richard II) is a coarse
and wanton travesty of the customs of chivalry, and when he
appears in person in Henry IV he seems to fully merit his
father's curt censure, 'as dissolute as desperate.' We see him
the hail-fellow of a crew of roisterers; his first words smack of
the tavern and the stews; and he unblushingly asks,' Where
shall we take a purse to-morrow?' He does not disdain the
title of one of the moon's men,' and he shares in an exploit
whereby peaceable travellers on the king's highway are beaten
and robbed. He enters with unalloyed zest into the humours
of low Eastcheap life, becoming 'sworn brother to a leash of
drawers,' who tell him flatly that he is a Corinthian, a lad of
mettle,' and on one of whom he plays a boyish practical joke.
Constituted authority in all its forms he treats with scant respect.
He does not hesitate to burlesque his father in an ale-house; he
is removed from the council for an insult to the Chief Justice;
and he tells a lie to the sheriff to screen Falstaff from punish-
ment for the robbery. When the outbreak of the rebellion
summons him from his haunts, he parodies military discipline by
strutting along in marching order with Poins, while he plays on
his truncheon like a fife.
How does Shakspere succeed in securing our sympathies for
such a character, and redressing the moral balance completely
in his favour? How is it that Henry's cry,
'If it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive,'
rings perfectly genuine, and that we feel his conception of
honour to be truer and nobler than Hotspur's? The answer is
270
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
that the prince's real nature does not show itself in this
Bohemian existence, to which he is driven by the conditions
which surround him. As heir to the throne he finds that his
choice of occupation lies between statecraft and arms. But the
subtle policy of a Bolingbroke, dealing with men as counters in
a game, and the high-flown military ardour of a Hotspur are
equally impossible to the young prince, whose character is simple
and genuine to the core. He therefore flies from court and
camp into the London streets and taverns, where he sees life as
it is, without veneer. Shakspere, like Milton, gave little for
'a fugitive and cloistered virtue,' and Henry dips into the most
turbid social depths. That he rises absolutely unspotted, is
perhaps questionable by an age more censorious than the
Elizabethan on the point of personal purity. But at worst his
nature takes a superficial stain, and is at its centre wholly sound
and unspoilt; while the breadth of his experience gives him the
sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men, which is invalu-
able to a ruler. Henry, indeed, in a monologue soon after the
play opens, takes credit to himself for a more calculating design
in his wild manner of life: it is intended to serve as a foil to his
'reformation,' when he thinks it time to 'throw off his loose
behaviour,' and shine forth like the sun breaking through ugly
mists. But this Pharisaical declaration need not be taken too
literally, as it is probably meant for little more than a dramatic
'aside' to the audience, assuring them that Henry is in reality
not what he appears, and indeed Shakspere is at pains to
show that the prince stops short of serious misdoing, and is
prompted to his escapades by a spirit of reckless hilarity. Thus
when he is asked to take part in the robbery at Gadshill, he
starts back in indignation. 'Who, I rob? I a thief? No,
by my faith;' he is only brought to countenance the exploit
that he may turn the tables upon Falstaff, and he takes care that
the merchants shall have their money paid back again with
advantage. When he is summoned to take his part in the
struggle with the rebels, he goes forth with cheerful alacrity, not
a whit daunted by Falstaff's blood-curdling picture of that fiend
Douglas, that spirit Hotspur, and that devil Glendower.' So on
the eve of the campaign he can stand in his father's presence,
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Henry IV.
and while entreating pardon for those things wherein his 'youth
hath faulty wandered and irregular,' truthfully declare that he is
sound at heart, and that the time is at hand when he, the
'unthought of Harry,' will
'Redeem all this on Percy's head,
And, in the closing of some glorious day,
Be bold to tell you that I am your son.
Henry is completely without jealousy of Hotspur, yet there is
a somewhat ostentatiously self-confident note in his description
of the knightly hero as a 'factor,' who is engrossing up glories
to be afterwards surrendered to him, and a severely realistic
criticism might even be tempted to doubt whether the madcap
of Eastcheap could be transformed in a moment into the
feathered Mercury' of Vernon's glowing description, and to
inquire which among his comrades that dashed the world
aside' could bear comparison in their panoply of war to
estridges and eagles. But in the day of trial Henry makes
his promises absolutely good. He saves his father from the
onslaught of the Douglas, and when he at last meets Hotspur
face to face he proves victor in the combat. But he shows no
ungenerous exultation, for his feeling of triumph is stifled in his
mourning over the fall of this 'great heart,' and he takes so little
thought for honour in the sense of outward glory, that he is
willing to let Falstaff bear away the credit of his own brilliant
feat of arms. The only 'honour' valued by this genuine,
unpretentious nature is that highest form which lies in the
inward conviction of duty done in a rightful and patriotic
cause.
It is thus very characteristic of Henry that when we next see
him after his great achievement, he should be confessing to
exceeding weariness and to a desire for small beer. He has
returned for a time to the old haunts and boon-companions, but
it is partly to seek relief from sorrow at his father's sickness,
which makes his heart bleed inwardly, but which he cannot
confess without seeming a hypocrite. There is a final outburst
of the madcap mood when, disguised as a drawer, he goes with
Poins to the Boar's Head to catch Falstaff with Doll Tearsheet
on his knee. But just when this frolic is at its height, he is sum-
272
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
moned away by news of danger abroad, and we do not see him
again till he enters the chamber of his dying father, and places
the crown upon his own head. The incident was found by
Shakspere in Holinshed, and he could not well pass it over, but
it scarcely heightens our conception of Henry. The haste with
which he seizes on the symbol of royalty, immediately he thinks
his father dead, is somewhat irreverent, and there is a touch of
sophistry in his subsequent plea for pardon. But no doubt is
left of the nobly unfaltering spirit in which he will enter upon
his new responsibilities.
My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me. Lo! here it sits,
Which Heaven shall guard: and put the world's whole strength
Into one giant arm, it shall not force
This lineal honour from me.
Henry feels that the crown comes to him by an inviolable
title. As he declares to his father in the precious moments of
mutual confidence which follow the final burst of suspicion :
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me.
Then plain and right must my possession be.'
And when Bolingbroke at last passes in reality away, it is
in the confidence of 'plain and right' possession that Henry
mounts the throne: strong in this confidence he rises at
once to the height of his great station. He assures his
trembling brothers that he will be their father and their brother
too; he confirms in his seat the Chief Justice who had pun-
ished him in his younger days, and when Falstaff hails him
familiarly, as he comes from the scene of his coronation, he
turns upon the fat knight with the scathing rebuke, 'I know thee
not, old man,' and banishes him ten mile from his person on
pain of death. This rigorous measure is doubtless a political
and, as will appear, a moral necessity; but the world always
eyes jealously a breach between old associates in mirth, and
Henry's abrupt dismissal of his boon-companion seems un-
pleasantly like the practical complement of his self-righteous
soliloquy in earlier days. But to appreciate fully the signifi-
cance of the incident we must turn our attention to Falstaff
himself.
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Henry IV.
The fat knight is by universal consent the greatest comic
figure of ancient or modern literature. He is so however
because, like his chief rival for this place of honour, Don
Quixote, he is by no means purely a humorous creation. Ile
is in fact one of the most complex of beings, and can only be
described in seemingly contradictory antitheses. 'He is a man,'
to use the words of the eighteenth century essayist, Maurice
Morgan, 'at once young and old, enterprising and fat, a dupe
and a wit, harmless and wicked, weak in principle and resolute
by constitution, cowardly in appearance and brave in reality,
a knave without malice, a liar without deceit, and a knight,
a gentleman, and a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or
honour.' Such a series of paradoxes proves beyond doubt that
Falstaff's character presents a baffling problem which even the
most subtle analysis can only in part hope to solve.
It is essential to recognize that, though Sir John is seen from
the beginning of the play amidst low surroundings, yet he
belongs by birth to the world of breeding and culture, and its
marks are visible on him to the last. He was page in his youth
to the Duke of Norfolk, and he may well have been then a slim
enough stripling to give some justification to his boast, 'I was
not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any
alderman's thumb-ring.' That he mixed with men of the
highest rank is shown in his reminiscence of the pun he made
to John of Gaunt in the tilt-yard, when he hit Shallow on the
head. His talk is full of allusions only possible to a man of
education, even though he applies them in a perverse way. He
quotes readily from the Bible; he has read the cause of apoplexy
in Galen, and can discourse thereof to the Chief Justice; in his
letters he imitates the honourable Romans in brevity.' He is
familiar with the drama, and his burlesque of Henry IV reprov-
ing the prince is done in King Cambyses' vein'; while it
further shows an acquaintance with the literary peculiarities of
Euphuism, and the ceremonial etiquette of the Court. Nor does
Falstaff forget his social superiority to his companions, even
when he has flung away every remnant of true dignity. The
drawers at the Boar's Head speak of him to Henry as a proud
Jack,' and when he is deluding Mistress Quickly with promises.
6
T
274
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
(
of marriage, he desires her to be no more so familiarity with
poor people,' as cre long they will call her 'madam.' His very
signature shows him to be punctilious as to degrees of intimacy.
He is 'Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers
and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe.'
How comes it that a man, with the accomplishments of
a gentleman and a scholar, and with no small share of class
pride, should be found, when his hair is white, as the centre of
a crew of roisterers in a tavern? The answer is contained in
Falstaff's soliloquy on honour, 'What is honour? A word.
What is that word, honour? Air. A trim reckoning There-
fore I'll none of it; honour is a mere scutcheon, and so ends
my catechism.' We have seen the various modes in which
Hotspur, Glendower, and Prince Henry pursued honour. To
Falstaff they are all alike foolishness. Honour is in his eyes an
impalpable figment, which has no place among the solid realities
of life. For to him nothing is real of which the senses do not
give direct evidence; he is a materialist to the finger-tips, and
his whole existence is based on the denial of moral law. For
this his corpulence must be held partly responsible; it would
need an unusually spiritual nature not to adapt itself to such an
environment, and there is truth in Falstaff's plea that he has
'more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty.' One
who is so physically clogged in the struggle for the ideal may
well refuse even to enter the arena, and be content to take his
ease at his inn.
But Falstaff finds that the moral law which he ignores is
recognized by the world at large, and he therefore turns against
it an apparently irresistible weapon-his humour. Laughter is
the solvent by which he seeks to get rid of all awkward facts
which clash with his theory of existence. Here again his bodily
appearance is a factor, for it irresistibly provokes mirth. As
he himself declares, 'Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me;
the brain of this foolish-compounded clay man is not able to
invent anything that tends to laughter more than I invent or
is invented on me. I am not only witty myself but the cause
that wit is in other men.' It gives him infinite delight to be
able to make Prince Henry laugh without intervallums' while
XI]
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Henry IV.
he cannot abide the sober-blooded Prince John, for a man
cannot make him laugh.'
But Falstaff's power of exciting laughter depends far more on
his mental than his bodily characteristics. (The play of his
intellect is as nimble and keen as the movements of his un-
wieldy bulk are lethargic. It is the delight in this play of his
faculties that, far more than any deliberate attempt to deceive,
leads to his stupendous lies, while in case of detection he
always makes sure of escaping discomfiture by some in-
genious, unlooked-for manoeuvre. Thus in recounting how
he was set upon at Gadshill, he gradually expands the disguised
Prince and Poins into eleven men in buckram suits with three in
Kendal green. At this point the Prince confronts Falstaff with
the true facts, and thinking that he has trapped him, cries,
'What trick, what device, what starting-hole canst thou now
find out to hide thee from this open and apparent shame?'
But Falstaff doubles upon his enemy with marvellous skill. He
had known him from the first, but was it for him to kill the
heir-apparent? He had shown the instinct of the valiant lion
which will not touch the true prince. So afterwards on the
field of Shrewsbury, when he claims to have killed Hotspur,
Henry answers incautiously, 'Percy 1 killed myself, and saw
thee dead.' Falstaff at once scizes on the handle given him by
the last words, 'Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is
given to lying. I grant you I was down and out of breath, and
so was he, but we rose both at an instant and fought a long
hour by Shrewsbury clock.' And Sir John's monstrous lies
have the slight kernel of justification that he is not a coward in
the strict sense. He may run away in the presence of danger,
but he never loses his self-command. Thus, even after the
exploit at Gadshill, Henry has no hesitation in procuring him
a charge of foot in the royalist army. It is true that all sense of
soldierly duty is so dead in him that he misuses the king's
press' for his personal profit, and finally gathers together such
a crew of tattered prodigals that he is ashamed to march through
Coventry with them. Nor in the battle itself is it the part of
a captain to lead his ragamuffins where they are so peppered
that but three are left alive, while he turns tail with a bottle of
T 2
276
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
L
sack in his pocket. Yet even to have time for thoughts of self-
indulgence at such a crisis argues considerable presence of mind,
which is further shown when he counterfeits death to escape the
attack of Douglas. And it is noticeable that Falstaff acquires
a reputation for knightly service at Shrewsbury, which can
scarcely spring entirely from the fable of his having killed
Hotspur. He is sent with Prince John against the northern
rebels; as he boasts himself, 'There is not a dangerous action
can peep out his head but I am thrust upon it.' And though
he again makes use of the muster-roll to fill his pockets, and
arrives at the camp when all is over, yet he has sufficient repu-
tation with the enemy for the valorous Sir John Coleville of the
Dale to think no shame of surrendering to him.
Falstaff's cowardice thus springs less from 'instinct' than
from a desire to ridicule that idea of honour which he looks
upon as an airy nothing. It is only part of the vast system of
imposture by which he seeks to utterly reverse facts. Thus he,
who is written down old with all the characters of age, cries to
the merchants at Gadshill, 'What! ye knaves, young men must
live,' and parries the rebukes of the Chief Justice with the retort,
'You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are
young: you measure the heat of our livers with the bitterness
of your galls.' He, the corrupter of youth, reproaches the
Prince with having done 'much harm' upon him, and cries out
indignantly, Company, villainous company hath been the
spoil of me.' He, who takes purses on the highway, complains
of having his pockets picked in the tavern. He, whose bulk is
due to unlimited consumption of sack and sugar, invokes
'a plague of sighing and grief; it blows a man up like a
bladder.'
Such a power of turning realities topsy-turvy is a complete
defence against prickings of conscience. Sir John indeed at
times talks of repenting, but this is merely an additional instance
of his method of utterly reversing facts. And thus, as the play
progresses, he gradually sinks lower and lower. The scenes in
which he appears in Part II have lost much of the earlier
Bacchanalian brilliancy. We feel the atmosphere grow ranker
as we see Falstaff arrested for a beggarly debt at the suit of mine
XI]
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Henry IV.
hostess of the tavern, or cuddling Doll Tearsheet and courting
her for busses! Even in his intercourse with Justice Shallow,
Sir John's rapacity appears in a more undisguised and cynical
form than before: 'If the young dace be a bait for the old pike,
I see no reason in the law of nature, but I may snap at him.'
Yet to the end Falstaff exercises a fascination even over his
victims. Mistress Quickly breaks down when she bids him
farewell, as he goes off to the wars; and Doll, who loves him
'better than e'er a scurvy young boy of them all,' cannot speak
for emotion. Bardolph is content to be the butt of his wit for
two and thirty years, and Master Shallow is so delighted with
his company that he forbids him to take his leave. Therefore
when Pistol brings the news that the old king is dead, Sir John
has reason to think that Harry the Fifth will be to him all that
Prince Hal has been, and that the laws of England are now at
his commandment. He is sternly and speedily undeceived.
The new king casts him off before the world, and for the first
time Falstaff finds no retort spring to his lips. He deludes
himself for a moment with the idea that he will be sent for in
private, but this hope is quickly dispelled, and the hitherto
invincible Sir John is borne away crushed. Pistol is not far
wrong when he declares a little later, 'his heart is fracted and
corroborate.' Falstaff had laughed conscience out of existence,
but at his heart, unknown to himself, there lurked one vulner-
able spot-his affection for his 'tender lambkin,' sweet Hal.
Through that spot he is now mortally pierced, and hence it is
that the new king's attitude seems harsh and ungenerous. But
it is founded upon an imperious necessity. Falstaff's whole
career has been an attempt to defeat moral laws and facts by
the resources of infinite humour, while Henry's main characteristic
is his loyal, instinctive fidelity to those very facts and laws
Thus though the knight fascinates the 'son of England' for
a time, their cardinal principles of life are diametrically opposed,
and the crisis that calls Henry to a throne cannot but sever him
from a companion so 'surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane.'
Yet while we feel that Falstaff meets with a just condemnation,
we find it difficult to part with him for ever.
There is in every
man, however strenuous and serious, a touch of Falstaff, a germ
278
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of rebellious temper against the stern immutability of moral law,
and a longing for a world with a less remorseless logic of facts
than our own.
It is this instinct that makes us lenient to Sir
John; and that Shakspere himself wished us not to think unkindly
of him at the last is evident from the pathetic account of his
death by Mistress Quickly in Henry V. "A went away, an it
had been any christom child,' playing with flowers, smiling on
his finger ends, and babbling o' green fields. At last Sir John
was once more what he had so long pretended to be-young,
with the youth of second childhood. And with the name of his
childhood's God upon his lips, the great Reality recognized for
one brief closing moment, Sir John goes to 'Arthur's bosom.'
The mighty personality of Falstaff dwarfs the subordinate
comic characters of the play, but this is a calculated effect, for
just when Sir John grows completely bankrupt in reputation
and in fortune, Pistol, Shallow, and Silence make their appearance,
and, in contrast with this pack of boobies, the knight, even
when most deeply degraded, maintains something of heroic
proportions. It is a steep descent from Falstaff's magnificent
duel with honour, and his Titanic mendacities, to the puny
impostures of these swaggerers and poltroons. Ancient Pistol
is one of that small class of Shaksperean figures who do little
more than caricature some passing fashion of the Elizabethan
age, and who have therefore lost something of their original
interest. An abject coward, who will not swagger with a Barbary
hen, if her feathers turn back in any show of resistance,' he
seeks to cloak his poverty of spirit with grandiose phrases
borrowed from the most bombastic Elizabethan tragedies, and
strung together with an utter disregard of sense.
We are
reminded of Moth's epigram in Love's Labour's Lost: 'He has
been at a feast of learning, and has stolen the scraps,' though it
is the learning not of the study, but of the playhouse, where the
ears of the groundlings were tickled with rhodomontade.
A meaningless medley of classical allusions to Caesars, Canni-
bals and Trojan Greeks, King Cerberus, and fell Alecto's
snake, pours from his lips, but this parody of culture fails to
impose even on the most ignorant. Doll Tearsheet herself
cannot abide this 'mouldy rogue,' whom she has abandoned in
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Henry IV.
favour of Falstaff, and whose noisy vapourings cause him to be
thrust out of the far from select company at the Boar's Head
tavern. Even the addle-pated Shallow grows restive under
Pistol's preliminary flourishes about Africa and golden joys,'
when he arrives in Gloucestershire with tidings of the king's
death: 'If, sir, you come with news from the Court, I take it
there is but two ways; either to utter them or conceal them.'
Yet Shallow as critic of Pistol presents an edifying picture of the
blind leading the blind, for the Gloucestershire justice of the
peace is a match with Falstaff's ancient in vainglorious loquacity.
With him it takes the form of a tiresome reiteration of common-
place phrases, as if there was a leakage in his speech, and of
imaginary reminiscences of dare-devil doings in his youth, when
he lay at Clement's Inn with Falstaff, and was called mad
Shallow. But Sir John is too great an expert in the art of lying
to be deceived by such feeble braggadocio; he 'sees the bottom
of Shallow,' and determines to 'snap at him' for his own ends,
and indeed the fussy justice who lets Falstaff 'misuse the king's
press damnably,' and who gives corrupt countenance in a law-
suit to William Visor of Wincot, though he knows him to be
an arrant knave, amply deserves to be fleeced by his shrewd
visitor. But on the ladder of inanity there are many descending
steps, and below even Shallow stands his cousin and colleague
Silence, a laconic echo of his garrulous kinsman, save when
the sack mounts to his brain and he proves his mettle by trolling
forth boisterous snatches from tavern-tunes. Yet it is hard to
look askance at the foolish pair, for Shallow's house and garden,
where the most agitating topics are the price of a good yoke of
bullocks at Stamford fair, and whether the headland shall be
sown with wheat, form a pleasant resting-place after the dust
and din of camps and battlefields, or the recking atmosphere of
the Boar's Head. We partake with grateful imagination of the
pastoral fare of some pigeons, a couple of short-legged hens,
a joint of mutton, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws which
William cook has ready,' followed by a last year's pippin of
Shallow's own graffing, eaten in the orchard, with a dish of
caraways and then to bed.
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
HENRY V is the fulfilment of a promise made in the epilogue.
to Henry IV, Part II, and doubtless followed immediately upon
that play. Two important pieces of evidence fix its date with
unusual certainty. It is the first play which Meres does not
mention, and it must therefore have appeared later than 1598.
But still more decisive is the allusion in the chorus before Act v
to the campaign of Essex in Ireland, and the prophecy that he
would return in good time bringing rebellion broached on his
sword'.' These words, destined to be so bitterly mocked by
the event, could only have been written between April and
October, 1599, and the play thus belongs to the earlier part of
that year. A quarto edition appeared in 1600, followed by two
others in 1602 and 1608, but these make the impression of
pirated and fragmentary versions of the genuine text, which is
given for the first time in the folio of 16232.
The sources of
the play are, as in the case of Henry IV, Holinshed's Chronicle
and The Famous Victories of Henry V. Shakspere again follows
Holinshed with singular fidelity in the serious parts of the action,
while he adds comparatively little comic relief, and this of
curiously unequal quality. Thus the play fulfils stringent
dramatic requirements even less than Henry IV. It lacks
both plot and conflict of passion, and it does not compensate
for these defects by a rich variety of characters. The creative
power that had been expended with equal lavishness upon a
Prince Hal, a Hotspur, and a Falstaff is now massed upon one
central overshadowing figure, that of King Henry V. Shakspere's
aspiration in the opening lines of the chorus to 'ascend the
¹ Simpson, in his paper On the political use of the stage in Shakspere's
time' (New Shakspere Society, 1874), seeks to prove that the play is
intended to support the policy of Essex.
The quarto of 16c0 (of which the later ones are reprints) contains 1.623
lines, while the folio has 3 379, i.e. more than double the number. The
quarto omits the prologues and the epilogues, Act i. 1, Act iii. 1, and
Act iv. 2, besides about 500 lines in various scenes of the play. More-
over, through changes in the distribution of the parts, Ely, Westmoreland,
Bedford, Macmorris, Jamy, and other minor characters disappear from the
dialogue. This is evidently due to the desire to limit the number of rôles
for theatrical purposes. The quarto is therefore taken from a stage
version, abridged either by Shakspere himself, or, as is more probable, by
another hand. Of this version it is a corrupt and probably surreptitious
reprint.
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Henry V.
brightest heaven of invention' is far from fulfilled in the purely
dramatic sphere. The plane of interest is in fact less dramatic
than epic, as the use of elaborate narrative prologues is enough
to prove. The underlying theme of the whole series of historical
plays, the greatness of England, here rises to the surface, and
sweeps before it all minor motives. The King himself towers in
the forefront of the scene less as a gigantic personality like
Richard III than as the embodiment of national strength
and glory. He is even more than the mirror of all Christian
kings,' he is the personified genius of his race. What Achilles
is to the Greeks, Roland to the Franks, Arthur to the Celts,
that Shakspere's Henry V is to the Anglo-Saxons. And,
like these kindred heroes, he is typical of his folk in its hour
of triumph over a dangerous foe. Thus the three elements of
interest in the drama are the King himself, the nation whom
he leads to victory, and the rival nation whom they jointly
overthrow,
Henry V is, in all essentials, Prince Hal grown to maturity
and seated on a throne. The abandonment of the looser habits
of his youth, which had been in progress during Henry IV,
Part II, has now been completed. The Archbishop of
Canterbury shows some lack of insight when he declares of the
King, after his father's death :
'Never was such a sudden scholar made;
Never came reformation in a flood,
With such a heady currance, scouring faults.'
His brother of Ely is more penetrating when he compares
Henry to the strawberry that grows underneath the nettle: 'so
the prince obscured his contemplation under the veil of wild-
ness.' But if Henry has shaken off his youthful follies, he has
retained his faculty for adapting himself to all sorts and condi-
tions of men. As in Eastcheap he had caught the very spirit of
ale-house freemasonry, so in his altered sphere he excites the
wonder of all hearers by discoursing upon divinity, war, and
statecraft, as if each had been his peculiar and lifelong interest.
The charm that had formerly been felt by roistering 'Corinthians'
is now exercised over grave prelates, who vote him an unpre-
cedently large subsidy for an expedition against France. In
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
entering upon this foreign quarrel Henry is carrying out his
father's death-bed counsel, but from the first he shows that his
policy is to be swayed, not by Machiavellian canons of self-
interest, but by principles of equity. Henry's moral integrity
deepens, after his coronation, into profound religious feeling,
while his modesty takes the form of humble dependence upon
God, whose name is henceforth constantly upon his lips. Thus,
before waking the sleeping sword of war, he asks the Archbishop
of Canterbury whether he may, 'with right and conscience,'
make the claim to the French throne, handed down from his
heroic ancestors, the two Edwards. The Archbishop's lengthy
exposition of the Salic law may neither satisfy the strict require-
ments of poetry nor of accurate historical jurisprudence, but it
is sufficient to convince Henry of the justice of his cause, and
stirred by appeals from prelates and nobles alike, he bursts forth
exultingly:
'France being ours, we'll bend it to our awe,
Or break it all to pieces: or there we'll sit,
Ruling in large and ample empery,
O'er France, and all her almost kingly dukedoms,
Or lay these bones in an unworthy urn,
Tombless, with no remembrance over them.'
The king, in such a mood, may well feel stung to the quick by
the Dauphin's mocking present of tennis-balls, to remind him
of the giddy courses of his youth, though his irritation does not
find entirely happy expression in words which seem to cast
a slur on his own court:
'We never valued this poor seat of England;
And therefore, living hence, did give ourself
To barbarous licence.
•
But tell the Dauphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king, and show my sail of greatness
When I do rouse me in my throne of France.'
But vainglorious thoughts are checked in a moment by the
humble reflection, 'This lies all within the will of God, to whom
I do appeal.' Henry's trust in heaven is not the nerveless
pietism which merely waits upon Providence; if he and his
nation are to be the instruments of God, they must be equipped
for the divine service. Thus zealous preparation is made for
the great enterprise, and 'honour's thought reigns solely in the
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Henry V.
For the con-
breast of every man'-or almost every man.
spiracies of the previous reigns have a last echo in the plot of
Cambridge, Grey, and Scroop to kill Henry before he embarks
at Southampton. The discovery of their disloyalty, especially
that of his familiar friend, Lord Scroop, rouses him to eloquent
wrath, not on personal grounds, but because such treachery in
one who seemed the embodiment of every virtue leaves a blot
upon humanity at large :
'I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.'
The shattered ideal of friendship claims a meed of tears, but
the stern sense of justice, as formerly in the case of Falstaff,
prevails over private feelings, and the traitors who have plotted
their country's ruin are dismissed to their doom.
The scene shifts to Harfleur, and while the siege is in progress
we have our first glimpse of the interior of the English camp.
Among its 'culled and choice-drawn cavaliers' we are surprised
to find Pistol and Bardolph, but Shakspere probably consulted
the wishes of his audience in prolonging the careers of these
low-comedy figures, and in adding to them a third of like
kidney, Corporal Nym. Pistol, who has married Mistress
Quickly, follows the camp as a sutler, to suck, to suck, the
very blood to suck.' Nym and Bardolph are his sworn brothers
in filching. They will steal anything, and call it purchase.'
But this trio of 'swashers,' still steeped in the atmosphere of
Eastcheap, only throws into more vivid relief the true-hearted
soldiers, more expert with the sword than with the tongue, who
form the majority of the invading hosts. Scotch, Irish, and Welsh,
who in former reigns had been found in rebellion against the
throne of the Plantagenets, are now, under Henry's auspicious
leadership, banded together with the English in its support.
Captain Jamy, the Scotchman, has the taciturnity and dogged
resolution of his race; 'Ay'll de gud service, or ay'll lig i' the
ground for it.' Macmorris, the Irishman, by his manner of
speech, suggests that Shakspere had but scant familiarity with
Hibernian dialects, but he is a true son of Erin in his hot-
headed impulsiveness ('so God sa' me, 'tis shame to stand
284
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
still; it is shame, by my hand; and there is throats to be cut,
and works to be done'), and in his readiness to come to blows
with Fluellen over a question of personal dignity. Fluellen, the
Welshman, is a more elaborate and original type. In quaint,
pedantic fashion he is a personification of that spirit of discipline
which gives strength to the invading force. Military operations,
in his eyes, must be conducted according to the 'true and
ancient prerogatives and laws of the wars,' which are chiefly to
be found in the disciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans.'
But his martinet exterior barely hides a sound simplicity of
nature, which is imposed upon for a time by the swaggerer
Pistol, whom he takes to be as valiant a man as Mark Antony.
Yet when Pistol begs him to intercede for Bardolph, who has
crowned his career by the robbery of a church, and has been
sentenced to death, Fluellen sturdily refuses, for if, look you, he
were my brother, I would desire the Duke to use his good
pleasure, and put him to execution: for discipline ought to
be used.'
Bardolph's fate illustrates the stringent code maintained within
the English camp, but Henry knows well that there are moments
when an excited soldiery is deaf to the word of command, and,
by a highly-coloured description of the horrors attendant on
a successful storm, he induces the Governor of Harfleur to sur-
render the town. His forces, however, have been weakened by
sickness, and he determines to fall back upon Calais, but is met
upon his march by the French king's ambassador, bearing an
insolent defiance from his master. Henry's attitude at this
crisis shows a noble simplicity, worthy of the hero of Shrews-
bury. Scorning all politic artifices, he confesses that his army
is reduced in numbers and enfeebled; he is not seeking an
enemy, but should he find one in his path he will not turn back :
'We would not seek a battle as we are;
Nor, as we are, we say we will not shun it:
So tell your master.
Such an answer scarcely serves as an eirenicon, and on the
plains of Agincourt the slender English force finds itself hemmed
in by a mighty hostile array.
In his description of the French host and its leaders, Shakspere
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285
Henry V.
gives another masterly study of the decadent chivalry of the later
Middle Ages. The weaknesses which had caused Hotspur's
fall are here exhibited in broader working, and in aggravated
form, with but a wan reflection of the lustre shed round that
brilliant figure. In the English camp burghers and yeomen.
are prominent, but with their opponents the common soldier is
a cypher, and all attention is focussed on the 'high dukes, great
princes, barons, lords, and knights,' whose grandiloquent muster-
roll flows from the King's lips. The general impression created
is of a society, not without touches of high spirit and polish,
though taking fantastic forms, but arrogant, frivolous, and lacking
in moral fibre. Shakspere, however, shows his usual instinct
for gradation, and of the three figures whom he singles out from
the rest, the Constable falls least completely short of the true
standard of knighthood. He shows appreciation of his royal
foe, and recognizes the stubborn courage of the English
soldiery: 'Give them great meals of beef, and iron and steel,
they will eat like wolves, and fight like devils.' It is in his
favour also that he can pierce through the bravado of the
Dauphin, and is not afraid to speak his mind about so exalted
a personage. For in the heir to the French throne all the
defects of the moribund mediaeval system of arms appear in
intensified and contemptible form. The affection of the gallant
ider for his gallant steed, which is a touching feature in genuine
chivalry, is parodied by the high-flown passion of this carpet-
knight for his horse, whom he styles his mistress, and in whose
praise he indites a sonnet. With insolent levity he under-
rates his foes: Henry is in his eyes 'a vain, giddy, shallow,
humorous youth,' for whom tennis-balls are a fitting tribute,
while his followers are as little to be feared as if they were merely
busied with a Whitsun morris-dance. On the eve of the
battle he chafes at the delay in his expected triumph, 'Will
it never be day? I will trot to-morrow a mile, and my way
shall be paved with English faces.' Yet even the Dauphin
may perhaps rank above his admirer, the Duke of Orleans, who
extols him 'as simply the most active gentleman of France,'
and who in virtue of a superficial smartness in repartee
despises the fat-brained followers of the English king.
!
286
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
The contrast between the two opposing armies finds its cul-
minating expression in the majestic piece of descriptive verse
which forms the prologue to Act iv :
'From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night,
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fixed sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other's watch:
Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames
Each battle sees the other's umber'd face.
The confident and over-lusty French.
Do the low-rated English play at dice.
The poor condemned English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
•
Sit patiently, and inly ruminate
The morning's danger. . . O! now, who will behold
The royal captain of this ruined band
Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent,
Let him cry "Praise and glory on his head!"
For forth he goes and visits all his host,
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile,
And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen.'
The passage has inevitably suggested comparison with those
imperishable pictures by Herodotus and Aeschylus of the flaunt-
ing splendour of the Persian array, and the modest steadfast-
ness of the Grecian levies before Thermopylae and Salamis.
But another even closer parallel, and one of peculiar interest,
has escaped notice. The fifteenth century Scotch poet, Barbour,
in his poem, The Bruce, gives a vivid description of the cam-
paign which ended at Bannockburn. In the scenes preceding
the battle Robert Bruce plays the part of Shakspere's Henry, and
is knit to his followers by similarly close bonds, while the English
host anticipates in its bearing the forces of the Dauphin. Shak-
spere far excels Barbour in splendour of diction, but both poets
have fastened with kindred instinct upon the thrilling conflict
between a citizen militia captained by a patriot king, and a
feudal array, gorgeous in the outward pageantry of war, but
ineffective against its humbler foe. Indeed, it is not altogether
fanciful to see in this magnificent battle-piece the consumma-
tion of that predominant element in the old English epic, which
celebrates the mighty deeds of the chief at the head of his folk
weaponed for the fray.
'
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Henry V.
But Henry is something more than a pagan war-lord';
he is a soldier of God, who at this supreme crisis can cheer-
fully discover a soul of goodness in things evil,' and point
out to his brother Bedford that their bad neighbour makes
them early stirrers,' besides acting as an outward con-
science' to admonish them to be prepared for their end. And
the same note is struck when, moved by the impulse of his
earlier days, he mingles in disguise just before dawn with a
group of common soldiers, who are discussing the king's
responsibility for the souls of his subjects cut off by war in the
midst of their sins. Throwing himself into the argument, he
maintains that the king is guiltless in the matter, and that war is
often God's 'beadle' wherewith He arrests and punishes men
for the unrequited crimes which they have committed in peace.
'Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick
man in his bed-wash every mote out of his conscience: and
dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time
was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained.' This
serious vein is interrupted for a moment by an outburst of the
old jocular spirit, when he takes up a formal challenge to quarrel
from the rough-tongued Williams, and exchanges gages with
him; but as soon as he is left alone, he unpacks his heart in
words that show this strong man staggering under the burden of
his great office. Nowhere does Shakspere emphasize so unmis-
takably his cardinal conception of kingship as involving duties
rather than privileges. The ruler must miss the 'infinite heart's-
ease' that other men enjoy, and wins in exchange only 'thrice-
gorgeous ceremony,' which cannot charm to the bed of state the
sound repose granted to the meanest son of toil. Thus Henry,
like his father, envies his poorest subjects the blessing of sweet
slumber; but remorse and fear helped to drive sleep from Boling-
broke's eyes, while with the younger king this is solely due to his
overwhelming sense of responsibility. He feels indeed the
burden of his own and his father's trespasses, but with practical
religious ardour he has done what he can to make amends by
reinterring the body of King Richard, building two chantries.
where the priests sing for his soul, and keeping in yearly pay
five hundred poor who intercede for the divine mercy. With
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[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
characteristic humility, he crowns these 'good works' with the
offering of a contrite heart, entirely in the spirit of his counsel to
the soldiers:
All that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.'
辈
​And thus with purged conscience he can appeal to the God of
battles to steel his soldiers' hearts, and, trusting to the goodness
of his cause, can cheerfully rebuff Westmoreland's wish for ten
thousand men from England:
'God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me,
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!'
Yet the honour which Henry wins upon the field of battle is
not completely untarnished. Shakspere, by too strict fidelity to
Holinshed's narrative, casts a stain upon his hero's character.
While the fight is still raging, though the English have had the
advantage, Henry orders a massacre of all his prisoners'. It
is true that he had declared before Harfleur that in time of war
a man ‘must imitate the action of the tiger'; but this cannot
excuse such an atrocity in the hero of Agincourt, who, as the
hero of Shrewsbury, had wept tears of generous pity over a fallen
foe. Apart from this, Henry proves himself a peerless leader of
men on this day of days, when 'in plain shock and even play of
battle' his army, with the most trifling loss, slays ten thousand
Frenchmen. But the greatness of his triumph lights no spark
of egotism in his breast; it deepens his sense of dependence on
the divine will:
O God! thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to thy arm alone
Ascribe we all.'
And in similar spirit he afterwards, on his entry into London,
1 Shakspere goes even further than Holinshed, for he ascribes the order
merely to Henry's alarm at a reinforcement of the enemy, and not to his
indignation at the cowardly slaughter by some French fugitives of the boys
who were guarding the baggage and the royal tent. This incident, which
the chronicler assigns as the original cause of the savage command, is only
mentioned by Fluellen and Gower in a characteristic conversation after the
order has been given, and in any case such a bloodthirsty retaliation does
not suit the character of Shakspere's Henry.
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289
Henry V.
forbids his bruised helmet and his bended sword' to be borne
before him through the city:-
Giving full trophy, signal, and ostent,
Quite from himself to God.'
Intermingled with the stately battle scenes are humorous
episodes, falling however very far short of the brilliant comedy
of Henry IV. The insipid dialogue between Pistol and his
prisoner, of which the sole object seems to be the ridicule of
French pronunciation, is perhaps the feeblest which the
dramatist ever penned. More interesting are the scenes
which develop the character of Fluellen and increasingly
reveal the good sense and good heart which underlie the
Welshman's uncouth forms of speech. The comparison be-
tween Alexander the Great and Henry is ludicrous, on the score
that there is a river in Macedon and a river at Monmouth, and
there are salmons in both; but there is wonderful shrewdness
in the observation that as Alexander killed his friend Cleitus,
being in his ales and his cups; so also Henry Monmouth, being
in his right wits and his good judgements, turned away the fat
knight with the great belly-doublet.' The sturdy Welshman is
irresistibly attracted by the integrity of the king, whom he claims
to be of his own blood. 'By Jeshu, I am your majesty's
countryman. I care not who know it. I will confess
I will confess it to all
the 'orld. I need not be ashamed of your majesty, praised be
God, so long as your majesty is an honest man.'
Such a
declaration, however out of fashion' in its form, is a sterling
diploma of merit which Henry is the very man to appreciate, and
he soon turns this free-spoken loyalty to humorous account by
persuading Fluellen to wear Williams' glove, on the plea that it
was plucked from Alençon, and that any one who challenges
it is an enemy of the king. The Welshman receives Williams'
blow, and plumes himself upon having brought to light a most
contagious treason,' but as soon as the situation is explained, he
bears no malice against an assailant who has 'mettle enough in
his belly'; and when Henry fills the soldier's glove with crowns,
he follows with an offer of twelve pence, and the precept to
serve God and keep out of 'prawls and prabbles.' How differ-
ently does he deal afterwards with Pistol, when he makes
U
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[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
•
the swaggerer, who on Davy's day has given him bread
and salt wherewith to eat his leek, himself swallow the despised
vegetable, with a good cudgelling as sauce. And what charac-
teristic breadth of mind does Shakspere show, what superiority
to petty racial prejudices, when, in this play, devoted above all
others to the glorification of England, he defends an ancient
Welsh tradition, begun upon an honourable respect, and through
the mouth of Gower warns the mocker to 'henceforth let
a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition.' If in
Glendower the dramatist portrayed the weaknesses of the
Celts, he has redressed the balance in Fluellen, who is a type
of their shrewd mother-wit, their loyalty to a leader, and their
martial valour.
Thus even the humorous episodes have an underlying seri-
ousness of purpose, and it is therefore disappointing to find that,
in the final scene of the drama, Shakspere, by an unseasonable
display of his comic power, lowers in some degree the dignity of
his hero. The Princess Katharine of France had already been
introduced in an unpleasantly suggestive dialogue in broken
English with her waiting-woman, and we now find Henry
paying her court in terms that remind us of Hotspur's conversa-
tions with his wife. One does not expect Henry to indulge in
the ardent protestations of a Romeo, to 'look greenly nor gasp
out his eloquence,' but there is a mean between amorous rhap-
sodies and the 'down-right oaths' of this very 'plain soldier'
manner of wooing. Simplicity and sincerity are the basis of
Henry's character, but these alone do not give his figure its
massive proportions. For this there is something more needed
—a grandeur and glow of soul which shine forth in him as king,
warrior, and judge, but which fail him as a lover. In wooing
Katharine, Henry is wooing France, which he loves so well that
he will not part with a village of it, and in the midst of his
somewhat highly flavoured banter, he keeps a vigilant eye on the
articles of alliance. This mixture of jocoseness and shrewdness
is scarcely the fitting final attitude of the hero of the great historical
trilogy, the character whose development from youth to man-
hood Shakspere has traced with such loving care. But the
dramatist in this closing scene is perhaps occupied less with
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Henry V.
personal than with national considerations; and írom the latter
point of view there could be no more appropriate climax to the
historical plays than this marriage treaty, whereby England, at
unity with herself, is joined in 'incorporate league' to France,
and the enemies of a hundred years are brought together-though
for but a short time, as Henry VI had already shown-under
one imperial sway.
CHAPTER XII.
THE GOLDEN PRIME OF COMEDY.
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR forms the obvious
link between the main historical group and the brilliant comedies
of Shakspere's maturity. Its date cannot be fixed with absolute
certainty, but in all probability it followed closely upon Henry V.
It is not mentioned by Meres in 1598, but a quarto edition
appeared in 1602, which is, however, very imperfect when com-
pared with the folio text of 1623. Analogies to incidents in
the drama have been found in a story from the Pecorone, in
The Two Lovers of Pisa, and other works, but in dealing with
stock comic situations it is not necessary to suppose that Shak-
spere borrowed them. The bulk of the play, in any case, is
of Shakspere's own invention, and consists in large part of
characters and themes which had already done duty, but are
here further developed. Falstaff and Shallow are taken from
Henry IV, Part II, Nym and Pistol appear in much the same
light as in Henry V, and, what has perhaps not been so fully
noticed, Dr. Caius and Sir Hugh Evans, with their broken
English, are the counterparts of the Princess Alice and Fluellen.
But while there is this obvious general correspondence between
The Merry Wives and the immediately preceding historical
plays, all attempts to dovetail them in particulars prove un-
satisfactory. Apart from the problem of the relation of Falstaff
in this play to the carlier Falstaff, there are numerous minor
difficulties. As Sir John still seems to maintain his credit at
the court, we are forced to put his amorous adventures before
his banishment by Henry V, and we think of them as taking
The Merry Wives of Windsor.
293
place during the period of his intercourse with Shallow after
the northern war. But while in Henry IV, Part II, Shallow
treats Falstaff with effusive cordiality, here we find him and his
nephew Slender abusing the knight and his followers for all
manner of trespasses. Again, if the withered serving-man
Bardolph is dismissed in this play by Falstaff to become tapster
to mine host of the Garter, how is it that in Henry V he is
sufficiently vigorous to take part in the French campaign? And,
strangest of all, the Mrs. Quickly of the play, the servant of
Dr. Caius, is evidently an entirely different personage from the
genial hostess of the Boar's Head tavern. It is thus clear that
Shakspere was by no means at pains to secure harmony of
detail between The Merry Wives and the kindred scenes in
the historical plays, and this may be partly due to the fact
that the piece was apparently written in haste. The well-
known tradition mentioned by Dennis in 1702 asserts that it
was composed in fourteen days to please Elizabeth, who wished
to see Falstaff in love; and this is supported by the unique
preponderance of prose over poetry in the play. Almost the
only scenes written in blank verse are those in which Fenton
appears, while rhyme is not used except for the dialogue of
the counterfeit elves in Act v. Even the prose approaches
more nearly to a purely conversational level than in any other
of Shakspeare's works.
Apart, however, from this lack of elevation in style, and from
a certain slenderness in the drawing of characters, The Merry
Wives of Windsor is an admirable farcical comedy, breezy in
its movement, full of capital situations, and, at the same time,
satisfying strict literary requirements with a skilfully interwoven
major and minor plot. It deals purely with bourgeois life, and
critics have seen in this an additional evidence that it was prc-
pared for the special benefit of Elizabeth and her train, who
would relish this vigorous sketch of middle-class society, with
its manners and morals so entirely at variance with those of
a refined and dissolute court. The allusions in Act v. to
Windsor Castle, and to the chairs and insignia of the Knights
of the Garter, seem even to suggest the scene of the first
performance, though it is questionable whether Elizabethan
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
gallants could have entirely enjoyed the spectacle of one of
their own order, however degraded, suffering discomfiture at
the hands of citizens' wives. Nor is it true to say that The
Merry Wives is Shakspere's only play of middle-class life.
The Comedy of Errors, in spite of its classical source and
names, deals with exactly the same social grade; and indeed
the two plays are akin in their unflagging bustle and wealth
of humorous incident, which produce, besides other results,
in one case the cure of a jealous wife, and in the other, of
a jealous husband.
In itself the play offers few difficulties, but as soon as we
begin to compare the Falstaff, who is the centre of its main plot,
with the Falstaff of Henry IV, we are perplexed, not merely on
matters of detail, but on the broad issue of the identity of the
two characters. Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Hudson and Dowden
concur in repudiating this identity, which other critics-among
them Gervinus and Kreyssig- unhesitatingly maintain, asserting
that in The Merry Wives we see the climax of that degenera-
tion in Sir John which had been going on during Henry IV.
According to this view, The Merry Wives of Windsor, whether
written at the Queen's request or not, is no accidental offshoot
from the historical plays, but is an integral part of Shakspere's
scheme, for whose fulfilment it was necessary, not only to cast
round Henry V the true halo of heroism, but to strip Falstaff
of that false halo which his wit had shed over his evil life. If
this was Shakspere's aim, it must be admitted that he carried it
through unflinchingly. Falstaff, as he now appears, is hard
put to it to eke out existence upon an income of ten pounds
a week. Far more to fill his purse than to sate his lusts,
he determines to pay court to Mistress Ford and Mistress Page,
he wives of wealthy burghers, in whom he sees sources of
revenue they shall be my East and West Indies, and I will
trade to them both.' He writes them each identical love-
letters, which Nym and Pistol, in a sudden fit of honour,
refuse to carry, and which have to be delivered by the boy
Robin. Dismissed, in consequence, from the knight's service,
the pair revenge themselves by informing Ford and Page of the
plot against their household peace. Ford, who is of a jealous
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nature, and who wishes to put his wife's fidelity to the test,
seeks out Falstaff under the name of Brook, to encourage him
in his wooing, and at the same time to learn the exact hour
of assignation between the couple. Thus, self-betrayed, Fal-
staff finds his interviews with Mistress Ford cut short by the
entry of her infuriated husband. Once he escapes by creeping
into a buck-basket full of foul linen, where he is half stewed
in his own grease, and then abruptly cooled by a plunge into
Thames waters. Tempted to try his fortune a second time,
he has to hurry into the gown and hat of the witch of Brentford,
only to find himself unmercifully belaboured by Ford's cudgel.
And when finally, in the disguise of Herne the hunter, and
crowned with the horns that he had intended for others, he
proves punctual to a rendezvous in Windsor forest, he mis-
takes a group of dressed-up children for fairies, and suffers
himself to be scorched and pinched by them as long as they
please. At last, convicted of his blunder, he confesses that he is
'an ass,' and makes no attempt to answer the gibes and insults
showered upon his head: 'Well, I am your theme: you have
the start of me: I am dejected. Ignorance itself is a plummet
o'er me: use me as you will.'
But the very extremity of Falstaff's humiliation inevitably raises
the question, Can this be the man who formerly triumphed
over every foe, and was only crushed at the last by the irre-
sistible weight of moral reality embodied in Henry V? The
simplest and most attractive solution of the difficulty is that
adopted by the critics who deny the identity of the two Falstaffs.
But a minute comparison of the characters will scarcely sustain
so sweeping a generalization. It is not only that the Sir John
of The Merry Wives retains all the physical features of the
earlier Sir John, nor that he displays the same sins of lust and
greed. There is a more subtle affinity in the contempt of the
courtier, however false to his own class-standard, for the citizen,
the 'peasant, the mechanical salt-butter rogue,' and in the strange
medley of refinement and vulgarity that flows from his lips.
Do we not hear the voice of the old Sir John in the description
of Mistress Page, the purse-bearer, ‘a region in Guiana, all gold
and bounty,' who 'examined my parts with most judicious.
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ocilliades: sometimes the beam of her view gilded my foot,
sometimes my portly belly'; or in the adroit compliments to
Mistress Ford: Thou wouldst make an absolute courtier; and
the firm fixture of thy foot would give an excellent motion to
thy gait in a semi-circled farthingale'? And have we not the
same perverted scriptural and classical reminiscences, as in
the account to Master Brook' of his second encounter with
Ford; 'He beat me grievously in the shape of a woman; for
in the shape of man, I fear not Goliah with a weaver's beam,
because I know also life is a shuttle'; or when, horned as
a stag, and waiting for Mistress Ford in Windsor Park, he
invokes the assistance of Jove, who became a bull for the sake
of Europa's love? In face of these and similar passages it
is impossible to set down the Falstaff of The Merry Wives as
merely a big-bellied impostor assuming the name and style'
of the Falstaff of Eastcheap. Are we then to adopt the edifying
view of the chief German critics, that here at last we see the
true Falstaff, stript of the distorting haze which his humour had
thrown round him, and that the object of the play is to show
'how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill-
employment'? But here again we meet with difficulties, for the
two Falstaffs are at once the same and not the same. We
have seen that the Sir John of Eastcheap was not in the strict.
sense either a liar or a coward; in the present play he is both.
Formerly his humour had made its most brilliant strokes in
extricating him from apparently hopeless defeats; but now it
forsakes him on every emergency, and delivers him into the
hands of his enemies, to be misused in the grossest fashion.
The erewhile unmatched gladiator in the combats of wit, the
triumphant rival of Prince Hal and the Chief Justice, has for-
gotten the very elements of fence, and every puny whipster
gets his sword. But it is neither moral nor intellectual inferiority
that most completely sunders the earlier and the later Sir John.
It might be urged that we merely see here completed the deteri-
oration that had begun in Henry IV, Part II, though the change
has become one of kind rather than of degree. But the crucial,
difference between the two Falstaffs goes deeper still, down
to the very roots of personality. Out of every man there goes
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forth a 'virtue,' the product of his sum of qualities. The
'virtue' of the original Falstaff was fascination, depending
indeed primarily on his wit, but almost equally on the peculiar
balance of the other elements in his nature. This fascination,
it should be observed, is as all-powerful in Henry IV, Part II,
as it is in Part I, though it is exerted less over Prince Hal, and
more over subordinate figures, like Mistress Quickly, Doll, and
Shallow. But the Falstaff of The Merry Wives is absolutely
devoid of this 'virtue.' In the very first scene, Shallow, who in
Henry IV had begged Sir John to be his guest for another day,
turns upon him with reproaches, and threatens to make a Star-
chamber matter of his misdoings. Even his closest associates
forsake him. Bardolph gladly leaves his service to become
a tapster, and Nym and Pistol, in a sudden access of virtue,
refuse to carry his letter to Mistress Ford. The Merry Wives
do not see in him a seductive tempter against whose assaults
virtue will have to arm herself in complete steel, but merely
a gross compound of animalism, 'a whale, with so many tuns
of oil in his belly,' thrown ashore at Windsor.
Falstaff is no such mere monster of the slime.
his earthiness are the air and fire of genius, and had he been
the wooer, Master Ford would have had real cause to tremble
for his household honour, and would have had to defend it with
finer weapons than a cudgel. It seems therefore impossible
to uphold the judgement of the critics who see in the play a
profound moral aim of exhibiting vice in its nakedness, stripped
of distorting charms--and equally impossible to agree with those
who applaud Shakspere for having, to all appearance, humoured
Elizabeth's wish to see Falstaff in love, and yet made a lay-
figure do duty for the knight whom he had already sent to
Arthur's bosom.' The two Falstaffs are too different to suit
the first theory, and too alike to suit the second. Rather it
might be suggested that the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of
Windsor is Shakspere's literary crime; his caricature (for whatever
reasons) of one of the mightiest of his own creations, to which
a parallel would have been supplied had Cervantes subjected
the Knight of la Mancha during a part of his career to the
odious indignities heaped at a later date on Butler's Hudibras.
But the true
Mingled with
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But if the main plot of the play yields only a qualified pleasure,
ample compensation is found in the underplot, which shows the
defeat of a second mercenary intrigue against loyal love. The
connexion between the plots is of the closest, for two of Falstaff's
intended victims, Page and his wife, are now seen as ready, in
their turn, to victimize their own daughter for selfish ends.
Sweet Ann Page, which is pretty virginity,' with brown hair,
and 'good gifts, and seven hundred pounds and possibilities,' is
the natural magnet to all wooers and match-makers in Windsor.
Such a girl may well aspire to marry somewhat above her station,
and thus Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson, suggests her to
Justice Shallow as a suitable bride for his kinsman, Master Slender.
Shallow, who has left his Gloucestershire seat to complain of
Falstaff to the Council, is, apart from his altered relation to
Sir John, the same vainglorious blockhead as before, though he
now prates less of his wildness and more of his valour in the
past. 'I have seen the time with my long sword, I would have
made you four tall fellows skip like rats.' But it is Shallow's
good fortune to be always accompanied by a foil in the shape
of a satellite yet more brainless than himself, and now that
Silence is gone, Slender, with a little wec face and a little yellow
beard, is a more than sufficient substitute. For in Slender not
only do we see intellect flickering with its last feeble glimmer,
but the will attenuated almost to vanishing-point. Palpitating
on the brink of nonentity, he clings for support to the majestic
personality of Shallow, justice of peace, and coram,' who seeks
to explain to him Sir Hugh's suggestion on his behalf, and to
learn from him whether he can love and marry Anne Page.
But Slender has no self to assert even on so momentous
a matter: 'I will marry her, sir, at your request-I will do
a greater thing than that, upon your request, cousin, in any
reason.' When he sees the lady, he is at a complete standstill
for lack of his Book of Songs and Sonnets, and his Book of
Riddles; and when, a little later, she reappears to bid him to
dinner, he cannot, even on her invitation, summon up sufficient
appetite to overcome an aversion to the smell of hot meat,
though finally he yields to the peremptory command of her father,
and lets himself be driven into the house. Page thinks that
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The Merry Wives of Windsor.
three hundred pounds a year cover all Slender's deficiencies,
and he favours his suit, but it is a very labour of Hercules to
stiffen this invertebrate wooer sufficiently for a formal declara-
tion of his passion. Even when Shallow gives the cue with the
words, 'Mistress Anne, my cousin loves you,' he echoes with
inane impartiality, Ay, that I do: as well as I love any woman
in Glostershire.' And when Shallow is told to let him woo
for himself, and Anne asks, 'What would you with me?' he
serenely disclaims any personal desires or designs whatsoever :
Truly, for my own part I would little or nothing with you.
Your father and my uncle have made motions: if it be my luck,
so; if not, happy man be his dole.'
It is well for Slender that he is securely armed in vapid
cheerfulness against the buffets of fortune, for Mistress Page
is determined not to have him as a son-in-law, and smiles
upon the suit of Dr. Caius, the French physician who has
friends potent at court. Caius, with his broken English,
interlarded with snatches from his mother-tongue, is another
of the few Shaksperean figures designed chiefly to tickle
the ears of the groundlings. Yet he is a skilfully drawn
type of his race, excitable, garrulous, and fantastically sensi-
tive on the score of honour, but a valiant swordsman withal.
It was a delightful thought to embroil him with Parson Evans
for furthering the suit of his rival, Slender, and thus to bring
Celt into collision with Celt. How delicately discriminated are
these two representatives of kindred stocks, ‘Guallia and Gallia,
French and Welsh'! Sir Hugh, who must be Fluellen's twin-
brother in gown and cassock, is to the full as heady and mettle-
some as the doctor, and shows himself, when challenged, to be
a clerical fire-eater, ready to wipe out an insult with the sword. But
mingled with this vehemence is a vein of poetic melancholy which,
on the very duelling-ground, finds vent in snatches of pastoral
song and in 'a great dispositions to cry.' Deeper, however, than
all else is a genial and shrewd moral sense, which shines forth
even through quaintly cumbrous trappings of speech, as when
he declares to the unhappy Ford, 'You suffer for a pad
conscience: your wife is as honest a 'omans as I will desires
among five thousand, and five hundred too'; or when he draws
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the appropriate lesson from Falstaff's adventure in Windsor
forest Sir John Falstaff, serve Got, and leave your desires, and
fairies will not pinse you.' It is strange that he was not sharp
enough to see that Anne Page, for all her demure manner, was
too quick-witted to put up with the brainless Slender for
a husband. While others have been scheming around her,
Anne has chosen for herself. The favoured youth, Master
Fenton, is the typical successful comedy lover. He is highly
born, and has spent his substance in riotous living, as an
associate of the Prince and Poins; but he has all the attractions
and accomplishments that win a maiden's heart. He capers,
he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks
holiday, he smells April and May.' That, however, he is not
merely an elegant trifler is shown in his manly confession to
Anne that while he first wooed her for her father's wealth, he
has learnt to value her above stamps in gold,' and now aims
at the riches of herself. These riches Anne soon finds an
opportunity of entrusting to his guardianship. The fairy-
masquerade, designed for the final chastisement of Falstaff, has
a second, less laudable, purpose in the background. Page has
arranged that Anne in her disguise shall be carried off by
Slender and forthwith married, while his wife has laid a similar
plan in favour of Dr. Caius. The small-voiced maid meekly
consents to both schemes, and then, when the critical moment
comes, elopes with Fenton, leaving his rivals to the embraces of
two lubberly boys. Thus by an innocent deceit in the minor
as in the major plot, mercenary and self-interested intrigues
against true love are foiled, and the deepest note of the play is
struck in Fenton's spirited defence of his new-made bride :
'The offence is holy that she bath committed,
Since therein she doth evitate and shun
A thousand irreligious cursed hours,
Which forced marriage would have brought upon her.'
The parents accept the inevitable with a good grace; and the
consciousness that they have not only given, but also received
a lesson, makes them the more ready to be reconciled with
Sir John and to bid him home with the others, to laugh this
sport o'er by a country fire.' Thus amid a general atmosphere
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Much Ado About Nothing.
of good fellowship, and with the prospect of further merriment
in store, this healthy, homely comedy is brought to an end.
The connexion of The Merry Wives of Windsor with the
historical plays, and the special conditions under which there is
good reason to suppose that it was produced, make it different
in character from the group of comedies which, in all probability,
followed immediately upon it. This group, which exhibits
Shak pere's humorous genius in its perfection, includes Much
Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. These
comedies are marked by common features of style and spirit,
distinguishing them from all other writings of the dramatist.
The verbal extravagances of the earlier period, the puns, the
doggrel, the insipid 'sets' of merely surface wit, have almost
entirely passed away. We have instead dialogues in matchless
prose, with the clear-cut edge and sparkle of a diamond, or in
verse mellow with musical charm and alit with imaginative glow.
The plots are taken, as before, from romances and pastorals, in
themselves often of no striking merit. But the handling of the
material is far firmer, and, above all, the power of drawing
character has made such strides, that not only are the principal
figures flung forth in buoyant vitality, with the creative dew fresh
for evermore upon their brows, but each subordinate personage
is touched with delicate instinct for gradation into distinctive
life. It is, however, even less in finish of style and richness
of portraiture that these plays are united than in the peculiar
atmosphere which is thrown around them all. They are
comedies in the finest sense-not mere collections of mirth-
provoking incidents, but pictures of life in its sunnier aspects,
its sparkling and vivacious moods, though leavened with enough
of mischance and misdoing to not lose a hold of realities.
Of the three plays, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING alone
appeared in quarto form. The edition was dated 1600, and the
entry in the Stationers' Register describes it as 'sundry times
publicly acted.' As, however, it is not mentioned by Meres, it
can scarcely have been written before 1598, and it may there-
fore, with almost complete certainty, be ascribed to 1599. For
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
his main plot Shakspere is indebted to a French translation by
Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques of a novel by the Italian
writer Bandello, who had already helped to supply the materials.
for Romeo and Juliet'. The comic underplot, in which Benedick
and Beatrice are the principal figures, was, as far as we know,
invented by Shakspere 2. The idea underlying this underplot,
which far surpasses in interest the main story, had been already
more than once handled by the dramatist. The attempt of one
sex to declare social war against the other had been the theme
of both Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew.
The sallies between Berowne and Rosaline are a faint prelude
to the brilliant thrust-and-parry of Benedick and Beatrice; and
the character-contrast of Katharine and Bianca is reproduced.
with more delicate finesse in Hero and her cousin.
But though certain 'motives' from former plays thus reappear,
they find an entirely new setting in this brilliant comedy, which
was the most signal illustration of his mastery over the technique
of stagecraft that Shakspere had hitherto given to the world.
Marvellous as had been his manipulation of a highly involved
plot in The Merchant of Venice, it had consisted in interlacing
the threads of strongly contrasted tales, and in creating an
organic whole out of superficially discordant elements. But in
the present play the yet greater triumph is achieved of producing
the most subtle variations upon a single idea, so that the comedy
may be aptly termed a fugue upon the theme of Much Ado
about Nothing. The title is admirably suggestive of the character
of the piece, which introduces us to a society whose atmosphere
1 A still earlier version of the tale of the lovers parted by the stratagem
of a villainous rival was told by Ariosto in the Orlando Furioso, Book V,
translated by Harington in 1591. Shakspere may possibly have been
acquainted with the episode in this form, or with Spenser's rendering of
it in The Faerie Queene (Book II, canto 4). He may even have had
before him a dramatized version of the story, for a play, Ariodante and
Genevra, was performed in the presence of Elizabeth in 1583.
2 In the German dramatist Ayrer's Die Schöne Sidea, founded on
Bandello's novel, we have the introduction of a pair of humorous lovers
and the discomfiture of the man. The couple are, however, on a far lower
and coarser level than Benedick and Beatrice; and, in any case, it is impos-
sible to say whether Shakspere borrowed from Ayrer, or vice versa;
whether both drew from a common unknown source; or whether, finally,
the resemblance may have been merely fortuitous.
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Much Ado About Nothing.
is one of perpetual holiday; where everybody, from high to low,
having time enough on hand and to spare, indulges in leisurely,
circuitous fashions of speech and action, productive of mistakes
and misapprehensions-in short, of much ado which, in the long
run, always proves to be about nothing.
The brilliant stagecraft shown in the play will be made
clearer if, instead of separating the plots for analysis, we follow
their interaction. The scene opens in front of the house of
Leonato, Governor of Messina, who, accompanied by his
daughter Hero, and his nicce Beatrice, is receiving from
a messenger the account of a wellnigh bloodless victory just
won by Don Pedro of Arragon. Special mention is being made.
of a favourite of Don Pedro, a young Florentine called Claudio,
who has done 'in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion,' when
Beatrice bursts in with the query, 'I pray you, is Signior
Mountanto returned from the wars or no?' The term, drawn
from the fencing school, is used, as Hero explains, of Signior
Benedick of Padua, and we infer that the lady who drags him
into the conversation, though under cover of a jesting soubriquet,
is not indifferent to his safety. It is significant also that she
should continue to ply the messenger with satirical questions,
which only draw forth testimonies to Benedick's valour and
virtues; and, above all, that she should be inquisitive about the
company he keeps, and declaim against his fickleness in having
every month 'a new sworn brother.' Thus, before Benedick
appears on the scene, we see clearly that Beatrice has an
interest in him, to which she gives expression by making 'much
ado' about his non-existent faults. We surmise that the
'merry war,' which has long gone on between them, is, on the
lady's side at least, a mask for emotion which she has special
reason for wishing to conceal. The entrance of Benedick
with Don Pedro, Don John, and Claudio gives us a clearer
insight into the situation. He converses with Leonato and Don
Pedro, and ignores Beatrice till she draws his attention with
a gibe: 'I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick:
nobody marks you.' Whereupon he retorts with a thrust,
implying that he had hitherto been unaware of her presence:
What! my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?' This he
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
follows up with the complaint that he is loved of all ladies, only
her excepted; but that for himself he has such a hard heart that
truly he loves none. Beatrice, with suspicious haste, avows that
she is of the same humour for that, and that she would rather
hear her dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves her.
This passage of arms between the pair is sufficient to explain
the behaviour of Beatrice in the scene with the messenger.
Benedick, a favourite of nature and of fortune, 'of noble strain,
of approved valour and confirmed honesty,' with a piercing wit
and a ready tongue, has adopted an attitude of hostility to
women, and of cynical contempt for love and marriage. By an
irresistible impulse he pours his views chiefly into the ear of
Beatrice, who is his feminine counterpart in character and
intellect, and whom he singles out as certain above all others to
resent the outrage to her sex. In some aspects Beatrice cannot
but recall Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew, though the
comparison illustrates the great advance that Shakspere had
made in his art. Here, as there, a motherless girl, in a luxurious
household, with an indulgent guardian, and a single pliant
relative of her own sex, develops an exaggerated self-will and
self-love that go far to obscure a radically sound nature. Beatrice
is indeed quite free from Katharine's worst faults of jealousy and
acrid ill-humour. She is on the most affectionate terms alike
with her uncle and her cousin, and her heart keeps on the windy
side of care, so that she is never sad but when she sleeps, and
not ever sad then.' But she is too proud to acknowledge that
there is any lack in her nature which marriage would fill, and
she cannot endure to hear tell of a husband. This instinct has
been strengthened by her encounter with Benedick, who poses
as 'an obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty.' She is
piqued into the resolution to outdo him with his own weapons,
to answer scorn with yet greater scorn. Hence, as Leonato
declares, they never meet but there is a skirmish of wit between
them. But yet deeper, and unacknowledged even to herself, lies
a resolution of another kind: to bring to her feet this sworn foe
of her sex, whose brilliant qualities she cannot but recognize,
and whose powerful personality has a magnetic influence upon
her own.
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Much Ado about Nothing.
(
That her design is not as hopeless as at first sight it might
appear is quickly made manifest, when Benedick, pressed by
Claudio for his opinion of Hero, draws a distinction between
his simple true judgement' and his customary verdicts in the
capacity of a 'professed tyrant to their sex.' He cannot discuss
Hero without dragging in the name of Beatrice (as she had
done with his, when the tilk ran on Claudio), and proving that
he is by no means insensible to her charms: 'There 's her cousin,
an she were not possessed with a fury, exceeds her as much in
beauty as the first of May doth the last of December.' Such
a hint discounts beforehand all his railings against marriage,
ending with the declaration that the savage bull may in time
bear the yoke, but never the sensible Benedick. With similar
emphasis Beatrice, a little later, protests to her uncle that she
is at God upon her knees every morning and evening not to
send her a husband till He make men of some other metal
than earth. She will have none of them, for Adam's sons
are her brethren, and she holds it a sin to match in her kin-
dred. But the exaggerated vehemence with which the pair
are constantly repudiating the idea of matrimony proves that it
is always uppermost in their thoughts, and gives more
than an inkling that this much ado will prove to be about
nothing.
Meanwhile they see their most intimate companions advancing,
under their very eyes, towards the consummation of which they
affect such a horror. Claudio had become attached to Hero
before the war, and now that he has returned, with military
honours thick upon him, and signalized by the favour of Don
Pedro, he considers that he may aspire to her hand. Brave,
honourable, and pure in heart, he is so far fitted to be the wooer
of the gentle and modest Hero. But his sudden elevation has
dazzled his somewhat superficial nature, and even in speaking
of his love to Don Pedro and Benedick he lets fall the ominous.
conditional clause, if my passion change not shortly.' More-
over, the rise in his own fortunes has made him keenly alive to
the outward advantages of wealth and position. So before taking
any steps to secure Hero as his bride, he is careful to satisfy
himself that Leonato has no son, and that his daughter is the
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
only heir. His devotion is thus not so intense but that it can
find utterance through other lips than his own, and he readily
falls in with Don Pedro's proposal that at the masked ball,
which is to be held that night, Pedro should woo and win Hero
under the disguise of Claudio, and on his behalf. Such a round-
about proceeding is a minor case of much ado about nothing,
which brings others in its train. For this conversation is
partially overheard by a servant of Leonato's brother Antonio,
who reports that Don Pedro is in love with Hero and means to
woo her for himself; whereupon Leonato hurries off with the
news to his daughter, that she may be the better prepared with
A more correct version is retailed by another
eavesdropper, Borachio, the servant of Don John, and from
this more serious consequences spring.
an answer.
Don John is another of the Shaksperean villains whose nature.
has been warped by their circumstances. He is a bastard
brother of Don Pedro, and the stinging sense of his shameful
origin has turned him into a social Ishmaelite, who sees in
every man a natural enemy. Scowling and laconic amidst the
merry company gathered under Leonato's roof, he is a very
death's head at a feast. He has lately become reconciled with
his brother after a quarrel, and even his servant advises him to
improve the occasion, but he sullenly prefers to be a canker in
the hedge than a rose in Don Pedro's grace. Amongst
Shakspere's malefactors he is distinguished by his complete lack
of humour and of the kindred power to dissemble his real nature.
As he says himself, I cannot hide what I am. . . it better fits
my blood to be disdained of all than to fashion a carriage to rob
love from any.' It would seem as if the dramatist in this most
radiant of comedies had not wished to focus our attention upon
the villain by investing him with the fascination which underlies
evil-doing masquerading under the guise of good-humoured
honesty. Moreover, we are not inclined to augur very disastrous
results from the schemes of a mischief-maker who wears his
heart upon his sleeve in so transparent a fashion, and who seems
so ill-fitted for an intriguer's part.
To his original bitterness against society as a whole there is
at present added a peculiar grudge against the young 'start-up'
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Much Ado about Nothing.
His
Claudio who, as he thinks, has been his successful rival. He
thus catches eagerly at Borachio's tale of the Count's intended
marriage, and of the part that Don Pedro is to play in the
wooing. Herein he sees a way of crossing the Count, and he
puts his plan into execution that same evening at the masked
ball arranged by Leonato in honour of his guests. He assures
Claudio that the Prince is enamoured of Hero and is wooing
her for himself. The credulous youth at once swallows the
bait, and lending an casy ear to the insinuations against his
kind-hearted patron, moralizes on the inconstancy of friendship.
in offices of love, and bids farewell to Hero as a bride.
readiness to be duped on this occasion prepares the way for the
more disastrous instance thereof that is to follow, though it
appears immediately that he has been making much ado about
nothing; for Don Pedro is proved to have fulfilled his office
loyally, and to have won the consent of Leonato, who proffers
Hero to Claudio, and with her all his fortunes. The Count is
apparently dumbfounded at finding himself an accepted suitor.
after all, for he does not utter a word till prompted by Beatrice.
Hero is similarly mute, which is not surprising, when we
remember that, after being carefully prepared for a declaration
of love from the elderly Don Pedro, she now finds herself con-
signed to the arms of the youthful Claudio.
While thus by a roundabout process the hero and heroine
of the main story are being brought together, the gulf between
Benedick and Beatrice is widening till it seems impassable. At
the masked ball he takes advantage of his disguise to whisper
in her ear that he has it on authority that she has her good
wit out of The Hundred Merry Tales. The insinuation that her
bon-mots are borrowed cuts the lady's pride of intellect to the
quick, and assuming at once that Benedick is at the bottom of
so malicious a report, she retaliates by a description of him as
'the prince's jester: a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising
impossible slanders.' The thrust goes home and wounds his
self-love, as is seen from his indignant outburst when he is left
alone: The prince's fool! Ha! it may be I go under that title
because I am merry. Yea, but so I am apt to do myself
wrong; I am not so reputed: it is the base though bitter dis-
X 2
308
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
position of Beatrice that puts the world into her person, and so
gives me out.' And henceforth he exhausts his whole vocabulary
of vituperation in abuse of her. She is an infernal Ate in good
apparel, a haipy, who speaks poniards, and every word stabs.
But voluble as he is in reviling her behind her back, he knows
that she can outmatch him face to face, and as soon as he spies
her returning to the ball-room he flies precipitately from the
presence of my Lady Tongue.'
Thus the quarrel has been wrought up to the acute stage,
and all is now rife for the transformation. The very extremity
to which the pair have pushed their hostilities provides a piquant
suggestion for the onlookers, who have to while away a week.
between Hero's betrothal and her marriage. The amiable Don
Pedro, who has already shown a weakness for match-making,
proposes to fill up the interim by undertaking one of Hercules'
labours, which is, to bring Signior Benedick and the Lady Beatrice
into a mountain of affection the one with the other.' The
elaborate plot that follows is another modified case of much ado
about nothing. For Beatrice and Benedick, in spite of their
war of wits and tongues, have been shown to be far from
mutually indifferent; and Don Pedro's stratagem, though
necessary to provoke an avowal of their affection, is not,
as he supposes, the means of creating that affection itself.
Benedick indeed at this crisis seems to block up all chance of
retreat, to burn his very boats, by a last philippic against the
follies of love, and by the proclamation that till all graces be in
one woman, one woman shall not come in his grace. But the
train is already fired for his overthrow, or rather the overthrow
of the disguise with which he has cloaked his true nature, in
part even from himself. Yet with delicate tact the poet takes
care that the transition shall not be too abrupt. A pause is
made in the action of the story while Balthazar, who contributes
his quota of much ado about nothing by his preliminary
flourishes of pleas for indulgence, sings his ditty, 'Sigh no
more, ladies. Our spirits are thus attuned to changes of senti-
ment and situation, while the burden of the ballad strikes the
keynote of the dialogue that follows. Don Pedro and his
friends, in the hearing of Benedick, discourse upon the enraged
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Much Ado about Nothing.
affection passing the infinite of thought' with which Beatrice
loves him, and agree that it were better for her to sigh no
more, but to seek to suppress her passion. Benedick is thus
attacked through his weakest point--his excessive self-appre-
ciation, which has hitherio prompted his rebellious attitude
towards love. He now pays the full penalty, for it is this very
failing that delivers him into the hands of the conspirators.
The idea that he is being duped passes through his mind only
to be instantly dismissed, and, confessing that he must not seem
proud, he declares that he will be horribly in love. He foresees
that his inconsistency will make him a butt for the world's
ridicule, but he parries its shafts in advance with an ingenuity
worthy of Falstaff: 'When I said I would die a bachelor, I did
not think I should live till I were married.'
Beatrice in her turn is easily trapped by Hero and Ursula,
who lament in her hearing that so rare a gentleman as Bencdick
should have given his heart to one so self-endeared that she
disdains lovers in every form. But if she has played the part of
Lady Disdain towards 'Signior Mountanto,' it has been through
pique at his seeming indifference to her charms, and as soon as
she hears that this is merely counterfeit, she is ready to give
over hostilities-the more so that her self-love is mortified by
hearing herself censured for scorn and pride of wit. Less self-
conscious, however, than Benedick, and with a deeper emotional
nature, she surrenders at discretion, without any quibbling
pleas on her own behalf. We realize what a change has come
over her, when she ceases to speak poniards and actually
declares her feelings in verse.
Thus the two birds are limed;
the net has not been spread in sight of them in vain. Of the
pair, Benedick, who has been the more stalwart rebel against
love, goes through the more open and humiliating transforma-
tion. He dresses in outlandish fashions, studies the niceties
of his toilet, is sad and silent in company, and puts it down
to the tooth-ache. Beatrice too sighs and speaks in the sick
tune, and lets herself be outmatched in repartee by Hero's
waiting-women. The jesters par excellence have to submit to
a brief period of not unmerited chastisement, till the turn of
events shows that they are sounder of heart and keener of
310
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
penetration than those who for the moment have the laugh
of them.
Don Pedro's merry device for filling up the interval before
the marriage has had a criminal counterpart in an infamous
scheme of his brother, who, foiled in his first effort at mischief-
making, has sought the ruin of Claudio's happiness by more
desperate means. With the aid of his servant Borachio he
arranges a plot, in which Hero's maid is an accomplice, whereby
the Count, through overhearing and misinterpreting a midnight
dialogue between the pair, is to be persuaded that Hero is
unchaste. Monstrous as is the charge, and tainted the source
whence it springs, Claudio, as soon as it is suggested, shows
his former frivolous credulity in intensified degree, and with
an added strain of vindictive bitterness. If I see anything
to-night why I should not marry her to-morrow, in the congre-
gation, where I should wed, there will I shame her.' With such
a disposition he falls an easy dupe to the imposture, and, what
is more surprising, Don Pedro lets himself be equally deluded.
But far from reproaching Shakspere for an extravagant violation
of probability in representing the lover and his patron as con-
vinced of so heinous an offence on such slender evidence, we
should recognize that this is in strict accord with the genius of
the play, where, throughout, the most momentous inferences
are built upon overheard scraps of dialogue, and much ado thus
results about nothing.
A similar answer may be made to Kreyssig's criticism that
Shakspere has neglected the necessary dramatic sequence of
cause and effect in his account of the discovery of the plot.
This, it is maintained, should have resulted from some false
step on the part of Don John, and not, as is the case, from
a casually overheard dialogue between his subordinates. But
this roundabout method in which the conspiracy comes to light
is entirely in harmony with the tortuous direction that events
take throughout the play, while it serves as the source of
further complications, and introduces new actors on the scene
in the shape of the city watch, headed by master-constable
Dogberry and his colleague Verges. The long-winded charge
In which Dogberry instructs his subordinates in their duties is
XII]
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Much Ado about Nothing.
a fresh instance of much ado about nothing, for it amounts to
an elaborate exhortation to leave everything undone that they
are appointed to do. Happily, however, neighbours Seacoal
and Oatcake do not act up entirely to the spirit of this charge,
for chancing to overhear a rambling confession of his crime by
Borachio to Conrade, they have wit enough to arrest them,
though, with a characteristic misconstruction of a whispered
phrase, they believe that they are on the track of 'one
Deformed,' a fictitious personage about whom they make much
ado. Thus the conspiracy is unmasked apparently in time to
frustrate its evil aim-but this is to reckon without Dogberry
and Verges. It is strange that Coleridge should have spoken
of them as forced into the service of the plot when any other
less ingeniously absurd watchmen would have answered the
mere necessities of the action.' On the contrary, the necessities
of the action absolutely demand these twin specimens of
blundering officialdom, for had they been less given to illogical
and perverse circumlocution of speech, the exposure of Hero
would have been avoided, and, with it, the occasion that finally
unites Beatrice and Benedick. With the secret already in their
possession the two worthies wait on Leonato on the very
morning of the marriage; but they are so occupied in each
taking the word out of the other's mouth, and in 'bestowing all
their tediousness' upon his worship, that before they can come
to the point of their story he has to hurry off to the church.
The reader however, more fortunate than Leonato, knows
that Don John's agents are already in custody, and is thus less
pained than he would otherwise be by the wellnigh tragic
situation in the church, when Claudio with foul calumny casts
back the innocent Hero into her father's arms. This is the
crowning instance of much ado about nothing, which finds yet
another illustration in Leonato's hysterical lamentation over his
daughter's supposed shame. But the friar, who had been ready
to perform the nuptial rite, sees in the maiden's face the witness
of her innocence. He counsels that she should be secretly
kept in and given out as dead, that Claudio may thus be moved
to remorse. Two other friends are faithful to Hero in her hour
of need, Benedick and Beatrice. The former bids Leonato
312
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
cease from his frantic outcries, and it is he who sagaciously
fixes on John the bastard as the author of the mischief, while
Beatrice champions her cousin's innocence with generous,
whole-hearted ardour. Thus at this crisis the deeper nature of
each leaps into sudden, unashamed light, and through the very
catastrophe that has overwhelmed Hero the way is made easy
for a mutual confession of love. Beatrice weeping! At such
a sight must not Benedick's lips shape themselves into the
avowal, 'I do love nothing in the world as well as you'? And
there is only one answer that can come back through the tears,
'You have stayed me in a happy hour: I was about to protest
I loved you.' But with characteristic vehemence she at once
tests her wooer's devotion to the uttermost by the command to
kill Claudio. When he refuses, she mounts through ever-rising
stages of passionate indignation at the Count's misconduct to
the final outburst, ‘O God. that I were a man. I would eat
his heart in the market-place.' Mrs. Jameson shows little of
her usual insight in setting down this speech to temper. It
springs rather from 'a noble and righteous fury, the fury of
kindled strength'; but in the very measure of her strength the
woman is made, with the finest truth, to find the measure of her
weakness, and Beatrice, in this hour of her self-revelation, cries
aloud for the powers of the sex that has hitherto been the butt
of her scorn. Benedick can supply what she lacks, and, the
triumph of the thought sweeping away his scruples, he goes
forth to challenge Claudio. He is forestalled by Leonato, who,
in passionate reaction from his credulity within the church,
dares the Count to combat for having slandered his child to
death; while his brother Antonio, who a moment before had
been playing the moralist, takes up the family quarrel with even
more unrestrained vehemence. It is another case of much ado
about nothing, for the greybeards cannot persuade Claudio
to cross swords with them, and the news of Hero's death,
announced after this fashion, fails to produce the effect intended
by the friar. Thus when Benedick appears upon the scene,
he finds Claudio in a mocking, light-hearted mood, which is
glaringly unseasonable, and which finds only matter for
additional mirth in the formal delivery of this challenge.
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Much Ado about Nothing.
But a change is at hand. The examination of Borachio and
Conrade has happily not been conducted by Dogberry and
Verges alone. They have a colleague in the sensible Sexton;
and while Dogberry is making much ado about nothing by
bewailing that Conrade's words have not been put on paper, and
that he has not been written down an ass, the Sexton hurries
off with proofs of the plot to Leonato. Borachio, knowing
that his villainy is on record and that the game is up, confesses
his misdoings to Don Pedro in the presence of Claudio. Now
at last the Count is struck with remorse, but his is not a nature
to be agonized even by the consciousness that he has done his
affianced bride a fatal wrong.
With frivolous disloyalty to her
memory he accepts at once Leonato's offer of a niece, 'almost
the copy of his child that's dead He hangs with elaborate
funeral pomp the prescribed elegy upon Hero's cenotaph, only
to find it a case of much ado about nothing. For when, on
the morrow, his new-made bride unmasks, she is seen to be no
other than Hero-dead only as long as her slander lived. If
she thus seems to pardon her lover with unnatural promptitude,
it must be remembered that with her the will of her father is
law, and that furthermore this phenomenal facility of forgive-
ness is a peculiarity which she shares with several other
Shaksperean heroines. Beatrice and Benedick next step forth
to claim the friar's good offices, only, however, to find that they
love each other no more than reason, and that they have been
mutually misled. But their own poetical effusions are called
to witness against them-their hands against their hearts-
and thus at last the whirligig of time brings in its revenges,
and presents us with the spectacle of Benedick, the married
man.' And the critics who, with singular lack of penetration,
seek to mar our satisfaction at the union of this delightful
couple by dismal predictions of a stormy matrimonial career,
may be confidently assured that they have caught the infection
of the play, and are supplying an additional instance of much
ado about nothing.
Though TWELFTH NIGHT was probably written just
after rather than just before As You Like It, it connects more
314
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
closely in general tone and structure with Much Ado about
Nothing than the pastoral play, and may therefore be treated
first. The earliest text is in the folio of 1623, and the absence
of all external evidence led critics like Tyrwhitt and Malone
on the slenderest of internal hints to assign the play to the final
period of Shakspere's career. But the discovery by Hunter in
1828 of Manningham's diary put an end to this theory. From
the diary we learn that a play called Twelfth Night, or, What you
Will, was acted on Feb. 2, 1601-2, in the Middle Temple Hall,
and from the brief analysis given of the plot there can be no
doubt that it was Shakspere's comedy. As it is not mentioned
by Meres, it must have been later than 1598, and its style and
general atmosphere fully support the conclusion that it belongs
to the end of the dramatist's second period. The more exact
date cannot be fixed with certainty, though various indications
point to its being about 1601¹. The name of the comedy, as
Pepys complained when he saw this 'silly play' in 1662, has
no relation to its subject, and is probably due to the fact that
it was first played on Twelfth Night. If this be so, we may
plausibly assign its original performance to Twelfth Night,
1601-2.
Manningham in describing the play spoke of it 'as much like
The Comedy of Errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like
and neere to that in Italian called Inganni.' These compari-
sons, however, are not specially felicitous, for the resemblance
to the Menaechmi goes no further than the use of mistaken
identity as a motive, while the Italian play to which Twelfth
Night is most closely allied is not the Inganni (The Cheats) of
Secchi, nor yet the play of the same name by Gonzaga, but
another comedy, Gl' Ingannati (The Deceived), printed at Venice
in 1537, with a poetical introduction, Il Sacrificio. The plot
of this piece, dealing with the fortunes of Fabritio and Lelia,
a brother and sister separated at the sack of Rome in 1527, is
1 The song, Farewell, dear heart,' of which fragments are sung in
Act ii. scene 3, first appeared in that year in Robert Jones' Book of Airs;
and the new map with the augmentation of the Indies' (Act iii. Scene 2),
which Steevens thought had reference to the map in the translation of
Linschoten's Voyages (1598), has been recently shown to be more probably
the map in the complete edition of Hakluyt's Voyages (1599-1600).
XII]
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Twelfth Night.
exactly similar to that of the serious portion of Twelfth Night,
while the introduction supplies the name, though nothing but
the name of Malevolti or Malvolio. But Shakspere probably
drew upon more than one version of what was a popular and
widespread story'. He turned the shadowy figures of Italian
romance into living consistent types, though still true to their
origin in their luxuriant fancy and sensibility; and he added
a contrasting group of actors of coarser grain, with the realistic
temper of the Teutonic stock. Thus in Twelfth Night, as in
Much Ado about Nothing, we have in harmonious union dra-
matic elements drawn from the north and from the south; and
as Much Ado about Nothing reproduces motives from earlier
plays with heightened effect, so Twelfth Night handles more
artistically themes already used in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
and in The Comedy of Errors. The likeness to the latter play is,
however, of a superficial kind. In both cases mistaken identity
is an element in the plot. But in The Errors the complica-
tions thence arising form the staple of the play, and give it
the character of a comedy of incident. In Twelfth Night the
confusion does not begin till the piece is more than two-thirds
over, and, though it provides some highly amusing episodes, is
subordinate to the main scheme of the work, for it helps ulti-
mately to afford a way out of an apparently hopeless impasse,
created by the strange cross-purposes of human hearts. The rela-
tion between Twelfth Night and The Two Gentlemen of Verona
is of a more intimate kind, for in both plays the dramatist is
chiefly occupied with the same fundamental theme of love in its
varied manifestations. But the crude colouring of the earlier
1 The story is told, with different names, by Bandello in one of his novels
(translated by Belleforest into French in the Histoires Tragiques), and
with considerable alteration of detail in the Hecatomithi of Cinthio,
who is the first to lay the scene of the story in Illyria, and to introduce
the incident of a shipwreck. Cinthio's version is followed in its main
features by Barnabe Riche's story of Apolonius and Silla in his Fare-
well to the Militarie Profession, 1581. Another possible source of the
play has been recently suggested in Emanuel Forde's Parismus, the re-
nowned Prince of Bohemia, 1598, which contains some incidents similar
to Twelfth Night, and employs for the first time the names Olivia and
Violetta. This enumeration of the many kindred shapes through which
the story passed is enough to prove how idle is the attempt to identify the
precise original of the play.
316
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
work has now been replaced by a delicate and subtle gradation.
of tints that melt into a perspective of harmonious beauty.
In the Duke Orsino, who marches at the head of this masque
of Cupid, we recognize at once a kinsman of Proteus and of
Romeo, in the days of his love for Rosaline. As Olivia, the object
of his fruitless acoration, fully admits, he is possessed of many
gifts and graces.
He is noble, virtuous, of stainless youth,
learned, valiant, handsome in form, and of great estate. It
seems unnatural that so richly endowed a wooer should lavish
his whole wealth of affection in vain. But the passion of Orsino
does not spring from those inmost recesses of the heart whence
alone love draws its irresistible spell; it is a nursling of the
fancy, and in its lack of fibre and of magnetic force betrays
but too clearly the source of its being. It is probably not
without a touch of half-conscious irony that Viola describes the
Duke to Olivia as worshipping her,
"With adorations, fertile tears,
With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire.'
It is not with such sentimental weapons that love achieves its
conquests, and the Duke reveals how his passion preys merely
upon itself when he declares that he is turned into a hart, whom
his desires pursue like fell and cruel hounds. Such exaggerated
sensibility finds its best antidote in resolute grappling with the
realities of life, but from this healthful discipline Orsino, after
the manner of his kind, shrinks back. Even the chase, the
favourite exercise of his class, has no attraction for him. He
cares only to steep himself in an atmosphere of volup uous
languor, with music as the chosen food of his love. The min-
strelsy that he cultivates is of the melting kind that nourishes
his already far too melting mood; he encores a strain, whose
dying fall is of such liquid sweetness that it cloys even in
repetition, and he is swayed to ecstasy by the tender, inde-
finable charm of old-world songs, haunted by the echoes of
the days that are no more. That he himself is dimly con-
scious that his passion is dreamlike in its nature appears in
his declaration to Viola, that the fancies of men are more
giddy and unfirm, sooner lost and won than those of women.
•
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Twelfth Night.
Yet a moment after, in one of his rhapsodical flights, he
insists that
'There is no woman's sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart.'
His love, he declares, is more noble than the world, more
hungry than the sea. Indeed, it is highly remarkable how he
continually wears his heart upon his sleeve. It needs only three
days for him to unclasp to Viola 'the book even of his secret
soul,' and all who surround him, of whatever rank, seem to be
equally favoured. The only person, strange to say, who makes
an exception is the lady who is the object of his suit. He sends
to her time after time embassies of love, but his own foot does
not cross her threshold. Had his passion been of sterling
quality, it would have driven him by an irresistible impulse into
her presence, and Olivia is justified in turning coldly from
addresses that she never hears but at second-hand. Viola
glances pointedly at Orsino's lethargy in his love-making when
she declares to Olivia that were she the wooer she would
make
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.'
When at last he nerves himself to plead his suit in person. it
is too late, for Olivia is already contracted to Sebastian, whom
she has mistaken for Viola. For a moment Orsino betrays the
heartless selfishness that, in Shakspere's view, always lurks
just below the seductive surface of the sentimental nature. He
thinks of death as a meet doom for Olivia, and then for Viola,
in whom he recognizes a triumphant rival. But the reappear-
ance of Sebastian and the revelation of Viola's true sex suggest
a more satisfactory solution of the entanglements of the situation.
Orsino now finds the clue to the enigmatical speeches of his
supposed page on the subject of love, and with one of the
sudden, overwhelming changes of feeling, to which Shakspere's
sentimentalists are peculiarly liable, he transfers his affections
wholesale to Viola, and proclaims her his mistress and his
318
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
fancy's queen. Though he seems to be favoured beyond his
deserts in carrying off so lightly a far richer prize than that for
which he had long sighed in vain, the chastened tone of his
utterances encourages the hope that his dilettante love-in-idleness
has been but the prelude to a genuine manly devotion, driving
its roots deep into the secret places of the soul.
Olivia, at first sight, seems scarcely suited to attract, except
by the power of contrast, the sentimental nature of Orsino.
Young and beautiful she indeed is, but the serious tendency of
her mind has been aggravated by the death in quick succession
of her father and her brother, and she has shut herself up for
seven years in cloistral seclusion to nurse her grief. Every-
thing in her surroundings bears witness to her austere temper.
Her household is governed by a puritanical steward on rigid
principles of order, and though her unusually strong sense of
the ties of relationship leads her to entertain a roystering kins-
man, she seeks to confine his licence within endurable limits.
She is an enemy to all false show, inward or outward. No
paint contributes to the red and white of her cheeks, and she
scorns overstrained praise or 'lowly feigning' from the lips of
others. It is not strange that this 'mouse of virtue,' as the Fool
aptly calls her, whose very seal bears the image of the chaste
Lucrece, should shrink back in disgust from the cloying incense
of Orsino's adoration, and (in a phrase that drops naturally from
the mouth of a recluse) should term his love 'a heresy.' But
the icy manner in which she rejects his addresses shows that
she pushes austerity to a point where it becomes indifference to
the sufferings of others, and she pays a full penalty when, at the
first sight of the disguised Viola, her heart overflows with
a passion for the servant, as intense and as fruitless as that of
the master for herself.
Our age has lost the peculiar Elizabethan delight in the
entanglements arising from confusion of sex, and the extracting
frenzy' (to use her own phrase) of Olivia for Viola strikes us as
pushed to unnatural limits. Vows of seclusion, dignity of
rank, reserve of womanhood are all flung to the winds, and
her passion utters itself in ardent phrases, which, unlike Orsino,
she pours not into the ears of every hearer, but into those of her
XII]
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Twelfth Night.
beloved alone. Coldness only moves her to greater fervour;
even scorn, she declares, looks beautiful on the adored one's
lip, and such a fiend might carry her to hell. It is just because
Viola is not what she seems that Shakspere permits the infatua-
tion of Olivia to be carried to such grotesque lengths: so
persistent a pursuit of a real man by a woman would have been
unendurable, even in the eyes of an Elizabethan audience, which
had laxer ideas than our own on the respective spheres of the
sexes in love-making. But when Olivia has sufficiently
expiated her scorn by suffering equal scorn at the hands of
another, the appearance of Sebastian makes it possible for her
to be extricated from her humiliation, and to reap a reward
befitting the merits of her intrinsically sterling nature.
A strain
is indeed put upon our credulity when we see Sebastian yielding
so promptly to the solicitations of the unknown fair one who
flings herself at his head. But the strange behaviour of the
Fool, followed by that of Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, has already
prepared him for surprises, and that he is not unused to ardent
demonstrations of attachment from strangers is shown by the
conduct of his rescuer, Antonio, who, at the peril of his life,
becomes his guide to Orsino's court. In welcoming the
advances of Olivia he is unconsciously giving effect to her
maxim, that 'love sought is good, but given unsought is better';
and it is a further recommendation that fortune makes him the
chastiser of the two foolish knights who have been marring her
household peace. Thus all bodes fair for the future, and now
that her devotion, instead of foaming itself away against a strong
barrier, can pour its flood through a receptive channel, the
Duke's prophecy may at last come true:
'She that hath a heart of that fine frame
To pay this debt of love but to a brother,
How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
Hath killed the flock of all affections else
That live in her.'
Equally removed from the Duke, with his dreamy languor of
desire, and from Olivia, tossed between the frozen and the torrid
zone of emotion, stands the figure of Viola, perfect in its balance
of sensibility, gaiety, and strength. In her Shakspere has
320
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
united qualities which he usually tends to divide between two
different types of wornen.
She has the softness of Hero and
Bianca, combined with the resolute will and ready tongue of
Portia and Rosalind. No womanhood less exquisitely poised
could have glided with such sure footing through the bewildering
mazes into which she is thrown. The disguise in man's attire,
whence these complexities mainly spring, is forced upon her by
the needs of her situation. Shipwrecked on the inhospitable
coast of Illyria, she finds that she can only take shelter with the
Duke, of whom she has heard her father speak, and that yet she
cannot enter the court as an unprotected girl. Throughout
she shows nothing of Portia's or Rosalind's roguish pleasure in
playing the part of a youth. The equivocal phrases, in which
she so often hints that she is not what she seems, disclose the
trembling woman's heart beneath the page's doublet, and when
she first realizes Olivia's passion, she confesses that 'disguise is
a wickedness wherein the pregnant enemy does much.' Had
Orsino been less absorbed in his self-pitying melancholy he
might have guessed the real sex of his page; for he notes that
she has Diana's lips, and a maiden's shrill, small voice, and that
all is semblative a woman's part. Even as it is, in the golden
hours of unreserved confidence her image steals, though he
knows it not, into his soul; and while she listens, more privileged
than Olivia, to the story of his sorrow from his own lips, her
tender heart goes out towards this love-lorn wooer, who charms
her with his affecting eloquence. But hers is the 'love indeed
that, born in the silent depths of the spirit, cannot blazon itself
upon the tongue. It is of herself she speaks when she tells of
the pretended sister whose history was a blank:
'She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.'
Yet in Viola's attitude, though she is scarcely aware of it
herself, there is something more than mere mute resignation.
She carries out in the spirit, if not in the letter, her own plan for
those who sue in vain: she makes a willow cabin at the loved
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Twelfth Night.
one's gate, and calls upon her soul within the house. Hopeless
as her passion may seem, her exquisite insight may have revealed
to her the touch of hollowness in Orsino's adoration for Olivia,
and indeed she vaguely hints at this when, in her assumed
character, she declares:
'We men may say more, swear more; but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.'
Yet she loyally performs her part as Orsino's advocate, and
takes no denial of admission in Olivia's presence. Doubtless an
eagerness to see her rival mingles with her fidelity to her trust,
and the bantering tone with which she at first masks the tumult
of her heart changes to one of impassioned earnestness when
she beholds her beauty. The dignity that prevents her deep
tenderness of nature from ever slipping into weakness shows
itself when she rejects Olivia's proffered fee, and with infinite
delicacy she safeguards the Countess' reputation by leaving
Malvolio in the belief that it is Orsino's ring with which he
is sent in quest of her. Though her purse is but light, she
generously shares it with her brother's friend, Antonio; and
while repudiating with high-spirited scorn the charge of ingrati-
tude, she is led by her quick wit to the conclusion that she is
being mistaken for Sebastian. Her masculine shrewdness and
decision throw into delightful relief the thoroughly feminine lack
of merely physical courage and the horror of bloodshed, which
appear in the irresistibly comic affair of honour with Sir Andrew.
Yet this same timorous maiden, who nearly swoons at the sight
of cold steel, is ready a few minutes later, at Orsino's bidding,
to offer her bosom to the sacrificial knife:
'I, most jocund, apt, and willingly,
To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.
But her devotion to the Duke is to prove itself not in death, but
in life. The turn of fortune at last draws them into each other's
arms, and we know that Viola is speaking the unaffected
language of the heart when she declares that she will guard her
vows of love as securely as the sun his fires. How far finer
is such a consummation in its poetic justice than that which is
Y
322
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
meted out to Viola's twin-sister, Euphrasia, in the Philaster
of Beaumont and Fletcher! Nowhere have the disciples more
nearly approached their master than in this exquisite creation,
who in character and fortunes irresistibly recalls the heroine
of Twelfth Night. But the tender loyalty of Euphrasia is not
vivified by the quick salt of Viola's wit. She is a more perfect
ideal of self-sacrificing love, and she can even look on con-
tentedly while her heart's idol is united to another woman. Of
Viola no such supreme self-renunciation is asked, but if her
brow lacks the aureole of a living martyrdom, there is shed
round it the softer, more pervasive light from
'A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food.'
From love in its sentimental excess and in its silent strength,
we turn to love in its grotesque insufficiency, born not of the
heart, nor even of the fancy, but of inflated self-conceit.
Malvolio, as we learn from the testimony of Leonard Digges in
1640, was one of the stage-figures who extended the popularity
that Shakspere had won with Falstaff, and who was always safe
to draw a crowded house to 'Cockpit, Galleries, and Boxes.'
The sustained attraction of the character through the period
preceding the Civil War is natural, for in Malvolio we have the
only specimen of a Puritan whom Shakspere satirized for the
benefit of his theatrical patrons. Even on this theme he avoided
the temptation to caricature. The Tribulation Wholesome, the
Ananias, the Rabbi Zeal of the Land Busy of Ben Jonson
remain as types of the Puritan, seen through the jaundiced eyes
of Shakspere's dramatic friends. They are, one and all, unctu-
ous, illiterate rascals who, under a show of zeal, hide low vices
of gluttony or covetousness. And similar has been the treat-
ment of kindred types in later times, as is sufficiently shown
by the Thwackum of Fielding, and the Chadband and Stiggins.
of Dickens. Shakspere's satiric method is incomparably more
subtle and convincing, for it covers its object with ridicule, while
admitting its merits, and without ascribing to it a single hateful
or hypocritical vice. It is only the lost sheep of Puritanism
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323
Twelfth Night.
that become the prey of the wolfish desires of the flesh; but it
is its choicer spirits that are most prone to be the victims of the
narrow brain and the still narrower heart. Lamb therefore
rightly insisted, as against the prevailing stage-tradition of his
day, that the character of Malvolio was not essentially ludicrous,
and that an air of dignity should be thrown round the part.
'He might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our
old Roundhead families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady
Fairfax.' Such a service is that of Olivia, and, as she says her-
self, he suits well with her fortunes, for he is sad and civil.'
That he acquits himself worthily of her trust is shown by her
confession that she would not have him miscarry for half
her dowry, and indeed had she not shown him unusual favour,
the trick so successfully practised on him would have been
impossible. But Malvolio's virtues have their shadow in an
intolerable self-sufficiency, to which Olivia shows herself alive
when she accuses him of being sick of self-love and tasting with
a distempered appetite. This self-love takes the aggressively
pharisaical form of hostility towards all the amusements of the
children of this world by whom he is surrounded. He thinks
that because he is virtuous there shall be no more cakes and
ale. Not only does he stop Sir Toby's midnight revels with
a haughtier reproof than is becoming from a major-domo to his
lady's kinsman, but he puts Fabian out of favour on account
of a bear-baiting. He finds matter of offence in the sallies
of Feste, whom he terms 'a barren rascal,' and he looks upon
the wise men who crow at fools as no better than the fools'
zanies. This self-esteem is encouraged by his position, for
there is no class more ridiculously inflated, more contemptuous
of inferiors, than the upper servants of a great house. The
ceremonial of society is aped by them, without the refinement
which is the breath of its life, and vulgarity under its varnish
of etiquette becomes doubly offensive. Thus in dress and
deportment Malvolio cultivates what he fondly imagines to be
the grand style. He wears yellow stockings and cross-garters,
he plays with his chain of office, he practises behaviour to his
shadow in the sun, and 'cons state without book, and utters it
by great swarths.' Thoroughly in love with his own excellences,
1 2
324
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
he is easily led to believe that others are equally in love with
them, and a hint from the mischievous Maria has been enough
to encourage the idea that Olivia's feeling for him is of a tenderer
kind than that of a mistress for a faithful servant. The idea
brings with it a rapturous vision of Count Malvolio in his
branched velvet gown, lording it over his officers and patroniz-
ingly rebuking his 'kinsman Toby.' The vision seems to gain
full warrant from the forged letter that Maria lays in his path.
The missive is cunningly drawn up, for it contains just enough
of transparent mystery to flatter him with his penetration in
piecing out its meaning. There can be no doubt now that his
lady loves him, and he hastens at her desire to cast his humble
slough, and to be point-devise the very man. With the stoical
fortitude of martyrdom in a worthy cause he parades before his
mistress in his cross-garters, though they do make some obstruc-
tion in the blood, and he forces his austerely set countenance
into the curves of an unnatural smile. It seems almost too
pitiable a catastrophe that these gallant efforts to enter into the
golden castle of his dreams should win for him only the cruel
realities of the madman's dark room and bonds. And insult is
indeed added to injury when the Fool, under the disguise of Sir
Topas, affects to lay the fiend who has harboured himself in this
godly heart, or when he makes it a test of the Puritan's sanity
that he should hold the opinion of Pythagoras concerning the
transmigration of souls. His release only brings with it the
fresh mortification of learning the trick that has been played
upon him, and of seeing Olivia united to Sebastian. In the
bitterness of disillusion he strides away with threats of revenge
on the whole pack' of his tormentors, and we scarcely share.
the Duke's trust that he may be entreated to a peace.
self-love of natures such as his cannot be humbled by outward
defeat. He belongs to the stiff-necked generation, which learns
nothing and forgets nothing.
The
Yet Malvolio, affectioned ass though he be, stands head and
shoulders over another rival for Olivia's hand. In Illyria at
least it cannot be said that the children of this world are wiser
than the children of light, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek is Shak-
spere's compensation for Malvolio. This lank-haired knight,
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Twelfth Ni ht.
with whom Brownists' are in very ill favour, and who, without
any 'exquisite reason,' would beat a Puritan as a dog, is a type
of the cavalier in his most fatuous form. According, indeed, to
Sir Toby, who for his own purposes wishes to make a match be-
tween him and his niece, 'he is as tall a man as any 's in Illyria:
he hath all the good gifts of nature, speaks three or four languages,
and plays o' the viol-de-gamboys.' But Sir Andrew has only to
be seen and heard for a moment to prove the falsehood of these
flatteries. To do him justice, he has but a poor opinion of his
own capacities, believing that he has no more wit than a Chris-
tian or an ordinary man, though this comes from his being
a great eater of beef. He is conscious too of lost opportunities,
of hours given to fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting that would
have been better bestowed upon the arts. And with the curious
glimmer of instinct which survives even in the most hopelessly
brainless gentleman, he realizes that his wooing does not speed,
that it is four to one Olivia will not have him, and that he had
best be off home at once. But a word from Sir Toby is always
enough to put him in a good conceit of himself, for not even
Slender shows a more touching trust in his kinsman Shallow
than does Sir Andrew in his brother knight. He imitates his
every action and echoes his every word, inanely confident that
in this boisterous boon companion he has found an infallible
social model. Even in Feste he sees attractions to which he
would fain soar: 'I had rather than forty shillings I had such
a leg, and so sweet a breath to sing, as the fool has.' And
when Viola scatters her flowers of speech on the Duke's behalf
before Olivia's feet, Sir Andrew seizes and stores them for future
But the favour shown by the Countess to the messenger
stirs the knight's infinitesimal drop of spleen, and at Sir Toby's
instigation he sends a challenge to his rival. The wording of
this missive is an evident caricature of the fashionable jargon of
the 'duello' with its fine-spun niceties of insult, and it is notice-
able that Sir Andrew 'keeps on the windy side of the law,' and
stops short of using the phrase which, according to the etiquette
of the day, would have necessitated the taking up of his chal-
lenge. He makes indeed a poorer show, if possible, in the
service of Mars than in that of Venus, and he puts it out of
use.
326
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
doubt that he has not so much blood in his liver as 'would clog
the foot of a flea' when, rather than draw sword, he proffers his
grey horse as satisfaction to his foe. The providence, however,
that watches over fools finds a match for the poltroonery of the
knight in the natural timidity of the virgin, and the spectacle of
the unwilling combatants trembling like aspen-leaves before
each other is irresistibly diverting. Sir Andrew would have
done well to rest upon his laurels, and to have contented himself
with the action at battery against his enemy provided by the
indulgent law of Illyria. But his evil genius, Sir Toby, per-
suades him to tempt fortune a second time, with the result that
he falls into the hands of Sebastian, and carries off a broken
head for his pains. Yet even this cannot shock him out of his
simple faith in his boon companion, which is as unassailable as
Malvolio's faith in himself. A wound that Sir Toby shares is
robbed of half its anguish by the joy in prospect of their being
able to be dressed together.'
Loyalty in its most asinine aberration is preferable to heart-
less self-seeking, and the gull Sir Andrew is less odious than Sir
Toby the blood-sucker. Olivia's uncle is not without a family
likeness to Falstaff, but it is to Falstaff in his decadence. His
treatment of Aguecheek is the practical application of Sir John's
doctrine of the dace and the pike, as set forth at the house of
Shallow. There is the same contempt of the man of birth for
his inferiors, as seen in the retort to Malvolio, 'Art any more
than a steward?' There is the same faculty of turning culture
to perverse uses, and there is even a trace of Falstaff's genius
for repartee, as when he sets down his drunkenness to drinking
healths to his niece, or meets Malvolio's homilies with the un-
answerable plea, 'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,
there shall be no more cakes and ale?' One advantage indeed
Sir Toby has over the fat knight in a talent for song, and the
cozier's catches which he and his fellows roar forth at dead
of night, without mitigation or remorse of voice,' mingle an
element of Bacchic fire with the potations of sack and canary.
But his joviality covers a malevolence and meanness of spirit of
which Falstaff knew nothing, at any rate in his palmy days.
He uses his niece as a decoy, even while he is battening on her
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327
Twelfth Night.
hospitality, and makes a laughing-stock of the simpleton whose
ducats are going to swell his purse. But even with this crafty
self-seeker Cupid plays his pranks, and presents us with the
edifying spectacle of the biter bit. In spite of his class pride,
Sir Toby is captivated by the ready tongue and wit of the
waiting-woman, Maria. Their association in the plot against
Malvolio entangles him deeper in her toils, and at the close she
secures him as her husband. He, who has been so busy in
gulling others, ends by exposing himself to the permanent
derision which accompanies a mésalliance.
Amidst this tangle of human passions one figure trips in light-
hearted irresponsibility. Feste is a being of far finer clay than
the clowns of the earlier comedies, whose portion has been
chiefly one of blows and buffets, and whose stock-in-trade has
consisted of a homely monotony of mother-wit. But Olivia
has secured a jester who can act up to the ideal of his office.
'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.'
As he declares himself, 'cucullus non facit monachum,' and he
wears not motley in his brain. He is sharp enough to see into
the minds of the most different characters, and to skilfully adapt
himself to their varying moods. He even takes advantage of
the principle that 'there is no slander in an avowed fool though
he do nothing but rail' to shrewdly rebuke the failings of his
superiors. He deftly draws Olivia into the admission that her
extravagant mourning is for a brother whom she knows to be in
heaven, and he suggests to the Duke a cure for his melancholy
absorption in his passion. He has a natural antipathy to the
pompous Malvolio, who scorns him and his class, and he takes
part in the plot against his self-love. But it is the spirit of fun
rather than of spite that prompts him, and he helps to bring
about the prisoner's release. He joins Sir Toby and Sir
Andrew in their midnight catches, and his gift of song throws
round his figure a soft lyrical charm. It is as if the spirit of the
early English ballad-poetry stood embodied before us, masquer-
ading in cap and bells. And it is highly significant of the way
328
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
in which old and new mingle in the Shakesperean drama that
this most refined of jesters should take leave of Malvolio in
a jingling stave, recalling the relation of the Devil and the Vice
in the Morality Plays. But for more sensitive ears he has sweeter
music. He enchants Sir Toby and Sir Andrew as he carols of
love and youth in their brittle rapture of possession, and he
pierces Orsino's very soul with the elegiac tenderness of the
swan-song of a broken heart. Thus by an exquisite artifice it is
the fool, himself untouched by passion, who lets us hear across
the pealing melodies of this jocund Twelfth-Night pageant the
faint undertone of the thousand, thousand sighs' breathed over
the grave of a hopeless love.
AS YOU LIKE IT first appeared in the folio of 1623. It
was entered on the Stationers' Register together with Henry V,
Much Ado about Nothing, and Ben Jonson's Every Man in His
Humour, 'to be staied,' i. e. not printed. The date is August 4,
but the year is not mentioned. The previous entry is dated May,
1600, and as the other plays were printed in 1600 and 1601, we
infer that the August is that of the year 1600. The play cannot
have appeared before 1598, for it is not mentioned by Meres,
and the quotation from the 'Dead Shepherd,' Marlowe, 'Who
ever loved that loved not at first sight?' is taken from his Hero
and Leander, published in that year. It may be dated with.
practical certainty about 1599 or 1600, and, as already sug-
gested, it probably just preceded Twelfth Night. It has, how-
ever, features which make it peculiarly representative of
Shakspere in the most joyous period of his art, and it may
therefore fittingly stand as the climax of his greater comedies,
though in compact structure of plot it cannot vie with Twelfth
Night, and still less with Much Ado about Nothing. This loose-
ness of texture is due to the source of the play, a novel by
Thomas Lodge, called Rosalind, Euphues' Golden Legacy,
printed in 1590. Lodge's story is founded in its turn upon The
Tale of Gamelyn, wrongly ascribed in several MSS. to the Cook
in The Canterbury Tales, but in all probability dating from the
middle of the fourteenth century. The mutual relation of the
Middle-English poem, the Euphuistic novel, and the Shak-
XII]
329
As You Like It.
sperean comedy is in the highest degree significant. The Tale.
of Gamelyn belongs to the cycle of rude ballad-poetry which
formed almost the earliest expression of the reviving Anglo-
Saxon national consciousness after the shock of the Norman
Conquest. This species of literature, belonging to the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, takes as its favourite type of hero
a man of extraordinary physical power and bravery, who as
a rule has met with some form of injustice, and who has con-
sequently withdrawn into an open-air retreat, whence he defies
constituted authorities, and acts as the good genius of the poor
and the oppressed. Hereward of the Fens, Guy of Warwick,
and, above all, Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, are specimens
of these doughty popular champions, and the fame of the two
latter in especial was closely connected with the midland district.
Greene had already made use of the Robin Hood legend for
dramatic purposes, and that Shakspere had it in his mind while
writing As You Like It is plain from the description given of the
banished Duke: 'They say he is already in the forest of Arden,
and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the
old Robin Hood of England,' Gamelyn is a hero of exactly
similar type¹. The youngest son of a dead knight who has
favoured him in his will, he is maltreated by his elder brother
till he grows stout enough to rebel and chastises his brother's
servants. After defeating a mighty champion at a wrestling
match, he falls again, through treachery, into his brother's
power, and would have been starved to death had he not been
delivered by Adam Spencer, his father's old servant, the very
type of the devoted Teutonic retainer. With their good oaken
staves they cudgel the elder brother and a body of Churchmen
whom he was feasting in his hall, and they serve similarly
a company of four and twenty young men sent by the sheriff
to capture them. They then ride off to the forest, where they
join a company of merry outlaws, of whom Gamelyn becomes
king. He is indicted by his elder brother, who is sheriff; but he
turns the tables upon him, and hangs sheriff, judge, and jury.
1 In fact, as Skeat points out, Gamelyn is the same person as Gamwell,
who in the ballad of Robin Hood and The Stranger is Robin's nephew, and
is made one of his chief men under the name of Will Scadlock or Scarlet.
330
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
In spite of this he makes his peace with the king, who creates
him 'chief justice of all his free forest.'
Here we have a thoroughly naïve popular tale, glorifying
a strong arm and a stout heart, regardless of nice moral
scruples, and without a tinge of sentiment. The pastoral back-
ground is the simple greenery of the forest glades, such as
the writer of the ballad and his hearers had themselves known.
But in the Elizabethan age this homely native product became
associated in the hands of Lodge with a completely different.
literary growth-the conventional Renaissance pastoral. In
contrast to the mediaeval English folk-poetry this was the
outcome of a superfine and ‘decadent' culture.
It had origi-
nated with the Sicilian Greeks in the days when the glories of
Hellenic thought and action were things of the past, and when
weary of the complexities, 'the fever and the fret,' of city life,
men turned with a sigh of relief to nature. In the primitive
occupations of the shepherd class, and in their simple joys and
sorrows, these sophisticated worldlings found the most piquant
of contrasts to the problems of their own existence. The
fiercer the whirl of real life, the more alluring was the vision of
an Arcadia peopled by nymphs and swains, tending their flocks.
by cool streams, or resting beneath leafy boughs, while they
piped aloud in innocence of heart, or bewailed the bitter-sweet-
troubles of love. Thus it was natural that the Roman poets
should follow in the track of Theocritus and Bion just when
the republic was in its death-throes, and that Virgil should sing
of the Mantuan fields and Horace of his Sabine farm when
Italy was still gaping with the wounds of the civil wars. And
not dissimilar were the conditions in the sixteenth century. It
was a time of violent fermentation in religion and morals, of
complicated political intrigue, of elaborate ceremonialism in
society, and once again men sought an asylum in the dreamy
lotos-land unfolded to their view by the newly rediscovered
pastoral poetry. In Italy and Spain this impulse was first and
most strongly felt, and writers of verse and prose alike clothed
their creations in rustic garb, and set them down amidst
meadows, flocks, and sheepcotes. The Aminta of Tasso and
the Pastor Fido of Guarini in the sphere of the drama, and the
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331
As You Like It.
Arcadia of Sanazzaro and the Diana of George of Montemayor
in that of the novel, were amongst the most brilliant results of
this prevailing fashion, and their influence quickly extended to
northern lands. In England Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in
1579 was the first important pastoral poem, and in the following
year Sidney was at work on his pastoral romance, the Arcadia,
though it did not appear till 1590. It was in this year that
Lodge published his Rosalind, which, though in style a direct
imitation of the Euphues, was in subject a novel not of town
but of country life. Here Gamelyn reappears under the heroic
name of Rosader, still attended by the faithful Adam Spencer,
and in the earlier part of the story he performs exactly the
same feats as in the old ballad. But the scene of the tale is
shifted to France, and overlying and almost concealing the
original framework is a typical Arcadian story. The mis-
fortunes of Rosader have their counterpart in a higher sphere.
in those of Gerismond, the lawful king of France, banished by
his usurping rival, Torismond, to the forest of Arden. In this
forest gradually congregate Rosader and his elder brother
Saladin, and the daughters of the rival kings. The bulk of the
tale consists in their love-making, with an added element that
specially appealed to the taste of the times in the hopeless
passion of the shepherd Montanus for Phebe, requited by
Phebe's frenzied adoration of the disguised Rosalind. At the
close the love entanglements are happily solved, and instead of
Gamelyn's vengeance on his brother, we have the defeat and
death of the usurper, Torismond, at the hands of Rosader and
Saladin, aided by 'the twelve peers of France.'
The incidents of this narrative Shakspere adopted for his
drama with a few changes. The rival kings become brother
dukes, in order that their relation may be more closely assimi-
lated to that of Rosader and Saladin, who in the play are
known as Orlando and Oliver, The violent feuds between
these two, with their rude glorification of Rosader's muscular
prowess, are almost completely omitted. Alinda, who now
becomes Celia, follows Rosalind to the forest of Arden out of
pure love, and not because she is included in her father's
decree of banishment. Within the forest itself Shakspere would
332
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
allow of no incident ruffling the golden calm of this sylvan
Paradise. He thus omits the rescue of the ladies by Saladin
from robbers, and the final war against the usurper, whom he
prefers to represent as voluntarily laying down his ill-gotten
power. These changes all tend to greater naturalness and
unity of design, but they are not in themselves of the first
importance, and they leave untouched the cardinal fact that
Shakspere has followed the framework of Lodge's attractive
though somewhat prolix tale with unusual fidelity. All the
more remarkable therefore is it that by readjustments of the
perspective, and by the addition of a series of entirely novel.
creations, the dramatist has given to his work a profoundly
original and, in respect of his epoch, unique character. For
the broad result of his treatment is to substitute for the artificial
atmosphere of the Renaissance pastoral the open-air freshness,
the breeze and blue of the old English ballad-poetry, which
sent its breath through the rough tale of Gamelyn. But, by
a masterstroke of skill, a single episode, that of Silvius and
Phebe, is worked up into an exaggerated form of the con-
ventional pastoral method, so that the contrast between it and
the natural charm of the simple woodland life is the most
effective satire upon this growth of the literary forcing-house.
Thus Shakspere preserves all that is really true in the contrast
between town and country while parodying its exaggerations.
Not indeed that As You Like It takes us back to the homely,
realistic Warwickshire or Windsor scenery of Love's Labour's
Lost or The Merry Wives. Rather we find ourselves in an
atmosphere akin to that of A Midsummer Night's Dream,
truly English in the main, but with added features unfamiliar to
the traveller's eye. As in the earlier play, the action begins not
within the greenwood, but at the court of the neighbouring
town, and in a few pungent strokes the vices of city life are laid
bare. A usurper who, having seized his brother's throne, drives.
his niece into banishment for fear of a popular rising in her
favour; an elder brother who robs a younger of his inheritance,
and who, hating him because he is of all sorts enchantingly
beloved,' seeks to compass his death-these are the figures
who are brought into prominence. The wicked prosper, while
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As You Like It.
the good can but display the virtues of patient endurance or
of loyalty, or find, like Orlando and Rosalind, in the kinship of
their fortunes an all-powerful stimulus to love. In this pro-
logue, if we admit Shakspere's postulate of love at first sight,
and if we grant that, in the case of Celia, cousinly affection has
warrant for overriding filial duty, we see human motives in their
ordinary action.
But as soon as the scene shifts to the forest of Arden there
is a change, and we feel that the air of this sylvan retreat has
a subtle effect on all who breathe it. There are
There are no elves
playing their tricks on mortals with wonder-working herbs, but
there is evidently some mystic influence present in a wood
which, along with the flora and fauna of a more temperate
clime, produces the lions, serpents, and palm-trees of the
tropics. This influence steals with soothing balm into troubled
hearts, and bathes them once more in the dewy freshness of
their prime. Its effect is most clearly seen in the banished
Duke and his 'co-mates and brothers in exile.' Far from
looking back longingly to their former splendour, they find this
forest life 'more sweet than that of painted pomp,' and they
have learnt to discover
'Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.'
Sweet in truth are the uses of adversity when it enables the
sufferers to translate 'the stubbornness of fortune into so quiet
and so sweet a style.' Indeed it is hard to realize that this
jocund company have ever known real adversity. There are
the lingering echoes of past sorrows in the references to man's
ingratitude and envy, which bite more keenly than the winter
wind and freezing sky. But even of these we hear chiefly in
songs, and the forest life is one of unruffled calm and content.
To lie beneath the greenwood tree, turning a merry note unto
the sweet bird's throat, or to kill the deer and to bear his body
with a lusty chorus to the festal board-these are the occupa-
tions with which the Duke's followers fleet the time carelessly
as they did in the golden world.' All the detail of these
delightiul scenes is Shakspere's own, with scarcely a hint from
Lodge, and their spirit, as has been said, is that of the old
334
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
English popular poetry. The sentimentality of the orthodox
pastoral is entirely absent, and in its place we have the ruddy
vigour, the leaping pulse and play of the open-air life that
loves to live i' the sun.' Never has the indescribable charm of
outdoor existence found more matchless expression, and as we let
it penetrate us in all its power, we apply to the dramatist the
words used of Wordsworth by Matthew Arnold:
'He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth.
Smiles broke from us, and we had ease;
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sun-lit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.'
At the
On Orlando also the air of the forest acts as a tonic.
moment of leaving his home he had needed comfort and
counsel from Adam, but within the wood the parts are reversed.
He cheers the fainting old man, and with his drawn sword, at peril
of his life, seeks for him food and shelter. As soon as he finds
that he has fallen in with the banished Duke and his companions,
the gentleness of his nature breaks through his show of violence,
and henceforward he displays an unaffected gaiety of heart.
When Jaques proposes that they should sit down together and
'rail against our mistress the world, and all our misery,' Orlando
rebukes such unreasonable pessimism: 'I will chide no breather
in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults.' It
fits better with his sunny humour to roam the forest glades,
hanging upon every tree verses in praise of the incomparable
Rosalind, which atone by their ardent sincerity for their 'very
false gallop' and jingling rhymes. It must be set down partly
to the peculiar influences of the locality that even with the
eagle-eye of love he cannot recognize in the saucy page-boy,
Ganymede, the mistress of his heart. In the scenes between
the two Shakspere has departed largely from the example of
Lodge, who assigns to them almost equal shares of the dialogue.
The dramatist, who never drew the jeunes premiers of his
comedies with the elaborate finish of his heroines, lets Orlando
play an almost passive part in the interviews with the disguised.
Rosalind. He even throws into the background his exploit of
saving his sleeping brother's life from a lioness by not exhibiting
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335
As You Like It.
it before our
<
eyes, but narrating it through the mouth of the
rescued man.
Rosalind's swoon at the recital probably reveals
her secret to Oliver. Hence his exclamation, 'You a man?
You lack a man's heart,' and his refusal to believe that 'this
was counterfeit.' What Oliver knows cannot be a secret from
Orlando, as the latter hints when he declares that his brother
has told him of even greater wonders' than the counterfeited
Swoon. Thus when the final disclosure of Ganymede's real sex
is made, her lover does not utter a single word of surprise, but
silently takes his mistress to his heart. Perhaps, were his nature
less equably cheerful, he might plead that from being in his
character of Gamelyn the original centre of the story, he had
been reduced by Lodge, and in still further measure by Shakspere,
to a relatively less important position. But what he loses in
prominence of speech or action he gains in sunny charm of
character, which makes him a pervasive presence in this golden
Arcadia, and endears him to us above all other heroes of his
special type.
Oliver's part in the story is curtailed to a still greater degree.
In Lodge's romance, after he has been saved from the lion by
Orlando, and thus turned to repentance, he helps to rescue
Rosalind and her cousin from a band of robbers. This is the
origin of his love for Celia, the progress of which is gradually
unfolded in lengthy speeches. But in the play the episode of
the robbers is omitted, and Oliver, without having performed
any action which redeems his past misdeeds, wins in one short
interview Celia's whole heart.
The subordination of these personages by the dramatist
allows him to lift into bold relief the figure of Rosalind, who in
the romance had been on much the same level of interest as the
other characters. He doubtless singled her out in this way
for two reasons. Lodge's sketch of her contained the germ
of much that Shakspere most loved in womanhood; while his
delight in confusion of identity was gratified to the full by such
incidents as her courtship by Orlando, in the belief that she is
merely personating in play the Rosalind who in very truth she
is, and her simultaneous courtship by Phebe, who takes her in
reality for the handsome boy that she appears to be.
Yet from
336
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the earlier scenes we should scarcely guess that the dramatist
destined her for so pre-eminent a part. In the palace of Duke
Frederick she is overshadowed by Celia, and her fits of melan-
choly, coupled with the sudden surrender of her heart to the
scarcely seen Orlando, might seem to indicate that in her we
have yet another of Shakspere's sentimentalists. But from the
moment that she arrays herself in her masculine attire, with
a gallant curtle-axe upon her thigh, and a boar-spear in her
hand, she seems transformed, though in truth it is her real
nature that now displays itself under the shelter of her disguise.
Henceforth it is she who takes the lead; though she is as wearied
as Celia by the journey to the forest, she feels that she 'must
comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet and hose ought to show
itself courageous to petticoat.' On no one does the air of Arden
work so powerfully. The very spirit of the woodlands seems
to enter into her being, and to throng her pulses with its glad
fulness of life. Her speech throws off the deadweight that clogs.
human utterance in this workaday world, and, catching the
secret of the thrush's 'fine careless rapture,' becomes a jubilant
carol. Yet beneath her outward gaiety she preserves her deep
sensibility, as we see in her 'petitionary vehemence' to Celia to
declare the name of the bard who hangs her praises on the
trees. When she hears that it is Orlando, how instinctive is
her lament, What shall I do with my doublet and hose?' and
with what cagerness do her questions about him tumble head-
long from her lips! When, however, her wooer appears, she
seems resolved to atone for her earlier frank confession of her
feelings by ridicule of all amorous passion, though her feigned
derision is intended to draw from Orlando renewed protestations
of his loyalty, which may thus reach her in spite of her disguise.
It is in these forest dialogues between the lovers that Shakspere's
skill in transforming Lodge's romance is most decisively shown.
The novelist had put into the mouth of Rosalind moralizing
reflections on the dangers of love, containing some pretty turns
of phrase, but growing oppressive in their heavy Euphuistic
brocade. For this Shakspere substituted a gushing stream of
wit that carries foam and freshness into the close atmosphere
of the conventional Arcadia. But this wit of Rosalind is of
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As You Like It.
peculiar quality. Unlike that of Beatrice, it is lambent rather
than pungent, and does not spring so much from a penetrating
intellect as from a fertile fancy. It shows a far-off touch of
kinship in its prodigal use of metaphor to the Euphuistic passion
for similes, which appears indiscriminately in the speeches of all
Lodge's characters. This leisurely forest life allows ample
time for weaving imaginative embroidery round not too serious.
themes, and thus we get Rosalind's charming little lecture on
the divers paces in which time travels with divers persons, and
her comparison of love to a madness, which deserves a dark
house and a whip, and only escapes because the whippers share
the lunacy. In a similar vein is her modernized version of the
romantic stories of Troilus and Cressida, and Hero and
Leander, in support of her assertion that 'men have died from
time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.' Of
this painful raillery it may be said in her own words that it
would not kill a fly. It is a weapon merely of self-defence, and
the pictures that she draws for Orlando's benefit of the change-
able humours of a coquette and of a wife's wayward moods are
in ironical antithesis to the passionate devotion with which her
own heart swells almost to bursting. How eagerly she longs to
hear her lover's pleadings is seen in her suggestion that he
should woo her under her disguise, in the name of Rosalind, in
order to be cured of his love. When he is not punctual to his
appointment she weeps with vexation, and declares that Cupid
has merely clapped him o' the shoulder, but that he is heart-
whole. And when, after the mock marriage, he takes his leave
for two hours, she confesses to Celia that she is fathom deep in
love. By her swoon at Oliver's story she involuntarily makes
the same confession to him, and thus the way is prepared for
the final solution of entanglements in the marriage masque, which
here, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, ends the play, and
which suggests that it was produced in honour of some magnate's
wedding. The masque is short, but exceedingly to the purpose,
for it introduces the figure of Hymen in person, and it raises.
a jubilant paean in his praise:
'Honour, high honour, and renown
Tɔ Hymen, god of every town.
2
338
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Amongst the couples whom Hymen unites are Silvius and
Phebe, who had already made their appearance in Lodge's
romance. The novelist had censured Phebe for her excessive
scorn, and had emphasized the retribution in kind that falls upon
her head. But his picture of the self-forgetting devotion of
Silvius was, on the whole, sympathetic, and neither of the
characters moved in a different plane from the remaining figures
in the story. But in the drama this is exactly what they do, for,
by a number of minute touches, Shakspere transposes them into
the region of caricature. Unlike the other lovers, they speak
uniformly in verse instead of prose, and this in itself gives a dis-
tinctively idealistic flavour to their sentiments. Silvius' recital
in strophic form to Corin of the signs of true love, ending with
the triple invocation of the name of Phebe, prepares us for the
pageant played between him and his disdainful mistress. Phebe
has all the regulation' charms of a pastoral nymph-inky
brows, black silk hair, bugle eyeballs, and checks of cream; but
these are turned into burlesque by the addition of 'a leathern
hand, a free-stone coloured hand.' She has been allowed a very
pretty gift of language, and her process of proof to Silvius that
eyes, 'the frailest, softest things, who shut their coward gates on
atomies,' cannot be called butchers or murderers, is a charming
piece of filigree logic. But her dainty terms become ridiculous
when they are used to express her love for Ganymede; and the
poetical epistle in which she questions the supposed youth whether
he is a god to shepherd turned,' and promises, if her passion is
fruitless, to 'study how to die,' is a glaring travesty of the senti-
mental effusions of the conventional love-lorn Phyllises and
Chloes. Similarly the 'tame snake,' Silvius, who is satisfied to
live upon a 'scattered smile' loosed now and then by his mistress,
and who bears her letter to Ganymede in the fond belief that it
has an angry tenor, is a parody of that true loyalty of heart
which, as seen in Orlando, is no enemy to either cheerfulness or
self-respect. At the end of the comedy, when they have served
the dramatist's purpose, they are united in marriage like the
other lovers; but this similarity of fate does not annul the con-
trast between the Dresden-china couple, and the true children of
nature, Orlando and Rosalind.
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As You Like It.
To throw Silvius and Phebe into yet bolder relief Shakspere
has set beside them one or two genuinely rustic figures, drawn
probably from his personal observation in Warwickshire. Corin,
the shepherd to a churlish master, had already appeared in
Lodge's novel. With his primitive philosophy, that 'good
pasture makes fat sheep, and that a great cause of the night is
lack of the sun,' he puts to shame the extravagances of morbid
fancies, and instead of sighing and weeping after the fashion of
mock swains, he finds in the honest toil of a country life an
abiding content: 'I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man
hate, envy no man's happiness; and the greatest of my pride is
to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.' He does not aspire
to the refinements of a more elegant society than his own, but
on the other hand he does not imagine that the Arcadian standard
of taste is to be everywhere followed: 'those that are good man-
ners at the court, are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour
of the country is most mockable at the court.' To the same
genuinely rustic species, though of coarser mould, belongs Audrey,
a creation completely of the dramatist. She is, as she does not
hesitate to admit, an ill-favoured thing, without any touch of
the beauty in which the idyllic shepherdess is habitually arrayed.
And that she is better versed in a plain country morality than in
lyrical flights of passion is sufficiently proved by her inquiry
what it is to be poetical. 'Is it honest in deed and word? Is it
a true thing?' This bucolic simplicity delivers her completely
into the hands of the artful Touchstone, for whom apparently she
forsakes a former lover William.
Touchstone is another figure due to Shakspere's invention,
and together with Feste he stands far above the other Fools in
the comedies. He entirely lacks Feste's tender lyrical vein, and
the few snatches of rhyme that fall from his lips are only jingling
parodies. Feste's good humour had not been seriously ruffled
even by the contemptuous ill-will of Malvolio, but Touchstone's
wit takes always and with every one a caustic turn, and though
he gives practical proof of his attachment to Celia by following
her to the forest, he spares her with his tongue as little as the
rest. Thus while, like Feste, he has to do with each of the
characters in turn, he notes their special disposition, not in order
Z 2
340
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
(
to chime in with it, or to gently hint a cure for its defects, but
to throw it up in all its worst lights. The acid flavour of his
wit is another of the ingredients with which Shakspere tempers
the lusciousness of the conventional pastoral, and his readiness
to rail against both town and country goes far to keep the
balance evenly swung between the two. He thus acts in some
degree, as critics have pointed out, the part of The Chorus'
in a classical play, and through the lips of a number of the
characters we are expressly told that his foolery has a hidden
depth of meaning. Rosalind declares that he is wiser than he
is ware of; Jaques speaks of the strange places in his brain
crammed with observations, which he vents in mangled forms;
and the Duke asserts that he uses his folly like a stalking-horse,
and under the presentation of that shoots his wit. Nothing
certainly could be more effectively pointed than his ridicule of
a courtier's complete vocation in the boast that he belongs to
the charmed circle. I have a trod a measure; I have flattered
a lady; I have been politic with my friend, smooth with mine
enemy; I have undone three tailors; I have had four quarrels,
and like to have fought one.' Thereupon follows his inimit-
able exposition of the catechism of courtly quarrelling through its
seven degrees, from the 'retort courteous' up to the 'lie direct,'
with its tremendous consequences, unavoidable save by the help
of your only peacemaker, an 'if.' We are reminded of the dis-
creet terms of Aguecheek's challenge to Viola, and Sir Andrew
might have served as hero of Touchstone's other anecdote of
the knight, who swore by his honour they were good pancakes,
and the mustard was naught, and who, though he spoke the
opposite of truth, was not forsworn, for he never had any
honour. Love is equally unmercifully ridiculed in Touchstone's
narrative of his courtship of Jane Smile, with the follies into
which it led him, while his wooing of Audrey, of whom he hopes
shortly to get rid, is a parody upon Silvius' protestations of
eternal fidelity to Phebe. Though he makes mock of courtly
etiquette, yet in his intercourse with Audrey and the other
natives of Arden, he plumes himself upon his superior breeding,
and it is highly diverting to see this manikin in motley posing
as the apostle of refinement among boors, or, in his own phrase,
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As You Like It.
as Ovid among the Goths. To have not been at court is, as he
assures Corin, to be 'damned like an ill-roasted egg all on one
side'; and when he introduces his rustic bride-elect to the Duke,
it is with the condescending tone of a patrician who is marrying
outside of his caste. 'A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favoured thing,
sir, but mine own.' Yet on occasion Touchstone can be less
entirely supercilious towards a shepherd's life, as when he
declares, '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 respects 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.' This
may be, as Kreyssig urges, only sublime nonsense out of which
Shakspere did not intend us to draw any moral, yet it is none
the less one of the cases in which Touchstone is wiser than he
is ware of, and it expresses, however grotesquely, the truth that
every fashion of life has its balance of pleasures and of pains.
The addition of a Fool to the personages found in the original
romance is in no way surprising, but far different is it with
another Shaksperean creation whom we encounter within the
groves of Arden. What has the melancholy Jaques to do
there, and why is he drawn with such elaborate finish? In him,
from yet another and more subtle point of view, the dramatist
makes war against the idea that in an idyllic life every nature will
find an anodyne for its peculiar malady. Under the influences
of Arcadia the unhappy may become cheerful, and even the
wicked may turn to good, but real sorrow and real evil imply
stability of character, and a recognition of the facts and laws of
life. There is one type of nature which never for a moment
plants its foot on the solid rock-bed of things as they are, but
which sees in existence only a constant flux of sensations after
which it constantly flies. Of this type Jaques is the consum-
mate representative, and to him Arcadia is merely a fresh field
for the chase of new experiences. In men of his class the
inward fever begets a corresponding physical restlessness which
drives them from pole to pole in search of an elusive satisfaction
-with the result of profound ennui. Thus it is that Jaques
explains his melancholy to Rosalind, distinguishing it from all
342
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
other species: 'It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of
many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the
sundry contemplation of my travels; which, by often rumination,
wraps me in a most humorous sadness.' Even Jaques' melan-
choly is infected by the unreality of his general attitude to life;
in Dowden's words it is not grave and earnest, but sentimental,
a self-indulgent humour, a petted foible of character, melancholy
prepense and cultivated.' As he says himself, he loves it better
than laughing, and it never costs him a single heartfelt sob or
tear. He has experimented on life under all its phases, and
this, as we gather from the Duke, has included a deep plunge
into vicious pleasures; but we think of him as merely a dilettante
libertine, who has gone through a course of iniquity that he may
be more qualified to inveigh against the dark side of all things
human. Everywhere and always he pores morbidly upon the
hollow and petty phases of existence. The world to him is
a stage, and nothing more: the men and women are merely
players, with their exits and their entrances, mechanically
regulated movements, in an ephemeral pageant. The life of
man, as he pictures it, reproduces the condition of the imaginary
state of nature described by Hobbes: it is 'solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and' (in the sense that it has no outlook into the future)
short.' From infancy to age it is a succession of contemptible
'parts,' culminating in 'mere oblivion,' when man dwindles to
a very cypher, 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.'
It is natural that this world-wearied moralist, compact of jars,
should shun the society of his fellows, and thus Jaques avoids.
the Duke, and curtly severs company with Orlando. But how-
ever deeply he plunges into the forest glade, he carries with him
his inexhaustible curiosity and faculty for squandering unsub-
stantial sentiment, and these he sates upon the spectacle of the
wounded deer. Its sobs draw from him tears; but there is an
acid humour mingled with the drops, for while he weeps, he
moralizes the incident into a thousand similes wherewith
'Most invectively he pierceth through
The body of the country, city, court.'
Such capricious tears have their natural counterpart in equally
capricious laughter, and thus Jaques when he meets with Touch-
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As You Like It.
stone bubbles over with ecstatic glee. 'A fool, a fool! I met
a fool in the forest!' And when the fool begins to moralize, the
delicious incongruity of the affair so tickles Jaques that he crows
like a chanticleer, an hour by the dial. It is, at bottom, the same
passion for whatever is unusual and piquant that drives him
later to seek out Duke Frederick, who, through the combined
influences of the air of Arden and the counsel of an old religious
man, undergoes a miraculously swift conversion. All is fish, to
use the homely phrase, that comes to the net of the sentimen-
talist, but the meshes are so wide that they cannot hold their
booty long. Thus we leave the melancholy man in eternal
pursuit of ever fugitive phantoms of joy and truth; and while
we linger for a last moment on the outskirts of Arden, with the
'hey ding a ding, ding' of the birds in our ear, from the depth
of the forest glades shrills Jaques' mocking cry, Ich auch in
Arkadien.'
C
CHAPTER XIII.
THE PROBLEM-PLAYS.
THE opening of the seventeenth century coincides almost
exactly with a sharp turning-point in Shakspere's dramatic career.
On one side of the year 1601 lie comedies of matchless charm
and radiance, and histories which are half comedies. On the
other appear plays, in which historical matter is given a tragic
setting, or in which comedy for the most part takes the grim
form of dramatic satire. The change has been compared to the
passage from a sunny charming landscape to a wild mountain-
district whose highest peaks are shrouded in thick mist. The
causes of this startling alteration in the poet's mood are, as has
been shown, in great measure obscure. He was in the full tide
of outward prosperity, and though his father died in 1601, this
event could not have brought a keener pang than the loss of his
only son in 1596, which seems to have left no shadow on his work.
The Sonnets, with their record of mental anguish and disillusion,
give a partial clue, but it must be acknowledged that the
evidences of date tend to place the estrangement between
Shakspeare and Will during the period of the brightest comedies,
and their reconciliation just before the production of the graver
plays. Another cause that has been suggested for the
dramatist's change from gaiety to gloom, is the failure of the
conspiracy of Essex, followed by the execution of the Earl and
the imprisonment of Shakspere's friend Southampton. To this
we might find a parallel in Spenser's Complaints, whose pes-
All's Well that Ends Well.
345
simistic tone is largely due to his grief at the death of Sidney
and Leicester. It can scarcely be a mere coincidence that
Julius Caesar immediately follows the Earl's tragic end, and it
is remarkable that most of the plays which with more or less.
warrant may be assigned to the last three years of Elizabeth's
reign, contain painful studies of the weakness, levity, and
unbridled passion of young men. This is especially the case
with All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus
and Cressida, and Hamlet. The last-named play is, of course,
distinguished from the others by its tragic ending, but it is akin
to them in its general temper and atmosphere. All these
dramas introduce us into highly artificial societies, whose civil-
ization is ripe unto rottenness. Amidst such media abnormal
conditions of brain and of emotion are generated, and intricate
cases of conscience demand a solution by unprecedented
methods. Thus throughout these plays we move along dim
untrodden paths, and at the close our feeling is neither of
simple joy nor pain; we are excited, fascinated, perplexed,
for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory outcome,
even when, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, the com-
plications are outwardly adjusted in the fifth act. In Troilus
and Cressida and Hamlet no such partial settlement of difficulties
takes place, and we are left to interpret their enigmas as best
we may. Dramas so singular in theme and temper cannot be
strictly called comedies or tragedies. We may therefore borrow
a convenient phrase from the theatre of to-day and class them
together as Shakspere's problem-plays.
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL is probably the earliest
of this group¹, and may be conjecturally dated about 1601-2. The
1 The play first appears in the folio, and we have only internal evidences
to go on. The percentage of double endings (20) points to the date men-
tioned above, as do a number of minor resemblances to Hamlet (e. g. the
Countess' precepts to her son on his departure to Paris recall those of
Polonius to Laertes; Hamlet calls Denmark a prison,' Parolles calls
France a stable,' a 'dog-hole.') The only feature that seems to suggest
an earlier date is the occurrence in the dialogue of numerous rhymed
passages, some of them of considerable length, e.g. I. i. 231-244; II. i.
133-213; and II. iii. 78-111 and 132-151. On the strength of such
passages, and some minor links with Love's Labour's Lost, many critics have
,
346
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
source of the play is Boccaccio's novel of Giglietta di Nerbona,
which had been translated by Painter in his Palace of Pleasure.
Here, as in other cases, notably The Merchant of Venice, Shakspere
seems to have been attracted by the problem of working back
from a traditional plot, full of anomalous incidents, to the motives
that would render such incidents possible, or even probable.
This he accomplishes in two ways: by giving to the puppet-like
figures of the original story the special type of heart and brain
from which certain actions necessarily flow, and by adding new
characters who stand in some vital relation, whether of analogy
or of contrast, to the central theme. Thus in the play before
us, the hero, the heroine, and the King of France are taken from
Boccaccio's tale, while the Countess of Roussillon, Parolles,
Lafeu, and the Clown are inventions of the poet.
It was in the character of Helena, or Giglietta, as she is called
in the romance, that Shakspere, as Elze has well brought out,
found the chief temptation to dramatize the story. From his
conception of this leading figure everything else springs by
strict psychological necessity. The problem was to turn
a woman, who in the novel is merely an adventuress, into an
ideal of feminine strength and devotion, capable of saving the
man she loves from the consequences of a nature at once
stubborn and volatile. Thus Shakspere here treats the same
supposed that All's Well is a recast of an earlier play, probably Love's
Labour's Won, mentioned by Meres in 1598. This theory has Leen stated
in its most positive form by Fleay (New Shaks Soc. Trans. 1874). But
Hertzberg, in his introduction to the German Shakspere Society's edition
of Schlegel and Tieck's translation, contends that this view is false. He
identifies (as already stated) Love's Labour's Won with 7he Taming of the
Shrew, and argues that All's Well was entirely written at one period,
sometime between 1600 and 1603. He shows with great force that the
rhyming lines, like the rest of the play, have often the break in the sense in
the middle of the verse, instead of at the end, and that their frequently harsh
rhythm and elliptical construction are quite different from the smooth, trans-
aient couplets of the early comedies. He might have added that the
rhyming lines occur chiefly, according to a familiar usage in Shakspere, in
] assages of sententious reflection, or of interchange of repartee, as between
Helena and the king. Another consideration which deserves more weight
than is generally given to it, is that Shakspere, in his first joyous period,
would scarcely have handled a theme with such sombre features as the plot
of All's Well. I therefore incline to Hertzberg's view, while admitting that
the question has not been quite conclusively settled. Elze, in his interesting
essay on the play, gives up all attempt to fix the date.
·
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All's Well that Ends Well.
subject as in The Taming of the Shrew, but with the parts
reversed. There the man of firm will by heroic remedies forms
a wayward girl into a devoted wife here a woman of similar
mould by remedies still more heroic shapes a husband of
potential excellence out of a headstrong youth. In the one
case we have a wellnigh burlesque handling of the natural
relation between the sexes: in the other an abnormal relation
is prevented from becoming repulsive by being elevated almost
into the tragic sphere.
Helena in the drama, as in the novel, is the child of Gerard
de Narbon, physician to the Count of Roussillon, who on her
father's death had reared her as a foster-daughter along with his
own son Bertram. The Count has himself just died, and
Bertram, who is now left in ward to the French king, is setting
forth for the Court at Paris. Of the tears shed at his departure,
the bitterest flow from the eyes of Helena, who has formed
a deep, silent love for her early playmate. This love is rooted
in humility. The poor dependant-for Shakspere has rightly
made Helena poor instead of rich, as in the novel-looks up to
the scion of the great feudal house as a being of another
sphere:
'It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me.'
The imagery that she uses in speaking of their relation is
borrowed from the most abject forms of worship:
and again,
'Now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics;'
'Indian-like
Religious in mine error, I adore
The sun, that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more.'
Similarly she compares herself to the hind that would be mated
to the lion, and whose fate is to die for love. The very
existence of her passion needs an apology, 'It hurts not him
that he is loved of me.' Her highest gratification has been the
bitter-sweet indulgence of gazing constantly upon her heart's
348
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
idol--so near her and yet so infinitely removed.
'Twas pretty,
though a plague, to see him every hour.' Thus Shakspere has
emphasized the womanly self-abasement of Helena to a degree
where it borders on servility, in order to prove that, in her own
words, she does not 'follow him with any token of presumptuous
suit,' but with the sacred zeal of a divine mission.
Her pene-
trating insight has revealed to her that there are spots in the sun
that she so ardently worships, and she fears that in the 'learning-
place' of the court they may grow bigger and darker. She
feels within herself, humble though she be, a power to arrest
that growth, and for this she is eager to spend herself to the
utmost. Nothing is further from her mind than her own worldly
advancement :
'My master, my dear lord he is and I
His servant live, and will his vassal die."
But the dramatist has hit upon a device for convincing us of
Helena's single-mindedness far more effective than any senti-
ments from her own lips. A mother has proverbially the
quickest eye for spying out a design against her son's happiness,
and is the severest critic of any claimant to the love that has
hitherto been hers alone. Thus our sympathies are warmly
aroused in Helena's favour when we find that she is loved by
the Countess of Rousillon, as if she were her own child. The
Countess, who is purely a creation of Shakspere, is the most.
engaging type of French character that he has drawn. She is,
in the very best sense, a grande dame of the ancien régime.
She has the aristocratic virtues without their defects. Her rich
experience of life has taught her valuable lessons, in which she
schools her son before he plunges into the temptations of the
Court. To a high-bred graciousness of speech and bearing,
she unites that dislike of outward emotional display, that repose
of manner which stamps her caste. She has felt too many
'quirks of joy and grief' to be readily demonstrative, but her
sympathies are wonderfully keen and alert; she is one of the
women who never break with the memory of their own past,
and who thus, with the silvered hair and the faded cheek,
preserve the secret of perpetual youth. She had long half
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All's Well that Ends Well.
divined Helena's secret, and when she gets accidental confirma-
tion of it, she is stirred by the deepest fellow-feeling ·
'Even so was it with me when I was young:
If ever we are nature's, these are ours; this thorn
Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong;
Our blood to us, this to our blood is born:
It is the show and seal of nature's truth,
Where love's strong passion is impress'd in youth :
By our remembrances of days foregone,
Such were our faults; or then we thought them none.'
The woman who is unassailable by the deadening influences
of old age is equally proof against the exclusive spirit of exalted
rank. She knows the sterling worth of the girl reared under
her own eye, and she recognizes in her, in spite of the difference
in station, the fittest bride for her son. She forces her into
a shamefaced avowal of her passion, and smooths the way for
the enterprise by which she seeks to win him in his own interest.
Gervinus however, in his desire to emphasize the difference
between Helena and the scheming Giglietta of the novel, goes
too far when he asserts that it is the Countess who first suggests
to the girl the idea of making her journey to Paris for the cure
of the invalid king, a means to the acquisition of Bertram.
Helena avows with absolute candour:
My lord your son made me to think of this;
Else Paris, and the medicine, and the king,
Had from the conversation of my thoughts
Haply been absent then.'
She is not, in the bad sense, a schemer, but, on the other
hand, she is no idle waiter upon Providence, and she seizes,
now and hereafter, with tactical promptitude, upon the chances
thrown in her way.
Hers is the deliberate creed of self-help,
specially appropriate on the lips of an orphan:
'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.'
The healing of the king's body is evidently intended by
Shakspere to foreshadow the healing of Bertram's spirit. In
both cases the patient is unwilling to submit to the cure; in
350
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
both Helena prevails by her profound conviction of a heaven-
sent mission, and by the sacrificial ardour that is ready to stake
life itself. To such a nature the end sanctifies the means, and
Shakspere, with dramatic consistency, makes Helena bluntly
demand a husband in return for her services, though in the
novel the offer of this reward comes from the king. But, on
the other hand, the strangeness of the situation, where the
woman chooses her life-partner from among the young nobles
at the Court, is tempered by a number of subtle touches. We
see the disappointment of lord after lord as she passes them by,
and we hear the muttered complaints of the experienced Lafeu
that he is too old to take his chance with the rest.
We get
a further hint of the spirit in which Helena is acting from the
words which she addresses to one of the lords:
'Be not afraid that I your hand should take,
I'll never do you wrong for your own sake.'
If she is about to do a wrong in the sense of making an
unnatural claim, it is to be for the benefit of the person seem-
ingly injured. And this is yet more directly stated when she
pauses before Bertram :
I dare not say, I take you: but I give
Me and my service, ever whilst I live
Into your guiding power.-This is the man.'
Thus at the supreme moment when she claims Bertram for
her own, Helena repeats that she offers him 'service.' She has
already spoken of herself to the Countess as his 'servant' and
'vassal.' These words are not to be taken merely as metaphors.
United to the semi-religious element in Helena's mission, there
is another which may easily be overlooked, as it is foreign to
modern ideas. She feels throughout that as a dependant of the
great house she stands in a feudal relation to Bertram, and that
in return for the protection extended to her, she owes him, in
the technical sense, 'service.' Here once again Shakspere uses
for dramatic purposes a distinctively mediaeval conception, and
Gervinus misses this point when he asserts that 'the difference
of blood and rank has no importance for Helena.' It would be
truer to say that she never forgets it, and that the spirit of her
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All's Well that Ends Well.
relation to Bertram is almost identical with that of the lowly
Griseldis to Count Walter, though in the one case service is
shown by passive endurance, and in the other by strenuous action.
Indeed, as soon as Helena has won Bertram's hand, she sinks
back into a slavish submission to his authority, unparalleled
save by Count Walter's bride. She obeys his cruel orders
without a murmur, and departs homeward unkissed. His curt
and icy letter decreeing eternal separation between them till
seemingly hopeless conditions are fulfilled, wrings from her only
a few sharp twitches of pain, 'This is a dreadful sentence,' and
"'Tis bitter.' Unlike the Giglietta of Boccaccio she does not at
once begin to consider how these conditions may be met. The
thought that drowns all others is that through her Bertram has
been driven to the Italian wars, where he is in danger of his life.
Once more she must sacrifice herself for his sake, and fly the
home to which he will not return while she is there. It is
appropriate to her religious nature that her flight should take
the form of a pilgrimage, though with the lurking hope that
some means of deliverance may be forthcoming, she breaks her
journey at Florence. Here Bertram's infatuation for Diana, the
daughter of her hostess, enables her in the most unforeseen
fashion to comply with his conditions. Once again she seizes
with swift decision the opportunity placed in her way; once.
again she does Bertram wrong for his own sake,' by this plan
which, in her own words,
'Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed,
And lawful meaning in a lawful act,
Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact.'
She achieves her object, and her husband, with a cry for
pardon and promise of stedfast love, throws himself at her feet.
Thus all ends well,' and we feel that Helena deserves her
triumph, yet her fortunes do not awaken our keenest sympathies,
like those of Portia, Viola, and Rosalind. Coleridge has called
her the loveliest of Shakspere's women,' but no chorus of
general acclaim echoes the critic's judgement. Helena exercises
over the majority of readers a less powerful charm than over
the personages in the play. She lacks the superb air of dis-
352
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
tinction which stamps other of Shakspere's heroines. She is, to
say the truth, in the eyes of a generation unfamiliar with her
feudal doctrine of service, a trifle bourgeoise. She has all the virtues
of the missionary type of character, the courage, the self-sacrifice,
the faith that moves mountains. But what her nature thus gains
in intensity it loses in breadth. She is Puritan in her poverty
of interests and of culture, and in her narrow concentration
upon a single aim. Shakspere achieved a triumph in making
the woman who had to play so strange a part entirely worthy of
our admiration, but even he could not gain for her our love.
The character of Helena necessarily determines that of
Bertram. A man grown to maturity, schooled, for good or for
evil, in the ways of the world, could not have been moulded
by a girl. Bertram is little more than a boy, on the threshold
of life's responsibilities and its temptations. Early influences
have been in his favour. His mother's character we know, and
the king gives an equally attractive picture of his dead father.
From him Bertram inherits his arched brows, his hawking
eye, his curls,' as well as his valour and passion for martial
glory. It speaks well for him that the novel attractions of the
court should not temper his impatience at being held back from
the Italian campaign:
'I shall stay here,
Creaking my shoes on the plain masonry,
Till honour be bought up, and no sword worn,
But one to dance with.'
But this high spirit has another, less worthy side, in Bertram's
pride of birth, wherein he differs as far as possible from his
parents. Youth is always apt to judge by externals, and the
heir to material advantages of rank and wealth is easily blinded
to the value of the less concrete treasures of the mind and
heart. Love as a rule is the first influence to bring a clearer
vision, and love is to Bertram as yet unknown'. It is this
1 The theory of Hertzberg, founded upon an obscure passage in the fifth
act, that Bertram is attached to Maudlin, the daughter of Lafeu, is, as Elze
has conclusively shown, quite untenable. Apart from the other difficulties
which it would raise, it is disproved by the conduct of Lafeu himself, who
could never have been so enthusiastic about a woman who was robbing his
daughter of her lover.
XIII]
353
All's Well that Ends Well.
haughty, hot-blooded boy who now by the arbitrary fiat of
the king finds himself constrained to take to wife a woman,
separated from him by caste, robbed by familiarity of the
magical charm of the unknown, and whose very claim to his
hand violates the elementary relations of man and woman.
So
gross is this invasion of primary personal right that our sym-
pathies lean strongly to Bertram's side. But once again it is
needful to remember that the story moves in a semi-mediaeval
atmosphere, and that feudalism did not recognize the claims
of the individual in the same degree as modern theories of life.
The king had the power of regulating the marriage of his
wards, and Bertram's disobedience to his command would have
far less warrant then than now. Moreover there is an unworthy
element of mere class-pride in his disdainful rejection of Helena,
which merits and receives severe rebuke from his sovereign's
lips:
'From lowest place when virtuous things proceed,
The place is dignified by the doer's deed:
When great additions swell's, and virtue none,
It is a dropsied honour. Good alone
Is good without a name: vileness is so:
The property by what it is should go,
Not by the title.'
Thus here, as so often, Shakspere contrasts external show
with real worth, and it is beyond question that patrician scorn
of lowly merit aroused in him the poet's 'scorn of scorn.'
But it is inconsistent with all that we know of him personally,
and with the general tone of his writings, to suppose that he
had modern doctrinaire views about the equality of all men,
or that the play before us is intended as a protest against social
distinctions. The whole attitude of Helena, as we conceive of
it, is based upon the recognition of the difference in rank
between herself and Bertram. Moreover the king's enforce-
ment of an arbitrary right is by no means in accord with
democratic ideas, nor is his further exercise of prerogative in
ennobling Helena on the spur of the moment. If any social
doctrine is to be drawn from the scene it is that all men are
equal-before the throne, which indeed was the view of the
Tudor sovereigns.
That even after Helena's elevation Bertram will not consent
ла
354
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to be her husband, save in name, proves that class-pride is not
his only reason for rejecting her. From the insufferable pros-
pect of the dark house and the detested wife' he flies with
Parolles to the Italian wars. His native bravery gains him
brilliant distinction on the battlefield, but he is led away by his
worthless companion into the coarsest sensual pleasures. The
family pride, which had stood in the way of his union with
Helena, is trampled under foot at the demand of the important
blood,' and the ancestral ring denied to his wife is granted to
a paramour :
'Here, take my ring:
Mine house, mine honour; yea, my life be thine,
And I'll be bid by thee.'
By this surrender he forfeits the right to further urge the
claims of rank against Helena, and it is in the strictest poetic
justice that he should in this very way enable her to fulfil the
conditions that he has imposed upon her. At the same time
he learns from his mother that Helena is dead, and the news,
accompanied by the Countess' reproofs, affects him strongly.
We are told that on the reading of the letter 'he changed
almost into another man. Yet there is little proof of this in
the concluding scene of the play. His military services, backed
by letters of recommendation from the Duke of Florence, have
regained him the favour of the king, who is about to give him
in marriage to Lafeu's daughter. But the ring which he un-
wittingly has received from Helena suddenly rises in witness
against him, and to screen himself he lies unblushingly. Then
follows Diana's accusation, which he meets with further lies,
and the result is that the king, who throughout the play acts
with despotic impetuosity, orders Diana to prison, and Bertram
to be seized on suspicion of Helena's murder. The Count's
over-ingenious devices recoil upon his own head, and when,
at the height of the mystification, Helena herself appears,
Bertram may well hail her as a deliverer. The dramatic en-
tanglement in this scene is highly ingenious-more so than
has been generally recognized-and it no doubt appealed
strongly to the peculiar Elizabethan delight in 'mistaken
identity.' But psychologically the treatment is very unsatis-
XIII]
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All's Well that Ends Well.
<
factory. Bertram, with his sins of lust and lying still green
upon him, without penance or repentance, vows eternal fidelity
to Helena, and on this brittle foundation we must build our
trust that all ends well.' Once again Shakspere reminds us
that there is no situation which he handles so crudely as the
reunion between an injured woman and her faithless lover or
husband.
The most favourable omen for the future is that Bertram has
learnt the worthless character of his evil genius Parolles. This
personage of Shakspere's creation is introduced as the complete
contrast to Helena, and as a foil, in certain respects, to Bertram.
The heroine proves her quality throughout by deeds; Parolles,
as his name implies, is the empty spinner of words. He is
another variation on the type of the Miles Gloriosus, which
the Elizabethan drama borrowed from Roman comedy. Don
Armado, Pistol, and, from one point of view, Falstaff, all
belong to the species, as well as the Bobadil and Tucca of
Ben Jonson, and the Bessus of Beaumont and Fletcher. In
Parolles we have the consummate union of the braggart and
another classical type, the parasite. He thus is a product of the
comedy of manners, and is far more nearly akin to Pistol, that
strange offshoot of the comedy of humours, than to Falstaff who,
in his deepest essence, is a profoundly serious rather than merely
humorous figure. From the vagueness of outline of the mere type
Parolles is delivered by a strong dash of national colour. As the
Countess is the noblest of Shakspere's French creations, Parolles
is the vilest. The Dauphin and Orleans in Henry V are carica-
tures of true chivalry, but even a caricature retains a distorted trace
of likeness to its original, which is utterly wanting in this liar,
pandar, and sneak. A superficial showiness and glib volubility
are the capital elements of his slender stock in trade. By most
of those who come near him, this 'window of lattice' is seen
through at a glance. Helena knows his fixed evils,' though her
passion for Bertram makes her tender to them. The Florentine
women hiss out in the open street their curses upon this 'vile
rascal,' this jack-an-apes with scarves.' The sharp-sighted
Lafeu-and indeed it is the chief reason for his presence in
the play-never tires of covering him with most egregious
A a 2
356
Ссн.
Shakspere and his Predecessors
indignity.' 'I did think thee for two ordinaries to be a pretty
wise fellow thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel: it
might pass: yet the scarfs and bannerets about thee, did mani-
foldly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great
a burden.' He warns Bertram that there can be no kernel
in this light nut: the soul of this man is in his clothes.' But it
neither wants the instinct of a woman nor the trained sagacity
of a statesman to see through this dressed-up impostor. The
French lords, his companions-in-arms, have found him out to be
a 'hilding,' a 'bubble,' 'a most notable coward, an infinite and
endless liar, a hourly promise-breaker.' It is they who prepare
the stratagem for exposing him in his true colours before
Bertram, who alone has been dazzled by the garish trappings
of this pretender, this 'gallant militarist that had the whole
theoric of war in the knot of his scarf and the practice in the
chape of his dagger.' The exposure is so overwhelming in its
merciless completeness that laughter is stifled at its source by
the sting of shame at the spectacle of humanity wallowing in
such a slough of mud. Truth, military honour, patriotism, friend-
ship, are all sacrificed with equal readiness in order that Parolles
may keep a whole skin. It is the complete realization of the
Roman satirist's ideal of infamy, propler vitam vivendi perdere
causas, and it finds its climax in the dastardly cry, 'Let me
live, sir, in a dungeon, i' the stocks, or anywhere, so I may
live.' A last touch is added, after the trick has been revealed,
in the caitiff's deadness to his shame :
Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great
"Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more;
But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft
As captain shall: simply the thing I am
Shall make me live.
Rust, sword cool, blushes! and Parolles, live
Safest in shame
The tartness of scenes such as these is not tempered by
comedy of sweeter flavour. The clown Lavache is one of
Shakspere's most insipid jesters, and his coarse jokes about
women and marriage are scarcely suitable to the ears of the
stately and virtuous Countess. Yet he lets drop a phrase
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357
Measure for Measure.
which Dowden has happily chosen as a motto for the play,
'That man should be at woman's command, and yet no hurt
done!'
MEASURE FOR MEASURE, which first appeared in the
folio of 1623, may be conjecturally assigned to about 1604.
The revival in that year of a statute, which punished with death
any divorced person who married again while his or her former
husband or wife was living, is strikingly akin to the incident
with which the play opens. According to an ingenious theory
of Malone, two passages, Act i. 1. 67-72 and ii. 4. 27-31, are
intended as a 'courtly apology for King James I's stately and
ungracious demeanour on his entry into England,' which gave
great offence to a people accustomed to the Tudor bonhommie.
The date to which these references seem to point is supported
by internal evidence. The perfect balance between thought
and language, which marks the final group of historical plays
and the joyous comedies, is replaced by a compression of
style which often makes the rhythm harsh and sense obscure.
The play has practically the same percentage of lines with
double ending as All's Well (21), but is without the rhyming
passages distinctive of that work. As in All's Well, we have
the rescue of a brother by a sister, though Shakspere shows
his usual skill in producing variations. The tie is here one
of blood, not of adoption, and it is physical instead of moral
death from which the strong-willed woman delivers the weak
man. The repulsive instance of mistaken identity, which gave
Helena to the arms of Bertram instead of Diana, is repeated
in the case of Mariana and Isabella, although in the source from
which Shakspere took the plot of Measure for Measure there is
no suggestion of this device. With Hamlet the play is linked
by its deeply reflective tone, its brooding sense of the pollution
spread by lust in the single soul and in society at large, and the
shivering recoil of the man of phantasies from the mystery of
the unknown hereafter. Claudio's gloomy meditations on death
sound like an echo from the soliloquies of the Danish Prince.
It is this wealth of philosophic thought, this concern with the
deepest issues of life here and beyond the grave, that give the
358
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
play a massive weight which the original framework of plot
might well have seemed too slight to bear.
The story was first told by the Italian novelist Cinthio in his
Hecatomithi. There Ludovico is sentenced to death for seduc-
tion by Juriste, the Emperor's deputy in Innspruck. Ludovico's
sister Exitia pleads for his life, and the deputy becoming en-
amoured of her, succeeds, by a promise of marriage and pardon
to her brother, in making her yield to his desires. He there-
upon violates his double pledge, but the lady appeals to the
Emperor, who forces Juriste to marry her and then condemns
him to death. At Exitia's intercession however he is pardoned,
and henceforward lives a reformed life. This story was drama-
tized in 1578 by George Whetstone in his Promos and Cassandra.
Whetstone's play was in two parts, containing ten Acts, of which
the first five deal with the iniquity of the deputy, and the latter
with its discovery by the king, who now first appears in person.
The work was written in a curious medley of metres, from
ballad-lines to blank verse, and, besides introducing a comic
underplot from low life, it modified the original story. The
brother, here called Andrugio, is not executed, but set at liberty
by the governor of the prison, who sends the head of a criminal
in his place. Thus, when the lady marries the deputy at the
close of the play, we are spared the revolting spectacle of
a heroine's union, not only with her own seducer, but with her
brother's judicial murderer.
This grim use of mistaken identity to save the brother's life
may have suggested to Shakspere another more repulsive use of
the same device to save the sister's honour. Hence the intro-
duction in Measure for Measure of Mariana, whose relation to
Angelo further serves to throw a strong light upon the deputy's
character. Besides this cardinal change the dramatist made
a number of minor alterations, all adding to the plausi-
bility and moral significance of the plot. Yet in spite of
these improvements, Measure for Measure has never won
the suffrages of the majority of readers, and has been.
condemned by a number of critics, including Coleridge, who
calls it the most painful-say, rather, the only painful-part'
of Shakspere's genuine works, and who speaks of the comic
XIII]
359
Measure for Measure.
scenes as disgusting, the tragic as horrible. Such criticism,
besides entirely passing over the wonderful technical skill which
has smoothed away most of the difficulties in peculiarly stub-
born materials, is grossly unjust to the spirit of the play. Such
epithets as 'disgusting' and 'horrible' can only be fairly applied
to scenes which violate aesthetic decencies from sheer love of the
foul or the barbarous. In Measure for Measure, though unde-
niably strong meat is served up, the most repulsive details have
all their place in the ge eral scheme, which is indisputably noble,
while numberless lustrous shafts of poetry and thought pierce
the sombre atmosphere in which the action moves.
The general effect of that atmosphere has been vividly caught
by Watkiss Lloyd in an otherwise singularly inappreciative study
of the play: We never get into the free, open, joyous atmo-
sphere so invigorating in other works of Shakspere: the oppressive
gloom of the prison, the foul breath of the brothel, are only
exchanged for the chilly damp of conventual walls or the oppres-
sive retirement of the monastery.' Vienna, whither Shakspere
shifts the scene, is, as here portrayed, a city of dreadful night,
wherein
'Corruption boils and bubbles
Till it o'errun the stew.'
Lust holds its shameless saturnalia in the open, and society
is perishing of inward corruption. Beneath the mild sway of
a shy, meditative ruler, animal instincts have broken loose in
uncurbed riot. For fourteen years the 'strict statutes and most
biting laws' designed for the restraint of these evils have been
let sleep. Justice, like the rod hung up in the child's sight, but
never used, is mocked at rather than feared; liberty plucks it by
the nose; the law is as a scarecrow, which has kept one shape
so long that it has become a perch for the birds of prey, instead
of their terror. The Duke's sluggish temperament has at length
been aroused to the gigantic proportions of the disease, and he
determines to set the rusty machinery of the law once more in
motion. But with the sensitiveness of a finely-strung nature he
shrinks from the tyranny of rigorously punishing sins to which
his own laxity had granted a 'permissive pass,' and he withdraws
for a time into seclusion, whence, in the disguise of a friar, he
360
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
can watch the progress of events. The Duke's scruples, as he
himself confesses, are not his only, perhaps not his chief, motive
for this retirement. Otherwise it would have sufficed to appoint
as his deputy the experienced and capable Escalus, who has the
prior claim to this office. But with a leavened and prepared
choice' he gives the first place on the commission to a younger
man, Angelo, and we gradually realize that the desire to test
this man's character has at least as much to do with the Duke's
strange course as his dislike of inconsistency. Angelo is the
product of an age of licence-generated by a process of recoil.
In this mediaeval Sodom he is determined that there shall be at
least one righteous man. While others dally along the primrose
path, he walks straight on in the narrow way. He subdues the
flesh by a system of penitential discipline, and even libertines,
who do not hesitate to talk scandal of the Duke, admit that
Angelo is
A man whose blood
Is very snow broth; one who never feels
The wanton stings and motions of the sense
But doth rebate and blunt his natural edge
With profits of the mind, study and fast.'
Escalus is the spokesman of public opinion when he asserts
that Angelo is worthy beyond all others to fill the office of
deputy. But the deep-sighted Duke is suspicious of virtue so
entirely self-concentrated, and there is a flavour of irony in the
solemn address with which he prefaces the appointment:
'Angelo... thyself and thy belongings.
Are not thine own so proper, as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike
As if we had them not.'
And the Duke's distrust of this precisian, who thanks God that
he is not as other men are, yet values above all things his
reputation in their eyes, is more explicitly avowed to Friar
Thomas:
'Lord Angelo scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be.'
XIII]
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Measure for Measure.
The Duke thus acts on the principle of the Greek proverb,
åpxǹ deíţei ävdpa, but his deputy's private life has already given
a significant hint of what may be looked for from him in his wider
sphere. He had been affianced to Mariana, sister of the great
soldier Frederick, but between the time of contract and the
appointed day of nuptiil, Frederick had been lost at sea, and
with him had gone down Mariana's dowry. Whereupon this
'well-seeming Angelo,' pretending discoveries of dishonour in
her, had swallowed all his vows and left her in her tears. The
virtue which does not shrink from cold-blooded treachery may
well be suspect, and is deservedly exposed to the searching
ordeal of irresponsible sway.
The moment Angelo feels the sword of justice in his grasp
he proves to the world that it is no longer to be borne in
vain. The 'drowsy and neglected act' punishing immorality
with death is revived. The officers of justice hale with new-born
zeal suspected offenders before the deputy and his colleague.
Draconian severity is substituted for the laxity of the previous
régime. Yet the results of this rigid censorship are decidedly
equivocal. While the suburban dens of iniquity are demolished,
those in the city are allowed to 'stand for seed,' because ‘a wise
burgher put in for them.' It is the opinion of experts that the
sin aimed at will not be 'extirped till eating and drinking be put
down,' and that if men lose their heads for it, in ten years there
will be wanted a commission for more heads. Moreover there
are divided counsels on the judgement-seat, as appears in the
examination of Froth and the disreputable clown Pompey.
Angelo, irritated by the blundering charge of constable Elbow,
who is evidently next of kin to Dogberry, and by the realistic
circumlocution of Pompey's defence, hurries abruptly away, with
the grim wish that his colleague may find good cause to whip
them all. Escalus continues the investigation with imperturbable
patience and good humour. He laughs at Elbow's mistakes,
pulls Pompey up short in his long-winded digressions, by concise,
leading questions, scans Froth narrowly for signs of his
character, and in the end delivers an impartial but merciful
judgement. Froth is discharged with a few kindly words of
caution, Pompey is threatened with a whipping should he appear
362
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
at the bar again, and the constable, whose own private life has
proved not to be beyond reproach, is warned that it would be
advisable for him to pass on his office to some other sufficient
man in his ward.
This divergent conception which Angelo and Escalus hold of
their duties is yet more clearly illustrated in the case of a more
highly-placed offender, Claudio. With deliberate distinctness,
which hasty reading must not be allowed to blur, Shakspere has
set forth the circumstances which bring this young man, who in
Whetstone's version was an ordinary libertine, within the scope
of the terrible statute. He had been contracted to Juliet, and
had lived with her as his wife, though the outward form of
marriage had been postponed, because Juliet's dowry remained
in the coffer of her friends, whose favour had yet to be gained
for the union. A contracted couple, from the Elizabethan point
of view, were looked upon as joined in wedlock, and thus Claudio's
sin was merely one in name. Moreover--and it is one of the
dramatist's most subtle and original uses of parallelism-Claudio's
relation to Juliet had been almost of a piece with that of Angelo
to Mariana. But where the one had for worldly reasons left his
already affianced bride in the lurch, the other with generous
impetuosity had preferred disregard of an outward form to
heartless desertion. Thus Claudio's transgression is in itself
most venial, and Angelo is the last man justified in visiting it
with condign penalties. The humane Escalus pleads the miti-
gating effect of circumstances, the infirmity of human nature,
the unsullied record of Claudio's house. He upholds that the
true function of law is to cure, not to destroy, to 'rather
cut a little than fall and bruise to death.' But Angelo
remorseless. He is the consummate type of the martinet
official whose circle of vision is bounded by the narrow horizon
of his department, who drives a code mercilessly through the
delicately complex mechanism of society, and to whom the
claims of red-tape are more sacred than those of human flesh
and blood. The one imperious idea that the law must take
its course fills his mind to the exclusion of all else, and
Esclus' appeal is met with the dry, pitiless formula, 'Sir, he
must die.'
XIII]
363
Measure for Measure.
In his desperate strait, with less than twenty-four hours
between himself and death, Claudio sends for help to his sister
Isabella. There is flagrant irony in the fact that he must
choose as messenger the dissolute Lucio, who had seduced
a maid under promise of marriage, and shaken himself free
of her by perjury. And it heightens the irony that this liber-
tine should have to seek Isabella within the convent of Saint
Clare. For Claudio's sister is about to turn her back upon
the world, and to become a votarist. The travail of the senses,
which is convulsing the social fabric of Vienna, is absolutely
stilled within this retreat, where the nuns may speak with men
only in the presence of the prioress, and may not speak and be
seen at the same time. Yet even these privileges are too large
for Isabella, and she would fain be subjected to a more strict
restraint. Like Angelo she disciplines her nature by austerity
of life, but instead of starving body and soul alike, she subdues
the flesh to the service of the spirit. Her virtue is not an
external property laboriously won, a distinguishing badge, a
phylactery made broad to be seen of all men. It is the bloom
and fruitage of noble energies, of a life fed from the inexhaust-
ible depths where all sense of self is lost. 'Isabella,' it has
been said, 'is the only one of Shakspere's women whose heart
and eyes are fixed upon an impersonal ideal, to whom some-
thing abstract is more, in the ardour and energy of her youth,
than any human personality.' Helena had been stirred by
missionary ardour, but its concentration upon one object had
robbed it of the impressiveness which catholicity alone can
bestow. Isabella's gaze is not thus narrowed: it is fixed full
upon the surpassing splendour of the beatific vision, and her
face, as the virginal 'cheek-roses' testify, is luminous with the
reflected glow. Yet this rapture of the spirit has not deadened
her to sweet earthly affections. She prizes the memory of her
father; she speaks of her school-fellow Juliet under a tender
fiction of kinship, and she holds her brother very dear. Though
mistrusting her own power, she answers at once to his call for
help, and hastens to the deputy. At first it would seem that her
lack of confidence in herself is but too well-grounded. Her
brother's vice is abhorrent to her; she is at war 'twixt will and
364
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
will not,' and she petitions for condemnation of the sin, but
mercy on the sinner. As Lucio declares, she could not plead
more tamely for a pin, and it needs all the pressure that he can
bring to bear to prevent her withdrawing upon Angelo's first
refusal of her suit. But the frozen surface of her vestal nature
gradually thaws, and the imprisoned eloquence streams from the
depths beneath. Though acknowledging the justice of the
statute, she pleads for mercy in words that recall those of Portia,
but, as befits her character, she anchors her claim more avowedly
upon divine precedent :
'Why all the souls that were were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy.'
Angelo is sufficiently moved to offer a justification of his rigour,
and even to cloak it under the semblance of pity. But the flimsy
covering shrivels in the white flame of Isabella's scorn, as she
reminds the deputy that it is excellent to have a giant's
strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant.' And autocratic
officialism, exultant in the exercise of its short-lived power,
meets its annihilating indictment in the majestic irony of the
supposition:
'Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder.'
Angelo visibly wavers beneath this attack, and Isabella
presses home her advantage by a personal appeal. She bids
the deputy knock at his own bosom, and ask of his heart if
it confess a natural guiltiness like Claudio's: in that case he
must sound no thought' against her brother's life. Escalus
had already used the same argument in vain, but on the lips
of this saintly advocate it has a novel power. The die is cast,
when he utters the simple words: 'I will bethink me-Come
again to-morrow.' Isabella has prevailed, but not through the
avenue of which she thought. She has not softened Angelo's
heart, or convinced his reason, but inflamed his desire. His
nature has just kinship enough with her own to feel the full
seductive charm of her immaculate purity. He recognizes in
XIII]
365
Measure for Measure.
her the ideal which all his efforts reproduce, but in distorted
and fragmentary form, and he covets its possession. Thus
he is attacked through the very virtue in which he fancied
himself so securely entrenched, and the man whose blood had
never been stirred by wanton allurements, finds in the chastity
of a vestal a more subtle and irresistible snare.
the moment of self-revelation,
"O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint
As he cries in
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is the temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue.'
But it is not easy, when Isabella returns, to put his thoughts
into words. He discloses himself by riddling questions, whence
she only gradually gathers his purpose. She thinks at first
that he is merely making trial of her virtue, and the martyr-
spirit that welcomes pain as the deliverance from dishonour
leaps out to meet the challenge:
'Were I under the terms of death,
The impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies
And strip myself to death, as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I'd yield
My body up to shame.'
But Angelo takes advantage of her confession that women
are 'ten times frail' to return to the attack. He bid her
be what she is—a woman, for, if she is more, she is none, and
he declares his passion in unequivocal terms, with her
brother's pardon as the reward of her compliance. Her infinite
scorn can only find voice in the repetition of the single epithet
'seeming, seeming,' though with feminine readiness she at once
assays to turn to Claudio's profit the tactical advantage given
her by the deputy's proposal. But she now learns the un-
scrupulous meanness of this cold-blooded calculating man of
affairs. To her threats of denunciation the would-be sensualist
opposes the bulwark of his 'unsoiled name,' and in a brutal
outbreak of the cruelty which in Shakspere's eyes is the reverse
side of lust, he proclaims that, in case she resists his suit, Claudio
shall suffer torture as well as death. But the pain which
Isabella does not dread for herself, she does not dread for
366
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
others. She carries in her breast, as Kreyssig has said, 'the
categorical imperative' which forbids her, under whatever
pressure of circumstance, to swerve an inch from the rigid line
of inexorable moral law.
Yet even the most unfaltering virtue, in the hour of its
probation, welcomes the fellowship of another human heart,
and Isabella hurries away to the prison in the hope of hearing
her resolution endorsed from Claudio's lips. She finds him in
the company of the fiiar-duke, who is seeking to make death
less terrible to him by fixing his gaze upon all that is mean,
paltry, and pestilent in life. But, though Claudio murmurs
assent to these platitudes, his personality gives them the lie.
The floral grace of this youth jars with the blackness of the
condemned cell, the yet pitchier blackness of the sepulchre.
Though at Isabella's first mention of the price by which he may
be saved, he delights her by the brave ring of his protest, yet
the passionate instinct of the living to clasp life, by whatever
means, proves itself too strong. 'Death is a fearful thing,'
moans the quaking wretch, who already feels its chill hand
upon his brow.
With panic-born eloquence he gives voice to
the mutiny of the warm tingling flesh and of the delighted
spirit' against the terrors of the impenetrable Beyond, with
its vista of charnel-house pollution for the body, and infernal
tortures for the soul. In the paroxysm of his despair he can
only grasp the one fact-that his sister's honour may be flung
as a sop to the grisly shape that hovers over him, and implor-
ingly he pleads for its sacrifice. A modern dramatist would
doubless have here seen the materials for a theatrically effective
situation, in which the heroine was torn by the conflict between
sisterly love and her ideal of duty. But Shakspere did not con-
sider that the drama's function was to elaborate such a situation,
with the inevitable result of blurring the line between right and
wrong. Isabella's recoil is instantaneous, absolute, final. The
swift vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this white
spirit',' and if her wrath is stern, wellnigh savage, it is the
elemental rage of unsophisticated purity against sin.
¹ See Walter Pater's essay on Measure for Measure in his volume of
Appreciations
XIII]
367
Measure for Measure.
Up to this point, which forms the exact centre of the play, all has
been wrought in Shakspere's mightiest manner, but henceforward,
through the remainder of Act iii and Act iv, the workmanship
flags. The scenes are written chiefly in prose of a compara-
tively tame character, and the rapidity with which they succeed
one another is confusing. But the action advances in a number
of material points. Isabella proves that her outburst of defiance
to Claudio does not spring from callousness to his sufferings,
for she lends herself to the Duke's stratagem whereby her
seeming assent to Angelo's overtures is to save her brother and
secure the happiness of the forsaken Mariana. The glimpse
of the lonely woman at the moated grange gives the outline
which the Lincolnshire poet of our own day was to fill in with
sombre detail from the landscape of the fens. A pleasanter
glimpse is that of Angelo's brick-walled garden, abutting on
a vineyard with a planched gate. But the scene lies for the
most part in the prison and its precincts, where the disguised
Duke adds hourly to his experiences of criminal life, and
gathers fresh evidence of the results of his deputy's administra-
tion. Once having entered upon the downward path, Angelo
finds himself driven ever lower and lower. Having secured,
as he believes, the fruits of his nefarious compact, he violates it
from fear of after-consequences, and he even orders Claudio's
execution at an illegally early hour.
The threads thus 'somewhat loosely scattered are gathered
into a knot in the fifth act. This act in its structure closely
resembles the final scene of All's Well that Ends Well. The
ruler again sits in judgement, and there are the same charges,
arrests, and threats of death, the same deliberate mystification
before guilt is brought home to the evil-doer. But the dénoue-
ment is more impressive in the present play, which rises once
again to something of its earlier power. The Duke's proclama-
tion of redress to petitioners on his re-entry into the city has
disquieted Angelo, and his worst fears are fulfilled when Isabella
steps forth to accuse him in the open street. Yet outwardly
he maintains his composure, and even when Mariana denounces
him, he seeks to quell her with a sneer. But the discovery that
the Duke, 'like power divine,' has beheld his 'passes,' completely
368
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
crushes him, and he begs for immediate sentence and sequent
death. The shrine of outward respectability at which he had
worshipped so zealously is shivered, and in the agony of hist
humiliation he may well crave to be buried among its ruins.
Coleridge deplores that he is not taken at his word, that he is
not sacrificed to 'the strong indignant claim of justice.' But
Angelo's character is not conceived of as irredeemably vile.
It was the previous austerity of his life, and the overstrained.
self-confidence which this begot, that left him prone to the
overwhelming temptation that burst upon him from the most
unforeseen quarter. Isabella herself admits that 'a due sincerity
governed his deeds' till he looked upon her, and though she
believes that Claudio has died by his command, instead of
clamouring for vengeance she petitions Angelo's pardon on
the ground that he has sinned but in intent. Mariana, with
whom he has been constrained to fulfil his marriage-contract,
sues for his life on the plea that best men are moulded out
of faults.' The Duke for a time poscs as inflexible:
(
'An Angelo for Claudio, death for death!
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure,
Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.'
reality the negation of the
Even while the Duke thus
But the spirit of the play is in
maxim which serves as its title.
pronounces judgement he knows that Claudio is alive, and that
the capital sentence on Angelo is merely a feint. The deputy
is saved by that humane interpretation of the law against which
he had battled so tenaciously. In the years passed since
The Merchant of Venice was written Shakspere had reached
a loftier conception of justice. The earlier play had furnished
an ideal illustration of 'measure for measure.' Shylock took
his stand upon the letter of the law, and by the letter he was
overthrown. But here the fanatical worship of the letter is
shown to conflict with the genuine principle of equity, and
we realize that codes and charters may become a curse instead
of a blessing to society, unless they are applied in a remedial
and not a nakedly retributive spirit. That such will henceforth
be the case in Vienna is guaranteed by Isabella's elevation to
a share in the ducal seat. She does not return to the nunnery,
XIII]
369
Troilus and Cressida.
yet in her cloistral whiteness of soul she bears abroad the stamp
and seal of her noviciate. Her leavening presence at the core
of the state promises a speedier regeneration of the devotees
of Venus genetrix in her impure form than the most Draconian
enactments. In her we salute what Angelo had so miserably
failed to become, a 'saviour of society,' and if the light that
streams from her countenance is at first dazzling in its pure
severity, it turns if we gaze but long enough into a soft, benig-
nant glow.
<
The date of TROILUS AND CRESSIDA is one of the most
puzzling problems in Shaksperean chronology. The work was
published by Bonian and Walley in two quarto editions in 1609.
The first of these contains a very remarkable preface. Eternal
reader, you have here a new play, never staled with the stage,
never clapper-clawed with the hands of the vulgar.... Refuse not
nor like this the less for not being sullied with the smoky breath
of the multitude: but thank fortune for the scape it hath made
amongst you, since by the grand possessors' wills I believe you
should have prayed for them rather than been prayed'. We
thus learn that Troilus and Cressida had not hitherto been
acted, and that by 'the grand possessors' (i. e. probably the
Globe Theatre company's) 'wills' it would not have been
printed. The publishers must therefore have got hold of the
MSS. surreptitiously, and issued a pirated edition. Its circula-
tion in printed form evidently hastened its production on the
stage, for in a second quarto of 1609 the preface is omitted, and
instead we have the words, 'as it was acted by the King's
This preface contains one of the most glowing contemporary tributes to
Shaksperc's genius: This author's comedies are so framed to the life that
they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives,
showing such a dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with
plays are pleased with his comedies. So much and such savoured salt of
wit is in his comedies that they seem, for their height of pleasure, to be born
in the sea that brought forth Venus Amongst all there is none more witty
than this; and bad I time I would comment upon it, though I know it
nceds not for so much as will make you think your testern well bestowed;
but for so much worth as even poor I know to be stuffed in it, it deserves
such a labour as well as the best comedy in Terence and Plautus. And
believe this, that when he is gone and his comedics out of sale, you will
scramble for them, and set up a new English Inquisition.'
B b
370
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
6
Majesty's Servants at the Globe.' In the Stationers' Register,
February 7, 1603, there is an entry of The Book of Troilus and
Cressida as it is acted by my lord Chamberlain's Men.' This
cannot be Shakspere's play if the statement in the preface to
the first quarto be true that it had never been 'staled with
the stage'; nor is it likely to be the drama written to
Henslowe's order in 1599 by Dekker and Chettle, which could
scarcely have passed into the hands of Burbage's company.
The entry in the register may possibly refer to a first sketch
of Shakspere's play, and there are a few passages in the main-
plot which look as if they had been written earlier than the rest
(e. g. i. 1. 94-109). But such an inference is highly conjectural.
In any case, if metrical evidence is to be trusted, the play must
have been completed several years before it was piratically.
published. The percentage of lines with double endings (20)
would place it about 1603-4, and the fact that it has only six
light endings, and no weak ones, is a strong argument against
a later date. Why it should have been kept so long unacted by
the Globe company is a mystery which we have no means
of solving.
But the difficulties about the date of the play are insignificant
compared with the difficulties of its interpretation. The story
of Troilus and Cressida, though the titular plot, occupies less
space than the rivalry of the Trojan and Greek forces, and the
internal disunion within the opposing camps. It is in the
purpose of this secondary plot, and its relation to the love-story,
that the crux of the play lies. An attempt to read the riddle
necessitates an inquiry into the growth of the Troilus romance,
and of the mediaeval additions to the original tale of Troy.
Troilus is only once mentioned by Homer, as a son of Priam,
and a dauntless charioteer, who was cut off in his youth.
Cressida does not appear at all in the Iliad, but her name is
probably derived either from Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses,
a priest of Apollo, or from Briseis, the beautiful captive of
Achilles. In the sixth century A. D. there appeared a Latin
prose work, Historia de Excidio Trojae, which purported to
be a translation of a journal kept during the siege by an eye-
witness, Dares the Phrygian. This work was entirely favourable
2
XIII]
371
Troilus and Cressida.
to the Trojans, and appealed to the peculiar superstition of the
chief western nations that they were descended from the people
of Priam. Dares portrays Troilus as a youth of beauty, courage,
and passion for glory. He also describes the appearance and
character of Briseida, but he does not bring her into any relation
with Troilus. The idea of connecting them by a love-affair
originated with Benoît de Sainte-More, a Norman trouvère of
the twelfth century, who wrote Le Roman de Troie, a French
poem whose materials were chiefly taken from Dares. But
Benoît added considerably from other sources or from his own
invention, and the episode of Troilus and Briseida is the most
important of his embellishments. Briseida is drawn as an
attractive coquette, with a quick and ready wit and a changeable
heart. She is the daughter of Calchas, already represented
by Dares as a Trojan priest, who through foreknowledge of
what was to come had taken refuge in the enemy's camp. She
is beloved by Troilus, but one day Calchas reclaims his daughter,
and she is conducted in the deepest grief within the Greek lines,
where she soon forgets her former wooer, and consoles herself
with Diomede. Benoît's poem was rendered into many different
languages, the most successful version being the Latin prose
novel by the Sicilian Guido Colonna. Guido's novel in its turn
became the source upon which Boccaccio drew in the fourteenth
century for his epic poem the Filostrato, 'the man overthrown
by love.' The genius of the great Italian transformed the naïve
story of Benoît into a highly-wrought epic, steeped in the passion
of the South. In fact Boccaccio, in the person of Troilus, tells
the tale of the joys and sorrows inspired by his own love for
La Fiammetta, and hence Griseida (as the name now appears)
is changed from a girl to a young widow. A new character
is added in the person of Pandaro, Griseida's cousin, who is
the bosom-friend and confidant of Troilus, and who helps him
to surmount all the difficulties in his path. It was doubtless
on one of his visits to Italy that Chaucer read the Filostrato,
and shortly after 1380 he put forth his English version of it,
Troylus and Cryseyde. The poem is his masterpicce of narrative
art, and is executed in a spirit widely different from that of its
model. Boccaccio had brought into bold relief his heroine's
Bb 2
372
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
woman.
disloyalty with Diomede, and had drawn from this the moral
of the changeable nature of women. Chaucer is repelled by
this portion of the tale, and his active sympathy ends with
the separation of the lovers. His Troylus is a young man who
has mocked at the victims of Cupid and who is overtaken by
Nemesis when the first sight of Cryseyde plunges him into.
amorous frenzy. Cryseyde, as in the Filostrato, is a young
widow, but otherwise she is greatly changed. She is not a siren
of passionately sensuous nature who meets her wooer's advances
more than half way, but a modest, tender-hearted, winning
Her surrender to Troylus is only made inch by inch,
and is largely due to the direct agency of Fate. Her subsequent
disloyalty is almost incredible to Chaucer; he passes over it
as lightly as possible, with the excuse that she was so sorry
for her untruth.' This modification of the heroine's character
necessarily gives a greater importance to the part of the go-
between, and thus in Chaucer's version Pandarus becomes
a figure of the first rank. He is no longer a young knight,
cousin to Cryseyde, but her elderly uncle, an experienced man
of the world, who volunteers his good offices to Troylus in this
delicate affair of the heart. The spectacle of a greybeard.
busying himself in such fashion would be in the highest degree
offensive were it not robbed by Chaucer's art of much of its
grossness. Pandarus, in fact, with his frankly materialistic view
of life, his incomparable resource and versatility, his rich humour,
his culture perverted to unworthy uses, his delight in youthful
associates, is in many respects a prototype of Falstaff.
Shakspere may have used Chaucer's poem, but the whole
spirit in which he treats the romance is essentially different
from that of his great predecessor. Indeed, paradox as it may
sound, Romeo and Juliet is more akin to Troylus and Cryseyde
than is Troilus and Cressida. Alike in the tragedy and the
poem, a passionate love-story is acted out against a background
of feud and bloodshed. In both Fate helps to throw two lovers
into each other's arms, and then cruelly separates them by a
mischance springing from the hostility of their kinsfolk. Troylus,
with his union of senti entality and bravery in action, resembles
Romeo; Cryseyde, at once modest and ardent in her love, till
XIII]
373
Troilus and Cressida.
her departure from Troy, is allied to Juliet, and the garrulous
good-natured Pandarus plays a part curiously akin to that of
the Nurse. Above all, in lyrical intensity, in passionate pulse
and swing, the two works strike a similar note.
The
But Shakspere's lyrical period lay far behind him when he
was attracted to the story of Troilus and Cressida. He saw in
it the materials for a merciless satire of the high-flown ideal of
love, fostered by the mediaeval cycle of romance, whence the tale
had sprung. The absolute devotion of a gallant to his mistress,
which this form of literature had glorified, is transformed into
the delirious passion of a youth for a mere wanton.
knightly love which Spenser had sung of in The Faerie Queene
as a sublime and half-unearthly rapture, the all-powerful stimulus
to the practice of every virtue, is here exhibited as an intoxi-
cation of the senses, paralyzing the will, blinding the gaze, and
sapping manhood at its source. Troilus, apart from his infatu-
ation, is a model of youthful heroism. Ulysses, the critical
observer, grows eloquent in his praise:
'The youngest son of Priam, a true knight:
Not yet mature, yet matchless; firm of word,
Speaking in deeds, and deedless in his tongue;
Not soon provoked, nor being provoked, soon calmed:
His heart and hand both open and both free;
For what he has, he gives; what thinks, he shows;
Yet gives he not till judgement guides his bounty,
Nor dignifies an impure thought with breath.
Manly as Hector, but more dangerous.'
Throughout the play he justifies this lofty tribute. He is fore-
most in the field, and if Pandarus is to be trusted, returns
with his sword bloodied, and his helm more hacked than
Hector's. In the council which debates the restoration of Helen
as the price of peace, he displays a passion for glory which
recalls Hotspur:
'Worthy Hector,
She is a theme of honour and renown,
A spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds,
Whose present courage may beat down our foes,
And fame, in time to come, canonize us:
For, I presume, brave Hector would not lose
So rich advantage of a promis'd glory,
As smiles upon the forebead of this action
For the wide world's revenue.'
374
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Yet this pattern of chivalry bemoans, in the paroxysm of his
amorous frenzy, that he is
'Weaker than a woman's tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
Less valiant than the virgin in the night."
So hoodwinked is he by passion that he misreads the trans-
parent characters of Pandarus and Cressida. In his eyes, and
his alone,
'He's as tetchy to be woo'd to woo,
As she is stubborn-chaste against all suit.'
When at last he stands on the threshold of attainment, his
brain reels in the dizzying vortex of his rapture:
I am giddy expectation whirls me round.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense. What will it be
When that the watery palate tastes indeed
Love's thrice-reputed nectar? death, I fear me,
Swounding destruction, or some joy too fine,
Too subtle potent, and too sharp in sweetness
For the capacity of my ruder powers.
I fear it much, and I do fear besides
That I shall lose distinction in my joys;
As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps
The enemy flying.'
Never has there been a more exact and subtle analysis of the
delirious ecstasy that chokes in its own surfeit. And all this is
for a shallow wanton in whom this heroic greenhorn, himself
'as true as truth's simplicity,' looks to find 'a winnowed purity
in love' equal to his own. He is ready to throw his glove to
Death on behalf of her constancy, and if his heart flutters at her
departure from Troy, it is only through dread that her faith
should be corrupted by the insidious arts of Greek courtiers.
When Ulysses leads him to Calchas' tent, and his own eyes and
ears bear witness to the perjury of his idolized mistress, he
seeks to discredit the evidence of his senses:
This she? no; this is Diomed's Cressida.
If beauty have a soul, this is not she.
If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimony,
If sanctimony be the god's delight,
If there be rule in unity itself,
This is not she.'
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Troilus and Cressida.
But the bitter truth cannot be thus kept at bay, and Troilus
is startled out of his callow optimism into a stern realization of
the falsehood and wickedness of the world. His nature is
however too sound for him to sit whimpering over his disen-
chantment. He seeks refuge from his heartache in strenuous
achievement on the field of battle, and when we take leave of
him, he is planning exploits of revenge for the death of Hector,
whose fall has left him the foremost hope of Troy.
Shakspere's treatment of the story involves the degradation
of Cressida. The charming coquette of Benoît, the voluptuous
court-lady of Boccaccio, the tender-hearted widow of Chaucer,
becomes in the play a scheming cold-blooded profligate.
Such a woman does not need to have Troilus' suit pressed
upon her by Pandarus, and if she holds off' for a time, it is
merely, as she frankly confesses, to gratify her vanity and eager-
ness for despotic sway over her lover:
'Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she beloved knows nought, that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is:
That she was never yet, that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.'
This is not the language of passion, whether pure or unholy,
but of that calculating wantonness which prefers the feeling of
mastery even to sensual gratification. Yet when the confession
of her partiality for Troilus cannot be any longer delayed, she
cleverly poses as the deeply enamoured woman whose lips have
hitherto been sealed by modesty. She affects a fear that, in her
rapture, she will betray her emotion 100 unreservedly, and with
an ambiguous request to stop her mouth, she draws him into
kissing her. Then, with the artfulness of a consummate flirt,
she pretends to be eager to hide her confusion in solitude, and
can only be prevailed on to stay by a passionate declaration of
Troilus' eternal fidelity. She protests her own unswerving
loyalty with equal ardour, and crowns this mockery of genuine
devotion by yielding to his wishes. When afterwards she hears
that she is to be exchanged for Antenor, she declares that she
will never leave Troilus, that she has forgotten her father, and
376
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
that whatever extremes 'time, force, and death' may do to her
body, 'the strong base and building' of her love
'Is as the very centre of the earth
Drawing all things to it.'
This expression, as Gervinus has noted, is ominous, and
on her arrival in the Greek camp she at once shows herself
in her true colours. She allows herself to be kissed in
general' by all the chiefs, and she gets the laugh of Menelaus
by an equivocal jest. She does not gradually fall away
from loyalty to Troilus, for of loyalty her shallow nature is
incapable; she simply throws herself with redoubled zest into
her old game in this new field. In Diomed, who has been her
escort between the hostile lines, she spies, as she thinks, a fully
qualified substitute for Troilus. But she has mistaken her man,
and in the scene between the two in Act v, Shakspere has, with
a few pungent strokes, delineated the Nemesis upon the heartless
coquette. Diomed is no raw youth, dwelling in a fool's para-
dise, and seeing life and love through a rose-coloured haze.
He is an experienced soldier and man of the world, who takes
at a glance the measure of the woman with whom he has to
deal. He 'tames' her by a method as suited to her character
and as effective as Petruchio's with Kate. When she tries on
him her accustomed trick of holding off, instead of pleading for
her favours, he taunts her with being forsworn, and turns his
back upon her with a curt good-night. It is she then who, to
keep him by her side, has to use entreaties and caresses, and
even to offer him in pledge of her faith the sleeve given her by
Troilus. The shallow coquette pays a heavy yet just price for
her selfish levity, when she exchanges a chivalrous adorer for
a harsh and imperious taskmaster.
The dramatist's conception of Cressida's character necessarily
limits the function of her uncle, and the Pandarus of Shakspere
is of far less importance in the development of the plot than his
namesake in Chaucer's poem. It is difficult to see why some
critics should speak of the later Pandarus as a more finished type
than the earlier. We find in him not a trace of the fascination,
the high-bred polish, the stores of humour and worldly wisdom
which distinguish Chaucer's masterly portrait. We see instead
XIII]
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Troilus and Cressida.
a cringing hanger-on of the court and of great houses, whose con-
versational stock-in-trade consists of honeyed, scented phrases,
and gossip of the boudoir. Chaucer's Pandarus has a real affection
for his friend, and takes care that his affairs of the heart shall
be kept a secret from the world. But in the play he is simply
a busybody, who revels in holding the threads of a fashionable
intrigue, and who is at trouble, by sly looks and hints, to make
it plain to outsiders that he knows more than he cares to speak
of. But we get a hint that his evil courses are not without their
punishment. In the brief glimpse that we get of him in Act v
he is complaining of his ill-health. He is suffering from the
retribution with which age pays for youthful excesses, and added
thereto is social degradation, when Troilus dismisses him con-
temptuously to eternal ignominy and shame.
But for such
It is however when we turn to the secondary plot, introducing
the chief heroes of the rival hosts, that we have to face the main
difficulty of the play. That the creator of a Prince Henry and
a Hotspur should bring on the stage in travestied form the
glorious paragons of antiquity, an Achilles and an Ajax, is at
first sight one of the most startling phenomena in literature.
It looks as if Shakspere, conscious that he was wrestling with
Homer for the supreme poetic crown of all time, thought to
secure victory by heaping ridicule upon his rival. Or, to put it
in a more symbolical manner, the genius of Romantic drama
might seem to be taking its revenge upon the classical ideals
which had sought to strangle it in its cradle.
a view there is not the slightest solid foundation.
of the secondary plot, like those of the main story, are not
classical but mediaeval. The precise original upon which
Shakspere drew cannot be determined: it may have been
Caxton's translation of Raoul le Febvre's Recueil des histoires
de Troie, or some similar work, in which the Homeric story
was overlaid by a fantastic embroidery of feudal ideas. It is
this cycle of chivalric romance that supplies the many details
in the play of which the Iliad knows nothing—the love of
Achilles for Polyxena, the relationship between Hector and
Ajax, the dream of Andromache, Hector's visit to the Greek
camp, the name of his horse Galathe, the dreadful Sagittary, and
The sources
378
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Margarelon, the bastard son of Priam. It has been asserted that
Shakspere could have found the figure of Thersites nowhere
save in the Homeric poem, but this is far from being the case.
In any case the majesty, the severe and sculpturesque beauty of
the Greek epos, cannot have been revealed to him. For the
only form in which he could have become familiar with the
Iliad was Chapman's version of the first seven books, published
in 1598. This version had great and unique merits, but its use
of quaint conceits prevented it from reproducing the massive
simplicity of the original. Moreover it should not be forgotten
that in all probability Chapman was the rival poet who ousted
Shakspere from his patron's favour, and that this translation
seems to have been one of the causes of his triumph. It is
therefore a highly plausible conclusion that Shakspere in this
travesty was attacking not Homer but Chapman. The per-
sonages for whom Chapman stood as chief literary sponsor
would have, in the dramatist's eyes, nothing of the sacrosanct
inviolability with which they are clothed for all who have bowed
in the temple of Greek art. The original classic story and the
mediaeval embellishments would seem to him to stand on an
exactly similar footing, and he would feel no more scruple in
debasing Ajax and Achilles than Pandarus and Cressida.
In the Lucrece Shakspere had introduced an elaborate de-
scription of the siege of Troy, and had there referred to Helen as
'the strumpet that began this stir.' The phrase gives us an
important clue to Shakspere's motive for combining in one play
the story of Troilus and Cressida and the broader theme of the
conflict between Greece and Troy. Helen and Cressida are
made to figure in exactly the same light. Both are heartless
and disloyal, yet they awake a devotion of which they are utterly
unworthy. The infatuation of Troilus is paralleled by that of
Menelaus and Paris, whom Diomed cynically classes together as
equally deserving of Helen :
He merits well to have her, that doth seek her,
Not making any scruple of her soilure,
With such a hell of pain and world of charge.
And you as well to keep her, that defend her,
Not palating the taste of her dishonour,
With such a costly loss of wealth and friends.'
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Troilus and Cressida.
But Helen not only throws a spell over her individual lovers;
she brings two nations into conflict for the sake of her beaux yeux.
As Diomed asserts:
'For every false drop in her bawdy veins
A Grecian's life hath sunk: for every scruple
Of her contaminated carrion weight
A Trojan hath been slain.'
Hector makes a similar statement in the Trojan council when
he urges the surrender of Helen as the price of peace. In his
eyes 'she is not worth what she doth cost the holding':
"Tis mad idolatry
To make the service greater than the god,
And the will dotes, that is inclinable
To what infectiously itself affects
Without some image of the affected merit.'
These lines strike the very keynote of the play, and knit together
the two plots. The 'mad idolatry that makes the service
greater than the god' is exemplified in the one on a personal,
in the latter on a national scale. Troilus is infected by the
mania as virulently in his public as in his private character.
His rhapsodies over Cressida are not more glowing than over
Helen, the
'Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness.
Wrinkles Apollo and makes stale the morning.'
For her sake he, and, as is natural, Paris, are eager to risk the
welfare of the entire Trojan state, and Hector, though he holds
that the moral laws of nature and of nation' demand her
restoration, yields to the impetuous counsels of his younger
brothers, and confesses that he has already sent a 'roisting chal-
lenge' among the Greeks. The debate moves throughout in the
circle, not of antique, but of mediaeval ideas. It illustrates and
implicitly condemns the quixotic sacrifice of great national
interests to a fantastic code of exaggerated gallantry. Even the
challenge of Hector, in spite of his attitude at the council,
strictly conforms to chivalric usage. The Trojan offers to
make it good that he hath a lady wiser, fairer, truer,' than any
380
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
among the Grecian dames. And Agamemnon retorts in exactly
similar spirit:
'We are soldiers,
And may that soldier a mere recreant prove
That means not, hath not, or is not in love.
If then one is, or hath, or means to be,
That one meets Hector: if none else, I am he.'
Even the veteran Nestor prepares to gird on his armour as the
champion of his countrywomen. And if Achilles, for whom the
challenge is especially meant, fails to answer it, the reason is
that he is involved in an amour with Hector's sister Polyxena,
and to this he sacrifices every instinct of a patriot and a soldier:
Fall, Grecks: fail, fame; honour, or go, or stay,
My major vow lies here, this I'll obey.'
Thus in both camps sentimental gallantry is the ruling motive,
with disastrous results to true national interests.
But on the Grecian side this is not the only anti-social force.
Exaggerated self-love is as fatal to the success of the common
enterprise as exaggerated idealization of the bond between the
sexes. As Ulysses declares, in a speech full of the ripest political
wisdom, 'the specialty of rule has been neglected,' and every
tent is become a faction. 'Degree,' that principle of the subor-
dination of the lower to the higher, upon which the whole
visible universe depends, and which is the base of social life in
all its forms, has been rudely shaked. The result is anarchy :
'The general's disdain'd
By him one step below; he, by the next:
That next, by him beneath: so, every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick
Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation.'
The mightiest makes himself the centre of an ever-spreading
contagion:
The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns
The sinew and the forehand of our host,
Having his ear full of his airy fame
Grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent
Lies mocking our designs.'
As Pandarus inflames the passion of Troilus by depreciating
the charms of all the Trojan ladies except Cressida, so Patroclus
flatters Achilles' infatuated self-esteem by parodying all the
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Troilus and Cressida.
other Grecian commanders. Ajax is similarly infected; he
bears his head as proudly as Achilles,
'Keeps his tent like him,
Makes factious feasts; rails on our state of war,
Bold as an oracle, and sets Thersites
To match us in comparisons with dirt.'
This diseased self-love, an exaggeration of Hotspur's passion
for honour, blinds the judgement no less than the diseased senti-
mentality of Troilus. The two commanders scorn every element
of warfare save the brute strength in which they personally excel;
the finer strategy which taxes the brain they sneeringly dub
'bed-work, mappery, closet-war.' How disastrous this factious
arrogance is to the main enterprise is made clear by Hector's
challenge. Achilles would be the natural champion of the
Greeks in the duel with the foremost warrior of Troy, and in
Nestor's eyes it is essential for him to take the field, as the
result of this combat will influence the entire campaign. But
Ulysses demurs:
'What glory our Achilles shares from Hector,
Were he not proud, we all should wear with him,
But he already is too insolent;
And we were better parch in Afric sun
Than in the pride and salt scorn of his eyes.'
It will therefore be wiser to choose the Greek champion by
lot, and to arrange that it shall fall to Ajax. This will give an
opportunity for exalting the latter above Achilles, and thus
'physicking the great Myrmidon who broils in loud applause.'
To yet further 'physic' him, the adroit Ulysses devises the inci-
dent of the Greek chieftains passing their haughty colleague as
he stands at the door of his tent, with curt, disdainful greeting.
Ulysses himself brings up the rear, and interprets to him the
effects of his scornful withdrawal from the fray. He demon-
strates that abilities, however pre-eminent, are practically non-
existent, unless they are exercised on the general behalf and re-
ceive their recognition in the grateful applause of the multitude:
That man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without, or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection;
As when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.'
382
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Achilles' arrogant self-idolatry has thus a suicidal effect on his
glory, and it has allowed Ajax to supplant him in the eyes of
mankind, which fixes its gaze solely on present achievements.
Ulysses thus plays the reverse rôle to Pandarus. The latter
uses his knowledge of the world, in the lowest sense, to inflame
the delirious passion of Troilus. Ulysses uses his far loftier
experience of men and things to cure the self-love of Achilles.
But his exhortations have little effect. A letter from Polyxena
is enough to keep Achilles still back from the fray, and he is
only roused to action by the death of Patroclus at the hand of
Hector. Careless as ever of the general interest, he seeks
no foe but the slayer of his friend. At their first meeting,
Hector, with overstrained chivalry, forbears to strike because
Achilles is fatigued: at their second it is the Trojan who is at
the disadvantage, but generosity has no place in the Grecian's
breast; he hounds on his Myrmidons against his defenceless.
enemy, and when he is dead drags him brutally at his horse's
tail. Thus the scene closes in an atmosphere of squalid atrocity.
With truth it has been said that in this play 'we are introduced
to heroic personages in order to be cured for ever of hero-
worship.'
But whatever rag of nobility still clings to the chief actors in
the drama is pitilessly stripped off by Thersites, who to some of
his original Homeric characteristics, now adds those of the
Shaksperean fool. The result is a loathsome creation, who
has enough of coarse plebeian insight to spy out all that is
bestial beneath the fair shows of human life, and enough licence
of speech to vent the leprous scum of his brain where he will,
with nothing worse to fear than a cudgelling. The war on his
lips sinks to the level of a brawl in the vilest of resorts. The
combatants on either side are 'all incontinent varlets.' Agamem-
non has not so much brain as ear-wax'; Menelaus is both ox
and ass, and, rather than be he, Thersites would conspire against
destiny; Achilles is a ' valiant ignorance, with a great deal of his
wit in his sinews.' But the main gush of his vitriolic abuse is re-
served for the 'elephant Ajax,' the 'sodden-witted lord, Mars' idiot.'
He parodies his pompous bearing before the duel for the benefit
of Achilles, though in an angrier mood he classes them together
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Troilus and Cressida.
as draught-oxen, whom Ulysses and Nestor yoke, and make
plough up the wars. But even this more mentally-gifted pair
comes in turn under his lash, 'the policy of those crafty swear-
ing rascals, that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor, and that
same dog-fox, Ulysses, is not proved worth a blackberry.' They
have sought to strike at Achilles through Ajax, and the only result
is to have made the one as supercilious as the other.
Whatever Thersites touches he leaves polluted with slime.
Mankind as viewed by him does not belie the description of it
in Gulliver's Travels as 'the most pernicious race of little odious
vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the
earth.' And indeed the spirit in which Shakspere conceived
the character of Thersites is akin to that in which Swift drew
the appalling picture of the Yahoos. Not that this nauseating
figure is to be taken as the ' chorus' of the play. His profanation
of all things human is as far removed from the sane, equitable
worldly wisdom of Ulysses as are the delirium of Troilus, the
self-love of Achilles. They are dazzled to realities by the false
glitter of fantastic ideals; Thersites is blinded to them by a con-
genital disease of moral vision. But only in a mood of bitterest
disenchantment with the world could such a character have been
conceived. Even were he removed, the atmosphere of the play
would still be black with the shadow of a great eclipse. And in
this case the flight of time has added to, instead of, as often,
taking away from the effect of the work. The reader of to-day
mourns the degradation of the mediaeval romance of love and
chivalry into a satire, however legitimate in itself, of the mediaeval
ideals. It is turning the swords of the offspring against their
mother's breast. And even if this be pardoned, we shudder,
as an Elizabethan would never have done, at the spectacle of
the god-like creations of the Greek Muse being dragged through
the dirt. It scarcely soothes our pain, though it rectifies our
judgement, when we realize that the Achilles of Shakspere is
not 'the great Achilles whom we knew,' that his Ajax is simply
a magni nominis umbra. They are mediaeval figures decked out
in borrowed trappings, and the shafts that riddle them glance
harmless from the glorious forms under whose titles they mas-
querade. But even as a satire of chivalry, Troilus and Cressida
384
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
overshoots the mark. The feudal code of love and honour,
artificial though it be, deserves better than to be made the butt
of savage scorn. Cervantes, within almost the same hour, had
discovered a more excellent fashion of smiling it away.
The atmosphere of obscurity which wraps the group of plays
belonging to this period closes most thickly round HAMLET,
and criticism has at times failed to realize that its baffling
mystery is no isolated portent, but the cardinal expression of
a mood which has left its trace on the other works treated in
this chapter. Like them it presents difficulties of date, but
a consideration of the evidence suggests that Shakspere's first
sketch of the play was written in 1601, and that this was
expanded into the present form in 1603-4¹.
1 Nash, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, 1587 or 1589, speaks of
'whole Hamlets, I should say, handfulls of tragical speeches,' and Lodge,
in his Wit's Miserie, alludes to the visard of the ghost which cried so
miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster wife, "Hamlet, revenge.' These
references prove the existence of a drama on the subject of Hamlet at least
as early as 1589, and Henslowe mentions in his diary, June 9, 1594, the
performance of a play Hamlet by the Lord Chamberlain's company at the
Newington Theatre. It is probable, as already suggested (p. 63), that this
work was from the hand of Kyd. It cannot have been Shakspere's play, for
had it been in existence, in however im erfect a form. before 1598, it must
have been mentioned by Meres in preference to Titus Andronicus, as an
example of his tragic power. The first certain reference to Shakspere's
play is the entry in the Stationers' Register, July 26, 1602, of 'A book, The
Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as it lately was acted by the Lord
Chamberlain his servants.' The book was printed in quarto form in the
following year, and on the title-page we learn that it had been acted divers
times in the City of London, as also in the two Universities of Cambridge
and Oxford and elsewhere.' In 1604 appeared another quarto,' The Tragical
History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare. Newly
imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the
true and perfect copy.' The claim was substantially accurate, for this Q.
contained fifty leaves instead of thirty-two, and in it the play appeared,
except for a few passages added in the folio, as we know it now. The
relation between the two Q.s is a difficult problem. The Q. of 1603 is sọ
mutilated and corrupt that in all probability it was printed from shorthand
notes taken down during a performance. The question then arises, Was it
an imperfect report of the play as it appears in the quarto of 1604? This
is most unlikely, for there are differences between the Q.s which imply
a revision of the play by the author between the two issues. The names
Polonius and Reynaldo are substituted for Corambis and Montano. The
scene with Ophelia is shifted from Act ii. 2 to Act iii. 1. The dialogues
between Hamlet and Horatio in Act iii 2 and in Act v. 2, Hamlet's short
XIII]
385
Hamlet.
The
The story of Hamlet is told in the Historia Danica of Saxo
Grammaticus, who wrote about 1180-1208. It appeared in
French prose in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, 1570.
only extant English translation, The Historie of Hamblet, dates
from 1608, but there may have been earlier versions, now lost.
The tale in its original form is thoroughly characteristic of the
age and country that gave it birth. It belongs to that Anglo-
Danish cycle of legends, of which King Horn is a specimen.
which celebrates the prowess of a national hero. Hamlet's
father Horwendil is murdered by his brother Fengo, who
seizes the throne and marries his victim's widow, Gerutha. The
Prince summoned to revenge by his father's ghost, feigns
madness and is narrowly watched by his uncle and a courtier.
The murder of this courtier by mischance, Hamlet's voyage to
England, and the death of his companions, follow as in the drama,
but the original version then takes a quite independent course.
Hamlet marries in England the king's daughter and returns to
Denmark, where he kills his uncle and is chosen king in his
stead. He then visits England again, where he marries two
wives, by one of whom he is finally betrayed to his doom.
It is evident that in this rude tale of treachery and bloodshed
soliloquy at the close of Act iii. 2, his encounter with Fortinbras and the
important speech that follows in Act iv. 4, all appear for the first time
in the quarto of 1604. These passages combine to throw greater light
upon Hamlet's motives and mental characteristics, and it is incredible that
their absence from Q. I should be due merely to the accident of faulty
reporting. It is in the thrce later Acts that Q. 2 shows the greatest advance
upon the first, and it has been conjectured by Aldis Wright that Shak-
spere, as in the case of King John and The Taming of the Shrew, was
working in Hamlet upon an older play; that in the Q. of 1603 we have this
play retouched chiefly in its earlier portions, while in the Q. of 1604 we
have the completely revised version. The researches of Gregor Sarrazin
(Kyd und sein Kreis, 94-122) have tended to confirm this theory. It is
highly probable that Q. I contains fragments of Kyd's play, and even in its
final form Hamlet shows the influence of Kyd's semi-Senecan dramatic
method. It is likely that Shakspere wrote his first draft in 1601, while
the Lord Chamberlain's men were travelling, because they were for the
time being out of favour at Court, on account of their connexion with the
Essex conspiracy (hence the allusion ii. 2 to the inhibition' of the players
to perform in the city owing to the late innovation), and that he revised
and enlarged the work after his return, about 1603. For a fuller discussion
of these last points, see E. K. Chambers' Introduction to his edition of
Hamlet in The Warwick Shakspere, and his appendix D.
CC
386
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
1
Shakspere found only the roughest materials for his drama, yet.
it was a happy accident that led him to choose this Scandinavian
saga as the framework of his most representative play. For
thus the English Muse in her full-grown maturity turns her face
again towards the region where she was cradled in infancy.
Hamlet the Dane claims kinship with Beowulf, and in the space
of a thousand years that separates them the surrounding features.
of nature have but little changed. The air that blows over the
platform at Elsinore is as nipping and eager as when it bellied the
sails of the Vikings' galleys, and the opposite cliff with dreadful
summit still beetles o'er his base into the sea. Echoes of the
primitive age reach us in such episodes as the 'angry parle,' in
which Hamlet's father smote the sledded Polacks on the ice, and
the sea-fight wherein Hamlet himself is taken prisoner. But as
many later critics, e.g. Kreyssig, Werner, and Dowden have.
clearly shown, Gervinus was entirely at fault in declaring that
the play 'transports us to a rude and wild period from which
Hamlet's whole nature recoils and to which he falls a sacrifice
because by habit, character, and education he is alienated from
it, and like the boundary-stone of a changing civilization, touches
a world of finer feeling.' On the contrary, Shakspere represents
not only the Danish prince, but all who surround him as members
of a highly cultured and refined society, decadent through its own
effeteness. Marcellus' words, 'something is rotten in the state of
Denmark,' strike the true key-note; the court of Elsinore is suf-
fering from the corruptions of a highly artificial civilization, not from
the untamed riot of barbarian violence. Hamlet is a picture of the
same society as is reflected in Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale,
and in some of Bacon's most typical Essays. But if Gervinus
errs in treating Hamlet as the man of culture who falls a victim
to the brute force of a wild epoch, Werner is scarcely less.
mistaken in speaking of him as the representative of a decaying
society, who perishes and cannot but perish in its general
wreck. 'Hamlet's is a tragic doom from which he can as little
deliver himself as Oedipus from his fate. Here appears, what
1
¹ I am indebted to these critics in especial for valuable suggestions in my
study of the play. It will be seen, however, that my interpretation of the
relations of Hamlet and Ophelia differs materially from Dowden's.
XIII]
387
Hamlet.
the poet wished to show, the power of society over the indivi-
dual the latter is the product and image of his time, his race,
his surroundings, whose course he cannot break, and which, let
him do what he will, make of him what they please.' Such an
interpretation may save Hamlet's character from the charge of
weakness by the heroic method of robbing him of all respon-
sibility for his deeds, but it throws the play into entirely wrong
focus. It is primarily a study of a human soul, not a fragment of
political philosophy. Hamlet's fall has its origin not in irresistible
external pressure, but in his own breast. Yet, as Dowden has
rightly insisted, Werner's interpretation, though misleading
when offered as a solution of the total problem of the play,
emphasizes an aspect of it which, under the influence of Goethe's
criticism in Wilhelm Meister (Lehrjahre, bk. iv. 13), has been
too much put out of sight. To me,' wrote Goethe in words that
remain for ever classic, 'it is clear that Shakspere meant, in the
present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon
a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole
piece seems to me composed. There is an oak-tree planted in
a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its
bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered. A lovely, pure,
noble, and most moral nature without the strength of nerve which
forms a hero, sinks bencath a burden which it cannot bear and
must not cast away.' Here we have the root of the matter, the
truth-but not the whole truth. Hamlet is too completely
sundered from his environment, and no weight is attached to the
conspiracy of circumstances which fur.hers, though it does not
necessitate, his downfall. The stars in their courses fight against
him by thrusting him amidst conditions fatally apt to develop the
inherent weakness of his nature. Another man than Hamlet might
have set right the world that was out of joint around him: he
himself might have overcome his deep-seated malady in another
and sounder world. But his inward disease is ever fed from the
rank poison that circulates through the body politic around him.
Rightly does he, who could be bounded in a nut-shell and
count himself a lord of infinite space, call Denmark a prison, for
whenever he seeks to escape from his weakness he is clogged
and thrown back by the system of things wherein his lot is cast.
CC 2
388
[CH,
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
If thus an element of truth lies in a theory which would
make of Hamlet a symbolic historical figure, may not a similar
element be found in the completely opposite theory which
identifies him with the dramatist himself? It has been
shown that all attempts to reconstruct the personality of
Shakspere by a combination of the known facts of his career
with inferences drawn from the complete body of his writings
are, at best, only partially convincing. A fortiori it would be
absurd to seek in a single figure from a single play the
dramatist's portrait drawn by his own hand. Yet the most
objective of wiiters cannot help entering into more vital com-
munion with certain of his creations than others, and the popular
instinct which has fastened upon the Danish Prince as, in
a unique sense, the mouthpiece of Shakspere is not to be
contemptuously brushed aside. Careful study of the play in its
relation to the original story tends in fact to reinforce the
traditional view, though in modified form. Nowhere has Shak-
spere departed so widely from the spirit of his sources as in
this play; the Hamlet of the saga and of the drama have little
in common beyond their name, and instead of seeking, as usual,
to work back from given data of plot to the inner motives from
which they would inevitably arise, Shakspere here makes the
impression of choosing a theme as the vehicle of thoughts.
which were surging in his own breast. It may be confidently
maintained that only out of an overwhelming subjective
impulse could Hamlet have arisen. For it is a unique, a para-
doxical phenomenon in the sphere of the drama. Tragedy
from time immemorial has shown the ruin of mighty natures
through action that brought them into collision with the iron
forces, moral or natural, of the world. But it was an unpre-
cedented venture, and one that naturally threw criticism for long
on a false scent, to make the incapacity for action the source of
the tragic nodus. The inference is irresistible that Shakspere
at some time must have felt himself in a peculiar degree
susceptible to Hamlet's weakness, even though the composition
of the play proves that he was now wholly or partially
delivered from it. But it is not merely the singularity of the
dramatic theme that justifies us in regarding Hamlet as in a special

XIII]
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Hamlet.
sense the embodiment of a side of Shakspere's complex nature.
The soliloquies in which the Danish Prince unpacks his heart
bear at times no very close relation to the actual progress of
events in the play, and seem to be the poet's own reflections¹.
Nor should it be overlooked in attributing to Hamlet an
exceptional significance that he is allotted exceptional treatment.
In the other masterpieces the interest is equally divided between
two or more characters, but here, though the minor figures are
drawn with consummate skill, they owe their importance almost
entirely to their relation to the hero, so that Hamlet minus the
Prince of Denmark has become a proverbial illustration of an
object robbed of its essential feature.
Thus the figure of Hamlet, as we gaze upon it, melts with
kaleidoscopic swiftness from one shape to another—now a sym-
bolic historical personage, now an embodied fragment of auto-
biography, now a purely imaginary type of manhood. It is
because he is at once all and none of these that the Danish
Prince remains a mystery, eternally fascinating, eternally in-
scrutable. Mystery is the atmosphere which wraps the play;
its brooding presence fills the opening scene. The change
of guard at midnight, the whispered allusions to 'the thing'
which twice has struck a chill into the sentinels' hearts, its
reappearance ‘in the likeness of the king that's dead,' harrowing
even the rationalist Horatio with fear, its silence when charged
to speak, its startled flight at cockcrow-all this is weirdly
impressive and is ominous of strange revelations to come.
1 The most famous of them all, on the question of 'to be or not to be,'
stood in the quarto of 1603, in Act ii, instead of, as now, in Act iii. Nor
does this meditation on suicide fall very aptly from Hamlet, just when he is
occupied with the congenial task of arranging a trap for the King in the
play of Gonzago. Moreover, there is no reason why the Danish prince
should complain of the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised
love, the law's delay.' But these are evils to which Shakspere himself was
subject, and in a group of the Sonnets, especially in 66, he bewails them in
words which are almost an echo of Hamlet's monologue.
Nor again
is Hamlet's lecture on the art of acting vitally related to the plot of the
piece. The Prince is made the mouthpiece of criticisms of which the
theatrical company at the Globe had doubtless often had the benefit, while
the allusion in the dialogue with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the aery
of children' of the Queen's Revels, who were proving successful rivals of
the Lord Chamberlain's men, puts out of court all a priori theories of
Shakspere's pure objectivity.
<
390
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
A comparison of this scene with the episode of the ghosts in
Richard III proves the extraordinary advance of Shakspere's
art in dealing with the supernatural, and it is to be noted that
the apparition here is no mere birth of a disordered conscience,
seen only by the victim whom it haunts. Three unimpression-
able witnesses are forced to testify to its reality. But it would
be idle to conclude from this that Shakspere believed in the
'objective' existence of ghosts. Probably like most great
artists he held that the spiritual and material worlds bordered
closely and that influences passed easily from the one to the
other. But the emphasis laid upon the reality of the apparition
in this scene is dictated by dramatic necessities; were it possible
to believe that this spectral visitant was only a creature of
hallucination, the ground would be cut from under the plot,
and the problem of Hamlet's career would be utterly un-
meaning.
To rightly appreciate that problem we must realize what
manner of man Hamlet is, as he stands in the presence of his
uncle and his mother. Like the heroes of the allied group of
plays, he is young. He has passed the boyish stage of a Bertram
and a Troilus, but he has not entered upon the duties and
responsibilities of manhood. At thirty years of age he is still
in the undergraduate' temper of mind. In the academic.
seclusion of Wittenberg he has found a congenial atmosphere,
which he has only quitted to attend his father's funeral, and
to which he is anxious to return without delay. He has
saturated himself with culture in all its forms. Philosophy has
evidently been his principal study, but law and history have not
been neglected. He has mastered the theoretical principles of
the fine arts, especially the drama, and can, on occasion, turn
poet himself. He is an adept at oratory in all its branches,
from the loftiest declamation to the most acid repartee. Nor
though he is fat and scant of breath, is he devoid of physical
accomplishments. He is a skilful swordsman, who is equally
able to prove his mettle on the duelling ground or in a hand-
to-hand grapple with pirates. Nor does he quail before the
terrors of the supernatural; when even the blood of soldiers
runs cold, Hamlet does not blench. A man of such versatile
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391
Hamlet.
genius can scarcely lack the personal magnetism which draws
to him devoted friends and followers. Despite his shrinking
from publicity, he is idolized by the multitude, and in Horatio
he finds a comrade whom he can wear in his 'heart of heart.'
It is strange that Shakspere, who knew nothing of the Uni-
versities, save what he could glean upon chance professional
visits, should have left this typical picture of a college friendship
between the brilliant highly-strung scholar and the plain man
with limited ideas and unimpassioned sturdiness of temper.
Horatio's inflexible loyalty is as a rock where Hamlet stands
firm among the quicksands of life. For Hamlet's self-culture
has issued in a species of misanthropy: his idealism has taken
the form of pessimism; his will and his emotions are alike
diseased. The metaphysics of Wittenberg have dwarfed and
dimmed for him the practical world of facts and events, and
have sapped his power of acting energetically within that world.
He has allowed his uncle to secure the sceptre to which he
had a presumptive claim, and which at the cost of a little
exertion he might have made his own. But the melancholy
with which Hamlet is afflicted when the play opens, does not
spring so much from lassitude of the will as from a profound
emotional shock. Like Troilus he has idealized the sexual
bond, but as between husband and wife, instead of lover and
mistress. In the mutual love of his parents he has seen the
consummate pattern of such a union--and now, with his father
not two months dead, his mother has married his uncle, de-
clining with most wicked speed from Hyperion to a satyr. In
the agony of his disillusion, life seems to him a mass of hollow-
ness and corruption, the world an unweeded garden that grows
to seed. He already lets his mind run on the idea of suicide, but
the canon of the Everlasting against self-slaughter bars the
way. He must at least, fly from the polluted family hearth
and the pestilential atmosphere of Elsinore, back to Wittenberg,
to the academic seclusion where the distracting voices of the
world are shut out. But at this point Hamlet's wishes conflict
with those of the King and Queen, and pliant from the first
where action is concerned, he yields to their entreaties, and
remains at court.

392
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Had Claudius but known it, he would have been furthering
his own safety by letting Hamlet depart. But a criminal never
feels secure save when he can keep his eye on all whom he
mistrusts, and it is a criminal who wears the crown of
Denmark. A vice of kings,' 'a king of rags and tatters,'
Hamlet names him afterwards, and except that he is not devoid
of ability, he is the most beggarly counterfeit of all that royalty
should be. He recalls King John, but he lacks even the
patriotism and soldiership which did something to redeem John.
in his earlier days. Incest and fratricide have paved his way
to the throne, and the instrument of his crime has not even
been the dagger, which demands strength and courage, but 'the
leperous distilment' of hebenon stealthily poured into the ears
of a sleeping victim. A serpent' had figured in the official
bulletins as the cause of Hamlet the elder's death, but that
serpent now wears the crown. And the reptile nature, though
cloaked under the glittering show of royalty, manifests itself
in sinuous, fawning methods of address, utterly unlike the
genuine bonhommie of the true ruler of men. Such a nature
finds in diplomacy a congenial weapon, and the warlike prepara-
tions of young Fortinbras against Denmark are not met by
a display of force or even an imperious summons to disarm,
but by an embassy to his bed-rid uncle praying his interference.
Peace at any price, wherein to enjoy the ill-gotten pleasures
of his new position as king and husband-this is the be-all and
end-all of Claudius' foreign policy. But he cannot feel at rest
while there is a perpetual death's head at the feast in the shape
of Hamlet, with his clouded brow and inky cloak. A little
flattering tribute to his nephew's laudable exhibition of filial
grief prefaces a long-winded series of commonplaces on the
topic that every son in turn must lose a father, and that there-
fore mourning unduly prolonged shows 'a will most incorrect
to Heaven.' Similar conventional phrases for the solace of the
bereaved fall from the lips of the Queen, and to these Hamlet
retorts with natural testiness. For the woman who can thus
bury the memory of her first husband under a cover of plati-
tudes had been cherished by him so tenderly that he would not
'beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly,' and in
XIII]
393
Hamlet.
return she had given him the appearance of a true and ever-
strengthening love.
But hers is a sensuous, self-indulgent nature, ready to cling
where it finds support, but powerless to grow incorporate with
another life. There is in her nothing of the integrity of devotion
which is proof against a seducer's blandishments and bribes.
Pliant and impressionable, she had been fascinated by the
witchcraft' of Claudius' wit, and lured on to sin. Her shallow
capacity probably found in the adroit, obsequious intriguer more
'warmth and colour' than in the heroic form
'Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.'
Yet she cannot have been an accomplice in the plot against
her first husband's life; her sins are not premeditated out-
rages, but the transgressions into which weakness drifts. Nor
has her disloyalty to the father stifled her affection, such as it
is, for the son. She cares for Hamlet enough to have a senti-
mental longing to assist at his bridal, but not enough to divine
with a mother's instinct when danger threatens him at Claudius'
hands. As we look into Gertrude's unstable, volatile nature, we
realize that her son's vacillation of will is in part a heritage
from the cradle.
When the current of a nation's life is poisoned at the source,
the social waters will be turbid far and wide. The family of
Polonius presents a suggestive study of an aristocratic Danish
'interior.' The head of the house is chief court functionary,
lord chamberlain, and cabinet councillor in one.
Claudius pays
a tribute to the organic bond between him and the throne, and
he is indeed a minister after the new king's heart, though we
wonder in passing how the elder Hamlet could have promoted
him to the office which he has evidently long filled. For in
Polonius is embodied all that has made the term 'diplomatist'
a by-word for narrowness of vision, pompous self-sufficiency,
and ignorance of the human heart. His whole life long he has
been hunting the trail of policy, seeking to get at truth by
'windlasses and assays of bias.' He has stalked it like a piece
satisfied with his bag. But
of big game, and he is mightily
394
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
H
truth is not thus to be captured, and Polonius has only a stock
of shallow worldly lore to show for his pains, with just here and
there a fragment of higher verities. The garrulous old gentle-
man is at the moment enjoying an unequalled opportunity of
unlocking his treasure-house of wisdom, for his son is just
returning to Paris, and the paternal blessing on the voyager
would be incomplete without some words of paternal exhortation.
Polonius' 'few precepts' are a guide to the whole duty of
a young man of fashion away from home. They contain irre-
proachable counsel on the management of the tongue, the purse,
and the apparel, but the sententious form in which they are
uttered proves that they are little more than copy-book maxims,
amidst which, as Dowden has well said, the noble exhortation
'To thine own self be true' is brought in 'as if it were a little
bit of hard unvital wisdom like the rest.' How lax an inter-
pretation is put by Polonius on his own code of morals is seen
a little later in his instructions to the confidential agent whom he
sends to Paris as a spy upon his son. It is no very exacting rule
of life which includes among the venial slips of youth 'gaming,
drinking, fencing, swearing,' and worse; nor is it a scrupulous
sense of honour which originates the idea of manufacturing
aspersions on a son's character as baits to draw from strangers
whatever they know to his discredit.
As a fact, Polonius has no cause to be dissatisfied, for
Laertes is a decidedly favourable specimen of the school in
which he has been brought up. Plunged from the corruption
of Elsinore into the yet deeper corruption of Paris, whose
demoralizing influence had been so fatally proved on Bertram in
All's Well that Ends Well, he does not degenerate into the mere
professional roué. He is at pains to perfect himself in the
elegant accomplishments befitting a man of station.
He plies
his music; he cultivates a rhetorical gift; he becomes a complete
master of fence. But of a world governed by loftier ideals, by
more elemental passions than those which are current in 'good
society,' he knows nothing. Thus the news that the young
lord Hamlet has been paying attentions to his sister Ophelia
merely rouses his fears of a breach of social decorum; it is not
comme il faut for the heir-apparent to be on tender terms with
XIII]
395
Hamlet.
a subject, and Laertes proceeds to read the girl a lecture on the
proper regulation of her affections. She listens meekly to his
reproof, and then hastens to take up her parable in turn, where-
upon Laertes finds that it is time for him to be going. If
mutual exhortation can avail anything, the family of Polonius is
not likely to wander from the narrow way. Laertes gone, the
lord chamberlain himself takes his daughter to task. The
shrinking girl is forced to unbosom the secrets of her shy little
heart, to admit her incapacity to judge of the worth of Hamlet's
tenders. When she ventures to plead his holy vows as proof of
his good faith, they are scornfully dismissed as springes to catch
woodcocks, and she is forbidden henceforth to slander any
moment leisure' by talking with him. Not a word of protest,
or even of entreaty, falls from Ophelia's lips, only the dutiful
little sentence: 'I shall obey, my lord.' Her docility is without
bounds. She delivers up her letters, she returns her gifts. It
would be profanation to call a feeling which can thus surrender
at discretion by the sacred name of love. Ophelia is a sensitive
plant nurtured in the hothouse atmosphere of Elsinore, with
a pallid fragile beauty, opening instinctively to warmth and
light, and closing as instinctively at the first chill touch upon its
leaves. Such a wellnigh automatic process exhausts the capa-
bilities of Ophelia's heart. She is no Juliet to deny father and
mother for the sake of her wooer, no Helena to energetically
surmount the obstacles of birth. Yet Ophelia is not entirely to
blame if she does not bring strength and joy into Hamlet's life.
From the first, in spite of his 'holy vows,' his love for her
is cankered by the disease which is ravaging his emotional
nature. We do not see them together till after the convulsion
in Hamlet's whole being, caused by the apparition of his father,
but the letter recited by Polonius is a memorial of their attach-
ment in earlier days. Is it to be believed that the serious
passion of a man so richly endowed as the Prince of Denmark
could find utterance in such phrases as 'To the celestial and my
soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia, in her excellent white
bosom, these,' or 'Thine evermore, most dear lady, while this
machine is to him, Hamlet'? We have said that Hamlet is still
in the undergraduate stage of existence: his feeling for Ophelia,
396
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
if it may be judged by its expression on paper, is rather a senti
mental vacation dalliance than a genuine outflow from the depths
of his heart. It is questionable if Hamlet, in his emotional and
mental chaos, was capable of a deep, steady love for any woman,
and still more questionable whether he could have been steeled
by feminine influence into strong, beneficent energy. Is it so
certain, after all, as some would have it, that even a Juliet could
have exorcised his deep-seated and complex malady? It was the
very malignity of fortune that threw an Ophelia across his path.
To complete our view of the society in which Hamlet's lot is
cast we must include three other figures whom the course of the
story brings on the scene. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern recall
the Salanio and Salarino of The Merchant of Venice. It is a law
of their existence for such personages to hunt in couples. Each
seeks to compensate for an entire lack of individuality by an
alliance with the other. Together they bow themselves in and
out, they bandy tittle-tattle and compliments, they smirk and
wheedle, and fetch and carry in general. They are the indis-
pensable quidnuncs and hangers-on of the polite world. A yet
hollower counterfeit of true good-breeding is Osric, the grandilo-
quent phrase-monger who did comply with his dug before
he sucked it,' and who is ready to assent in one and the same
breath to contradictory statements about the weather from
Hamlet's mouth.
Amid this world of shams the ghost of the murdered king,
phantom though it be, can claim, as Werner has pointed out,
a unique reality. For it rises from the grave with a purely
moral purpose-to secure the punishment of guilt. News has
been brought to Hamlet that it is abroad, and with his friends.
he awaits its reappearance on the platform at midnight. He
does not watch in vain, and the spirit, dumb to others, speaks to
him and in what words! How harrowing are the glimpses of
the prison-house, with its purgatorial fire, how moving the
appeal,
'List, O list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love.'
How soul-shattering the awful injunction thundered on the mid-
night air, Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder,' and
XIII]
397
Hamlet.
how vividly impressive the story of the crime, how heart-rending
the cry of the tortured soul:
'Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand,
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatched;
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!'
After all this, are the Ghost's farewell words necessary, ‘Adieu,
adieu, adieu! remember me'? But the father knows his own
son. At the first mention of murder, Hamlet is all on fire to
act:
'Haste me to know 't, that I, with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge.'
From the table of his memory he will wipe away 'all trivial fond
records' that the Ghost's commandment may alone dominate his
brain. And how does he begin? He draws out his 'tables’
(as if he were taking notes of a philosophical lecture at Witten-
berg) and jots down the commonplace that one may smile, and
smile, and be a villain,' at any rate in Denmark. And the
Ghost's farewell words, they too go down, as if they were
a peroration in danger of being forgotten, unless put on paper
offhand. But this is not one of the crises where the pen is
mightier than the sword. Hamlet's proper course would be to
at once share his secret with his friends, to rouse the populace,
and execute summary justice on Claudius. Nor is he held back,
as is sometimes suggested, by moral scruples; not only was the
duty of private revenge for the blood of a kinsman a maxim in
primitive societies (and on this point Shakspere was faithful to
the spirit of the original saga), but Hamlet, as son of the late
king and presumptive heir to the throne, was the representative
of national justice, and in punishing Claudius would have been
the organ of the community at large. It is not scruples of
conscience that come between Hamlet and his mission, but his
aversion to deliberate action. Instead of hurrying back to his
friends, he leaves them to find out him, and then greets them with
'wild and whirling words,' and hysterically repeated conjurations
398
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to secrecy.
He feels that, under the awful shock of the
revelation just made to him, he has lost the full control over
his own faculties, and in order to cover this partial mental
disorder he suddenly resolves 'to put an antic disposition
on,' to assume the disguise of actual madness. This is not
part of a deep-laid scheme of revenge, as in the original saga.
It is a device to gain breathing-space. Hamlet's 'immediate
need is to calm himself, to escape into solitude, there to
recover self-mastery, and come to a clear understanding of the
altered state of things.' But in resorting to this disguise Hamlet.
enters upon a false track. The saviour of society in Denmark,
who is to set right the time that is out of joint, must be trans-
parently sincere and direct in his methods. In posing as a mad-
man, Hamlet catches something of the infection of the age, its
preference for roundabout, disingenuous dealings. The man
who is himself shamming is not on the way to overthrow a world
of shams. Moreover Hamlet becomes absorbed in the intel-
lectual fascination of his rôle; he revels in the opportunities
it gives him of bewildering those about him, of letting fly shafts
of mockery, here, there, and everywhere. But these verbal
triumphs are Pyrrhic victories, which draw him further and
further from his legitimate task.
And is interview with Ophelia in her closet-is this purely
the last despairing endeavour of a lover, at the crisis of
his fate, to find strength and comfort in the woman of his
heart? Is there not an histrionic element in the proceeding, of
a piece with the half-unreal courtship to which it forms the
close? The disordered dress, the knocking knees, the pallid
face, the long silent stare, the forlorn gestures, the deep-drawn
sigh-all these are unpleasantly suggestive of attitudinizing.
Hamlet, in his turmoil of soul, may be groping for latent sources
of support in Ophelia's nature, but his method of inquisition
seems deliberately arranged for the purpose of startling the
timid girl out of her wits. It is not to be wondered that she
flies in terror to her father, or that he should conclude from her
narrative that rejected love is the cause of Hamlet's transforma-
tion. Here is the key to the mystery which has been taxing
the count for the last two months, and flushed with the excite-
XIII]
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Hamlet.
ment of his discovery, Polonius hurries to the presence-chamber.
He is far too much a master of his trade to out with his
secret at once. He keeps expectation on tip-toe, while the
envoys from Norway make a business-like report on their
mission then, after a long-winded prologue to demonstrate that
'brevity is the soul of wit,' he defines the case under investi-
gation:
:
'Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it: for to define true madness
What is 't but to be nothing else but mad?'
The problem thus lucidly set forth, there remains to
'Find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause.'
Before pronouncing judgement, Polonius with diplomatic
caution puts in documentary evidence in the shape of Hamlet's
letter, and only then, after a further digression on the correctness
of his own conduct, does he announce that the Prince is mad
for Ophelia's love. He stakes his reputation, even his head, on
the truth of his diagnosis; but the King's uneasy conscience
asks for further proof, whereupon Polonius suggests the device
of 'loosing' Ophelia to Hamlet in the lobby where Claudius
and he may act as eavesdroppers. Ophelia, with her customary
docility, lends herself to the stratagem, and even agrees to
a hypocritical pretence of devotion. A high-spirited woman
would not play such a part, yet it is easy to exaggerate the girl's
offence. She is acting in obedience to the double mandate of
her father and her king; she is encouraged by Gertrude to think
that her action may forward Hamlet's recovery, and in any case
she believes that she is furthering a legitimate attempt to find
out the cause of his malady. Hamlet enters lost in thought.
He is again meditating on suicide, and, as has been said, his
indictment of the evils from which death is a tempting refuge
seems to spring rather from the poet's own mood than from the
particular dramatic situation. Hamlet must have forgotten all
about his father's ghost, when he speaks of 'the undiscovered
country from whose bourn no traveller returns,' but he is true to
his character when he emphasizes the paralysis of the will
400
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
produced by reflection on the terrors that may await us beyond
the grave. In the midst of these thoughts he suddenly beholds
Ophelia at prayer, and still brooding on the perils of the world
to come, he instinctively cries,
'Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.'
He
Intent on his meditations, he answers absently her inquiry as to
how he fares, 'I humbly thank you, well, well, well,' and when
she offers to return his gifts he seems at first not to realize the
situation: 'I never gave you aught.' But the sight of his
tokens recalls to him the present with all its bitterness.
remembers that Ophelia has denied his suit, he possibly suspects
that in the atmosphere of espionage which surrounds him she is
being used as a tool, and he turns upon her abruptly with the
mocking query, 'Ha ha! are you honest?' The flood of
invective that follows has been thought by Coleridge and others
to be directed mainly to the eavesdroppers whom Hamlet has
guessed from Ophelia's manner to be within earshot. But there
is no proof that the Prince has made this discovery, and his
tirade is more like the swollen gush of the bitter waters in which
his heart is rotting away. To pour this vitriolic abuse upon the
gentlest of maidens seems to be wantonly breaking a butterfly
upon the wheel, but Hamlet, in the hysterical sweep of his
indignation, is generalizing Ophelia into a symbol of her sex, and
he is arraigning not the cowering girl before him, but 'the eternal
feminine' as it appears to him, the frailty whose name is woman.
Claudius, listening behind the arras, is convinced that the source
of his nephew's disorder is not love but 'something in his soul,
o'er which his melancholy sits in brood.' With the penetration
of guilt he scents danger in the hatch and disclose,' and he
settles on the spot to send him to England -- and to death.
spy on Hamlet, the latter is
The one uses Ophelia as
But while the King plays the
engaged in reversing the parts.
a decoy, and the other a travelling company of actors. Into the
heart of the drama Shakspere introduces a typical group of his
professional brethren, and stays the progress of the story to
concentrate attention upon them and their art. What is the
XIII]
401
Hamlet.
motive for this? Is it merely to show how Hamlet forgets his
mission, while occupying himself with the congenial functions of
dramatic critic and stage-manager? This is part of the answer,
but far from all. Here, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Shakspere approaches the problem of dramatic art as part of the
broad problem of reality and show. From the first appearance
of the Ghost the contrast between these two elements has
underlain the play. A visitor from the world of shadows enters
the solid, material world; in this material world itself all is
show-the appearance, without the substance, of kingship,
wifehood, wisdom, chivalry, love; even Hamlet who sees through
and hates this world of imposture, who justly claims that he has
'that within which passeth show,' is drifted into the limbo of
unrealities by the perpetual action of his reflective faculty
dissolving facts into a train of ideas. And now into the midst of
this society masquerading with realities step the tragedians
of the city to whom masquerade is the serious business of life.
Hamlet begs their star-actor for a taste of his quality, and gives
him the lead in a passionate speech on the murder of Priam
by Pyrrhus. The theme is highly characteristic, for it is the
ferocious revenge of the son of Achilles on the king who, as
lord of Troy, is responsible for his father's death. Hamlet can
revel in the theatrical declamation of such a deed while taking
no steps to accomplish it in the field of action.
losing himself in his subject turns colour, and has
eyes as he enlarges in his recital on Hecuba's grief.
the world puts sham in the place of reality; this man in the
sincerity of his art clothes fiction with the living power of fact
over his hearers and himself. Hamlet's penetrating intelli-
gence fastens immediately on the contrast and its application to
his own case:
"What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba
The player
tears in his
The rest of
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? . . . Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made.'
D d
402
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Hamlet, however, can say only too much, and this very
paroxysm of self-reproach effervesces in a torrent of impreca-
tions upon his uncle. But he checks himself:
This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion!'
Does he, any the more, sweep to his revenge? No, he sees
in the arrival of the actors a means of satisfying a scruple
which is suddenly started, and which helps to stave off the
dreaded hour of action. The Ghost may have been the devil,
and its tale untrue. A play on a subject like his father's
murder, acted before the king, will serve as touchstone to his
conscience. If he blench, Hamlet 'knows his course.' The
performance takes place, and the king's conduct establishes
his guilt beyond a doubt. Now is the moment for Hamlet's
course, for summary vengeance in the face of the whole court
upon the culprit who has delivered himself into his hands.
But Claudius is let slip away untouched, while the Prince
breaks into hysterical, incoherent snatches of rhyme, followed
by a call for music, as if he felt the need of calming the
tumult of his soul. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear,
and afterwards Polonius, to summon him to his mother's
closet. In the peculiar exaltation of his mood he takes an
exquisite pleasure in putting them to confusion, and then goes
forth to Gertrude.
Fortune seems to play into his hands, for in the lobby he
discovers his uncle at prayer. Now might he 'do it pat,'
and the sword is half drawn, and then rammed back into
the scabbard. He has found another plea for delay. To
kill Claudius thus would be to send him to heaven, and this
would be 'hire and salary, not revenge.' He must wait till
he can catch him at some act with 'no relish of salvation' in
it, and then hurl him straight to hell. The pretext is so
specious that some of Hamlet's critics have thought it a genuine
scruple, instead of a fine-spun excuse to shuffle off the
duty for the accomplishment of which this is the all-propitious
XIII]
403
Hamlet.
hour. In this crisis of his fate the Prince is unfaithful to his
mission, and Nemesis henceforward dogs his every step. It is
written that they who draw the sword shall perish by the sword,
but there are times when the opposite holds good, that they who
draw not the sword shall perish by the sword, and drag down
alike the innocent and the guilty to share their doom. The
weapon that Hamlet could not steel himself to lift against the
King is driven a moment afterwards, in an impulse of hysterical
excitement, through the heart of Polonius, as he lurks behind
the arras, and the deed of blood draws from him nothing but
a few contemptuous jeers at 'the rash intruding fool' who has
thus met his fate. For Hamlet is now absorbed in the one
overmastering object of bringing home to his mother the sense
of her wrong-doing. The Queen's frailty had cast a blight on
creation for him, even before he knew of the King's villainy, and
of the two it seems to move him far the more deeply. In
brooding over the wantonness and weakness of woman, he
dissipates the energies that were needed to avenge masculine
misdeeds. Was this what the Ghost foresaw when he warned
Hamlet to contrive naught against his mother? How then can
he rest in his grave when his commands are being doubly
violated, when Claudius is spared and Gertrude pilloried? So
again he rises at dead of night to whet his son's almost
blunted purpose. Hamlet confesses that, lapsed in time and
passion,' he has neglected to fulfil his task, but even after this
visitation he is as far from deliberate action as ever. He aban-
dons himself to a fatalism which recognizes in the seeming
accidents of life instances of divine intervention, and which
therefore reduces human forethought and purpose to cypher
value. In the death of Polonius he sees the direct agency of
heaven; he lets himself be shipped off for England without
protest, for he believes that there is a special providence
watching over his fortunes; and he ascribes to inspiration from
above the impulse which moved him to open his companions'
paper of instructions, and thus to frustrate the design upon
his life. In a similar spirit he complacently disavows all
responsibility for the fate to which he sends the unsuspecting
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
D d 2
404.
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
'They are not near my conscience :
'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.'
Once only, after encountering Fortinbras and his army on the
march to do battle for a little patch of ground, does he feel
driven to chide himself for his lethargy. In the conduct of the
soldiers, as before of the actors, he sees a rebuke. Twenty
thousand men for an egg-shell, a fantasy and trick of fame,' go
to their graves like beds, while he through
'Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event'
will not stir, though he has 'a father killed, a mother stained.'
But the irony of retributive justice provides Hamlet with
a more stinging contrast than Fortinbras and his men. By
taking the life of Polonius he has placed Laertes in a position.
exactly parallel to his own, and the latter 'sweeps to his revenge'
for his murdered father. He hastens from Paris to Elsinore,
stirs up the populace to rebellion, and bursts, at the head of an
angry mob, into the royal presence, clamouring for instant
retribution:
To this point I stand,
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes; only I'll be revenged
Most throughly for my father.'
There is, however, a windy passion in Laertes' heroics which
argues a shallow soul beneath, and family pride rather than
filial love spurs him on. He seems almost less concerned at his
father's death than at the slur of his obscure burial:
'No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o'er his bones,
No noble rite nor formal ostentation.'
Yet this cavalier, who sets such store by heraldic parade,
and whose own bearing is marked by a showy pomp, stoops
immediately afterwards to complicity in an unknightly and
treacherous design. Chance has landed Hamlet again on the
Danish shore, and Laertes greedily catches at the King's
suggestion of a fencing match, in which the Prince, most
generous and free from all contriving,' will not peruse the foils,
and will thus give his foe the opportunity of striking at him
XIII]
405
Hamlet.
with an 'unbated' weapon. Laertes even betters his instructor
in mean villainy by proposing to dip his sword-point in venom
'bought of a mountebank,' whereupon Claudius, to make assur-
ance doubly sure, adds the device of the poisoned bowl.
The histrionic passion of Laertes is a less genuine tribute to
the memory of Polonius than Ophelia's madness. The girl had
looked to her father in all things; her individuality was scarcely
so much her own as a subordinate part of his. The breach of
her relations with Hamlet and the spectacle of his seeming
lunacy had caused her nothing more than a few sighs and tears,
but the loss of the parent on whom her life had hung crushes
her being. The frail will snaps, and the feeble wit flickers out:
Ophelia is henceforth merely a 'wandering voice,' a creature
'incapable of her own distress,' till she sinks gently, with music
on her lips, beneath the river-waves. But the voices of the world
that had made life hard for her rage round her even in death.
The harsh rubric of a merciless, letter-bound Church, exactly
such a Church as we should expect in Elsinore, grudges Christian
burial to the maiden who falls under suspicion of having sought
her own end. Had priestcraft had its way, uncontrolled by the
civil power,
'She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
Till the last trumpet; for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.'
Even the populace, as represented by the captious, logic-chop-
ping grave-diggers, see in her 'bringing home with bell and
burial' an abuse of class privilege. Laertes, on the other hand,
the worshipper of pageantry, is infuriated by denial to his sister
of complete funeral rites, and seeks to compensate for their
absence by an ostentatious display of grief. With hyperbolical
invocations he leaps into Ophelia's open grave. Hamlet, just
returned from his voyage, has been lingering in the churchyard
brooding on the vanity of all human things. Laertes' words fall
on his ears like a challenge, and in a moment he too is in the
grave, vociferating:
'I loved Ophelia :, forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum."
406
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
But what weight can such a declaration have from the lips of
a man who had made light of killing her father, and had not
given a thought to the daughter's grief? Is, then, this and the
phrases that follow, as the Prince himself declares, a parody of
Laertes' mouthing? The impulse to ridicule hollow protesta-
tions may fire the train of Hamlet's rhetoric, but once alit it
passes out of his control, and consumes his whole being in its
blaze. Then follows the cold fit, with its abrupt change to
entreaty, followed by a relapse into his normal fatalism:
'Hear you, sir;
What is the reason that you use me thus ?
I loved you ever; but it is no matter.
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.'
The fatalistic note is struck once again shortly before the duel,
when Horatio seeks to dissuade his friend, with whom all is ill
about the heart, from taking part in the encounter.
• We defy
augury' is the rejoinder; there is special providence in the fall
of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to
come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the
readiness is all.' The presentiment of evil at Hamlet's heart is
fulfilled. The plot of his enemies claims its intended victim, but
chance adds the Queen and Laertes to the sacrificial roll, and in
a moment of hectic energy, before the fell sergeant death'
completes his arrest, Hamlet at last sends Claudius to his
account. The Manes of the murdered King had demanded
a life for a life; the son who had been unequal to the burden of
a just revenge crowns with his own body the heaped-up 'quarry'
of the slain. Hamlet has, of a truth, not set right the times that
were out of joint. The story that his apologist, Horatio, is left
to tell is one
'Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters;
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' heads.'
But with the nomination of the heroic Fortinbras to the vacant
throne we foresee the dawning of a new era, sounder than the
old, when the leaven of a young and vigorous stock will slowly
XIII]
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Hamlet.
regenerate all that is rotten in the state of Denmark. Thus, as
ever, Shakspere leaves us with hope for the future, and even the
tragedy of Hamlet's fall is lightened as we see him borne to
a soldier's grave, aid 'the drums and tramplings' of armed
battalions, and the roar of artillery speaking to the northern sky.
No critic of Hamlet can ever hope to satisfy any other, least
of all, perhaps, himself. How can outsiders grasp the secret of
a life that was a mystery to the man who lived it? No
Shaksperean character opens his heart so freely in words as
the Danish Prince, yet none leaves us so ignorant of his real
nature. In the day when the abysmal depths of personality
unclose their shyest and most shadowy recess, where a water-
shed, minute as a needle's point, only just severs genius and
madness, love and cruelty, truth and falsehood, then, and not
till then, will the world 'know the stops' of Hamlet. The
guess hazarded here is that he is a man of genius, with will
atrophied through an abnormal development, not only of the
reflective but of the emotional faculties. Potentially he is an
idealist, but never in fact, for the world around him is base,
and his generalizing instinct, united to the hysterical sweep
of his passion, magnifies its faults. His whole view of woman
in particular is diseased. Gertrude is false, Ophelia feeble,
but it is only mental disorder that leaps from these examples to
the dogmatic conclusion, 'Frailty, thy name is woman.' Thus,
when he should be sweeping to his revenge, he finds a bitter
pleasure in mocking Ophelia, and disobeys the Ghost by wringing
his mother's heart. Here, almost as much as in his lassitude
of will, lies the root of his inaction against the King. The
more he delays, the harder action becomes, except in hysterical
outbursts whose results he can afterwards ascribe to agency from
above. Hence his indifference to the fate of Polonius, his callous
despatch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to an unearned doom.
Hamlet's paralysis of will culminates in partial paralysis of the
moral sense. In this even more than in 'the quarry that cries
on havoc,' surrounding him in death is seen the Nemesis on his
procrastination. But it is only a Polonius of criticism who
would seek to exhaust the significance of the drama by drawing
from it a neat little lesson on the value of dispatch in practical
:
408
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
life. In mystery it opens, and in mystery it ends. Yet, if after
groping in a twilight region we feel the need of some sure fool-
hold, we may find it in the broad historical contrast of the infant
and the full-grown Teutonic consciousness as unfolded respec-
tively in the Saga of Beowulf and the anglicized story of Hamlet
the Danc.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE CLIMAX OF TRAGEDY.
HAMLET, with its tragic close, is the connecting-link between
the problem-plays and the tragedies in the stricter sense, whose
theme is the downfall of a noble nature through some ruinous
sin. The change from the one group to the other is as the
passage from a valley swathed in folds of mist into a bare,
storm-swept upland. The baffling obscurity of Hamlet and
Troilus and Cressida, the perplexing moral entanglements of
All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, no longer
confront us. The issues now awaiting solution are plain from
the outset, and the catastrophes are too appalling to have an
enigmatical significance. The change of theme' and of treat-
ment is accompanied by a change in the character of the leading
figures. In the problem-plays the heroes had been young men
reared amidst highly artificial social conditions. The tragic
protagonists are beings of wellnigh superhuman stature, recall-
ing the creations of Marlowe. They are mature in years, and
they belong to races or to epochs distinguished by colossal
passion and energies. A Celtic Chieftain and a Celtic King, both
looming gigantic through the haze of tradition, a Moorish Com-
mander and an Egyptian Queen, a primitive Roman warrior
who is a veritable Mars in carthly mould,--such are the forms
which stride in majestic procession before our eyes, and the
spectacle of whose ruin convulses our inmost being with pity
and terror. In Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus the dead-
weight of historical material hampered the free movement of the
410
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
tragic spirit, but in Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear it had
unshackled sweep, and wrought itself into forms of unique
sublimity.
The date of MACBETH cannot be fixed with complete
certainty. The play first appeared in the folio of 1623. It
must, however, be at least earlier than April 20, 1610, for on
that day Dr. Forman saw it performed at the Globe, and recorded
the main outlines of the plot in his Diary. On the other hand,
it must be later than the accession of James I in March, 1603,
for a number of passages are evidently intended as compliments
to the sovereign who had shown special favour to the 'Globe'
Company. Among these are Macbeth's vision of kings (Act iv.
Sc. 2), including some 'that two-fold balls and treble sceptres
carry,' and the incident (Act iv. Sc. 3) of touching for the king's
evil, which James claimed as hereditary in the Stuart house¹.
Macbeth may therefore be placed without doubt between 1603
and 1610. Its precise date must be conjectural, but it is probably
about 16062. The metrical characteristics are those of a late,
but not the latest, period. Light endings appear for the first
time in considerable number, but weak endings are still almost
entirely absent. The style has many of the characteristics, in
intensified form, of portions of Measure for Measure and Troilus
and Cressida. It is pregnant, and elliptical often to the point of
obscurity. The difficulties which it presents are, however,
1 The repeated references to witchcraft are similarly inspired, for it
was a subject in which James had a peculiar interest. In 1589 the fleet
in which he was bringing home his bride, Anne of Denmark, had been
dispersed by a violent storm, and, in the belief that this was due to
sorcery, he had taken vigorous proceedings against witches. In 1599 he
had published his tract Demonologie, maintaining against sceptical attacks
the reality of possession by evil spirits, and in 1604, the year after he
came to the English throne, a new statute was passed against witchcraft.
A play in which witches gave awful proof of their malign power would
thus be peculiarly attractive to a monarch who believed himself to have
been the victim of their baneful influence.
2 In Act iv. Sc. 1 of The Puritan, published in 1607, the words, 'Instead
of a jester we'll have a ghost in a white sheet sit at the upper end of
the table,' seems to be an allusion to Banquo's ghost, and, if so, 1606
or the early part of 1607 would be the latest date for the tragedy. The
bestowal of Cawdor's honours on Macbeth may have been suggested by
the investiture of Sir James Murray on April 7, 1605, with the dignities
of Scone forfeited by the Earl of Gowry for conspiracy against James.
XIV]
411
Macbeth.
probably not entirely due to Shakspere. The earliest text, that
of the first folio, is very unsatisfactory, and suggests that it has
been taken from a stage-version. This would help to account
for the unusual shortness of the play, and the number of incom-
plete lines. It has been conjectured that this stage-version is
due to Middleton, who wrote for the King's Company between
1615 and 1624, and one of whose plays was called The Witch.
The theory is that Middleton condensed Macbeth for theatrical
purposes, inserting at the same time passages of his own, some
of which resemble scenes in The Witch. The balance of evidence
is in favour of the view that the play has been ‘edited' in all
likelihood by Middleton, but that the interpolations are far fewer
than some critics have asserted, and are to be found chiefly in
the passages in the witch-scenes where Hecate appears¹. The
story of Macbeth had been poetically treated during Elizabeth's
reign, but Shakspere's sole authority was Holinshed's Chronicle.
He follows closely the account there given of the reigns of
Duncan and Macbeth, though the central episode of the play,
the midnight murder of Duncan, is based on Holinshed's earlier
narrative of the assassination of King Duffe by Donwald, the
governor of his castle, and his wife.
The theory of extensive interpolations in Macheth has been chiefly
advocated by the Clarendon Press editions and Fleay. The former ascribe
to Middleton (a) portions of the witch-scenes, i. 3. 1-37; iii. 5; iv. I.
39-47, 125-132. (b) The Porter scene, ii. 3. 1-46. (c) The Sergeant
scene, i. 2. (d) A number of miscellaneous passages, including the 'King's
evil' scene, iv. 3. 140-159. Fleay accepts the Porter scene as genuine,
but adds to Middleton's contributions in the witch-scenes, i. I, iv. 1. 71–
72, 79-81, 89-103, as also iii. 4. 130-144. He has a further theory that
the weird sisters' of i. 3, the Scandinavian Norns or goddesses of destiny,
are distinct from the witches' of iv. I. But he has to confess that
Shakspere calls these 'witches' in iv. 1. 136 'the weird sisters.' This is
fatal to his theory, which moreover draws distinctions of which Shakspere
knew nothing.-The whole question of the interpolations is well discussed
by E. K. Chambers in appendices E, F, G, to his edition of the play in
the Warwick' Series. I agree substantially with his conclusion that
the only passages which we have any warrant for ascribing to another
hand are three iii. 5, iv. 1. 39-43, iv. 1. 125-132. These are dis-
tinguished from the genuine witch-scenes by (1) the introduction of
a superfluous character, Hecate; (2) Iambic instead of trochaic metre;
(3) a lyrical element alien to the original conception of the witches.-For
a defence of the genuineness of the Porter scene, which Coleridge had
rejected before the C. P. editors, see Hales' paper The Porter in Macbeth
in his Notes and Essays on Shakspere. Compare De Quincey's On the
Knocking at the Gate in Miacbeth.
412
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Thus, in Macbeth as in Hamlet, Shakspere sought his materials
in the records of a semi-historic past. But, instead of Scandi-
navian saga, he now quarried in the richer mine of Celtic legend.
The significance of Macbeth as a novel point of departure in
English literature has scarcely been fully enough recognized.
Now for the first time did the southern country levy a return for
the toll which Scotch bards had taken from it for so long.
During the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries the poets
north of the Tweed, from King James to Sir David Lyndesay,
while showing a sturdy patriotism in the spirit of their verse,
had borrowed its forms almost exclusively from Chaucer.
Hitherto England had received no equivalent, but the balance
was more than redressed when the annals of Caledonia, stern
and wild' furnished Shakspere with the materials of one of his
mightiest creations. He may have visited Scotland as a member
of the company of which Laurence Fletcher, one of the Lord
Chamberlain's Servants, was the head, and whose presence at
Aberdeen is recorded in the register of the Town Council for
October, 1601. But, however this may be, he pierced, with an
intuition that in an Elizabethan Englishman was wellnigh
miraculous, into the very heart of Highland romance. The
desolate storm-swept heaths, where the evil powers of earth
and sky may fittingly meet and greet in hideous carnival;
the lonely castles, where passions of primaeval intensity find their
natural home, and where, at dead of night, murder may stealthily
move to its design; the eerie atmosphere, where the hoarse
croak of the raven and the scream of the owl, the fatal bellman,
foretell the impending doom, and where the wraith of the victim
stalks to the head of the board in the assassin's banqueting-
hall-every detail is steeped in the peculiar genius of Celtic
Scotland. Hitherto this fertile poetic material had found its
chief expression in ballads of weird imaginative power, but these,
though of supreme excellence in their kind, were only Volkslieder,
and had no more than a local circulation. But now Shakspere
claimed for universal purposes what had hitherto been the
monopoly of the clans. His mighty art preserved all the
mysticism and elemental passion of the Highland story, while
investing it with a stupendous moral significance of which its
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Macbeth.
Celtic originators had never dreamed. So Titanic is the theme
as handled by the dramatist that, contrary to his usual practice,
he does not complicate it with episodes, but develops it in its
isolated undeur. Thus Macbeth is, of all the great tragedies,
the simplest in structure. It was requisite to know society at
Elsinore through and through before we could grasp the problem.
of Hamlet's career; but to judge of the Thane of Cawdor and
his wife, we need only focus our gaze upon the lurid revelations
of their own hearts.
But Shakspere never entirely isolates the individual from his
environment, and in the opening scene of the play mysterious
agents hover through the air, sinister in aspect and in speech.
These witches or weird sisters are the embodiment, in visible
form, of the malignant influences in nature which are ever on the
alert to establish an unholy alliance with the criminal instincts of
the human heart. Dowden rightly dismisses as inadequate
Gervinus's interpretation of them as simply the embodiment of
inward temptation. These 'posters of the sea and land' are not
merely concrete symbols of a mental process; nameless and
sexless though they be, theirs is an independent vitality of evil
whirling through the universe till it finds asylum in a soul where
germs of sin lie ready to be quickened into life. That a subtle
reciprocity already exists between Macbeth and these demoniacal
forces is emphasized at the outset by Shakspere, for the witches'
anarchical formula, 'Fair is foul and foul is fair,' is echoed in
the Thane's first words on the heath near Forres, 'So foul and
fair a day I have not seen.' Yet to outward appearance Macbeth
is not the man in whom the Powers of Darkness could claim an
ally. As we first see him, he is returning from a well-foughten
field where, by brilliant feats of arms against his country's foes,
without and within, he has proved himself valour's minion,
Bellona's bridegroom lapped in proof.' In gratitude for his
loyal services his sovereign has, on the first tidings of victory,
sent to greet him with the title of the traitor whom he has over-
thrown in battle. But the weird sisters are more lynx-eyed than
the meek, unsuspicious Duncan. The hero whom the king
delights to honour already cherishes a fell design against his
royal master's life and throne. He has 'broken' this enterprise
414
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to his wife at some period earlier than the opening of the play,
but hitherto his criminal impulses have remained latent, partly
through lack of opportunity for their exercise, partly through an
innate reluctance to adapt means to ends. For M beth, as
Gervinus has well brought out, resembles Hamlet in his tendency
to procrastination, though with the Danish prince this has its
root in excessive reflection, while in Macbeth's case it springs
from morbid imaginings and aversion to the instruments by
which alone his desires can be compassed. His wife, in her
cold-blooded dissection of his character, declares:
'I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk o' human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou would'st be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it: what thou would'st highly,
That thou would'st holily; would'st not play false,
And yet would'st wrongly win: thou'ldst have, great Glamis,
That which cries, "Thus thou must do, if thou have it":
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.'
Thus with Macbeth murder is yet but fantastical' when the
witches greet him with their three Hails,' as Glamis, Cawdor,
and King in the hereafter. The third 'Hail' startles him into
a rapture of meditation; the prediction in itself would not fully
account for this, as Macbeth is a near kinsman of Duncan, and
the crown might fall to him according to primitive usage in
preference to young Prince Malcolm. But what plunges
Macbeth into his reverie is the discovery that his own guilty
aspirations find an echo in the voices of these mysterious
creatures. Their salutation goes far to turn the criminal in posse
into the criminal in esse, especially when he gets on the spot an
earnest of their supernatural foresight in Ross' announcement
that he has been created Thane of Cawdor. He feels assured
that the greatest is behind,' but the imaginative terrors which
beset him at the prospect of action plunge him back into the
fatalistic policy of merely waiting upon circumstances.
(
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me
Without my stir.'
How different is the effect of the witches' prophecy upon
Banquo. He is to Macbeth what Horatio is to Hamlet. He
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Macbeth.
is the unimaginative, limited, but upright man of affairs, in whose
breast evil stimuli from without provoke no sympathetic thrill.
The oracular declaration that he is 'lesser than Macbeth and
greater,' that he shall get kings though he be none, leaves him
quite unmoved. He discusses the appearance of these strange
creatures in a matter-of-fact way, and when they vanish he
dismisses them contemptuously as bubbles of the earth. When
the fulfilment of their 'Hail' of Macbeth as Cawdor proves that
they cannot be thus lightly set aside, he is thrown on his guard
against impending mischief.
'Oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence.'
In the train of accidents that follows may we not see in part
the machinations of those 'goddesses of destiny,' as the chronicle
calls the witches, who, by smoothing the path of crime for
Macbeth, were, as Banquo feared, to beguile him to his doom?
Duncan in the flush of victory nominates Malcolm as his heir,
and Macbeth now learns for certain that chance will not crown
him, without his stir. But in the same breath Duncan facilitates
such 'stir' by offering himself as his thane's guest at his castle
in Inverness. How utterly unexpected is his visit is shown by
Lady Macbeth's cry of incredulous exultation to the bearer of
the news, 'Thou'rt mad to say it.' To find that the destined
victim is actually thrusting himself upon his doom-that is
a grace of fortune which startles into momentary self-betrayal
the woman who has brought her nature completely under the
dominion of her will. It is no longer needful to labour the point
that Lady Macbeth is not a Northern Fury, a virago of abnormal
depravity and forbidding aspect. Perhaps, indeed, the pen-
dulum has swung too far the other way, and some recent
estimates of her character have been 'sympathetic' to a degree
which Shakspere would not have countenanced. It is plain,
however, that the woman who is addressed by her husband as
'my dearest chuck,' and who talks of her 'little hand,' must
have been feminine in feature and in bearing. Dr. Bucknill,
as the fruit of his medical experience, declared that she was
<
416
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
a lady beautiful and delicate, whose one vivid passion proves
that her organization was instinct with nerve force, unoppressed
by weight of flesh. Probably she was small, for it is the smaller
sort of woman whose emotional fire is the most fierce.'
had felt the softening influences of motherhood.
her husband by the closest bond, and lives but for and in him.
She is not a tigress like Regan, a she-wolf like Margaret of
Anjou, but a woman with the instincts of womanhood, which
she cannot crush without a deliberate effort of will:
She
She is knit to
'Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose.'
Her will responds to the demand made upon it; it subdues her
sensitive organism into a machine exquisitely adjusted to the
execution of the dark design which her husband has been
the first to broach, and which she is bent upon carrying to its
issue. Duncan's visit is a chance that must not be let slip;
as she proclaims, with grimly pregnant equivocation, 'he that's
coming must be provided for.' Yet even with his victim at his
mercy Macbeth still hesitates. Of moral scruples, in the strict
sense, he knows nothing. In their place crowds a medley
of motives, among which the sheer dread of earthly retribution
on crime counts for much.
That but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.
But in these cases
We still have judgement here;
·
•
•
this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice.
To our own lips.'
This fear is quickened by a forecast of the universal indignation
which the 'taking-off' of the blameless Duncan will excite; but
a worthier bar to action is the reluctance, so natural in a
Highland chief, to tarnish his honour by violating the laws of
hospitality, loyalty, and kinship. Thus when his wife brings
her dialectic to bear upon his wavering purpose, her tactics are
to show that honour incites him to the deed, and that it may be
XIV]
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Macbeth.
accomplished safely. It is only a coward who can let 'I dare
not' wait upon I would'; and failure is impossible with
a victim sunk in the lethargy that follows travel, and with
attendants drugged into drunken stupor, upon whom the guilt
may be laid. Macbeth is overmastered by her practical logic,
and even suggests fresh precautionary details-the use of the
grooms' daggers, and the smearing of their persons with
Duncan's blood. But as the moment of the deed draws nigh
Macbeth's heated fancy usurps entire sway over his nature.
The moral world has scarcely more reality for him than for
Richard III or Iago, but he dwells almost habitually in a region
of the imagination which is shut to them. The wild poetry
of barbarism is in his blood, and it steeps even his crimes in
a crimson splendour. From the riot of emotion within his
breast is born the midnight vision of the air-drawn dagger
marshalling him towards his goal, and as he strides upon his
errand he looms gigantic through the lurid haze of his own
imaginings.
The scene that follows is written with a pen of fire, and we
seem eye-witnesses of the deed of death, though it is transacted
off the stage. Macbeth acts with energy at the critical moment,
and Duncan is quickly despatched, but a trifling incident pre-
cipitates the emotional reaction which in a nature like his was
inevitable. Duncan's sons in the adjoining room wake for an
instant and mutter a prayer. The 'amen' with which the
murderer seeks to answer the 'God bless us' sticks in his throat.
And, the dagger yet in his hand, he is panic-stricken because he
cannot pronounce 'amen,' though the utterance of a single word
might mean detection. His fears of the plot miscarrying are
for the moment forgotten, yet it is not conscience that wrings
him; it is the shuddering realization that he is henceforth an
outcast, for ever beyond the reach of the 'blessing,' of which he
has such need. Nor is it conscience that thunders in his ear
'Sleep no more'; it is the warrior's shame at having violated
Nature's armistice, and the sense that never again can he claim its
shelter as his due. In the fierce tumult of his feeling he rushes
from the chamber, without taking the steps which were to
incriminate the grooms. Even at his wife's bidding he refuses
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418
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to return, and Lady Macbeth has to go in his place. Super-
natural terrors have no power over her; 'the sleeping and the
dead' are to her but as pictures.' Yet all that is womanly
in her revolts from the task. She had lacked the heart to kill
Duncan herself because he resembled her father in his sleep, and`
the sight and smell of blood are loathsome to her delicate
sensibilities. But her imperial will asserts its mastery, and with
a ghastly jest, in which her pent-up feeling forces for itself relief,
she hurries out to finish the half-done work.
The clamorous urgency of the knocking at the castle-gate
signalizes realistically the invasion of the blood-stained penetralia
by the importunate forces of the outer world. Even then
Macbeth's fears are of the imaginative kind, while his wife's
single anxiety is to get rid of all incriminating conditions. Yet
with the actual entrance of Macduff and Lennox, and the grow-
ing light and stir of daybreak, Macbeth regains his composure.
His indignation at the crime that has taken place under his roof-
tree is admirably feigned, and his sudden murder of the grooms,
on the plea of the uncontrollable fury aroused by their treason,
imposes for the time upon the Scottish lords. Lady Macbeth, on
the contrary, is beginning to feel the physical reaction that follows
an acute strain on the will, and her husband's startling an-
nouncement of his second deed of blood makes her faint away.
But even her weakness turns to good account. In the confusion
caused by her swoon Duncan's sons, alarmed for their own safety,
hurriedly agree to take flight, Malcolm to England, Donalbain
to Ireland. They thus rid Macbeth of the embarrassing pro-
blem of inventing motives for the grooms' murder of Duncan;
he has now only to give out that they were suborned by the
fugitive princes. Accident has again befriended the Thane by
at once giving plausibility to his tale and by removing his rivals.
As Duncan's cousin he naturally mounts the vacant throne.
The witches' threefold hail is fulfilled.
But Macbeth's is 'the vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself.'
The weird sisters when they hailed him as king, hailed Banquo
as the father of kings. The rapid fulfilment in so unforeseen a way
of the one prophecy should have taught him the futility of seeking
to frustrate the other. But logic is far less potent with a man of
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Macbeth.
Macbeth's nature than fear. Of what avail is the crown to him,
while Banquo is a perpetual death's head at the feast-dangerous
in the present, and of evil omen for the future? To be thus is
nothing, but to be safely thus.' It is with Banquo that his
alarms begin, but they do not stop there. His spies are in
every household, he eats his meals in fear, he is shaken nightly
by the affliction of terrible dreams. The joy of the successful
criminal, as it is known by Richard III and Iago, is denied even
for a moment to Macbeth.
He has put 'rancours in the vessel
of his peace,' and his own terrors drive him inexorably into
deeper guilt. He contrives the murder of Banquo only to find
that even' when the brains are out' the man does not die, but rises
with gory locks and glaring eyes to push him from his stool in
the banqueting-hall. The apparition is not, like the ghosts
that throng to the tent of Richard III, the offspring of a moral
revolt. It is born of the fevered blood, not of the conscience,
and though it turns Macbeth's cheek white with terror, it stirs in
him no feeling of remorse.
So transcendently convincing is the dramatist's art in this
scene that, in a sense, it defeats his further purposes. All other
tortures that Nemesis can inflict upon Macbeth seem superfluous
after this apocalypse of the inward hell which is devouring him.
But the stern Shaksperean ethics demand a double retribution
upon the sinner, at the bar of the world, as well as in his own
breast. Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, and the dramatist
therefore makes the crowning outrage against Banquo not only
a source of mental torture to Macbeth, but the beginning of his
fall from power. For Fleance, whom Macbeth had marked
for death along with his father, escapes, and the strong points of
coincidence between this murder and that of Duncan arouses, as
is seen from the ironical speech of Lennox, Act. iii. 6, suspicions.
which had been hitherto latent'. Accident which has till now
befriended Macbeth has begun to turn against him. Beset by
terrors on every side he seeks counsel of the weird sisters,
resolved to know, by the worst means, the worst.' The ghastly
incantation-scene, when the witches fling, one by one, into the
'
¹ This is well brought out by Moulton, Shakspere as a Dramatic Artist,
chap. 6.
E e 2
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[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
bubbling cauldron the loathsome ingredients of their hell-broth,
strikes the note of the coming doom. As they had before
hastened his rise by inflaming his master-motive of ambition, so
now they accelerate his fall by ministering to what has become
his cardinal passion-the yearning to feel himself secure. In
each case they embody the treacherous sycophancy of evil which
feeds the mind with its favourite nourishment, knowing it to be
a poison at the core. Macbeth's ambition had welcomed the
stimulant of the triple hail; his fears call for an opiate, and this
is provided by the supernatural guarantee of safety until appar-
ently impossible conditions are fulfilled. But one caution is
appended. Macbeth is bidden beware Macduff, the Thane of
Fife, and in this, too, the witches are 'harping' his pre-existent
dread. After Banquo's fall Macduff has become his chief terror,
and he now resolves to seize him at once. But the news comes
that the Thane has fled to England; accident has again played
Macbeth false. In baffled rage he falls on Macduff's castle, and
puts his wife and babes to the sword. This, the most wanton
outrage of his reign, is turned by ironical destiny into an
instrument for the satisfaction of the seemingly impossible
conditions necessary to his overthrow. Macduff, strictly speak-
ing, has not been born of woman; he therefore alone has the
power to harm Macbeth. But the Thane, on his arrival at the
English court, is checked in his design of a campaign against
the tyrant by the singular conduct of Malcolm, who at first
views his motives with suspicion. While he is still hesitating he
gets tidings of the butchery of his loved ones, and it is this that
decides him to take up arms against the fiend of Scotland.
Thus the bloody sequel to the witches' caution about Macduff
is a main agent in annihilating the illusory guarantees which
they had given for Macbeth's safety. Well may he cry out later
against
'These juggling fiends
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.'
It is part of the Nemesis that Macbeth has to face the approach-
ing doom alone. The bond of crime between him and his wife
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Macbeth.
slowly cancels all the holier ties that knitted them together at
the first. The murder of Duncan had been their joint enter-
prise, but Banquo's death and the outrages that follow are
planned solely by Macbeth. Once only, in the apparition-scene,
do we again see the lady at her husband's side, trying to steel
him into calm by the overmastering energy of her will, and with
consummate self-control doubling the parts of the solicitous
hostess and the reproving wife. Thenceforth Shakspere never
shows us the twain together; with averted faces each passes to
an uncompanioned doom. It has become customary of late.
among Lady Macbeth's apologists to speak of her as suffering
from remorse, but it is not easy to find the justification of such
a view. From her lips, as from her husband's, no word of
contrition for the past ever falls. She is simply the prey of her
delicate sensibilities as Macbeth of his flushed imagination.
The eternal feminine' in her nature rises in triumphant mutiny
against the will that for a space had wrestled it down. It is in
sleep that this will is entirely subdued, and then the liberated
instincts of womanhood are so tumultuous that they force her in
'slumbery agitation' from her bed. Macbeth has murdered sleep,
and sleep has forsaken his eyelids, but it is a still direr curse to
have sleep without its attendant balı. A midnight wanderer
with memory zig-zagging through the horrors of the past, and
stimulating the senses into mock activity, the woman of royal
will reduced to an automaton helplessly babbling its secrets to
all who have ears to hear-such is Lady Macbeth in her last
state, whence death is a self-sought release.
The loss of her who had once been his 'dearest partner of
greatness' is powerless to rouse Macbeth from the callous
apathy into which he has sunk. After the witches' assurances
of safety, his imagination ceases to torture him with supernatural
terrors, but it haunts him with the contrast between his life as it
is and as he had longed for it to be. His had been the clan-
chieftain's ideal of feudal glory, with its appurtenances of honour,
love, obedience, troops of friends; and instead he has for portion
curses not loud but deep' He drags out a solitary, sombre
existence; the rhythm of life is dulled for him into a meaningless
monotone; the procession of the hours becomes merely a vapid
422
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
pageant ushering mortality on its way to dusty death.' Yet
the approach of his enemies stirs in him the instinct of self-
preservation which the most complete world-weariness cannot
extinguish. He hangs out his banner on the walls of Dun-
sinane, and buckles on his harness for the fray. He is still
in point of mere physical courage the brave Macbeth.' Yet,
as it has been said, 'he fights now not like "Bellona's bride-
groom lapp'd in proof," but with a wild and animal clinging
to life':
They have tied me to a stake: I cannot fly,
But, bear-like, I must fight the course.'
He is unnerved, however, by the discovery that the witches have
played him false, and he soon falls beneath Macduff's avenging
sword. Thus the long-drawn agony ends, for here, as always, it
is the glory of the Shaksperean drama that death assuages,
and does not intensify the tragic pain.
Macbeth, if compared with Richard III, marks the marvellous
advance of the dramatist's art in subtlety and impressive power.
In both plays criminal ambition with its consequences forms the
central theme. The hunchback king, at the crisis of his fate,
feels the avenging power of the conscience which he had so
long deliberately set at defiance. But the career of Macbeth and
his wife presents a far more complex problem. Of conscience,
in the strict sense, neither is possessed. And the dramatic crux
was to exhibit the action of Nemesis in characters of this type.
The conditions are satisfied by making the man the victim
of his self-torturing imagination and the woman of her acutely
nervous sensibilities. We thus realize that nature has reserve
forces for the punishment of sin, when she cannot call conscience
to her aid. So awful, indeed, is the retribution upon the guilty.
pair that it avails them as a partial atonement for their misdeeds.
The criminal who cannot snatch even a moment of precarious
joy from his crime, with whom the offence and the misery of it
are simultaneous, has not reached the lowest depths of degra-
dation. Hence it is that the career of Macbeth and his wife
becomes fit material for tragedy, and that the contemplation of
it purges the emotions through pity and terror. In chastened
і
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423
Othello.
mood we look forward to the dawning of a new era for Scotland
when Malcolm has been crowned at Scone.
OTHELLO was first published in quarto form in 1622, but
the text is imperfect as compared with that of the folio version.
The evidences of date are purely internal, and certainty on the
point is impossible. But the small proportion of rhyme and
the frequency of 'run-on' verse are signs of maturity, while, on
the other hand, the practically total absence of light and weak
endings and the percentage of double endings (26) show that
the play does not belong to the latest period. In all probability
it dates from the first years of James' reign, 1604 or 1605.
The plot is taken from the same source as Measure for Measure,
Cinthio's Hecatomithi. Shakspere followed closely the incidents.
of the Italian tale till the murder of the heroine, but he pro-
foundly modifies the relations of Othello and Iago, and adds the
new figures of Roderigo and Emilia¹. The novel reads like
a page out of a Venetian 'Newgate Calendar,' and the heroine's
fate is held up as a fearful example to self-willed damsels who
put their trust in fascinating strangers. 'I fear,' says the ill-starred
bride, 'that I must serve as a warning to young maidens not to
marry against the will of their parents; an Italian girl should
not wed a man whom nature, heaven, and mode of life have
wholly separated from her.' It is Shakspere's glory that out of
this crude record of atrocities, with its moralizing tag, he should
have constructed one of the world's most stupendous tragedies.
This result is due, as always, to the consummate psycholo-
gical insight with which Shakspere, from a given set of events,
' In Cinthio's tale Desdemona marries the Moor against her family's
wishes. The ensign, who corresponds to Iago in the play, loves Desde-
mona wrongfully. She gives a friendly preference to the lieutenant who is
degraded for wounding a soldier on the guard; and for whose restoration
she pleads to her husband. In revenge for Desdemona's coldness the
ensign steals the Moor's handkerchief from her, leaves it on the lieutenant's
bolster, and then tells Othello that it was given by his wife to her lover.
At the Moor's request he undertakes to murder the lieutenant, but only
succeeds in wounding him, and afterwards, with the husband's help,
smashes in Desdemona's skull with a socking full of sand. The two
then quarrel, and the Moor on the ensign's accusation is tried for the
murder, which he denies even on the rack. He is banished, and afterwards
is killed by one of Desdemona's relatives. The ensign is somewhat later
put to the torture for another offence and dies in agony.
424
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
reasons back to the mental conditions in which they must
have originated. The horrors of the story, which the dramatist
reduced, but which were, in part, essential to it, become en-
durable when we realize that they flow inevitably from the
collision of two such characters as Othello and Iago. They
cease to be mere outbreaks of the beast in man, and become
fraught with profound moral significance.
In this play Shakspere returns for his dramatic background
to the city of the lagoons, which had already furnished the
setting to The Merchant of Venice. But
the peculiar local
colour of the earlier work is missing, partly because the scene,
after Act i, is shifted to Cyprus¹, partly, perhaps, because
Shakspere's genius was so concentrated upon the development
of the personal issues that he paid little heed to atmospheric
detail. Yet, as in The Merchant of Venice, we are made to
realize vividly the international position of the Republic, though
here it is in its military, instead of its commercial, aspect. The
Teutonic poet seems indeed to have welcomed the unique
opportunity which the cosmopolitan relations of the island-city
afforded him of bringing into dramatic collision strongly con-
trasted racial types. In The Merchant of Venice representatives
of many countries, including a Moor, had made their appearance,
while East and West stood arrayed against each other in the duel
between Shylock and Portia. In Othello the violent catastrophe
springs from the contact between a 'supersubtle Venetian' and
a grandly simple but hot-blooded son of the desert.
The African commander whom the Republic has taken into
its service, and who yields it in return a chivalrous loyalty,
is yet as much a stranger in a strange land as Shylock. He is
not a Pariah like the Jewish usurer, but he is none the less an
alien, tolerated solely as an invaluable mercenary. It is the
sword of Othello, not his person, that is precious to the mag-
nificoes, who, with the exclusiveness of Autochthones, have scant
1 On the insoluble problem of the time which the action in Cyprus is
intended to cover, see the paper by Wilson (Christopher North), reprinted
from Blackwood in New Shakspere Soc.'s Trans. 1875. Two days only
seem to be required. yet a number of passages suggest a period of indefinite
length. Hence Wilson's theory of a tremendous double-time' at Cyprus,
a theory which he applies also to Macbeth.
XIV]
425
Othello.
love for an extravagant and wheeling stranger of here and
everywhere.' The Moor is the typical Renaissance soldier of
fortune who, since his arms had 'seven years' pith,' has had
no home but the tented field, and whose career has been
a series of moving accidents by land and sea. This 'unhoused
free condition' of life, with its disastrous chances and hair-
breadth 'scapes has been exactly fitted to expand the barbaric
strength and simplicity of the Moor's nature. The romance of
war and of travel has filtered into his blood, and lends him
a grandeur of which he is all unconscious. Though, as he
confesses, he is rude of speech, the poetry of great adventure
thrills through his words, and makes him an orator in his own
despite. But this primitive fashion of life has unfitted him to
face the problems presented by more complex social conditions.
The warrior who has been wont to carve his way clear by the
sword's edge will find himself baffled by a situation which
cannot be solved through force, and in his perplexity will be
liable to be whirled into irremediable disaster by the maddened
rush of the fierce tropical blood, which soldierly discipline has
hitherto held in check.
Among the Venetian homes to which Othello's office
procures
him the entrée is that of the wealthy senator, Brabantio. But
he is admitted less on the footing of a friend than of a 'lion'
(the colloquialism is here specially apt), who is expected to
entertain his host with a collection of stirring reminiscences.
There is, however, another listener whose interest in the tales
speedily deepens into an interest in their teller. It does not
seem to have occurred to Brabantio to place any bar on the
intercourse between his motherless daughter, Desdemona, and
Othello. He took it for granted that a modest, gentle girl,
who had refused in marriage 'the wealthy curled darlings' of
her own nation would be prevented by a horror naturalis from
running to the sooty bosom of such a thing as the Moor.
But the astute Venetian for once trips in his calculations. He
forgets that in the affairs of love it is the unexpected that
usually happens, and that radical unlikeness between two
natures often acts as an incentive to their union. Desdemona,
quietly busied with her music and her household duties in her
126
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
wealthy father's home, had turned a deaf ear to the suit of the
frivolous gallants who had pestered her with their conventional
adoration. But the swarthy, battered man-at-arms, rehearsing
at her side the epic of his eventful life, is as a being dropped
from another world than her own. All that in her maiden
dreams she has pictured of heroism and romance clusters round
this impressive figure who bears about him the superlative.
fascination of the unknown. His exotic birth and hue thus
cease to be repellent, and are accepted by her as elements in
the unique marvel of his whole career. As she declares later
to the Duke,
'I saw Othello's visage in his mind,
And to his honours, and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.'
Thus Desdemona's love for the Moor, as Kreyssig has rightly
insisted, is born less of the heart than of the imagination.
It is as an ideal of heroic manhood that he takes her fancy
by storm. She knows nothing of his nature 'save what per-
tains to feats and broils and battles,' and is incurious as to its
other possibilities, from whose revelation she might perchance.
have turned shuddering away. To Othello, the hero-worship of
this gracious maiden appeals with irresistible power. His bar-
baric pride finds the most delicious flattery in the thought that
the pure and gentle creature, who has turned away from suitors
of her own race, should lavish such a wealth of sympathy upon
him. She is a vision of angelic tenderness who has floated
into the circle of his stern existence, and the man of blood and
iron surrenders to the spell. Othello sums up the whole story
of their wooing when he tells the Duke
'She lov'd me for the dangers I had passed,
And I lov'd her that she did pity them.'
A union thus based upon mutual fascination rather than
mutual knowledge of character has in it the seeds of a bitter
disenchantment, a violent catastrophe. It is the disastrous.
fortune of Othello and Desdemona that there are those about
them who are interested in quickening these seeds into pre-
cipitate growth.
XIV]
427
Othello.
The Moor has in his service as 'ancient' a young Venetian,
lago, of tried military capacity, cheerful temperament and bluff
honesty of bearing. No one, to outward seeming, could be
less of a villain, and yet this plausibly respectable exterior
covers a fiend in human shape. Iago is the arch-criminal of
Shaksperean drama-'more fell than anguish, hunger and the
sea.' Richard III is in many features his prototype, but the
hunchback king is incited to his unnatural deeds by the con-
*sciousness of his physical deformity. Moreover, though he has
taken Machiavel' as his master, he is after all an 'Italianate '
Englishman, not an Italian, and though he crushes conscience,
as he believes, out of existence, it asserts its power at the last.
But in Iago conscience is completely wanting. He is, as
Coleridge has said, 'all will in intellect.' He is the incarnation
of absolute egotism, an egotism that without passion or even
apparent purpose is at chronic feud with the moral order of
the world. His mind is simply a non-conductor of spiritual
· elements in life. 'Virtue' is to him a 'fig,' love ‘a lust of
the blood, and a permission of the will;' reputation, ‘an idle
and most false imposition,' whose loss is a trifle compared with
a bodily wound. Hamlet in the agony of disillusion had com-
pared the world to an unweeded garden, occupied solely by
things rank and gross in nature. This is Iago's habitual view,
and to him it causes no particle of pain. Evil is his native
element, and the increase of evil an end in itself. It is, there-
fore, unprofitable to discuss in detail the grounds of his hatred
towards Othello or his other victims. His is at bottom, to use
Coleridge's phrase, a 'motiveless malignity,' and he can scarcely
be in earnest with the pretexts which he urges for his misdeeds,
and which vary from day to day. Othello's advancement over
his head of Cassio, a Florentine who knows nothing of war
but the bookish theoric,' might seem a genuine grievance, yet
it is noticeable that after the first few lines of the play Iago
scarcely alludes to this, and makes more of what are evi-
dently imaginary offences by Oello and Cassio against his
honour as a husband. In one passage he hints vaguely
that he loves Desdemona, and it is significant that this is the
only trace left of the ensign's motive for revenge in Cinthio's
428
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
novel. That Shakspere departed so widely from his original
proves that he meant Iago to be actuated by nothing but sheer
diablerie.
The contemplation of such unmixed wickedness would be
unendurable were not our moral pain relieved by the intel-
lectual delight of watching the marvellous skill and coolness
with which this incarnate Mephistopheles carries out his pur-
poses. Hence Shakspere makes us eye-witnesses of every stage
in Iago's scheme, from its origin to its climax. We see him
roughly outline his plan of operation, and we stand fascinated
while he fills in its details by turning to account every weak-
ness in his victims, and every advantage that chance throws in
his way. Money is a scoundrel's first necessity, and, before the
play opens, he has got hold of a dupe whom he can ‘bleed’
to an unlimited extent. This is the brainless young landowner,
Roderigo, one of the curled darlings' whom Desdemona has
rejected. Brabantio, doubtless at his daughter's request, has
forbidden him his house, but, with a greenhorn's infatuation he
persists in his forlorn hope. It is this obstinacy as a suitor
which distinguishes Roderigo from Slender and Sir Andrew
Aguecheek, to whom he is otherwise akin; and it is this that
delivers him into the hands of Iago, who hoodwinks him into
the belief that he can help him in his amorous campaign,
as long as his purse-strings are wide enough open. Even
Roderigo's credulity is staggered by the news that the lady of
his hopes has been carried off by his agent's own commander,
but Iago adroitly cuts short his remonstrances by bidding him
rouse the injured father, and start a hue and cry in the streets.
The moment, however, is not opportune for a display of
hostility towards the Moor. A midnight meeting of the council
of state has been hurriedly summoned to take measures against
a threatened invasion of Cyprus by the Turks, and Othello is
the indispensable leader of the Venetian forces. The Duke,
therefore, gives a somewhat impatient hearing to Brabantio's
charges of witchcraft against his son-in-law, and the assembly
is visibly relieved when Othello's round, unvarnished tale of his
whole course of love, followed by Desdemona's declaration of
allegiance to her lord, procures his honourable acquittal. But
XIV]
429
Othello,
as Brabantio goes out in baffled rage, he lets fly a parting shaft
which, scarcely marked at the time, is found later to have
inflicted a rankling wound:
'Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceived her father, and may thee.'
Othello's committal of his wife to Iago's care during the
voyage to Cyprus proves how accurately the ancient gauges
his master's character:
'The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by the nose
As asses are.'
For Iago has already planned to use Desdemona as an engine
against her husband by representing her as too familiar with
Cassio, the lieutenant whose post he covets. Cassio's dis-
position lends itself readily to Iago's designs. He is brimfull
of enthusiastic loyalty to his chief and the lovely bride whom
he has won; he has, in fact, been Othello's confidant through-
out his wooing, and he adopts towards Desdemona the frankly
intimate bearing of a privileged friend. To Iago's foul imagina-
tion this chivalrous gentleman becomes a knave very voluble,
no further conscionable than in putting on the mere form of
civil and humane seeming, for the better compassing of his salt
and most hidden loose affection.' The courtesies between the
pair on their arrival at Cyprus confirm him in this view, and
in the even more gratuitous assumption that Desdemona returns
the supposed passion:
'That Cassio loves her, I do well believe it;
That she loves him, 'tis apt, and of great credit.'
It is superfluous to ask whether Iago's suspicions are a reality
or a pretence. His is the very wantonness of malice, where the
wish to believe becomes equivalent to the belief itself. The
gross nature spies carrion everywhere, and nothing is clean
to the disciple of the dung-hill philosophy which he expounds
for the benefit of the unsophisticated Roderigo. The most
uncompromising modern realism cannot improve upon this
bestial theory of love, which persuades the poor wretch, who
./.
430
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
had been ready to drown himself on the failure of his hopes,
to put money in his purse and follow the wars, in the hope
of yet enjoying his lady's favours. Thus Iago brings his 'fool,'
with well-lined pockets, to Cyprus, and he there turns him to
account in other than purely financial ways. It is essential
to his plan of campaign that Cassio should be dismissed from
his post for some breach of military discipline, and Roderigo
proves a useful tool for this purpose. The lieutenant, who has
very poor and unhappy brains for drinking, is tempted by Iago
to go too deep in his cups at the festival in honour of Othello's
nuptial and the perdition of the Turkish fleet; he is then, while
in command of the guard, provoked to fury by taunts from
Roderigo, and a scuffle follows which rouses Othello from his
marriage-bed. As the Moor vainly questions the brawlers in
turn as to the origin of the fray, we get for the first time
a glimpse of the tumultuous depths beneath his habitual self-
restraint:
'Now, by Heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule:
And passion, having my best judgement collied,
Assays to lead the way.'
Then, with well-feigned reluctance in the guise of Cassio's
apologist, Iago gives his version of the affair. Othello's re-
joinder is the stern, decisive sentence:
'Cassio, I love thee;
But never more be officer of mine.'
The Moor does not let his affections stand in the way of
summary justice upon his own familiar friend; how will it be if
hereafter one still dearer to him should seem to merit a more
rigorous penalty?
Cassio's dismissal completes one stage in Iago's scheme and
begins another, for at his instigation the lieutenant determines
to sue through Desdemona to Othello for pardon. The young
bride's utter innocence of evil, as the ancient sees, will lead her
into an equivocal position, and he will thus have the exquisite
joy of making the unearthly perfection of her goodness minister
to her own and her husband's ruin. It is the very triumph
of Iago's malignity that he thus discovers a suicidal property in
XIV]
431
Othello.
virtue itself, and that he can claim for his scheme a curiously
plausible aspect of good-faith :
'And what's he then, that says I play the villain?
When this advice is free I give and honest,
Probal to thinking, and indeed, the course
To win the Moor again? For 'tis most easy
The inclining Desdemona to subdue
In any honest suit: she's fram'd as fruitful
As the free elements. And then for her
To win the Moor .
His soul is so enfettered to her love,
That she may make, unmake, do what she list.
How am I then a villain
•
To counsel Cassio to this par. Ilel course
Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!
When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows
As I do now; for while this honest fool
Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes,
And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,
I'll pour this pestilence unto his ear,
That she repeals him for her body's lust,
And, by how much she strives to do him good,
So will I turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her own goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all.'
In
If one were venturesome enough to single out Shakspere's
crowning dramatic achievement, it might be found in the scenes.
that follow. And it is noticeable that their overpowering effect
depends extremely little upon poetical embellishment.
many passages the language keeps almost at conversational
level, even when blank-verse is being used. The most magni-
ficent series of speeches that could be gathered from Shakspere's
plays would not be so unique a testimony to his dramatic genius
as the homely unadorned dialogue which is here sufficient for
tragedy in its culminating form.
lago had spoken of putting the Moor into a jealousy so
strong that judgement cannot cure,' but, as Coleridge was the first
to point out, it is not jealousy in the strict sense that he awakens
in Othello's breast. The Moor speaks truly of himself as 'one
not easily jealous,' and the feeling which takes such irresistible
hold of him is a 'solemn agony' that the woman who had been
to him the ideal of purity should prove, as he thinks, to be
a wanton. He had enshrined her as a sainted presence in
432
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
his heart, and it tortures him to have to cast her forth as an
unclean thing. Had his love been grounded in experience it
would have been proof against all the ancient's stratagems; but it
is fed mainly from the imagination, and it is into the imagination
that Iago pours his poison. Even so he would have plotted in
vain had Desdemona had a share of Portia's or Rosalind's tact
and resource. But we begin to be anxious about the effects of
her intervention when we hear her promise Cassio:
'My lord shall never rest;
I'll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience;
His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift;
I'll intermingle everything he does
With Cassio's suit.'
So, when Othello has just been perturbed by Iago's first
venomed hints, she pleads with unseasonable persistence for the
lieutenant's immediate restoration, and maladroitly reminds her
husband that he had been his constant companion throughout
his wooing. This gives Iago an incomparable opening for
fresh insinuations, which are conveyed chiefly by the repetition
of Othello's own uneasy queries, with carefully studied emphasis,
and by a refusal to disclose his own thoughts. Then, when his
victim has been wrought to the requisite pitch of agitation,
he plays his master-card. The nature of jealousy is such that
the effort to fight against it almost inevitably strengthens its
hold upon the sufferer, and it is with diabolical ingenuity that
Iago proceeds to caution the Moor against the passion into
which he is bent on plunging him,
'O! beware, my lord, of jealousy:
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.'
Othello's answer is that of a 'free and noble nature' which
prefers even a horrible certainty to the wretchedness of doubts
and fears:
'Why? why is this?
Think'st thou I'd make a life of jealousy,
To follow still the changes of the moon
With fresh suspicions? No: to be once in doubt
Is once to be resolved. . . No, Iago;
I'll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;
And, on the proof, there is no more but this,-
Away at once with love or jealousy.'
1
XIV]
433
Othello.
Iago declares that he is emboldened by this avowal to show his
'love and duty' with franker spirit. He now openly bids.
Othello watch his wife with Cassio, and insinuates that it needs
one of their own countrymen to take the measure of a Venetian
bride's duplicity. He reminds him, as Brabantio had already
done, that her marriage had shown her capacity for deceit, and,
feeling his ground sure, he ventures on his crowning stroke
of urging that it was the sign of a diseased condition of mind
from which a recovery was to be anticipated:
'Ay, there's the point: as, to be bold with you,
Not to affect many proposed matches
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto, we see, in all things nature tends:
Foh! one may smell in such, a will most rank,
Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural.
But pardon me: I do not in position
Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear
Her will, recoiling to her better judgement,
May fail to match you with her country forms,
And, happily, repent.'
The feature in Desdemona's love which above all others had
made it irresistible to the Moor-her preference of him to suitors
of her own race-is thus turned into a source of alarm; and
Iago, having brought matters to this point, thinks it time to
take his leave. Fate proves his friend by throwing in his way
at this moment the handkerchief which had been Othello's first
gift to Desdemona- the precious heirloom in whose magical
virtues the imaginative African has unquestioning belief. The
ancient settles to leave it at Cassio's lodgings, and he is thus
armed with exactly the sort of evidence that he now needs.
For the Moor, when his tropical fancy has once been excited,
is whirled into such a frenzy of suspicion that he cannot rest
till he has convincing demonstration of his wife's guilt. There-
fore, on his next meeting with the ancient, he turns upon
him with the furious demand for 'ocular proof,'
Make me to see 't: or, at the least, so prove it
That the probation bear no hinge nor loop
To hang a doubt on: or woe upon thy life.'
Iago, by way of satisfying him, tells his realistic story of Cassio's
dream, and ends by declaring that he has that very day seen the
F f
434
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
lieutenant wipe his beard with the handkerchief given to
Desdemona by the Moor. This damning piece of evidence, as
it appears to Othello, completes the convulsion of his whole
nature. As we listen to his maddened roar for blood, blood,
blood,' it is as if we heard some wild beast of his native desert
bellowing aloud in its rage. Yet it is with a solemn pro-
testation to heaven, as of one entering upon a sacred task, that
he dedicates himself to a 'capable and wide revenge.' In his
most furious transports of passion he clings to the idea that he
is an agent of justice. Vengeance upon Cassio is a secondary
matter and may be left to Iago, but it is his own mission
to free the world of the 'fair devil',' who is ruining the souls
of men.
If Othello needed further provocation, Desdemona goes the
way to supply it. The Moor, when he next meets her, clamours
frantically for the charmed handkerchief, and the timid girl,
cowering beneath this unlooked-for storm, takes refuge in a
little white lie: 'It is not lost, but what an if it were?' Then
as Othello, with a monomaniac's infatuation, merely continues.
to yell unceasingly, The handkerchief, the handkerchief,' she
blunders into the idea that it is a trick to prevent her pleading
for Cassio; and, thinking to match him at his own game, she
retaliates by harping with equal persistence upon the theme that
is uppermost in her mind. Othello hears her bear witness
against herself, and, with assurance thus made doubly sure,
he rushes angrily away.
The violence of his delirium reacts even upon the veteran's
hardened frame, and Iago's additional lie about Cassio's con-
fession of guilt throws him into an epileptic fit. It is before he
has fully recovered the command of his faculties that he is
victimized by a transparent trick, which could only have,
been imposed upon a diseased mind. Cassio had lent the hand-
kerchief to a courtesan, Bianca, who follows him about with
embarrassing attentions. Iago arranges that the Moor shall
6
¹ It is worth noticing that Othello's name for Desdemona here is almost
the same as The White Devil,' Webster's title for his Vittoria Corombona.
When we realize that Desdemona seemed to Othello to be what Vittoria
was in fact, we can appreciate better his transport of rage.
XIV]
435
Othello.
hear Cassio making merry over this creature's infatuation for
him, and shall think that it is Desdemona whose favours are
being turned to scoff. Chance again plays into his hands, for
at this moment Bianca enters and flings back the handkerchief
to Cassio. She is a victim to jealousy, in the strict sense, and
she scorns to meddle with some minx's gifts to the man on
whom she dotes. Othello thus suffers the shame of shames, as
he sees the first priceless token of his love made the plaything
of a wanton's mood. There is nothing for it after such a spec-
tacle but to do the guilty wife to death that very night. And
yet, even yet, he can scarce steel himself to the task. The
'pity of it' almost overpowers him, the pity of the need to
annihilate what has been to him the paragon of all created
things. But a moment later, in a paroxysm of fury, he showers
upon her indescribable epithets. A woman of the world would
be roused to indignant rage, but Desdemona merely cowers
beneath the abuse whose foulness her innocence cannot grasp.
She is a child to chiding,' and she weeps that her lord is
angry, and hastens, at his bidding, to bed. The shock of
fear on her bewildering experiences turns her thoughts back
to the placid home of her girlhood, and she is haunted by
the 'song of willow' wherewith her mother's love-lorn maid,
Barbara, had soothed a broken heart. As she softly croons the
lullaby in the chamber where she is to die a horrible death,
it is as if some gentle echo of a maiden's sadness had fluttered
down from earth to the gates of hell.
woman.
Then comes the end. It is the potential tragedy of every
union of the sexes that the physically weaker being surrenders
herself into the power of the stronger. Thus in the last resort
the man, by superiority of brute force, can always destroy the
But civilization has provided a thousand safeguards
against such an ultima ratio, and where every higher motive
fails, the fear of her kinsmen's vengeance, or the penalties of the
law, paralyzes the husband's arm. But in this case the usual
deterrents do not act. For Desdemona has isolated herself
from her family, and the African gives no heed to the law of
a community in which he is an alien. Thus the problem is
reduced to its primitive conditions, and it has the primitive
Ff 2
436
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
result. But here we have to do not only with the duel between
sex and sex, but the equally elemental duel between the black
man and the white. The murder of a European by a negro is
an outrage from which the caste-pride of the dominant race
turns agonized away; all the more marvellous, therefore, is the
dramatic impartiality that shows us the Moor not as a monster,
but as the reluctant instrument of doom upon the being whom
he cannot choose but love. As he kisses her in her sleep he
cries:
"O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! One more, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee
And love thee after. One more, and this the last!
So sweet was ne'er so fatal.'
It is the fear lest delay should unnerve him for his task that
makes him inexorable to his victim's piteous plea for one half-
hour of life. When all seems over the door is unbarred, and
Emilia rushes in shrieking, 'Yonder's foul murder done.' The
words must seem to Othello the outcry of the world against his
own deed. But the spirit of murder has been abroad that night,
and Desdemona is not its only victim. Iago, finding that
Roderigo has begun to grow restive, and fearing that he may
call him to a restitution large of gold and jewels, incites him to
assassinate Cassio, who has been appointed Governor in place of
the Moor. The infatuated youth, hoping to keep Desdemona
longer in the island, waylays the lieutenant, but is wounded for
his pains. Iago strikes at Cassio from behind, and then stabs
Roderigo to death. Chance again befriends him by bringing
Bianca upon the scene. As Cassio has been supping at her
house, it is easy to charge her with being a party to his injury,
and thus avert suspicion from himself.
But murder will out, and Iago's elaborately-calculated scheme
is suddenly thrown into confusion through his neglect of one
essential factor-his wife. As Emilia bursts into the bed-
chamber with tidings of the bloody work outside, her mistress'
seemingly lifeless lips, in a last flicker of vitality, gasp out the
glorious lie which makes her 'kind lord' guiltless of her death.
'The Accusing Spirit which flew up to Heaven's chancery with'
the lie, blushed as he gave it in, and the Recording Angel, as he
XIV]
437
Othello.
wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out
for ever.' But Othello spurns the shelter of his wife's sacred
forgiveness. Strong in his sense of right, he calmly confesses
his deed, and cites Iago's testimony to Desdemona's guilt.
Then the honest indignation of a commonplace woman reveals
to the Moor the diabolical fraud which has caught him in its
toils. There is only one way-and that comes too late-by
which the ancient can stop Emilia's mouth. He stabs her; and
so at last, but in a manner far different from his anticipation, he
is 'evened' with Othello,' wife for wife.'
There is but one thing left to the Moor. The mighty
voyager has reached the limit of his wanderings for evermore:
'Here is my journey's end, here is my butt
And very sea mark of my utmost sail.'
A sword of Spain, the ice-brook's temper is in his hand, and
with a last proud thought of his services to the Republic, a last
plea for himself as one that loved not wisely but too well, he
plunges the blade into his bosom, and dies upon the body of
his wife. We look on 'the tragic loading' of the bed, and our
one dark consolation is the sight of the arch-villain in the hands
of his captors, awaiting the terrible penalty of his crimes. There
is no ray of light, as at the close of Shakspere's other tragedies,
heralding the dawn of a happier era. Yet we feel that it is
better to be a Desdemona or an Othello than an Iago, and we
are persuaded that there is an atoning efficacy in the death
through which the husband passes to join his wife. Before the
Moor, in his supreme agony, had risen an awful vision of the
Judgement Day:
'When we shall meet at compt
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven
And fiends will snatch at it.'
But the lips that had pardoned him in this life will not plead
against him in the next; and in that world where men see not as
through a glass, darkly, but face to face, Othello and Desdemona
may yet find
"That ruined love when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, more greater.'
438
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
KING LEAR was entered on the Stationers' Register
November 26, 1607, and the entry states that it had been
acted 'upon St. Stephen's day at Christmas last,' i. e. December
26, 1606. This performance was before the King at Whitehall,
and it gives the end of 1606 as a downward limit for the play.
An upward limit is supplied by the publication in 1603 of
Harsnet's Declaration of Popish Impostures, from which the
names of the devils in Edgar's speeches are derived. 1605
is the probable date of the tragedy, for in that year, owing
very likely to the success of Shakspere's works on the boards, the
old chronicle-history of King Leir was printed, and may have
been passed off on the reading public as the play acted at the
Globe. The reference in Act i. Scene 2 to 'these late eclipses'
must have been suggested by the great eclipse of the sun,
October, 1605, preceded by an eclipse of the moon in September.
The metrical evidences, which present the same general features
as in Othello, agree well with the external testimony in favour of
1605.
The source of the main plot is Holinshed's Chronicle, but
Shakspere completely changed the end of the story as given by
the annalist, and reproduced by Spenser and the writer of the
old play. In the original version the army of Lear and his
French allies is victorious, Lear is reinstated in his kingdom,
and on his death is succeeded by Cordelia, who is afterwards made
prisoner by her nephews, and kills herself in despair. Hamlet
was the only play in which Shakspere had hitherto departed so
boldly from supposed historical data, and the overwhelming
horror of the final scene becomes immeasurably more significant
¹ Two quarto editions, with elaborate title-pages, were issued in 1608 by
Nathaniel Butter. These editions are full of mistakes, and it is probable
that they were hastily printed from MSS. suptitiously obtained. They
omit a number of passages essential to the pl, which must have
belonged to the original version of the play. The folio text of 1623 gives
us in the main the original version, with the countless blunders of the
quartos corrected, and the omitted passages restored. But the folio, on the
other hand, leaves out a number of passages found in the quaitos. These
'cuts' seem to have been made for stage purposes, and care was taken, as
a whole, only to leave out such passages as are merely ornamental, and
are not necessary for the plot or the development of the characters.' There
is no need to suppose that Shaks] ere himself had a hand in the abridge-
ment, or that the folio is his revised version of an earlier text.
1
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King Lear.
when we realize that it did not spring naturally out of the
dramatist's materials, but that it is the result of a revolutionary
alteration in them. Shakspere, when he wrote King Lear, was
not in the mood that welcomes a smooth close to an eventful
history. He wished to see the destructive forces of the universe
pushing their ravages to the most malignant extreme, and over
the widest possible area. Thus, not content with turning the
story of Lear into tragic channels, he added to it from an in-
dependent source a minor plot dealing with a parallel theme,
and equally sombre in complexion. This is the story of the
Duke of Gloucester and his sons, apparently suggested by that
of the blind King of Paphlagonia in Sidney's Arcadia. But here,
as in the main plot, Shakspere substituted a tragic for a happy
ending. The union of these two tales widens the poet's canvas
till it seems of illimitable extent. The picture,' as Schlegel has
said, 'becomes gigantic'; we seem to be onlookers ‘at a great
commotion in the moral world,' and we are filled with such
alarm as we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly bodies
might one day fall from their appointed orbits. It is to these
analogies from the physical world that critics are driven in the
attempt to interpret the play. What is Lear?' asks Coleridge.
'It is storm and tempest-the thunder at first grumbling in the
far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length bursting in
fury over our heads-succeeded by a breaking of the clouds for
a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the
single hope of darkness.' But it is the paradoxical greatness of
the play that the seeming chaos of the elements into which it
plunges us is not a chaos after all. While everything seems in
the wildest confusion, a plot of labyrinthine intricacy is steadily
being unravelled, and the majesty of moral law sits as unseen
arbiter over the tumultuous strife of passion.
This unique mixture of Titanic vastness and passion with
orderly elaboration of detail has led a number of critics to place
King Lear at the head of Shakspere's writings. Hazlitt asserts
that 'to attempt to give a description of the play itself, or of its
effect on the mind, is mere impertinence.' Gervinus calls it an
epic tragedy, and compares it to the classical and mediaeval tragic
epics, whose object it realizes with smaller means. Ten Brinck
་
440
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
declares that, 'taken as a whole, it is the mightiest work that
Shakspere has created.' Dowden speaks of it as the greatest
single achievement in poetry of the Teutonic or northern genius.'
In spite of this weight of authority, the verdict is not one that
can pass unchallenged. Judged purely as a drama, King Lear
cannot rank with Othello, or even with Macbeth. Othello, as
has been already suggested, is the high-water mark of the art
of Shakspere, the playwright. Tried by every test, that tragedy
is supreme. It has a main plot of absorbing interest, into which
minor plots, which are variations on the leading theme of jealousy,
dovetail with exquisite nicety. The interest, instead of culminating
in the third Act, as is often the case in the dramatist's works,
grows with every scene, and we are enthralled by a spectacle
which strains our capacity for feeling to breaking-point. The
character-drawing is equally plastic and subtle, and the figures
range through all gradations from angelic virtue to fiendish
villainy; as a study in perspective, the play is a masterpiece.
Finally, the language reaches that ideal union of simplicity and
nervous intensity in which we catch the native accent of the
tragic Muse.
Can all this be truly said of King Lear? Its overwhelming
horror stuns instead of stirring the feelings. We grope our way
through thick darkness, broken now and then by sudden rifts
through which we see the shining of far-off stars. The figures
that crowd round us are scarcely human; they are, with few
exceptions, monsters of cruelty and lust, or sainted forms of
more than earthly tenderness. The contrasts are too unqualified,
and the parallelism of the twin plots is too absolute, for the most.
consummate effects, of a purely dramatic kind, to be attained.
Tragedy cannot be reduced to a study in black and white.
Hence it is that Lear, of all Shakspere's mightiest works, has
had least theatrical success. Lamb declared that it was essen-
tially impossible to be represented on a stage.' This was meant.
as a tribute to its intellectual and poetical grandeur, but never-
theless, it is, from one point of view, a condemnation. A drama
which it is essentially impossible' to act has outstepped the
legitimate bounds of its genus.
6
It would therefore be more exact to say of King Lear that it
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King Lear.
is not Shakspere's greatest play, but that it is the work which.
is the most stupendous expression of his genius, and in
which Romantic drama culminates. For in its passion, its
strength, its magnificent poetry, as in its tendency to combine
tragic and epic methods, and to stretch its span over the widest
possible area of incident and emotion, it marks the climax of the
movement, which, beginning in a sense with the Miracle cycles,
had entered, with Marlowe, upon its higher, more self-conscious
phase. Thus King Lear has the unique significance attaching
to any work, which is the most characteristic specimen of a
definite literary type.
ment.
In this play, as in Macbeth, Shakspere drew his chief materials
from the storehouse of Celtic tradition, and he has sought to
create a dramatic atmosphere that would harmonize with his
subject. In Macbeth he had dealt with the imaginative and
mystical elements in the Celtic nature, and had lifted the veil '
from that supernatural region whence they draw their nourish-
But in King Lear he singled out a different character-
istic of the race-its uncontrollable and wayward passion, which
links it not with the spirit-world, but with the untamed, ravening
forces of purely animal or natural life. We find throughout the
play that we are in the midst of a primaeval society, whose
gods' sit very far removed from it in the iron heavens, and
which still feels the instinct of the ape and tiger' stirring in
its blood. This kinship between man and beast is emphasized
by the curiously frequent references to animals, nearly always
under their predatory or noisome aspects'. The adder, the wolf,
the bear, the vulture, the lion, the sea-monster are among the
grisly fauna, of which man is as yet only primus inter pares.
Lear speaks of himself as a dragon; Goneril and Regan are
called tigers, she-foxes, pelican-daughters. We see 'unaccom-
modated man' stripped of his 'lendings,' ' a poor, bare, forked
¹ See Kirkman's paper Animal Nature in King Lear (New Sh.S.Tr.1879).
* Shakspere is, however, as usual, not entirely consistent in the details.
of his picture. Thus the duel between Edmund and Edgar is conducted
according to the etiquette of the developed system of chivalry, and the
proclamation of Edgar throughout the kingdom presupposes an organized
police-system. Many of the sarcasms of the Fool and of Lear in his madness
are directed against the evils of an artificial society.
442
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
animal,' scarcely distinguishable from his environment, save for
the presence of a few radiant types to bear witness that he is
'For aye removed
From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.'
It is therefore not till we have become steeped in the peculiar
atmosphere of the whole play that we can do justice to the
apparently preposterous incidents of the opening scene. In!
Lear we see an aged king, 'the best and soundest of whose
time hath been but rash,' and whose infirmities have been
aggravated by his unchecked exercise of the powers of a primitive
king and father. They have now taken the chronic form of the
unruly waywardness that old age brings in its train, and the first
words of the play are an allusion to one of his 'inconstant
starts.' He had apparently always affected his elder son-in-law,
Albany, more than his younger, Cornwall; but in the partition of
his kingdom he has, to the surprise of his court, arranged that
they shall have equal shares, while 'a third more opulent' is to
go to his youngest daughter Cordelia. We thus see that Lear
has settled beforehand the details of the division of his territory;
and that the singular 'viva-voce examination' in affection
through which he puts his daughters is simply the momentary
impulse of a vain nature, which cannot dispense with outward
and visible signs of regard. The trial is but a trick, and the
grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of
a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled and disap-
pointed.' Goneril and Regan roll off glib protestations of
unlimited devotion, but when it comes to Cordelia's turn, her
love's more richer than her tongue,' and her father's appeal
cannot draw a syllable from her, except the bare formula of
filial obligation:
'I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more, nor less.'
Such a legal definition of her attachment is repellent on a
daughter's lips. Cordelia here fails in that most difficult of
problems-the exact adjustment of speech to feeling. To say
the truth, there is mingled with her celestial tenderness just
the least little drop of inherited spleen and in the stubborn
taciturnity which she adopts as a foil to her sister's hypocritical
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King Lear.
professions, she shows that she is her father's child. Lear is
infuriated to madness by this undreamt-of check to his designs,
and the passionate words leap to his lips
'Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever.'
She who had been his 'joy' is henceforth his sometime
daughter,' and her share of territory goes to swell her sister's
dowries. Albany and Cornwall are invested jointly with the
royal power, but Lear retains 'the name and all the additions
to a king.' He can part with the reality of rule, but his weak
nature clings to the ceremonial show, which had been so
worthless in the eyes of a Henry V. One voice rises in protest
against the hideous rashness' of this settlement. In Kent we
have Shakspere's most elaborate picture of the ideal liegeman,
who holds his life but as a pawn to wage' against his king's
enemies, yet who is not afraid to protest when he sees him
rushing blindly to his own destruction. When his master turns
a deaf ear to his warnings, the trusty courtier, who is not
without his share of Celtic impetuosity, gives his tongue very
free rein:
'Revoke thy doom;
Or, whilst I can vent clamour from my throat,
I'll tell thee thou dost evil.'
He can be only silenced by a decree of banishment-an
arbitrary enactment which proves that Lear, even after his
abdication, does not hesitate at a despotic exercise of the power
which he has formally renounced. Immediately afterwards
Cordelia departs with the King of France, who realizes the
worth of this unprized precious maid,' and Lear, with his
retinue of a hundred knights, is left to the alternate hospitality
of Goneril and Regan.
These two terrible figures are by far the most revolting
creations of the dramatist. They are not simply unsexed
women, they are Gorgons, monsters in female shape, whose
look turns us to stone. With all the motiveless malignity of
Iago, they are wanting in his genius, his humour, his mag-
nificent audacity. The exploits of a devil dazzle us into a
444
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
reluctant and horrified admiration, but we are sickened by the
brutal havoc wrought by beasts of prey. The two terrible
creatures,' as Dowden has said, 'are, however, distinguishable.
Goneril is the calm wielder of a pitiless force, the resolute
initiator of cruelty. Regan is a smaller, shriller, fiercer, more
eager piece of malice. The tyranny of the elder sister is a cold,
persistent pressure as little affected by tenderness or scruple
as the action of some crushing hammer; Regan's ferocity is
more unmeasured, and less abnormal or monstrous.' It is
Goneril who begins the campaign of persecution by suggesting
to Regan that they should do something, and i' the heat,' and
it is under her roof that the old king is first taught to smart
for his folly. The insolence of Oswald is the prelude to the
crueller discipline that is to follow. But the time-serving steward
meets more than his match in Kent, who has entered Lear's
service in disguise, and who teaches him 'differences' in
characteristically rough-and-ready fashion.
Another, far humbler retainer, clings with equal fidelity to his
master. This is the Fool, 'who hath much pined away since my
young lady's going into France.' The Fool in King Lear is
the only specimen of his class who appears in Shaksperean
tragedy, and he fills a unique rôle. The typical Fool, as has
been seen in the case of Feste, is 'all things to all men,' and it
is his office to bandy words with every chance comer on any
topic that turns uppermost. But the Fool in this play has
a curiously specialized function. The one theme upon which
he harps without rest is the egregious folly of Lear in parting
with his crown, and in putting his neck under Goneril and
Regan's yoke. Hence it is that, unlike his fellows in other
plays, he is nameless, with no more distinguishing badge of
individuality than plain 'Fool.' For he is scarcely a person,
a unit to be counted in a census of population. He is a
wandering voice-the voice of Lear's conscience taking outward
form in this grotesque yet wistful figure, 'the soul of pathos in
a comic masquerade.' The workings of his mind show that
strange mixture of simplicity and acuteness which is so often
the birthright of 'a natural.' The flickering light of his intellect
has a curiously penetrating power. The sphere in which he
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King Lear.
is most at home is that which contains the lowest forms of
animal life. The snail, the eel, the oyster, the hedge-sparrow
all furnish him with illustrations of Lear's helpless position.
With doggrel snatches, with conundrums, with epigrams, he
over and over again returns to the attack. Lear 'has banished
two on's daughters, and did the third a blessing against his.
will;' he had little wit in his bald crown when he gave his
golden one away; he has made his daughters his mother and
put the rod into their hand.
The entrance of Goneril speedily demonstrates that 'this is
not altogether fool.' Doubtless Lear, who will not stay a jot
for dinner,' and who is free with his tongue and his arm on the
faintest provocation, is by no means an easy guest, and on the
principle of 'like master, like man,' it is quite credible that his
knights 'do hourly carp and quarrel,' turning the place into
'a riotous inn.' But Goneril's reproof is brutal in its icy calm,
and it ends with the pitiless threat:
'Be then desired
By her, that else will take the thing she begs,
A little to disquantity your train.'
Lear does not dream of excusing himself or his followers. His
amazement at first takes the form of ironical ejaculations: ‘Are
you our daughter?' 'Your name, fair gentlewoman?' but the
lash of Goneril's tongue soon stirs him to an ungovernable
transport of rage.
'Darkness and devils!
Saddle my horses; call my train together.
Degenerate bastard! I'll not trouble thee:
Yet have I left a daughter.'
As he begins to realize his folly in casting off Cordelia for her
'most small fault,' while favouring to the utmost this 'detested
kite,' he beats his head in impotent fury. Then he wheels.
round again upon Goneril, and he goes far to forfeit the
sympathy which his situation arouses by the unnatural horror
of the curses which he thunders at her. He still feels sure that
Regan, whose eyes seem to have had a delusive softness, will
prove ‘kind and comfortable,' and he sends Kent to her palace
to announce his coming. Goneril meanwhile dispatches Oswald
with a letter dissuading her from receiving the king, and the
446
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
result is that Regan and her husband, with the rival messengers
in their train, hurry off to the castle of the Earl of Gloucester.
In this castle an underplot has been developing parallel to
the events at court. A father has been led to cast off a devoted
child, and to advance one whose love is mere pretence. But,
as usual, Shakspere has avoided monotony by a skilful variation
in details. An elder son replaces a younger daughter as the
good genius of the story, while instead of two elder daughters
as evil-doers we have a younger son. This son, Edmund, is
a bastard, and this fact is the key to his conduct throughout.
His illegitimate birth puts him, he holds, outside the pale of
ordinary moral obligation. He is a child of nature; therefore
nature is his goddess, and to her law his services are bound.
Richard III's deformity had driven him into a similarly anti-
social attitude, and we hear the echo of the hunchback's cry,
'I have no brother, I am like no brother,' in Edmund's phrase:
Brother, a word; descend: brother, I say.' In power of
dissimulation and of turning opportunities to instant account
Edmund further recalls Richard, but he lacks entirely his
superstitious strain, and laughs at Gloucester's belief that the
late eclipses in the sun and moon are portents of evil. His is
the self-reliant creed that scorns 'the excellent foppery of the
world,' whereby we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the
moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity, fools by
heavenly compulsion, and all that we are evil in by a divine
thrusting on.' He finds it easy to persuade his credulous father
that his elder brother is plotting against his life, though, even
allowing for Celtic impulsiveness, Gloucester's instant con-
viction of a favourite son's guilt on the flimsiest evidence is
wanting in plausibility. Very thinly motived too is Edgar's
conduct in not seeking an interview with his incensed father,
and in taking flight at the suggestion that the object of
Cornwall and Regan's approaching visit may be to arrest him
as a partisan of Albany, who is already at feud with his brother-
in-law. Edgar's flight confirms Gloucester's worst suspicions,
and the plotter has his reward when the Earl proclaims a hue
and cry against the absconder, and declares that he will work
the means to make Edmund 'capable' in his stead.
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447
King Lear.
It is at this moment that Cornwall and Regan arrive at the
castle, and henceforward the main and minor plots begin to
mingle, and finally become almost indistinguishable. What-
ever chance there might have been of Lear faring better at the
hands of Regan than of Goneril is destroyed by the aggressive
vehemence of Kent, who, without provocation, abuses Oswald
in unmeasured terms, and then beats him black and blue. He
turns a scarcely less rough tongue upon Cornwall himself, and
is set in the stocks for his pains. Thus when Lear enters the
courtyard of the castle, he is greeted by the incredible sight of
his messenger in this degrading position, and the still more
incredible news that Regan and her husband are the authors of
the outrage. A wave of hysterical passion sweeps over him,
but he forces it down, and goes indoors to demand explanations.
Here another shock awaits him. Cornwall and Regan refuse to
see him, and Gloucester meets his expostulations by reminding
him of
The fiery quality of the duke;
How unremovable and fix'd he is
In his own course.'
Lear's imperious nature cannot brook in others 'the fiery
quality' which is predominant in himself. The long-ingrained
instincts of absolutism are roused into passionate activity by
such contumacy in those who have been wont to tremble at
his nod:
The king would speak with Cornwall; the dear father
Would with his daughter speak, commands her service:
Are they inform'd of this? My breath and blood!
Fiery? the fiery duke?
·
Go tell the duke and 's wife I'ld speak with them,
Now, presently: bid them come forth and hear me,
Or at their chamber-door I'll beat the drum
Till it cry sleep to death.'
At last the pair are induced to appear, but it is frosty comfort
that the king gets from Regan's lips. He is reminded that he is
of an age to be ruled and led, and is bidden return to Goneril
and beg her forgiveness. At that moment Goneril herself
enters, and as the sisters take each other by the hand, Lear
realizes their unholy alliance against his white locks. Turn by
turn they mercilessly beat down the number of his followers, the
448
[CH
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
sole relic of his former greatness, till Regan presents an
ultimatum in the query, 'What need one?' Tears threaten, at
first, to be the answer, but the old man summons his scanty
remnant of strength for one final outburst of vaguely terrible
denunciation.
'No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall-I will do such things-
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep;
No. I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep.'
But the strain of closing up Nature's outlet for emotion reacts
disastrously upon the enfeebled mind of Lear, and shrieking,
O fool, I shall go mad!' he rushes wildly out into the night
and storm. Henceforth, whatever his infirmities, he is ‘a man
more sinned against than sinning.'
In the scenes that follow, Shakspere's imaginative genius
soars to its most sublime height. The primitive poetry of the
elements, the poetry coeval with the laying of the earth's
foundations, sweeps through the lines whose majestic cadence
reverberates to the roll of cataracts and hurricanoes and all-
shaking thunder. The solid globe rocks to its centre, and the
'high-engendered battles' of rain, wind, and fire shake the vault
of heaven. Chaos is come again, and 'man's nature cannot
carry the affliction nor the fear.' But this colossal panorama of
a world in upheaval is the setting to a centrepiece of a single
human figure.
For tho' the giant ages heave the hill
And break the shore, and evermore
Make and break, and work their will;
Tho' world on world in my iad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours
What know we greater than the soul?'
The words of the modern poet interpret Shakspere's attitude
here, as elsewhere, and the dislocation of the cosmos is treated
as subordinate to the tumult in the breast of Lear, who,
'Strives in his little world of man to outscorn
The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.'
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King Lear.
As with royal eloquence he arraigns the elements for leaguing
themselves with two pernicious daughters against his white
hairs, he is still, though outcast and impotent, every inch a king.
But his physical suffering disorders further a mind already
weakened by hysterical passion. His wits begin to turn, and
soon he is driven completely mad by an incident which links
together the major and minor plots. Kent leads him for shelter
to a hovel, whence rushes out Edgar in the disguise of a Tom
of Bedlam, or village idiot, which he has adopted to escape
arrest. He is naked, save for a blanket round his loins, and his
talk is a strange gibberish in which the fear of foul fiends and
the memory of bodily hardships are the most coherent threads.
The contact with this apparent lunatic, through the operation of
a familiar law, produces total insanity in Lear, and the limits
of tragic horror are reached in the wild trio of madness that
follows the ravings of Lear, the feigned frenzy of Edgar, and
the babbling of the Fool. Coleridge did not exaggerate when
he cried, 'O, what a world's convention of agonies is here!'
Yet there is one ray of light through the blackness. Cordelia,
informed of the growing feud between Albany and Cornwall,
and alarmed on Lear's behalf, lands at Dover with a French
force. Kent sends her news of the king's condition, and
Gloucester, whose kindly though weak nature has rebelled.
against Goneril and Regan's savagery, seeks out Lear amidst
the storm, and, fearing for his life, bids Kent hasten with him to
the camp of the invaders. The sight of the king's sufferings
makes his own misery more acute, and in the hearing of the
disguised Edgar he cries to Kent:
I had a son,
Now outlaw'd from my blood; he sought my life,
But lately, very late: I loved him, friend;
No father his son dearer truth to tell thee,
The grief hath crazed my wits.'
Thus Edgar learns that his father has been alienated from him
by slanderous reports, and he is ready a little later to become
his protector in his sore need. For the action which alleviates
the Nemesis on the central figure of the main plot, precipitates
the Nemesis on the corresponding figure in the minor plot.
G g
450
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Gloucester has informed Edmund of his plan for rescuing Lear,
and the villain straightway discloses it to Cornwall. Thus when
the Earl returns from his mission of mercy he is seized and
bound, and his eyes are plucked out. Mutilation is always more
horrible than murder, and in this scene Shakspere, for the first
and only time since Tilus Andronicus, oversteps the limit that
separates the tragic from the papóv. For the blinding of
Gloucester upon the stage, unlike the 'sacrifice' of Desdemona,
is merely a barbarous outrage, that violates our emotions
instead of purging them through pity and terror. But, in
partial amends, our instinct of justice is at once satisfied by the
instantaneous punishment of the crime. One of Cornwall's
servants, with Celtic impetuosity, turns upon his master and
gives him a death-wound. The Duke's fall brings in its train
a complicated Nemesis upon all the other wrong-doers. For
the widowed Regan determines to mate with Edmund, but finds
a rival in Goneril, who, grown weary of her mild husband
Albany, has chosen the handsome villain as her paramour.
Thus the pair of monsters whom hate had joined in unnatural
league are now driven into unnatural conflict by love.
But the end is not yet, and meanwhile the two aged sufferers
pass through affliction to peace-one for ever, the other for
a time.
Gloucester is guided to Dover by Edgar, who
through a ruse prevents him from taking his own life. He
learns to accept his fate not as a wanton visitation from
above, but as a just decree to be borne with meekly till the
appointed end.
'You ever-gentle gods, take my breath from me;
Let not my worser spirit tempt me again
To die before you please.'
And, at the last, the joyful shock of discovering in his saviour
his much-wronged son makes his flawed heart burst smilingly.
Lear, too, amidst the fantastic flights of his madness, shows that
his physical and mental sufferings have taught him his helpless-
ness, and his folly in taking outward shows for realities: 'To say
"ay" and "no" to everything that I said! "Ay" and "no" too
was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once, and
the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace
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King Lear.
at my bidding; there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go
to, they are not men o' their words: they told me I was every-
thing; 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.' With a confused
memory of his passionate wilfulness and injustice he is ashamed
to come into Cordelia's presence till he is led thither by her
messengers. Then when nature's foster-nurse, repose, has done
its merciful work, the 'great rage' is killed in him, and through
the hell-black night that is fast closing in on every side, we have
one heavenly vista in the scene of reunion between Lear and
the daughter whom he had declared a stranger from his heart
for ever. Cordelia's breast burns with as pure a flame of
seraphic love as if she were already a soul in bliss, which Lear
in the dim interval between sleep and waking takes her to be.
All record of injury done to her in the past is blotted from her
memory, and the only violent harms' to which she gives
a thought are those which her sisters have inflicted on this
'child-changed father.' As she hangs over his bed, her voice is
soft and low as ever, and her words as few. But kisses and
tears are the fitting language for a tenderness so divine, and the
old king has at last learnt to value aright these noiseless tokens
of true love. He too weeps, but they are the tears of a contrite
heart; and we know that suffering has had its sacramental
efficacy on Lear, as we behold him on his knees before his
daughter, faltering forth that he is a very foolish, fond old
man,' and praying for forgiveness.
(
But repentance does not annul the past, and evil once set in
motion cannot be arrested at the fiat of its originator. The
hoary-headed king has still to see the ultimate outcome of his
sin in the catastrophe that swallows his entire household.
Cordelia's army is defeated, and she, with her father, taken
prisoner and sentenced to death. But the divisions in the
British camp make victory no less costly than deſeat. Goneril
is as ruthlessly energetic in her amorous intrigue as in her
persecution of Lear. She poisons Regan, and she sends
Edmund instructions to cut off her husband. Her missive is
intercepted by Edgar, who delivers it to Albany. Edmund,
after the battle is won, is arrested on the charge of treason, and
is fatally wounded by his brother, who appears in arms to make
G g 2
452
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
good the charge. Goneril, in desperation, plunges a dagger into
her own heart, and follows her victim Regan out of life. The
three great wrong-doers bring about one another's ruin. As
Edmund, with a last touch of cynical humour, cries:
'I was contracted to them both all three
Now marry in an instant.'
In a flash of penitence, before his lips close for ever, he
countermands the order for the execution of Lear and Cordelia.
But it is too late. The horrors that have gone by seem to fade
into insignificance as the white-haired king totters into the midst
of the petrified onlookers, with his daughter dead in his arms,
and the long-drawn monotone of lamentation on his lips.
There is a momentary thrill of hope as he bends down to catch
a fancied murmur of that still small voice. But it is hushed for
ever, and the silence on the loved one's lips, more potent than
all the thunders of heaven, cracks the heart of Lear. As his
glazing eyes take their last look of the martyr-form in his arms,
the whole riddle of life and death is compressed into the
anguished cry,
'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life
And thou no breath at all? Thou 'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!'
And thus, with the quintessence of negation rattling in his
throat, Lear dies.
What are we to make of it all? Was Gloucester right when
he spoke of humanity as the quarry of malignant, irresponsible
deities?
'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.'
Is the dead march with which the play closes not only the dirge
over the bodies of those that are no more, but over the futility
of human ideals, over fruitless loyalties, and martyrdoms in
vain? Is it all one to be a Cordelia or a Goneril, since in death
they are not divided? Is that Shakspere's 'message' to the
world, and was the eighteenth century right after all when it
rejected such a cheerless conclusion, and showed us Cordelia
victorious and happily wedded to Edgar?
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King Lear.
No! this most representative of Shaksperean tragedies is not
born of the pessimism that despairs of all things human, nor of
the facile optimism that thinks everything is for the best in the best
of all possible worlds. It is, as Kreyssig has called it,
'the
tragedy of the categorical imperative.' It boldly recognizes
that in the sphere of outward circumstances virtue is not always
triumphant nor vice cast down. Amidst the clash of the iron
forces of the universe, love and purity are often crushed.
'Streams will not curb their pride
The just man not to entomb,
Nor lightnings go aside
To give his virtues room;
Nor is that wind less rough which blows a good man's barge.'
But there is an inner sanctuary inviolable by these shocks from
without. In the kingdom of the spirit nothing matters except
'the good will,' and there Cordelia's ardour of love is justified
of itself. It exists, and in its existence lies its triumph. But,
even on the sternest interpretation of Shaksperean ethics, such
glorious self-abandonment wins a benediction from above:
'Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.'
And may we not even venture to interpret Lear's own words
as a prophetic salutation, and to think of her as 'a soul in bliss,'
one of the just spirits that wear victorious palms'?
CHAPTER XV.
THE PLUTARCH SERIES OF PLAYS.
It is characteristic of Shakspere that the problem-plays and
the three tragedies, in which his genius had taken its most
unfettered flights, should be flanked on either side by dramas
which clung, with unexampled fidelity, to historical tradition.
In 1579 Sir Thomas North had translated into English Amyot's
French version of Plutarch's Lives. We do not know when
North's book first fell into Shakspere's hands, but he did not
make use of it for dramatic purposes till after 1600, when he
had finished his group of plays dealing with the English Civil
Wars. About 1601 he wrote Julius Caesar which, as Digges
testifies, was very successful on the stage, but, instead of at once
taking other subjects from Roman history, he went elsewhere
for plots.
It may be, as Dowden suggests, that the historical
connexion was now a connexion too external and too material
to carry Shakspere on from subject to subject, as it had sufficed
to do while he was engaged upon his series of English historical
plays. Thus, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus were not
written till about six or seven years afterwards, and hence they
differ greatly in style from their forerunner. But, in spite of
this, the three plays are alike in their unique relation to the text
upon which they are based, and in their mode of handling
themes borrowed from antiquity.
We have seen that Shakspere, in dramatizing Holinshed's
narrative of the Civil Wars, kept loyally to the main lines of the
Chronicle, and took care that his humorous additions should
not distort what he accepted as historical truth. His treatment
Shakspere and Plutarch.
455
of Plutarch was even more scrupulous, and not without reason.
For while Holinshed was a mere annalist, whose work was
chiefly an unpretentious record of tradition, the Greek historian
was a literary artist of a high order, with a method that specially
fitted his writings to become a dramatic storehouse. Imper-
fectly acquainted with the political issues of the epochs which
he describes, he had a keen eye for character in its multifarious
varieties, and the incidents which specially attracted him were
those which threw light upon some notable personality.
Thus, as he tells us, he seeks 'the distinctive marks of the soul
in the smallest facts, in witty answers and lively off-hand
remarks, which often show a man's character more clearly than
murderous combats, or great battles, or the taking of towns'.'
This psychological method of interpreting history, equally
removed from that which simply records occurrences and that
which investigates complex social phenomena, is the one most
fruitful for dramatic purposes. The playwright finds that the
historian has come half-way to meet him by singling out pre-
cisely those episodes which are the distinctive marks of the
soul. Thus, while Holinshed supplied rough ore which had to
be carefully sifted and refined, Plutarch's material had already
gone through these processes, and only needed the crowning
embellishment of poetic handling. Hence page after page out
of the 'lives' of Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus is,
with curiously slight modifications, transposed by Shak pere
into dramatic form. His genius finds its scope not in invention,
but in animating Plutarch's narrative with the vivid life and play
of dialogue. As illustrative of the magical change produced by
a fresh setting of the same incident, contrast Plutarch's bald
account of the portents that heralded Caesar's death with the
impassioned interview by night between Casca and Cassius
when, with the tempest roaring overhead and an answering
tumult in their own breasts, they breathlessly debate the meaning
of these prodigies. Similar examples of marvellously heightened
effects may be found in the dialogue between Caesar and
1 See Stapfer's Shakspere and Classical Antiquity, chapter 16. I owe
several suggestions in this chapter to this interesting book.
456
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Decius Brutus regarding Calpurnia's dream, and in the episode
of Portia's suspense on the day of the murder. In the quarrel-
scene between Brutus and Cassius the dramatist achieved a yet
more signal triumph, for here he combined into one profoundly
moving episode a number of hints scattered through Plutarch's
narrative. The chief passages for which he is not indebted to
the biographer are the great speeches of Brutus and Antony to
the citizens, the death-bed dialogue between Cleopatra and her
waiting-women, and the witticisms of Menenius Agrippa.
But the qualities of Plutarch's work that made it so invaluable
as a dramatic treasury prevented it from being an accurate
picture of the Republic in its later, and still less in its earlier,
days. The moralizing Greek, who looked on Italian affairs
with the eyes of a foreigner, sentimentally prejudiced in favour
of republican heroes, was not a first-rate authority upon classical
antiquity. Nor was his account, such as it was, accessible to
Shakspere in the original; it was known only at third-hand,
through a translation of a translation. As has been seen, the
dramatist's Latin reading did not include much historical matter,
so that his knowledge of Roman annals was not supplemented to
any great degree from other sources. It is therefore only natural
that he should go entirely astray in his conception of some leading
features of ancient civic life. It is not merely that, as is his custom,
he arrays his characters in the dress of his own time, but he
throws a misleading light upon the social and political conditions.
of Rome. The plebs becomes a rabble, after the fashion of an
Elizabethan mob; the tribunes are turned into demagogues of
the modern type, and the Senate into an assembly of 'grey-
beards' with very indefinite functions. If nevertheless Shak-
spere's pictures of classical life do not jar violently upon the
historical sense, this is due largely to the kinship between Roman
and English types of character, and to certain parallel features
in the epochs of Caesar and Elizabeth. By the Thames, as by
the Tiber, a centralizing despotism resting upon popular sym-
pathies was in conflict with the inherited rights of an aristocracy
and an elective assembly. The fashionable life of the old
capital and the new had much in common, while Puritanism
offered to serious and introspective minds the refuge supplied by
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Julius Caesar.
Stoicism in the last days of the Republic. If Ascham and
Gosson had bewailed the pernicious influence of Italy upon
English morals, did not this exactly correspond to the corruption
of antique civic simplicity by Oriental luxury and vice? That
the steadfast integrity of the ideal Roman type of character had
deeply impressed Shakspere is shown by allusions outside the
Plutarch group of plays. It is Antonio's highest praise that in
him 'the ancient Roman honour' is perpetuated, and Horatio
Hence
is extolled as 'more an antique Roman, than a Dane.'
the most genuinely classical attribute of Shakspere's classical'
plays—at least of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus—is the large sim-
plicity of so much of the portraiture, united to a corresponding
simplicity in the sweep of the plot, and to a diction suitably
bare of all rhetorical ornament.
The most perfect of the Roman plays is JULIUS CAESAR,
the earliest of the three. It first appeared in the folio of
1623, but several converging lines of evidence fix its date with
practical certainty as 1600 or 1601. In Weever's Mirror of
Martyrs, 1601, are the lines:
'The many-headed multitude were drawne
By Brutus' speech that Caesar was ambitious;
When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne
His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious?'
This refers to the orations of Brutus and Antony, which are not
found in Plutarch, and only occur, as far as we know, in
Shakspere's play. It exactly tallies too with Digges' account
of the drawing' quality of the speeches in the piece, and it
makes 1601 the downward limit. On the other hand the play
cannot be put much earlier. It is not mentioned by Meres,
and it is not likely to have been written till the English historical
series was finished. The use of 'eternal' for 'infernal' in the
phrase 'the eternal devil' (Act i. 2) may be paralleled after
1600, but not before. The frequent references to Caesar in
Hamlet indicate that Shakspere had recently been dwelling
on the dictator's career, and the kinship of character between
the Danish Prince and Brutus suggests that they were created
about the same time. The style of the drama is similar to
458
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
that of the best comedies and English history-plays. Thought
and expression are adjusted with exquisite nicety, and the lines
run with a full yet liquid music that captivates the ear. The
conceits of the early days have fallen away, and the pregnant
obscurity of the final period is still to come. There is little
rhyme, and a very small proportion of weak and double endings.
Thus 1600-1601 may be confidently accepted as the date.
It is a paradox that this drama, so limpid in style, so symmet-
rical in plot, and so clear-cut in portraiture, should yet present, at
first sight, an amazing enigma which reminds us that it belongs
to the period of the problem-plays. Allusions elsewhere to the
great dictator as mightiest Julius' and 'broad-fronted Caesar'
prove that Shakspere did not under-estimate the man whose
place in the sphere of action is perhaps the closest parallel
to his own in the sphere of intellect. Yet when we open the
draina, of which he is the titular hero, we find that he appears
in only three scenes, and that he is killed before the play is half
over. The plot covers almost three years, from February,
44 B.C., to the battle of Philippi in the latter part of 42 B.C., but
during only the first month of this period was Caesar alive.
Moreover, on the few occasions when he does appear, he is
shown in an unfavourable or, at least, an equivocal light. We
see him first on the way to the festival of the Lupercalia,
superstitiously bidding Antony touch Calpurnia in his holy
chase as a cure for barrenness. Yet arrogantly indifferent to
auguries of ill concerning himself, he dismisses as a dreamer
the soothsayer, who bids him 'beware the Ides of March.' His
speech has the imperious tone of a Sultan, whose lightest word
is law, and he constantly talks of himself in the third person, as
Caesar, 'as of some power above and behind his consciousness.'
He is already, it is clear, an uncrowned king, and at the Luper-
calia Antony presses upon him the crown itself, which he
reluctantly puts by from fear of popular indignation. According
to Casca's mocking account of the episode he could not endure
the foul breath of the hooting rabblement, but fell down in the
market-place and foamed at mouth. Nor is this falling-sickness
his only infirmity. He had never, even in his best days, had
the wiry physical endurance of Cassius, as the anecdote of the
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Julius Caesar.
swimming-match in the Tiber proves, but now he is enfeebled
by the rigours through which he has passed, and he is deaf
When we
of one ear—a serious handicap for a leader of men.
next see him in his own house on the morning of the Ides
of March, superstition and arrogance are united to vacillation of
purpose. Alarmed by Calpurnia's evil dreams, he has sent to
consult the augurs, but without waiting for their report he
declares that he will go forth. When the answer is unfavour-
able, he still refuses to be kept at home:
'No, Caesar shall not: danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he:
We are two lions littered in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible:
And Caesar shall go forth.'
Yet in spite of this grandiloquent metaphor, he yields a moment
afterwards to Calpurnia's entreaties, and bids Antony tell the
Senators that he is not well. But when Decius Brutus comes
to fetch him he substitutes for this excuse the barefaced avowal
of a tyrant's whim :
'Caes. Decius, go tell them Caesar will not come.
Dec. Most mighty Caesar, let me know some cause,
Lest I be laugh'd at when I tell them so.
Caes. The cause is in my will: I will not come;
That is enough to satisfy the Senate.'
Yet when Decius gives a favourable interpretation of the dream,
and points out how Caesar's fears will be scoffed at by the
senators, he once more changes his mind and goes forth.
Such vacillation is a ridiculous prelude to the attitude of in-
flexibility that he adopts at the Capitol. There is a trace of the
sublime in his declaration, 'What touches us ourself shall be
last served,' though it argues an inflated sense of the distance
between himself and his fellows. But it is the very intoxication
of absolutism that claims to be constant as the northern star,'
or as immovable as Olympus; and the death-blows of the
conspirators are a tragically ironical retort to such pretensions
of superiority to human weakness.
'
What is the meaning of all this? Are we to conclude that
Shakspere deliberately intended to turn Caesar into a laughing-
stock for the benefit of the groundlings in the Globe, or that
460
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessor's.
he had radically misconceived his true character? Is Boswell
right when he says, 'There cannot be a stronger proof of
Shakspere's deficiency in classical knowledge than the boastful
language he has put in the mouth of the most accomplished
man of all antiquity, who was not more admirable for his
achievements than for the dignified simplicity with which he
has recorded them'? It has been shown, however, that
Shakspere did realize Caesar's greatness, and he could have
had no motive for wilfully misrepresenting him. The fact is
that Caesar is the hero of the play, but not the Caesar whom
we see passing across the stage, weak in bodily presence
and in will. The result shows that there was something
more than mere arrogance in the dictator's conception of
himself as a colossal, superhuman force. Whatever his per-
sonal limitations, he is a transcendent power in the world,
because he focusses in himself the inevitable tendencies of
his age.
This is illustrated in the opening scene, which, after Shakspere's
fashion, strikes the keynote of the play. The citizens, erewhile
the partisans of Pompey, are now with fickle hero-worship.
preparing an ovation for the man 'that comes in triumph over
Pompey's blood.' They disperse at the rebuke of the tribunes,
but they evidently have no loftier political ideal than a readiness.
to huzzah and throw up their caps in honour of any one who
will provide the occasion for popular holidays. They are
already infected with the spirit that, under the Empire, craved
nothing but bread and the shows of the circus. Thus even
their applause when Caesar refuses the crown does not spring
from genuine republican conviction; it is the mere unintelligent,
boisterous demonstration of a rabble, that treats a solemn con-
stitutional proceeding as if it were a piece of stagey heroics.
The populace is, in fact, weary of a liberty that means nothing
to it, and what it wants is an idol-crowned or uncrowned—
whom it may worship. It is this need that Caesar satisfies,
and while it exists, he is strong with a strength that death
only multiplies a hundredfold. The conspirators strike down
the man Julius, but they cannot kill Caesar.' The 'spirit of
Caesar' or (to use the modern phrase) of Caesarism, survives,
xXv]
461
Julius Caesar.
and the latter half of the play is the exhibition of its complete
triumph. The infirmities of the dictator in the flesh are merely
the foil to his irresistible might when set free from physical
trammels. What picture of Caesar, as conqueror or statesman,
could have left so ineffaceable an impression of his unique
place in the world's history, as this awe-inspiring spectacle
of his spirit, a silent, impalpable force, scattering destruction
among his foes?
In the portraiture of the men who thus, to their own undoing,
kill Caesar, and thereby set free his spirit to range for its
revenge, Shakspere's plastic art has achieved one of its most
consummate triumphs. Brutus and Cassius are fashioned on
somewhat too simple lines to be completely representative of
that complex world of tortuous political intrigues and personal
rivalries, whose chronicle, day by day, remains to us in Cicero's
letters. But what they lose in historical accuracy, they gain
in pure, essential humanity, and they thus become ideal ex-
emplars of the cardinal revolutionary types in all ages and
countries. Plutarch had marked the distinction between the
two men clearly when he wrote, 'It is reported that Brutus
could evil away with the tyranny, and that Cassius hated the
tyrant,' while he further states that Cassius was a choleric man,
hating Caesar privately more than he did the tyrant openly.
From such hints Shakspere has developed with unerring
truth of detail the character-contrast between the idealist driven
into revolution by his allegiance to an inflexible code of right,
and the genuine political conspirator, the man of mixed motives
and elastic morality. It is Cassius who hatches the plot against
Caesar. Physically and mentally he is suited to the part of
a ringleader. He is a spare man, with a lean and hungry
look. He seldom smiles, loves no plays, and hears no music,
being thus fit (as Shakspere had declared in The Merchant of
Venice) for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.' On the other
hand he reads much, and is a great observer, who looks quite
through the deeds of men. Caesar's instinct is not at fault
when he labels him'dangerous' on the ground that
Such men as he be never at heart's ease
When they behold a greater than themselves.'
462
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
His attitude towards the dictator thus springs in part from
personal jealousy, and mortification at being outstripped by
a rival in the political race. But this is mingled with a sincere
republican passion, which gives dignity to a character lacking
in moral elevation. The distinction between Brutus and Cassius
is thus not simply that between the idealist and the man of
affairs. Cassius is an idealist in his own way. The principle
of the equality of all men is as dear to him as abstract right is
to his kinsman. Liberty, as he declares over and over again,
is more to him than life:
'I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Caesar.'
Or, as he cries later in words of melancholy grandeur:
'Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius:
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat:
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit ;
But life, being weary of those worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.'
Cassius' doctrine of liberty rests upon the simple axiom that
every man, by the mere fact of his existence, is equal to every
other. This finds its extreme expression in his singular piece
of reasoning that Brutus and Caesar must be on all points
on a par because there is nothing to choose between their
names as examples of the proper noun.
'Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that "Caesar"?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
"Brutus will start a spirit as soon as "Caesar.”
Such an argument is an unconscious reductio ad absurdum
of Cassius' own theory, and it is needless to say that, from
a historical point of view, this decidedly primitive conception
of democracy is curiously inapt on the lips of a Roman of
the first century B.C. With Cassius' passionate conviction of the
Xv]
463
Julius Caesar.
divine right of republicanism, he sees in Caesar's ascendency
nothing but a proof of the degeneracy of the times.
'Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was famed with more than with one man?
Caesar has become a wolf, because the Romans are sheep;
a lion, because they are hinds. Let the brood of Romulus
recover its ancient spirit, and all will yet be well.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.'
He, at least, is determined not to be one of the petty men
walking under the legs of the Colossus, and he starts the con-
spiracy for his overthrow. He is ready, if need be, to die in
the cause of liberty, but he will first try what killing can do
on its behalf.
His initial step is to secure the adhesion of his kinsman,
Brutus. A Stoic philosopher, habitually absorbed in meditation
and in moral self-culture, Brutus has hitherto kept outside the
sphere of practical politics in Rome. His devotion to the
highest ideal of conduct has so impressed his fellow-citizens
that his approval of any course of action is taken as a guarantee
of its rectitude. As even the cynical Casca confesses:
'He sits high in all the people's hearts:
And that which would appear offence in us,
His countenance, like richest alchemy,
Will change to virtue and to worthiness.'
It is to give the conspiracy a plausible look in the eyes of
the world that Cassius spares no pains to draw Brutus into its
ranks. The general malaise of the times has so far affected
him that he is vexed with an inward trouble of mind, which
makes him neglectful of social amenities towards his kinsman,
but he has had no intention hitherto of actively opposing
Caesar, whose greatness he realizes, and who is his personal
friend. When he hears the shouting at the Lupercalia, he
quietly remarks: 'I do fear the people choose Caesar for their
king.' And when Cassius eagerly breaks in-
Ay, do you fear it?
Then must I think you would not have it so,'
464
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
he answers meditatively: 'I would not, Cassius; yet I love him
well.' The only way of stirring up such a man to violent action
is by convincing him that it is a duty which it is dishonouring
to shun. This is Cassius' method, and its effect on Brutus is
at once apparent. But he needs a night's interval for reflec-
tion, and he spends the time meditating in his orchard alone.
The torture of this period of suspense, while the idealist is
groping his way through conflicting issues to a definite resolve,
cannot be better expressed than in his own words:
'Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.'
To facilitate Brutus' deliberations Cassius does not scruple
to throw in at his window forged letters, which are ostensibly
appeals from Roman citizens urging him to strike for his
country's welfare. But this external stimulus has only a small
part in influencing his decision. The philosopher treats the
question of Caesar's assassination as if it were a problem in
abstract thought, to be isolated from all complicating factors.
He does not take into account the far-reaching practical
consequences of such a deed, nor does he even seem swayed
by a passionate detestation of absolutism as such. His interest
is focussed upon the hypothetical effect of Caesar's elevation
on his moral nature. Hitherto he has had no reason, either
public or private, to complain of the dictator. But what of the
future?
'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;
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.'
It is the tragic counterpart to Touchstone's burlesque disquisi-
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465
Julius Caesar.
tion on the virtues of 'your If.' The murder of Caesar is a
concession to the claims of a dialectic operating in vacuo. It is
the conclusion of what has been called 'a fanatical sequence of
thought.' But the individual undertakes a Titanic responsi-
bility who presumes, in obedience to what, in his private.
judgement, are the dictates of a transcendental morality, to
override the positive enactment of society against murder,
and the scarcely less positive obligations of friendship. It is
this perilous venture that Brutus makes, and the result
is catastrophe to the state, and the ruin of his own fortunes,
though his character rounds into more perfect beauty at every
stage in his downfall. Like Hamlet, he is summoned from
the seclusion of the study to undertake an uncongenial task,
and like Hamlet he fails. But while the Prince of Denmark
suffers from a syncope of the will, Brutus, once his decision
is made, acts with energetic promptitude. Where he errs
is in his complete misconception of the forces which sway
average humanity. Because he acts from the loftiest motives
himself, he takes it for granted that all men are equally disin-
terested, and he fondly believes that it is possible for con-
federates in assassination to keep their hands undefiled by
minor breaches of the moral code. It is an evil hour for the
conspiracy when he elects to join its ranks, for a revolution
conducted on such unimpeachable principles is foredoomed
to disaster 1.
While Brutus has been meditating in his orchard alone,
Cassius has been very differently occupied. It is a night of
tempest and thunder, of apparitions and prodigies. All nature
is convulsed in anticipation of the terrible deed that is to be
¹ It has not, as far as I know, been noticed that Cicero's words about
Cato in a letter to Atticus define with the utmost exactitude the character
of Shakspere's Brutus and its political results: Ille optimo animo utens et
summa fide nocet interdum rei publicae: dicit enim tamquam in Platonis
ToλITEίa non tamquam in Romuli faece sententiam. Thus Addison, however
inferior to Shakspere as a dramatist, showed a correct historical instinct
in making Cato, instead of Brutus, the incorruptible hero of the dying
republican cause. Cicero's account of Brutus' attempt to exact usurious
interest for a loan to the Salaminians is in startling contrast to the idealized
picture of the noblest Roman of them all' which Shakspere found in the
pages of Plutarch.
Ꮋ Ꮒ
466
LCH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
wrought on the morrow.
Cassius, with his emotions at fever-
heat, revels in this electrical atmosphere:
For my part, I have walk'd about the streets,
Submitting me unto the perilous night,
And, thus unbraced, Casca, as you see,
Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone;
And where the cross blue lightning seem'd to open
The breast of heaven, I did present myself
Even in the aim and very flash of it.'
The unnatural disturbance of the elements seems to his excited
fancy to be the counterpart of the abnormal political situation :
'Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man
Most like this dreadful night,
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars
As doth the lion in the Capitol.'
(
Even Casca is moved by this awful spectacle of 'a civil strife
in heaven.' He drops his accustomed tone of mockery, and
dilates eloquently on the significance of the portents which do
so conjointly meet.' It is a favourable moment in which to
broach the plot to him, and at the first hint of it, he pledges
himself to set his foot as far as who goes farthest.' Other
accomplices have already been secured by the energetic Cassius,
and as the first grey streak of dawn shows above the Capitol
on the Ides of March, 'the faction' assembles at the house of
Brutus. The choice of this rendezvous is a tribute to Brutus'
pre-eminent authority, which he at once uses to hamstring the
conspiracy. He objects to Cassius' proposal that the con-
federates should take an oath, which, in his eyes, is a stain
on the purity of their enterprise. He is equally averse to the
suggestion that Cicero should be brought into the plot. Because
the orator is vain and disinclined to 'follow anything that other
men begin,' Brutus sacrifices the advantages which lie in his
silver hair and eloquent lips. With yet more fatal lack of
insight he resists Cassius' final proposal that Antony should
be killed as well as Caesar. Brutus knows that Antony is far
from irreproachable in private life, that he is given to sports,
to wildness, and much company, and he therefore assumes that
he is a negligible quantity in politics:
'For Mark Antony, think not of him
For he can do no more than Caesar's arm
When Caesar's head is off."
xv]
467
Julius Caesar.
Moreover, additional bloodshed is abhorrent to the man who
has taken up arms against an abstraction and not a personality.
'Let us be scrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
We all st: nd up against the spirit of Caesar;
And in the spirit of men there is no blood:
O then that we could come by Caesar's spirit
And not dism mber Caesar!'
How unsuited Brutus is for the task in hand is shown yet more
clearly when the conspirators have taken their leave, and his
wife Portia enters. In this daughter of Cato the idealist had
found a worthy consort-one who realized to the full the Roman
jurist's definition, uxor socia humanae rei atque divinae.'
Schooled like himself in the stern Stoic creed, she had given
proof in earlier days of her indifference to pain by wounding
herself in the thigh. But fortitude and self-control are in her,
as in her husband, the cloak of an inward tenderness, which
suffuses their relationship with a fullness of warmth and glow
denied to a more superficially romantic passion. What words
could express with terser eloquence the ardour of a flawless
wedded love than Brutus' cry to Portia :
'You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.'
This absolute communion of soul is in designed contrast to the
shallow relation of Caesar and Calpurnia. The dictator treats
his wife as a child to be humoured or not according to his
caprice, but Portia assumes that, by the right and virtue of her
place,' she is entitled to share her husband's inmost thoughts.
Brutus discloses to her the secret which lies so heavily upon his
breast, and we know that this secret is inviolably safe in her
keeping. But for all her self-command, she has a woman's
highly-strung sensitiveness, and when Brutus has gone forth to
the Capitol on his dread mission, her agitation is so overwhelm-
ing that it almost betrays her, in her own despite, to the boy
Lucius. This agitation communicates itself to the reader of
the play, and it is intensified by the momentary uncertainty
whether Caesar will read Artemidorus' warning before listening
to petitions from other suitors. There is a second interval of
Hh 2
468
Shakspere and his Predecessors. [CH.
suspense while Popilius Lena whispers in Caesar's ear, and it
seems likely that the plot has been discovered. The excit-
able Cassius for an instant loses his nerve, but Brutus keeps
calm enough at this crisis to gather from the expression of
Caesar's face that the alarm is unfounded. Then Casca strikes
the first blow, and pierced through and through by the con-
spirators' weapons, Caesar falls, a bleeding piece of earth,'
at the foot of Pompey's statue. The tyranny seems ended for
ever, and Brutus is eager to signalize the great deliverance by an
impressive public demonstration.
'Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood
Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords:
Then walk we forth, even to the market-place,
And, waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry 'Peace, freedom, and liberty.'
But
But Brutus is now to learn that Caesar's spirit cannot be
annihilated by the sword, and that when Julius has fallen it can
turn into potent instruments those who have hitherto seemed of
little account. The austere moralist has despised the gamesome
Antony as 'but a limb of Caesar,' and up to this point he has
in effect been little more than a lay figure in the drama.
he has reserves of power, which the crisis produced by Caesar's
murder is exactly fitted to call into play. Lax in conduct, and
unstable in principle, he is completely wanting in Brutus' moral
idealism, and in Cassius' devotion to an abstract political
theory. But with acute aesthetic sensibilities, he is readily
fascinated by the glamour of an imposing personality. Caesar has
been in his eyes 'the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of
times,' and he has lavished upon him a loyalty perfectly genuine,
though fed from the imagination rather than the heart. More-
over, a monarchy with the ceremonial that accompanies it, and
the stimulus it gives to social gaiety, suits his fashion of life, and
thus he had taken the lead in pressing the crown upon Caesar.
He knows that the mob of Rome does not care a jot about
forms of government, and he is confident that an appeal to
their self-interest and their hero-worship will provoke an out-
burst before which the conspirators will be powerless. Having
Xv]
469
Julius Caesar.
obtained a safe-conduct, he enters the presence of the assassins,
ostensibly to
'Be resolved
How Caesar hath deserved to lie in death,'
and thereafter to follow the fortunes and affairs of noble Brutus'
with all true faith. Brutus takes him at his word, but Cassius,
profoundly suspicious of his intentions, makes a bid for his
support by the naked offer of a share in the spoils:
'Your voice shall be as strong as any man's
In the disposing of new dignities.'
Brutus, meanwhile, is beating the air in an elaborate disquisition
to Antony upon the excellence of his motives for the murder:
'Our reasons are so full of good regard
That were you, Antony, the son of Caesar,
You should be satisfied,'
So confident is he in the irresistible influence of these reasons
on Antony, that he grants his request to speak at Caesar's
funeral. Cassius remonstrates with such an impolitic con-
cession, but Brutus has an unassailable faith in the efficacy
of his own logic on the popular mind:
'By your pardon;
I will myself into the pulpit first,
And show the reason of our Caesar's death.'
Thus he addresses the throng of citizens in a cold formal
apologia, composed of carefully balanced antitheses, and nice
distinctions between the vari is aspects of Caesar's career.
But the crowd cares for none of these dialectical refinements.
It has lost its hero, and it wants another in his place. Hence,
as Brutus steps down from the rostrum, he is greeted by the
cry, annihilating in its unconscious irony, 'Let him be Caesar.'
It is the first revelation, all the more bitter because of its
complimentary intent, that 'Caesar' has developed into a per-
manent constitutional factor, indestructible by the cancelling
of an individual life. It is, in effect, the proclamation, Le roi est
mort, vive le roi.
But even this perverted form of popular enthusiasm for the
470
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
would-be liberator vanishes before the insidious assault of
Antony's oratory. The aristocrat with popular sympathies, real
or assumed, has always been the most effective of demagogues,
and Antony's address is an unparalleled masterpiece of rhetorical
art. To the modulation of flawless verse it unites the lucidity
and breadth of ideal 'platform' oratory, and the tactical adrcit-
ness of a first-rate debating speech. He begins by an ironical
show of deference to the 'honourable' assassins with their plea
that Caesar was ambitious, and then skilfully glances at inci-
dents which give the lie to such a contention. After a pause, to
note the effect of this opening upon his hearers, he introduces
a new topic-Caesar's will, and hints alluringly at its munificent
provisions. The crowd, wild with excitement, insists that the
will shall be read, and Antony, stepping down from the 'pulpit,'
bids them first make a ring about the corpse of Caesar, that he
may show them their benefactor. It is a superb piece of stage-
management, paving the way for the final coup- a direct appeal
to the emotions of the populace through the eye as well as the
ear. He points to Caesar's mantle, associated with one of his
glorious victories in the field, but now gashed and crimsoned by
countless strokes, including that 'most unkindest cut of all'
dealt by 'Caesar's angel,' Brutus. Then, as tears begin to flow
from the beholders, he plays his trump card by snatching the
covering from the body, and displaying it, 'marred with traitors,'
to the gaze of the throng. The effect is electrical. A confused,
hoarse clamour for 'revenge' mounts from a hundred throats,
and, in the tumultuous eagerness to hunt down the conspirators,
and burn the house of Brutus, the rabble forgets all about the
will which a moment ago it had been clamouring to hear read.
No more vivid picture has ever been drawn of the fickle, inflam-
mable temper of a crowd. But a piece of deadlier irony follows.
The citizens, in their stampede through the streets in quest of
the 'traitors,' run across Cinna, the poet. He protests that he
is a different person from Cinna, the conspirator, but the infu-
riated populace will listen to no explanations, and treats his
name as a sufficient reason for tearing him to pieces. Such is
the mob's interpretation of Cassius's theory that every name
entitles its owner to equal privileges in the commonwealth.
Xv]
471
Julius Caesar.
The end of the matter is that the liberators have to ride 'like
madmen through the gates of Rome,' while Caesar's beneficent
despotism is replaced by the sanguinary persecution of the
Triumvirate. Civil war follows, but the conspirators are handi-
capped in the struggle by the disunion that attends on a failing
cause. Cassius knows that their desperate strait calls for
desperate expedients, and he is not over-scrupulous about
corruption in himself or his subordinates. But Brutus will
make no allowance for the slightest deviation from his own
immaculate ideal. In his tent at Sardis he turns reprovingly
upon his companion-in-arms :
'Remember March, the ides of March remember:
Did not great Julius bleed for justice' sake?
What villain touch'd his body, that did stab,
And not for justice? What! shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes?'
This is the very fanaticism of righteousness, and it stirs Cassius
to an outbreak of choler, which Brutus answers in kind. Indeed,
it is not the idealist who shows to the greater advantage in this
scene. Brutus, precisian in morals though he be, forgets that
accuracy is of the essence of justice, and puts words into Cassius'
mouth that he had never used. Moreover, though he scorns to
raise money by vile means, he finds that this exalted conduct
will not of itself provide the sinews of war, and he is reduced to
reproaching his kinsman for withholding from him the supplies
which he has been too scrupulous to raise himself. But the
estrangement between the pair is soon over, and Brutus' un-
wonted irritability is explained by his quiet announcement,
'Portia is dead.' The heroic wife, overcome by the ruin of her
husband's fortunes, had sought her end by swallowing fire!
Brutus' grief is too deep for words, but Portia's presence seems
to brood over the solemn reconciliation between the kinsmen.
'Bru. Speak no more of her. Give me a bowl of wine.
In this I bury all unkindness, Cassius.
Cas. My heart is thirsty for that noble pledge.
Fill, Lucius, till the wine o'erswell the cup;
I cannot drink too much of Brutus' love.'
472
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
If Brutus, sick of many griefs,' has shown a momentary flash
of anger, he atones for it by his exquisite tenderness towards
his servants, especially the page Lucius. The man who had
slain his best friend 'for justice sake' has not the heart to wake
a sleeping boy. But gentle words and actions avail nothing
against big battalions, and in the contests of this world Brutus
is doomed to defeat. The apparition of Caesar's ghost, with its
menacing prophecy that they shall meet at Philippi, warns him
that the 'spirit' which he had hoped to annihilate is still active,
and is dogging the conspirators to destruction. And so it
proves on the day of battle. Cassius is the first victim—stabbed
by the very weapon that he had used against the dictator; and
Brutus, as he looks on the face of his dead kinsman, utters the
pregnant cry which strikes the keynote of the play:
'O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.'
A moment afterwards he, too, falls, pierced by his own sword,
and the republican cause is crushed for ever. The idealist, blind
to the facts of life, closes his career in disaster. But his is the
glorious blindness that springs from excess of light. He fails as
a leader of men, because his eye is for ever fixed on the radiant
vision of Man as he ought to be. And thus with characteristic
felicity Antony, in his farewell tribute, gives him the praise that
he would have coveted most, of being a pattern specimen of
humanity:
'His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, "This was a man ! ”
399
Dante, with his keen imperialist sympathies, consigns Brutus
and Cassius to the lowest circle of the Inferno, with Judas as
their companion in torture. Shakspere, on the contrary, exhibits
their motives and aims in the most favourable light. Yet the
play is a demonstration throughout of the inevitable triumph of
Caesarism. The dramatist knew nothing of the breakdown of
the Roman provincial system, and next to nothing of the consti-
tutional problems within the city itself. The more marvellous,
therefore, is the sagacity which led him, on the broad issue of
Xv]
473
Antony and Cleopatra.
Republicanism versus Caesarism, to anticipate the verdict of the
greatest modern historian of Rome.
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA was probably written about
1607. A 'booke called Antony and Cleopatra' was entered on
the Stationers' Register in May, 1608, by Blount, afterwards one
of the publishers of the first folio. This may have been Shak-
spere's play, whose metrical characteristics, in any case, assign
it to near that date. It contains seventy-one light and twenty-
eight weak endings, making together a percentage of just over
three and-a-half. The language has the pregnant compression
and boldness of construction that mark the later tragic period.
Coleridge declared that it was unique in its 'happy valiancy of
style.' Thus, though historically the play is a sequel to Julius
Caesar, it differs from it widely in metrical qualities, and no less
widely in its general spirit. The transition from the one to the
other produces in us, as Dowden has said, 'the change of pulse
and temper experienced in passing from a gallery of antique
sculpture to a room splendid with the colours of Titian and
Paul Veronese.' This change is due in large measure to
Plutarch, whose Greek origin gave him a special insight into the
social conditions of the semi-Greek city of Alexandria, and
whose Life of Antonius is a brilliant historical romance, full of
glow and movement. Shakspere never had more attractive
material to work on, and, in the main, he turned his oppor-
tunities to magnificent account. Coleridge said that Antony and
Cleopatra was by far the most wonderful of Shakspere's historical
plays, and that 'in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength
and vigour of maturity' it was a formidable rival to the chief
tragedies. Certainly in consummate delineation. of character,
and in the superb rhythmical swell of many passages, the work
is unsurpassed. But it has a grave share of the defects to which
Romantic drama had been liable from the first, especially when
it was drawing upon historical materials. The play covers
a period of more than ten years, from the spring of 40 B.C. to
the summer of 30 B. C., and the scene shifts from one end of the
Roman empire to the other. Shakspere seems to have felt
a conscientious obligation to introduce every incident, political
474
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
or private, mentioned by Plutarch, and the result is a loss of
dramatic unity and perspective. The multiplicity of details is
bewildering, and no single event stands out boldly as the pivot
on which the catastrophe turns.
But this artistic defect is here in part the outcome of a signifi-
cant peculiarity in Shakspere's treatment of love as a dramatic
theme. Sexual passion is the immediate subject of only three
plays, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and
Cleopatra. In each case the emotional interest is interwoven
with elements of a political nature-the civil strife of Montagues
and Capulets, the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, the
struggle for the lordship of the Roman world. Thus Shakspere,
even when making an elaborate study of amorous passion, does
not isolate it from the wider, more material, issues of surrounding
civic or national life. He thus avoids the disastrous pitfall of
treating love as the exclusive factor in existence- a method
which, according to the nature of the love chosen for analysis,
tends to produce an unwholesome sentimentality or a still more
unwholesome prurience. Shakspere opens to our view hearts
aflame with chaste affection or with sensuous desire, but he
never cheats himself or others into the belief that sexual relation-
ship is the solitary, imperious concern of all mankind. From
the kaleidoscopic changes of Cleopatra's moods he turns our
gaze to the legions tramping in solid array through the uttermost
parts of the earth, or to the council-chambers where the destinies
of kingdoms are being decided by the stroke of a pen. We are
shown in turn every aspect of the most materialistic age in the
world's history, the age when Roman civic virtue was, in its
death-throes, suffocated by the plethora of its golden spoils from
the South and the East. The spirit of the period has been
finely interpreted by Matthew Arnold:
In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,
The Roman noble lay;
He drove abroad, in furious guise,
Along the Appian way.
He made a feast, drank fierce and fast,
And crown'd his hair with flowers-
No easier nor no quicker pass'd
The impracticable hours.
Xv]
475
Antony and Cleopatra.
The brooding East with awe beheld
Her impious younger world.
The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd,
And on her head was hurl'd.
The East bow'd low before the blast
In patient, deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.'
But the East, as beheld in Shakspere's play, instead of being
plunged in thought, is holding revel amidst her palaces, and the
opening scenes transport us into the centre of a society whose
sole divinity is the pleasure of the passing hour. Waiting-
women, loose in morals and free of tongue, soothsayers, eunuchs,
-the whole motley rout that makes up an Oriental court,—
these are the ministers of the sacred orgies, whose high-priestess
is the Egyptian queen, 'the incarnate poetry,' as she has been
called, of a world deserted by the loftier forces of life.'
Cleopatra is among Shakspere's women what Falstaff is
amongst his men. Both have the same infinite complexity of
nature in which seemingly contradictory qualities are reconciled,
and both the same paradoxical grandeur compounded out of all
that is most morally worthless. Fascination radiates equally
from either personality, and as Falstaff, when completely bank-
rupt in honour and fortune, is still the knight and the gentleman,
so Cleopatra, guilty of the most detestable and squalid forms of
misconduct, remains every inch a queen. In the Boar's Head
tavern and in the palace at Alexandria a similar struggle is
being waged the venue is changed, and the weapons, but an
identical principle is at stake. Falstaff had sought to defeat
moral facts by the dazzling play of an inexhaustible humour;
Cleopatra substitutes the no less dazzling play of an inex-
haustible personal charm, wherein beauty, as Plutarch expressly
states, was only a minor element. Perfect beauty could indeed
scarcely be the portion of this 'gipsy,' with 'Phoebus' amorous
pinches black,' but she has the more talismanic gifts of perennial
youth and endless versatility of attraction. Antony cries to her
that she is one
Whom everything becomes, to chide, to laugh,
To weep; whose every passion fully strives
To make itself, in thee, fair and admired.'
476
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
And the dispassionate judgement of Enobarbus pronounces the
same verdict:
'Age cannot wither her,
Nor custom stale her infinite variety: .
•
For vilest things become themselves in her,
That the holy priests bless her when she is riggish.'
Antony's names for her, 'serpent of old Nile,' and 'great fairy,
testify to a spell that seems wellnigh more than human. Yet
its potency really springs from her unabashed revelation of
a womanhood dowered with every captivating attribute save
those which have a moral source. The Cleopatra of Shakspere,
and indeed of Plutarch, anticipates a type of which the modern
stage is often supposed to be the originator. This demi-
mondaine born in the purple, with her hot and cold fits, her
mingled restlessness and languor, her passion at once false and
true, her lavishness and her avarice, her seductive wiles varied
by outbursts of ferocity or coarseness-what essential aspect
of courtesan-nature has the realism of to-day discovered which
is not to be found in this wonderful picture? Fate provides
for a unique manifestation of the myriad possibilities of Cleo-
patra's character when it throws Antony into her toils. In her
youth she had been Caesar's paramour, but to the conqueror
and statesman this dalliance had been only an interlude amidst
the serious work of war and government. Antony is of other
mould, and is, in fact, as completely the masculine counterpart
of Cleopatra as Benedick was of Beatrice. The emotional
homage which in earlier days he had lavished on Caesar is now
poured forth yet more unreservedly at the feet of the Egyptian
Queen. In her Antony finds a being who satisfies the bound-
less craving of his richly endowed sensuous nature. Eternity,
as he tells her, is in her lips and eyes, and bliss in her brow's
bent. With her as partner, the infinite of pleasure seems
within mortal grasp.
Cleo. If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
Ant. There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
Cleo. I'll set a bourn how far to be beloved.
Ant. Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.”
xv]
477
Antony and Cleopatra.
As he folds her to his breast, he cries:
'The nobleness of life
Is to do thus: when such a mutual pair
And such a twain can do 't, in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless.'
And the passion of Antony and Cleopatra is the more royal
in its superb prodigality, because it is not the brittle rapture of
adolescence, but the quintessential bliss of riper years:
'What, girl though gray
Do something mingle with our younger brown,
Yet ha' we a brain that nourishes our nerves,
And can get goal for goal of youth.'
Yet this passion, so mutually enthralling, so opulent of
delight, is not, in any true sense, love. The souls of Antony
and Cleopatra have never for one moment mingled. The
gorgeous fabric of their bliss totters from hour to hour on an
unstable foundation. Antony is always on the watch for
treachery on the part of the 'gipsy,' and Cleopatra is ever
fearful that her paramour will be drawn from her side by his
bond as a husband, or his ambition as a ruler. Nor are there
wanting counsellors eager to deliver the Roman from his
'dotage.' Philo, in the opening words of the play, deplores the
spectacle of
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet's fool.'
And Enobarbus, while recognizing that Cleopatra is a won-
derful piece of work,' ridicules her artifices to his master with
caustic irony. At last news
At last news comes which stirs Antony for
a space out of his voluptuous languor. His wife, Fulvia, who
in his absence had begun war against Octavius Caesar, has
died, and Sextus Pompeius, the son of the great Pompey, has
obtained the empire of the sea, and is threatening the ascendency
of the triumvirate. Cleopatra's behaviour at this crisis is an
apt illustration of the inimitable strategy by which she seeks
to keep Antony perennially ensnared. She has mastered, down
to its minutest details, the coquette's prime secret of drawing
1
478
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
a captive into stricter bondage by crossing his humour at every
turn.
Cleo. See where he is, who's with him, what he does.
•
If you find him sad,
Say I am dancing: if in mirth, report
That I am sudden sick: quick. and return.
Char. Madam, methinks, if you did love him dearly,
You do not hold the method to enforce
The like from him.
Cleo.
What should I do I do not?
Char. In each thing give him way, cross him in nothing.
Cleo. Thou teachest like a fool; the way to lose him.'
Thus when Antony is anxious for sport, she bids him listen
to the ambassadors from Rome, and when he wishes to impart
to her their grave intelligence, she meets him with playful
mockery, aimed in especial at her rival, Fulvia :
'What says the married woman? You may go:
Would she had never given you leave to come!
Let her not say 'tis I that keep you here-
I have no power upon you: hers you are.'
Even the announcement of Fulvia's death only turns her
banter into a new channel. She jeers at him for not weeping
at his bereavement, and professes to believe that he would
mourn her own loss as little as he does his wife's. Yet beneath
this frivolous mummery, Cleopatra does cherish an unbounded
emotional enthusiasm for her heroic paramour, 'the demi-Atlas
of this earth.' When he has departed, she dwells comfortless
under the shadow of a vast eclipse. She begs for a draught
of mandragora that she may sleep out 'this great gap of time'
her Antony is away. Her thoughts follow him everywhere,
and she sends him each day a separate greeting. When
Alexas brings the report that in his absence from her, he is
neither sad nor merry, she twists these colourless tidings into
a shape that flatters both herself and him, and asks in passionate
tones, 'Did I, Charmian, ever love Caesar so?' Charmian, an
apt pupil in her mistress' methods, merely cries, 'O! that brave
Caesar.' Instantly we see a flash of the coarse and cruel temper
that lies just beneath the seductive surface of the 'gipsy's'
nature.
By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth
If thou with Caesar paragon again
My man of men.'
Xv]
479
Antony and Cleopatra.
This prepares us for the paroxysm of rage with which she
overwhelms the unhappy messenger who brings her the news
that Antony, to cement his alliance with Octavius, has married
the triumvir's sister. She strikes him again and again, hales
him up and down, threatens him with excruciating tortures,
and even draws out a knife wherewith to murder him. Yet
a moment afterwards she repents of her undignified violence,
and she has, at least, the excuse that Antony's faithlessness has
wounded to the quick whatever of genuine devotion there is in
her mercurial nature. Disillusion, petty jealousy, and the long-
ing for a renewed hold over her captive are strangely blended
in her words :
'Lead me from hence;
I faint:-O Iras! Charmian!-'tis no matter.-
Go to the fellow, good Alexas; bid him
Report the feature of Octavia, her years,
Her inclination; let him not leave out
The colour of her hair:-bring me word quickly.
[Exit Alexas.]
Let him for ever go:--let him not-Charmian I-
Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon,
The other way's a Mars.-[To Mardian] Bid you Alexas
Bring me word how tall she is.-Pity me, Charmian,
But do not speak to me. Lead me to my chamber.'
And the wellnigh farcical supplement to this serio-comic scene
is the second interview of Cleopatra with the messenger, when
she exults without disguise at hearing that Octavia is a widow,
'dull of tongue and dwarfish,' with a round face and a low
forehead.
The queen's confidence that Antony cannot like his wife
long is echoed by less prejudiced observers. The union has
been contracted for political ends, and the shrewd judgement
of Enobarbus prophesies its failure, even as a link between the
two generals.
'Eno. You shall find the band that seems to tie their friendship together
will be the very strangler of their amity: Octavia is of a holy, cold, and
still conversation.
Men. Who would not have his wife so?
Eno Not he that himself is not so; which is Mark Antony. He will
to his Egyptian dish again: then, shall the sighs of Octavia blow the fire
up in Caesar; and, as I said before, that which is the strength of their
amity shall prove the immediate author of their variance.'
But, for the moment, there is concord among the triumvirs,
480
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
and they even come to terms with Sextus Pompeius, the last
representative, as his father's son, of the republican cause.
Sextus, though not of much dramatic importance, is interesting
as the only figure in Shakspere's works who recalls the
Elizabethan sea-dogs who fought and plundered on the Spanish.
main. The banquet on his galley, in celebration of the treaty,
is just such a carousal as must often have taken place on a
vessel of Drake or Hawkins, when she came into port after
a successful raid. But this revel is something more than a
realistic sketch of naval manners under the Tudors. Shakspere
fills in Plutarch's meagre account with such elaborate detail
because the episode is intended to be symbolical of a world-
wide condition of things. Paganism, shorn of all its loftier
elements, is dancing with uproarious merriment to its destruction,
and the scene in the galley is a miniature of this gigantic
catastrophe. The world, we feel, must in truth be tottering,
when we see its 'third part,' Lepidus, reeling from side to side
till he is borne off dead drunk, while his companions take hands
and whirl madly in a circle, shrieking the Bacchanal chorus:
'Cup us, till the world go round;
Cup us, till the world go round.'
And what a grim background to this orgie is supplied by
Menas' whispered advice to Sextus to cut the ship's cable, and
then fall to the throats' of the triumvirs. Sextus is too scrupu-
lous to act on the hint, and thus throws away the lordship of
the world; but how infinite is the irony of a situation in which
the safety of the joint-rulers of Rome and its empire depends
on a corsair's honour and a ship's rope.
The league of peace so boisterously celebrated is soon broken.
Caesar with the aid of Lepidus overthrows Sextus Pompeius,
and then turns upon his wretched colleague, whose unfitness for
the dignity to which circumstances have raised him is jeered
at by the very soldiers and serving-men. Octavius' strong
measures infuriate Antony, and his wife undertakes a mission
of reconciliation between the brothers-in-law. But Antony's
passion for Cleopatra triumphs over his political instinct, and
he wrecks his future by taking advantage of Octavia's absence
to fly once more to the Egyptian's arms. Octavius finds in his
Xv]
481
Antony and Cleopatra.
sister's wrongs a specious pretext for his ambitious designs, and
equips instantly an expedition against the faithless husband and
his paramour. Yet the fortune of war might have inclined to
Antony's side had he challenged it on land, with the advantages
of a veteran soldiery and his own unrivalled skill in leadership.
But against the advice of his lieutenants, the infatuated Roman
yields to Cleopatra's capricious eagerness to fight by sea, though
he has only raw and scanty crews wherewith to oppose the
victors in the naval warfare against Sextus. Yet even under
these conditions neither side wins a decisive advantage, till in
the very crisis of the action, Cleopatra, swayed by a recklessly
frivolous impulse, hoists sail and flies with her sixty galleys.
Then follows the incident that forms the tragic nodus of the
drama, in so far as there is one at all. Antony, says Plutarch,
was so carried away with the vain love of this woman as if he had been
glued unto her, and that she could not have removed without moving of
him also for when he saw Cleopatra's ship under sail, he forgot, forsook,
and betrayed them that fought for him, and embarked upon a galley to
follow her that had already begun to overthrow him, and would in the
end be his utter destruction.'
•
Shakspere scarcely betters this in his version through the lips of
Scarus, how Cleopatra
'I' the midst o' the fight...
Hoists sails, and flies! . . . She once, being loofed,
The noble ruin of her magic, Antony,
Claps on his sea-wing, and like a doting mallard,
Leaving the fight in height, flies after her.
I never saw an action of such shame :
Experience, manhood, honour, ne'er before
Did violate so itself.'
Antony has at least the redeeming quality of frankly
recognizing his own shame. He confesses that he has 'offended
reputation—a most unnoble swerving,' and bids his friends fly
from a leader who has himself fled, and make their peace with
Caesar. But Cleopatra's prayers for pardon are as balm to his
wounded self-esteem; one of her tears ‘rates all that is won and
lost.' Yet the consequences of his infatuated action cannot be
thus undone. So completely is his judgement demoralized that
he challenges his cool, politic rival, who has now the big
battalions entirely on his side, to a single combat. It suits
I i
482
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Octavius' methods much better to intrigue with Cleopatra for
Antony's overthrow, and he sends Thyreus as his ambassador
to the queen.
She receives him with effusive protestations of
submission to his master, whose star is now in the ascendant,
and she allows him to kiss her hand. Antony, entering suddenly,
is maddened by the sight of such a familiarity. He orders this
'Jack of Caesar's' to be whipped, and rates Cleopatra fiercely
formingling eyes' with menials. The infatuation which in
a moment can be transformed into a frenzy of the vilest
suspicion and abuse would merely profane the name of love.
Cleopatra astutely bows before the storm, and Antony is soon
pacified. With a relic of the old frolicsome spirit he determines
on a last carouse before the battle that awaits him on the
morrow:
'Come,
Let's have one other gaudy night: call to me
All my sad captains; fill our bowls; once more
Let's mock the midnight bell.'
Cleopatra helps to buckle on his armour for the fray, wherein
Antony for a last brief spell tastes the sweets of victory. It is
the sunset glory of his career, and it tinges his passion, as he
clasps his 'great fairy' to his breast, with a belated flush of the
old gorgeous splendour:
'O thou day o' the world,
Chain mine armed neck! leap thou, attire and all,
Though proof of harness to my heart, and there
Ride on the pants triumphing.'
But it is the dying flame that shoots across the sky before the
blackness of night settles over the horizon. In the sea-fight
that follows Cleopatra's galleys desert to the enemy, and Antony
finds, like others before him, that Egypt is a reed which, if leant
on, pierces a man's hand.
'Betrayed I am :
O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,—
Whose eyes becked forth my wars, and called them home-
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end-
Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguiled me to the very heart of loss.'
Once again he virulently abuses his betrayer, who in terror
locks herself in a monument that she had built, whence she
Xv]
483
Antony and Cleopatra.
sends news to Antony that she has died with his name upon
her lips. But the cunning actress overreaches herself at last.
Antony has already resolved to escape from his shame by
suicide, and the tidings that Cleopatra has forestalled him pre-
cipitate his deed. An entrancing vision floats before his eyes
of a triumphal progress with his paramour across the Elysian
fields:
'I come, my queen! Stay for me:
Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.'
With this rapturous outlook upon a peerless supremacy of
bliss among the shades, Antony seeks his doom. But death
tarries long enough for him to learn the Egyptian's deceit. He
is past surprise at her arts, past anger: he begs to be borne
into her presence, and when she dare not leave the monument,
he suffers himself to be drawn up thither. His last words are
tender counsels to the queen, and proud recollections of the
days when he was 'the greatest prince o' the world.' Thus he
passes from the scene where he has been so resplendent a figure,
and Cleopatra is oppressed, as of old, by the dull mediocrity of
all things when 'the crown o' the earth' is taken away :
'Young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.'
She will not linger behind her hero among the petty figures
that now make up the world. And her resolve to die is
quickened by her aesthetic horror of being exhibited in Caesar's
triumph, and made mock of by the Roman populace with their
greasy aprons and foul breath. Yet even when she has de-
termined to take her own life, the courtesan's instincts of
venality and falsehood still assert their sway. She hands to
Caesar what purports to be a 'brief' of all her possessions, and
she appeals to her treasurer as a witness that she has kept
back nothing. When Seleucus exposes her fraud, with sublime
audacity she chides him for his ingratitude, and moralizes to
Octavius on the humiliation that fallen greatness has to endure
I i 2
484
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
from its dependents. But she is to cheat her captor of what
is more precious to him than all the wealth of Egypt. The
'pretty worm of Nilus,' that kills and pains not, sets her free
from Caesar's bondage. Her death is not after the high
Roman fashion' that she had predicted. It is a painless
ευθανασία :
'Peace, peace
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast
That sucks the nurse asleep?'
Such a death, as Dowden has said, has in it something
dazzling and splendid, something sensuous, something theatrical,
something magnificently coquettish, and nothing stern.' Its only
bitterness is the jealous pang at being outstripped by Iras in the
flight to the underworld:
'If she first meet the curled Antony,
He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have.'
Even in the Elysian fields the queen must compete for her
lover's embrace with her own waiting-woman! It is a trans-
cendent touch giving a glimpse into a vista of amorous rivalry
amid other than earthly haunts. For the passion of Antony
and Cleopatra, cloying for the moment in its voluptuous fullness,
carries at its heart the secret of an eternal unrest. The palace
of pleasure in which they have lain at ease melts into a cloud-
land castle, drifting and dissolving for ever before a chill night-
wind.
CORIOLANUS probably followed Antony and Cleopatra
directly, and dates from 1608 or the earlier part of 1609. In
Ben Jonson's Silent Woman, 1609, Dauphine is declared to
have 'lurched' his friends of 'the better half of the garland' by
concealing part of his plot. As there are other instances in
which Jonson ridiculed expressions in Shakspere's later plays,
it is probable that he is here travestying the singular phrase used
by Cominius of Coriolanus, 'He lurch'd all swords of the gar-
land.' Apart from this, we have only internal evidence. The
play contains sixty light, and forty-four weak, endings, a larger
Xv]
485
Coriolanus.
percentage of both than in Antony and Cleopatra, but less than
in the final group of dramas. The language is often elliptical
and obscure, and the rhythm harsh. But this suits the harshness
of the theme, the most uninviting, as a whole, of the materials
treated by Shakspere. The same temper of mind which had
singled out the story of Lear from the mythical annals of early
Britain now led the dramatist to handle an episode from the
semi-mythical annals of early Rome. In both cases the centre
of the action is a mighty figure ruined by passionate self-will
and pride. But the furious outbursts that are natural on the
lips of the Celtic king seem less suited to the Roman patrician,
and Lear has excuses for his rage which Coriolanus almost
entirely lacks. Yet the invective of the latter is shriller and
more prolonged, and dominates the drama with a persistence
that tends to forfeit the sympathy which a tragic hero should
always retain. In fact, in order to preserve for Coriolanus at
least a measure of that sympathy, Shakspere is led into the
most serious falsification of fact that occurs in any of the plays
purporting to rest on a historical basis. He sins partly through
ignorance, partly through wilfully shutting his eyes to some of
Plutarch's statements. He represents the plebeians of the early
Republic as if they were the rabble of the Rome of the Caesars.
The London mob of his own day served him as model for both,
and in this case with grievously misleading results. He would,
in many respects, have reached a truer conception of the class-
struggle which forms the setting to the play if he had sought
for an analogy in the history of his native town, where the
citizens had gradually risen from a state of villeinage to the
position of a self-governing corporation. It is such a process
that Plutarch describes in his account of the secession of the
Plebs to the Mons Sacer, where they abode for four months,
'offering no creature any hurt or violence, or making any show
of actual rebellion,' till they were granted a number of privileges,
including the right to elect tribunes. This orderly and im-
pressive demonstration, to secure certain well-defined ends, is
degraded by Shakspere into a street riot, and is made
a subordinate episode in a rising (which Plutarch assigned to
a later date) caused by a dearth of corn. The tumuit is at its
486
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
height when the play opens, and the famished citizens, who
regard Caius Marcius as their chief enemy-'a very dog to the
commonalty are clamouring for his blood, that they may
have corn at their own price. What does this rabble of 'apron-
men' with unwashed faces and soiled teeth care about political
privileges? All they want is food:
They said they were an-hungry: sigh'd forth proverbs-
That hunger broke stone walls, that dogs must eat;
That meat was made for mouths; that the gods sent not
Corn for the rich men only.'
Even this most elementary of rights Marcius denies them, but to
fully appreciate his attitude we must turn from the plebeians to
the aristocratic caste in whose bosom he has been reared.
Among its members it counts no grander figure than Volumnia,
Marcius' mother, 'the most noble mother of the world. No
creation of the dramatist is so genuinely antique as this ideal
Roman matron. Patriotism is with her a religion, and virtue is
summed up in the valour which is eager to bleed for its country
on the battle-field. Thus her pride in her only son is less
a purely maternal feeling than the exultation of the lion-hearted
dame who has given to Rome a champion of unrivalled prowess.
There is a metallic clang about the very words in which she
recounts her loyalty to her conception of a patriot-mother's
duty:
'When yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb,
when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way, when for a day
of kings' entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from her
beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a person, that it
was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not
stir, was pleased to let him scek danger where he was like to find fame.
To a cruel war I sent him; from whence he returned, his brows bound
with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing
e was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man.
Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons. . I had rather had eleven
die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.'
•
In a similar spirit she dwells triumphantly on the number and
position of Marcius' wounds, and while he is at the wars she
gloats in imagination over his bloody exploits in the field. But
it is no mere brute courage that she has instilled into him; it is
the heroism that looks on 'extremity' as the trier of spirits; and
xv]
487
Coriolanus.
that takes with a smile fortune's blows,' when most struck home.'
But along with these precepts that would make invincible the
heart that conn'd them,' Volumnia had taught her son less.
salutary lessons. Her patriotism, measureless in its depth, is
narrowed by her class feeling, and does not embrace the
plebeians, whom she has instructed Marcius to consider
'Woollen vassals, things created
To buy and sell with groats, to show bare heads
In congregations, to yawn, be still and wonder,
When one but of [his] ordinance stood up
To speak of peace or war.'
The seed thus sown falls on ground that is only too receptive,
and there is no one to arrest its malignant growth. For Corio-
lanus, as is the wont of men of mighty strength, has chosen
a gentle, timid wife, whose influence is too slight to counter-
balance that of Volumnia. Her mother-in-law's melodramatic
imaginings make Virgilia's blood run cold, and she turns pale at
the mention of wounds. Even Coriolanus' triumphant restoration
to her arms draws only tears from her 'dove's eyes.' Such
a bride will cling to her husband with affectionate loyalty, but
she will not be a curb upon his passions. Nor outside of his
family are there counsellors to guide him into more moderate
courses, with the doubtful exception of Menenius Agrippa.
This character is practically a creation of Shakspere. All that
Plutarch tells of him is that he was chief among the pleasantest
old men' of the Senate who were sent to treat with the revolted
plebeians, and that it was he who related to them the fable of the
belly and the members. Shakspere drew the ingenious inference
that the man who used an apologue in which the belly figured
as the most important of human organs, doubtless fully recog-
nized its claims in his own daily life. Hence Menenius is
represented as an indolent epicure, 'one that loves a cup of
hot wine with not a drop of alloying Tiber in 't.' He is
entirely lacking in genuine popular sympathies, but civil broils
disturb his easygoing mode of existence, so he tries, in
a spasmodic way, to quiet them. The rôle of mediator appeals
to his garrulous vanity, though he relieves his feelings,
whenever a chance offers, by gibes at the expense of the
488
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
(
Marcius, he
tribunes, the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians.'
tells them, is, in a cheap estimation, worth all their predecessors
since Deucalion, and it is evident that the one passion that really
stirs his lethargic temperament is his hero-worship for the mighty
warrior whom it is his foible to look on as a son. Equally
lavish is the adulation offered to Coriolanus by his patrician
companions-in-arms. Titus Lartius cries that a carbuncle
entire' were not so rich a jewel as this 'soldier even to Cato's
wish,' and Cominius, his superior in command, delivers a glow-
ing panegyric on his exploits before the Senate.
Amidst such conditions, it is inevitable that Coriolanus should
develop an exaggerated pride of class, and an equally exag-
gerated self-esteem. At the opening of the play the former is
the more conspicuous, but the course of events subordinates it
entirely to his personal arrogance. With this change our sym-
pathetic interest in the hero dwindles, for class-pride, however
unreasonable, is not a purely selfish principle; it testifies to
a* genuine, though restricted, idealism of nature, and it is the
source, especially in young communities, of many virtues, public
and private. Thus Coriolanus is a pattern of domestic excel-
lence. He reverences his mother, as if she were of more than
human mould, and he is bound to his wife by a flawlessly loyal
affection. He has a fond pride in his little son, who, as the
anecdote of the 'mammocked' butterfly shows, has inherited his
own spirit. He is gallant to noble ladies, like Valeria, and
shows kindly consideration to Menenius, whom he gratifies by
a letter from the wars, and to spare whose feelings at the crisis.
of the action he uses a delicate artifice. But these courtesies
are rigidly confined to members of his own class. Once, after
the capture of Corioli, he begs a favour for a poor man who had
used him kindly, but, by an extremely subtle touch which
Shakspere added to Plutarch's story, he cannot be troubled to
remember his benefactor's name.
But it is on the battlefield that Marcius gives most signal
proof of the ennobling effect of Volumnia's training. From his
boyhood he had fought beyond the mark of others, and in the
critical conflicts of the infant republic with its neighbours he had
shown himself a hero, not to be singly counterpoised,' through-
Xv]
489
Coriolanus.
out the world. His crowning achievement, which wins him the
title that henceforward clings more closely to him than his
own name, is the capture single-handed of the Volscian strong-
hold of Corioli, when his followers have basely left him in the
lurch. The sense of the measureless gulf between his heroic
valour and the poltroonery of the plebeians is indeed the most
reasonable element in that colossal disdain with which he regards
his inferiors; but even cowards have a claim to be treated as
within the pale of humanity.
'You souls of geese,
That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell!
All hurt behind; backs red, and faces pale
With flight and agued fear! Mend and charge home,
Or, by the fires of heaven, I'll leave the foe
And make my wars on you.'
Here, in the extremity of his rage, Marcius threatens that
desertion to the enemy which he afterwards carries out, and this
is not the only hint that patriotism is far from being the main
incentive to his unparalleled feats of arms. Like Hotspur, he
cares far more for personal glory than for the triumph of
common cause, as is shown by his declaration about the
Volscian general, Tullus Aufidius :
a
'I sin in envying his nobility,
And were I anything but what I am
I would wish me only he.
Were half to half the world by the ears and he
Upon my party, I'ld revolt, to make
Only my wars with him.'
This is to treat war merely as a gigantic duel between rival
champions, and to ignore those patriotic aspects of it which
alone give it a moral justification. It is the same exaggerated
passion for solely personal distinction that makes Coriolanus
reject all material rewards for his services. He feels that the
glory of achievements such as his is tarnished by the acceptance
of spoils, however splendid, and similarly he refuses to listen to
any laudation of his deeds, not from humility, but because he
deems them above the reach of due recognition by the voices of
his fellow-men.
There must, however, be always a broad line of cleavage
490
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
between the general and the private, and had Coriolanus' arro-
gance shown itself only in the camp, no irremediable harm
would have been done. But he carries this imperious spirit into
civil life, as appears in his very first words to the people.
'What would you have, you curs,
That like nor peace nor war? the one affrights you,
The other makes you proud. He that trusts to you,
Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;
Where foxes, geese.'
Coriolanus, in fact, treats the populace throughout as a wild
animal, as Hydra, 'the beast with many heads'.' He would
keep it chained up, and even, if he had his way, get rid of it by
starvation or by a murderous onslaught. The tribune is justified
in his rebuke:
'You speak o' the people,
As if you were a god to punish, not
A man of their infirmity.'
But the real condemnation of Marcius' attitude is found in the
conduct of this 'monster' towards himself. With a generosity
that puts the patrician to shame, the 'rank-scented many' are
ready to forgive him his past injustice for the sake of his brilliant
exploit at Corioli, and they welcome him back to Rome with
acclamation. When at Volumnia's desire he reluctantly stands.
for the consulship, he turns all the customary ceremonial of
petition into mockery, and begs for their 'voices' in bitterly
ironical phrases. Yet the citizens good-humouredly give him
their votes, and cry with one accord, 'God save thee, noble
consul.'
But the populace, as represented by Shakspere, though it has
generally good impulses, is pliable as wax in the hands of dema-
gogues, and the tribunes go at once to work to undo this novel
enlente cordiale between Coriolanus and the plebeians. The
dramatist, as was natural, had formed an entirely mistaken view
of the tribunate, the most unique constitutional office that the
world has ever seen. He confounded its holders with the mob-
orators of his own day, and in Brutus and Sicinius he has drawn
1 In this connexion it is worth noticing that the names of animals are
introduced with the same frequency in this play as in Lear. It is one of
the many points of contact between the two works.
Xv]
491
Coriolanus,
biting sketches of a pair of self-seeking, crafty, voluble ‘friends
of the people.' They remind the citizens that Coriolanus.
has always been their enemy, and censure them for their
'childish friendliness' in giving him their votes without exacting
guarantees for a change in his treatment of them. The crowd
instantly swing round and take back their votes, while the
tribunes, with adroit knavery, suggest that this reversal of
opinion should be set down to a spontaneous popular reaction
against their personal advocacy of Marcius' claims. Stopping
him on the way to the market-place, they announce the repeal
of the election, and Coriolanus, maddened at such an insult
from the objects of his scorn, bursts into a furious harangue
against the claims of the mutable, rank-scented many.' He
ends by calling upon the nobility to 'pluck out the multitudinous
tongue' by the abolition of the tribunate, whereupon Sicinius
declares him a traitor, and seeks to arrest him in the name of
the people. A tumult follows, in which Coriolanus and his
friends have the upper hand, but the cooler heads among the
patricians are alarmed at his irreconcileable attitude, and try to
come to terms with the plebeians. Menenius reappears in his
rôle of mediator, and even Volumnia condescends to political
opportunism at this crisis. It is somewhat startling to find the
inflexible matron so apt a mistress of diplomatic methods, and
her doctrine of legitimate dissimulation is better suited to the
Italy of Machiavelli than to the primitive morality of Rome in
the fifth century B. C. Even her authority cannot at first induce
Marcius to play the penitent before the citizens, but she finally
prevails by an appeal to his veneration for herself:
'At thy choice, then:
To beg of thee, it is my more dishonour
Than thou of them.'
He goes forth on his detested errand, and Volumnia's triumph
at this stage preludes, according to a favourite principle of
Shakspere's plot-construction, her infinitely more momentous.
triumph at the end of the play. But though Coriolanus has
promised to answer 'mildly' the accusations of the tribunes, he
gives way under the sharp ordeal. For the popular leaders,
knowing that a taunt will set his inflammable temper in a blaze,
492
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
fling the charge of traitor in his teeth. Curses and passionate
words of defiance at once leap to his lips, and while he is still
fuming, Sicinius, amidst shouts of approval from the citizens,
pronounces upon him the sentence of banishment. Thereupon
he retorts with a counter-sentence, in which the entire scorn of
his haughty nature is concentrated:
'You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcases of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.'
Rome's is the loss, not his-that is the conviction with which he
turns his back upon the city, to seek shelter with its deadliest
foes. For his desertion by 'the dastard nobles' in the hour of
his need has incensed him as bitterly against his own order as
against the plebeians; and the victor of Corioli, with patriotism
dead in his breast, carries his sword over to the Volsces, and
engages to fight against his 'cankered country with the spleen
of all the under-fiends.' His ancient enemy, Tullus Aufidius,
welcomes him with eloquent rapture, and hands over to him the
supreme command of half the Volscian forces. Under this joint
leadership a hostile array marches against Rome, and the news
of its advance startles the tribunes out of their fond dream that
they have inaugurated a golden era in the city. They attempt
to dispose of the unpalatable fact by the illogical process of
whipping the messenger who announces it, but this sorry expe-
dient is of no avail. Yet the tribunes appear in no worse light at
this crisis than the rest of the community. The citizens, when
they hear that the exile has returned for his revenge, straightway
begin to shift all responsibility for his banishment from off their
own shoulders:
'First Cit. For mine own part, when I said banish him, I said 'twas
pity.
Sec. Cit. And so did I.
Third Cit. And so did I; and, to say the truth, so did very many of
us that we did, we did for the best; and though we willingly consented to
his banishment, yet it was against our will.'
In the extremity of their panic they turn fiercely upon their
leaders-the idols of an hour ago-and, seizing Brutus, threaten
him with death by inches if Rome is destroyed. But the
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Coriolanus.
patricians show to quite as poor advantage as their inferiors. It
might be expected that, when the whole city was threatened
with fire and sword, they would have rallied all classes for
common defence against the common foe. But they content
themselves with cheap sneers at the tribunes for the 'good work'
that they have wrought. Even Cominius, the valiant general-
issimo of the Roman forces in the earlier campaign, instead of :
taking the field once more, plays the unheroic part of unsuccess-
ful pleader for mercy from his former subordinate. Menenius is
then induced to try his persuasive powers, and he builds his
hopes of success on a characteristic piece of strategy. Believing
that dinner is as entirely the pivot of other men's existence as it is
of his own, he fancies that if he can approach him when suitably
dieted,' he may prevail. But he, too, is sent back foiled, and
then, as a forlorn hope, the mother and wife of Coriolanus, with
his little boy, enter the Volscian camp. The exile has resolved
to trample on every human tie:
'Out, affection!
All bond and privilege of nature, break!
I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.'
But in the presence of all those round whom his affections have
been twined, he cannot maintain this attitude of Coriolanus
contra mundum :
'What is thy curtsy worth? or those doves' eyes
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows,
As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod; and my young boy
Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great nature cries, "Deny not.""
Plutarch's art had achieved a supreme triumph in the description
of this interview, and Shakspere, with the finest instinct, followed
his original almost word for word. The result is a scene
unequalled throughout the dramatist's writings for its strictly
classical feeling. The voice of Volumnia, pleading with austerely
majestic eloquence on behalf of her country, is not so much the
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voice of the human mother as the voice of Rome speaking
through her lips. All personal feeling is annihilated in the absolute
self-surrender to the welfare of the state. The Roman who can
wound Rome is to Volumnia an alien, though he be born of her
own body:
'Come, let us go:
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioli, and his child
Like him perchance.'
This terrible renunciation by the being whom he reveres above
all else on earth overpowers the warrior's stubborn purpose of
revenge. Volumnia wins a happy victory for Rome, but one, as
he himself foretells, most mortal to her son. He has been saved
from complete moral ruin, but the penalty of his averted crime
recoils upon himself. Aufidius, who has grown jealous of his
ascendency over the soldiers, charges him, on their return to
Antium, with treachery in sparing Rome, and mockingly names
him a 'boy of tears.' At the taunt there is an instant flash of
the old imperious passion :
"Boy!" False hound!
If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli:
Alone I did it! "Boy!""
In a moment the swords of the Volscians are in his bosom, and
the tumult of his rage is quenched in the everlasting calm of
death. But to the lonely exile his fate comes as a release,
and no other tokens of mourning need follow him to the
grave than the trailing of the soldiers' pikes in the dust,
and the sullen roll of the Volscian drums beating a funeral
march.
TIMON OF ATHENS may be conveniently included in the
Plutarch series of plays. Its chief source is a passage in the
biographer's life of Antony, where he compares the triumvir's
conduct after the battle of Actium to that of Timon, ‘a citizen of
Athens that lived about the war of Peloponnesus.' In Plutarch's
pages Shakspere found a brief account of Timon's self-banish-
ment from his ungrateful fellow men, of his relations to Alcibiades
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Timon of Athens.
and Apemantus, and of his burial on the sea-shore. A fuller
narrative of the misanthropist's career had been given in one of
Lucian's dialogues, and though, as far as we know, this had not
yet been translated into English, details from it probably reached
Shakspere through some intermediate source. One of these
may possibly have been the MS. play Timon, which, though
containing matter more suited to an academic than a popular
audience, anticipates a number of leading incidents in Shak-
spere's drama, especially the mock farewell banquet to the false
friends, and the fidelity of the steward to his fallen master.
Timon of Athens appeared first in the folio of 1623, but it may
be dated in all probability about 1607-1608. Not only were its
materials taken, in part, from the same source as Antony and
Cleopatra, but its lurid atmosphere, and its central theme of
ingratitude repaid by hatred and curses link it with Coriolanus
and King Lear. Metrical evidence confirms the date suggested,
though its value is lessened by the unsatisfactory condition of the
text of the play. For Timon of Athens, as it stands, cannot
represent a complete, genuine Shaksperean work. The con-
trast between the noble verse and imagery in the finer scenes,
and the halting metre and insipid dialogue of other parts, is too
striking to be entirely attributed to the dramatist in the maturity
of his powers. Yet these inequalities have been exaggerated,
and all attempts to rigidly separate the genuine from the spurious
parts of the work must be viewed with suspicion.
The play, as it has come down to us, has, apart from faults of
detail, two cardinal defects. Its main plot lacks sufficient
action, and dwindles in its latter stages into mere passionate
declamation. As King Lear by introducing a plethora of
incidents becomes epic rather than dramatic in structure, so
Timon through an insufficiency of incidents verges towards the
close on lyrical method and temper. Secondly, its underplot
with Alcibiades as hero, though its subtle variation on the main
theme is essentially Shaksperean, is not closely enough inter-
woven into the texture of the piece. Yet, in spite of these
weaknesses, Timon is a notable and highly characteristic product
of the tragic period, of which it is the fiercest as Lear is the most
stupendous expression.
496
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Though the scene is laid in Athens, Shakspere shows as little.
power of creating a Greek environment for his story as he had
done years ago in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Except for
a brief allusion to the 'great towers, trophies, and schools,' which
Alcibiades is begged to spare, there is not a hint to show that
the dramatist had any conception of the artistic and intellectual
glories of Athens in its prime. He was evidently as unfamiliar
with the conditions of Periclean Greece as of Homeric.
We are
introduced, it is true, into a cultured and wealthy society, but its
features are in no way distinctive, and it might belong to any age
or nation which had advanced to a certain stage of material
refinement. The representatives of its art are not sculptors or
dramatists, but a painter, and a poet who has allegorized for
Timon's benefit the commonplace moral of the fickleness of
fortune. The philosopher Apemantus is not a product of the
Hellenic schools, but is a specimen of the ubiquitous curmud-
geon type that from native perversity delights to snarl at the
heels of humanity. The young lords who are Timon's asso-
ciates, with their presents of four milk-white horses and two
brace of greyhounds, remind us, like Theseus in A Midsummer
Night's Dream, of Tudor nobles rather than genuine Athenian
aristocrats. But though Shakspere does not transport us back
into the atmosphere of the fifth century B.C., he achieves his
purpose of placing before our view an idle, luxurious society, of
which Timon is the leading figure. The rich lord, a spoiled
child of fortune from his cradle, holds a court among parasites
and fair-weather friends. He keeps open house for all and
sundry, and scatters his gifts with reckless prodigality. The
meanest offering to him, as his associates soon discover, he
regards as a challenge to his own generosity:
If I want gold, steal but a beggar's dog
And give it Timon, why, the dog coins gold;
If I would sell my horse, and buy twenty more
Better than he, why, give my horse to Timon,
Ask nothing, give it him, it foals me, straight,
And able horses.'
As he declares himself, he could deal kingdoms to his friends
and ne'er be weary. And this lavishness does not spring from
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Timon of Athens.
ostentation, but from genuine goodwill towards all mankind.
He is as ready to bestow upon his servant the wherewithal
to contract an advantageous marriage as to shower jewels or
plate upon his equals. But this munificence has its seamy side
in a criminal indifference to the elementary duty of balancing
income and expenditure. It is in vain that the faithful steward,
Flavius (who like Adam in As You Like It is a Teutonic, and
not a classical type), warns his master, account-book in hand,
that bankruptcy stares him in the face, and that when his wealth.
is flown, his friends will take flight too :
'Who is not Timon's?
What heart, head, sword, force, means, but is Lord Timon's?
Great Timon, noble, worthy, royal Timon!
Ah! when the means are gone that buy this praise,
The breath is gone whereof this praise is made:
Feast-won, fast-lost; one cloud of winter showers,
These flies are couch'd.'
But Timon turns a deaf ear and 'plunges' more wildly than
ever in his rôle of universal benefactor. He lives in a fool's
paradise, and believes that he can, at will, whistle back riches to
any extent, because friendship establishes a community of
goods: 'We are born to do benefits; and what better or
properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends?
O what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many, like brothers,
commanding one another's fortunes.' In this lax idealism lies
the seed of Timon's material and moral ruin. He needs a Polo-
nius to sound in his car the warning:
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.'
Friends are not to be won by indiscriminate bounty and
entertainment. For this, as for any other worthy end, the
exercise of will and judgement is necessary. The man who
begins by taking all his fellow men, without reserve, to his
bosom, is wellnigh certain to end in the other extreme of a
loathing for the whole of human kind. Thus it fares with
Timon.
The scenes describing his disillusionment have been rejected
k k
498
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
by many critics, but though they may have come to us in an
imperfect condition, the skilful variation of details, as one friend
after another fails Timon at his need, is distinctively Shak-
sperean. The reply of the Senate, as a body, to Flavius'
intercession for his master, is indeed too characteristic of the
dramatist's pregnant style to have fallen under suspicion:
They answer, in a joint and corporate voice,
That now they are at fall, want treasure, cannot
Do what they would; are sorry-you are honourable.
But yet they could have wish'd-they know not-
Something hath been amiss-a noble nature
May catch a wrench-would all were well-'t is pity;
And so intending other serious matters
After distasteful looks, and these hard fractions,
With certain half-caps, and cold-moving nods,
They froze me into silence.'
The scene with Lord Lucullus is an equally caustic sketch of
selfishness cloaking itself under forms of polite commiseration,
and it is quite worthy of Shakspere's pen. Lucullus, taking it
for granted that Timon's messenger brings a gift, welcomes
him with effusive politeness, and peeps under his coat for the
expected silver basin and ewer. To his dismay, Flaminius
produces an empty box which his master has sent, nothing
doubting that Lucullus will be pleased to drop fifty talents into
it. What a revelation of sordid ingratitude is there in his
lordship's answer!
‘La, la, la, la,—nothing doubting, says he? alas, good lord! a noble
gentleman 't is, if he would not keep so good a house; many a time and
often I have dined with him, and told him on't; and come again to supper
to him, of purpose to have him spend less; and yet he would embrace no
counsel, take no warning by my coming. Every man has his fault, and
honesty is his: I have told him on 't, but I could ne'er get him from
it... Draw nearer, honest Flaminius. Thy lord's a bountiful gentleman;
but thou art wise, and thou knowest well enough, although thou comest
to me, that this is no time to lend money, especially upon hare friendship,
without security. Here's three solidares for thee: good boy, wink at me,
and say thou saw'st me not. Fare thee well.'
Lucius proves an equally weak reed. Though a minute ago
he has been protesting before the gods that he is ashamed of
Lucullus' behaviour, he follows suit in his refusal to help the
needs of his 'very exquisite friend.' But instead of posing as
a good counsell or whose advice has been neglected in the past,
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Timon of Athens.
he bemoans his unlucky fate in just being prevented from
rendering a service which he would otherwise have been delighted
to perform. But the climax of hypocritical meanness is attained
by Sempronius, who affects a righteous indignation at not
having been applied to in the first instance, and makes this an
excuse for drawing his purse-strings tight. The whole gang
of voluble knaves get their deserts when Timon bids them to
the mock farewell banquet, and dashes in their faces the tepid
water, an apt symbol of their lukewarm friendship.
But Timon's fatal error at this crisis is that he does not stop
to consider how far he is himself accountable for what has
happened, and whether there is any surer way into men's hearts
than prodigal hospitality. His idealism of nature proves his
ruin, for, wrenched out of its original shape, it recoils in the
form of savage hatred of humanity. With bitter curses he turns
his back upon the whole race:
'Be abhorr'd
All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!
His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains:
Destruction fang mankind!'
He plunges into forest solitudes, and lives upon roots, but
Shakspere, as appears from As You Like It, had no illusions
about the healing properties of Nature on a radically diseased
mind. Indeed, Timon himself, with a curious anticipation of
modern scientific doctrines, realizes that Nature is one with
rapine,' that the struggle for existence produces war and treachery
in the animal world, and that one primordial matter breeds
humanity and the lower forms of life. The 'self-same mettle,
whereof '
'Arrogant man is puff'd,
Engenders the black toad, and adder blue,
The gilded newt, and eyeless venom'd worm,
With all the abhorred births below crisp heaven.'
Even the inanimate world is one wide area of mutual pillage:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement; each thing's a thief.'
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
:
Thus Timon's rage, though it has man for its prime object,
includes in its comprehensive sweep the whole universe. This
Titanic passion, the agonized outburst of a noble nature shattered
to its base, is thrown into splendid relief by being contrasted
with the mean, venomous ill-humour of the professional cynic.
Apemantus, doomed from his birth to a dog's life, tries to avenge
himself by mocking at all the gifts which fortune showers upon
her favourites, and from which he is for ever shut out. The grapes
are hung well beyond his reach, and it gives him a sinister satis-
faction to make them out as sour as possible. When Timon
turns his back upon the world, Apemantus hurries to the forest
to claim him as a disciple, and to pour fresh poison into his
wounds. But the man who has been driven to hatred of his
fellows by a convulsion of his moral being, turns with scorn from
this petty-minded railer at society, whose cynicism is as truly the
veneer of selfish hardness of heart as the jovial good-fellowship.
of Timon's former boon-companions. He exposes his sham.
philosophy in all its nakedness, as he overwhelms him with
bitterly truthful words:
'I, to bear this,
That never knew but better, is some burden:
Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time
Hath made thee hard in 't. Why should'st thou hate men?
They never flatter'd thee: what hast thou given?
Poor rogue hereditary. Hence! begone!
If thou hadst not been born the worst of men,
Thou hadst been a knave and flatterer.'
How completely Timon's is a noble rage, born of moral
indignation and not of rancorous spleen at the loss of his wealth
and position, is proved by his conduct after he has by chance
dug up gold in the forest. The glittering metal is his again in
abundance, and he is free once more to resume his part of social
dictator. But the iron has entered too deeply into his soul for
him to henceforth value at a pin's worth the homage of his
fellows. The gold that formerly he had lavished to further the
well-being of men he now devotes solely to their destruction.
He gives it to thieves and courtesans, to encourage them in their
nefarious occupa ions, and to Alcibiades to pay the soldiers, who
are marching to lay Athens in the dust. His malady is too
incurable for it to be affected even by the discovery that
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Timon of Athens.
righteousness is not entirely extinct upon earth. The faithful
Flavius follows him to his cave, and begs to be his steward still.
Timon, in his own despite, has to award him the diploma of
honesty, but he sees in him (to use a hackneyed formula in its
precise meaning) only the exception that proves the rule about
mankind as a whole :
'Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim
One honest man,-mistake me not,-but one;
No more, I pray,- and he's a steward.-
How fain would I have hated all mankind!
And thou redeem'st thyself: but all, save thee,
I fell with curses.'
Thus, though he rewards him bountifully for his fidelity and
bids him live rich and happy, it is on condition that he shall
'build from men; hate all, curse all.'
hate all, curse all.' The hostility towards
the human race that is not softened by Flavius' devotion naturally
does not relent at the appeal of the senators, who, in their alarm
at Alcibiades' threatened assault, seek to tempt Timon back to
be their captain. His answer is an outburst of savage rage and
irony. But the fury of his passion shatters his being, and with
words of solemn farewell the misanthropist sinks into the in-
violable asylum of the grave:
'Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Whom once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover: thither come,
And let my grave-stone be your oracle.'
It is meet that one who had found life so bitter should lie in
death beneath the bitter wave, and that, scorning the tribute of
human tears, he should make 'vast Neptune weep for aye' on
his 'low grave, on faults forgiven.'
Plutarch had mentioned that Timon, when he had forsaken all
other men, made a companion of Alcibiades, because he knew
that one day he would do great mischief unto the Athenians.
From this slender hint Shakspere developed a highly character-
istic underplot. He represents Alcibiades (who recalls the his-
torical figure in nothing but name) as undergoing an experience
akin to that of Timon, and meeting it in a diametrically opposite.
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Shakspere and his Predecessors.
way. The two plots are not sufficiently interwoven, but their
mutual bearing is quite clear, and it is strange that so many
critics should have rejected Act iii. scene 5, where we learn the
reason of Alcibiades' wrath against his native city. One of his
friends has, in sudden rage, killed a man who had traduced his
honour, and thus lies under sentence of death. Alcibiades begs
the senate for mercy, and his speech is an echo of the solemn
pleadings of Portia and Isabella. Like them it appeals from the
merciless written law to that higher principle of equity in which
law has its true sanction. But the senators, a body of cold-
blooded men of the world, have no spark of sympathy for the
pride of reputation, which, feeling a stain like a wound, strikes
out too vehemently in self-defence. As they had denied all help
to Timon when his high-souled generosity brought him to ruin,
so now they refuse all mercy to the victim of the chivalrous
principle of honour. And in both cases they are ungrateful as
well as hard-hearted, for, like Timon, the condemned man has
done the state good service, and Alcibiades throws his own
deserts as an additional weight into the scale. But to all
entreaties the senators make the icy rejoinder: We are for
law he dies.' Then follows a scene so strikingly parallel to
the central situation in Coriolanus that its rejection by critics is
incomprehensible. Alcibiades, like the Roman hero, feels a
patrician's and soldier's shame in stooping to beg of his inferiors,
and the rejection of his suit stirs him to an outburst, which
is a mild echo of Coriolanus' fury when he is refused the consul-
ship.
(
Alcib. Must it be so? it must not be. My lords,
I do beseech you, know me.
2 Sen. How!
What!
Alcib. Call me to your remembrances.
3 Sen.
Alcib. I cannot think but your age has forgot me:
It could not else be I should prove so base,
To suc, and be denied such common grace.
My wounds ache at you.
I Sen.
Alcib.
Do you dare our anger?
'Tis in few words, but spacious in effect:
We banish thee for ever.
Banish me!
Banish your dotage, banish usury,
That makes the Senate ugly.'
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Timon of Athens.
The way in which he flings the word 'banish' back into his
judge's teeth, and his resolve to destroy his native city, remind
us yet further of Coriolanus. It is at this point that his conduct
contrasts so vividly with Timon's. Instead of retreating into
the wilderness and unpacking his heart in idle execrations, the
energetic soldier gathers an army and threatens Athens with fire
and sword. The Senate (and again the situation recalls Corio-
lanus) sues humbly for peace, which Alcibiades grants on con-
dition that he may impose such terms as he pleases. So that
while Timon 'lies a wretched corse' upon the 'hem o' the sea,'
Alcibiades enters Athens in triumph. It is the contrast, already
drawn in Hamlet and elsewhere, between the idealism that is
often the source of its own ruin, and the practical nature that
succeeds largely by virtue of its limitations. But it is one of the
weaknesses of the play that our sympathies do not swing as in-
stinctively as heretofore to the side of the idealist, grand even in
his fall; Alcibiades, though a sketch rather than a full portrait,
is almost too honourable and forgiving to be a foil to Timon.
We turn with relief from the dissonances of the main plot to the
spectacle of the soldier-statesman using the 'olive'with the sword,
and inaugurating a new and sounder era in the Athenian
commonwealth.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE DRAMATIC ROMANCES.
ABOUT 1609 the temper of Shakspere's work underwent an
abrupt change. For seven years the dramatist had gazed into
that seething whirlpool of passion, which sucks into its vortex
the mighty ones of the world, who have slipped from their
moral foothold, and who but too often drag down with them
the innocents thrown by cruel destiny within their grasp. The
last state of Timon is symbolical of the doom of all the tragic
heroes. They lie buried' wretched corses' under the 'turbulent
surge' of their own fierce and restless desires. From this
terrible spectacle Shakspere at length averts his eyes, and
mounts into a serene region, over which broods the spirit of
atoning love, and which is luminous with the tender glow of
a tranquil evening sky. We see him (to apply the words in
which Milton sang of his own more immeasurable ascent),
"
Escap't the Stygian pool, though long detain'd
In that obscure sojourn .
Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend.'
It can scarcely be an accident that the change in Shakspere's
mood coincides with his retirement to Stratford. Amidst the
fields and glades of Warwickshire, the darker problems of life
must have thrust themselves less imperiously within his ken
than in the crowded society of the capital, and the adventurer
restored to the home of his youth found his natural theme in
tales of reunion between long-parted kindred, of penitence and
forgiveness for wrongs done in distant years. Thus this final
period of Shakspere's dramatic work brings entirely new groups
of actors on the scene. There pass before us, as in the
tragedies, figures ripe in years, and cast by nature and fortune
in majestic mould, but instead of being consumed by the fires
The Dramatic Romances.
505
of their own volcanic passions, they suffer the extremity of
wrong at the hands of others, and attain through trial and
endurance to godlike charity and calm. Such are Hermione
and Prospero, Pericles and Queen Katharine; such, though
lacking the stately composure of these mellower natures, but
with a more complex charm of her own, is Imogen. In
delightful contrast to these world-worn sufferers, statuesque
in their self-control, is a band of youths and maidens blithe
with that infinite gaiety of heart, which is the portion of the
innocents round whom the shades of life's prison-house have
not yet begun to close. This group, to which belong Miranda
and Perdita, Florizel, Ferdinand, and the boys of Cymbeline, is
unique among the dramatist's creations. These gracious beings
are equally distinct from the precocious, thoughtful children
of the earlier plays, like Arthur or Richard III's princely
nephews, and from the brilliant, full-blooded figures, in the
hey-day of life, who sparkle through the comedies. They
breathe the air of poetic wonderlands, a wave-washed Bohemia
or an enchanted isle, and they bear about them a more than
earthly charm. Their fortunes are such as befall the natives
of a world which goes a less jog-trot pace than our own.
They are torn in infancy from home and (except Miranda)
from parents; they are exposed to the perils of the ocean or
of mountain solitudes; they grow up ignorant of their true
birth and rank, and only after years of parting are they restored
to their kindred and to their rightful station.
Such material is suited to the romantic novel or the romantic
epic rather than to the drama, and Shakspere's instinct as
a playwright had gone partly astray when it led him to handle
themes more fitted to the methods of Spenser and Sidney than
to his own. The looseness of structure, which has been noted
as the principal defect in the English history-plays, reappears
in this last group of dramas in intensified degree. The Winter's
Tale and Pericles, in particular, which cover a period of about
sixteen years, during which infant princesses grow to mar-
riageable age, would have earned, and not without justice,
the adverse criticism of Sidney and Gosson, had they still been
alive. Moreover incidents occur, like the repentance of Iachimo,
506
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
which are inadequately motived, while among the subordinate
figures, as in The Tempest, there are found shadowy types,
lacking the distinctive vitality of the minor characters in earlier
plays. We find too, Shakspere, after a prolonged spell of
independent achievement, once more, as in the first days of
authorship, collaborating at times with other men. Thus the
general impression left upon us by the work of the final period,
is that the dramatist, exhausted by the gigantic creative effort
of the preceding years, was writing in leisurely fashion, not
swept along, as before, by the irresistible might of his own
imagination, but content to glide by gentle stages down the
slow-moving stream of romance. It is a return in part to the
method of Greene, the method of the story-teller rather than
the playwright, and we shall be truer to the spirit of these last
products of the Shaksperean muse, if we call them dramatic
romances rather than dramas. Setting aside for the moment
the works of which Shakspere was not sole author', we have
three of these dramatic romances, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale,
and The Tempest, illustrating the final phase of his art and
outlook on life.
CYMBELINE may be taken first, as, in spite of the complete
alteration in tone, it has numerous links of detail with the
tragedies and the Roman plays. Forman records in his MS.
Booke of Plaies (1610-11) that he saw it performed. Though
he does not give the exact date, 1609 or 1610 cannot be far
wrong, as is proved by the metrical characteristics. The per-
centage of light and weak endings is 4-83, and of double
endings is 32. In Holinshed's Chronicle Shakspere found
mention of Cymbeline and his two sons, and of the demand
for tribute from Britain by the Roman emperor Augustus. But
the idyllic episode of the theft of the boys in infancy, by
Bellarius, and their upbringing among the mountains, is of
Shakspere's own invention. The main plot of Posthumus and
Imogen is taken from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron, and it
is connected with the historical background by Imogen (the
Lineora of the novel) being made Cymbeline's daughter, and
¹ On l'ericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, see Appendix B.
XVI]
507
Cymbeline.
her husband his adopted son.
It would seem as if Shakspere,
even while setting his fancy free for its most adventurous
flights, cast a lingering glance back at the solid historical
material upon which he had been working so long.
Cymbeline, like Lear, carries us back to Celtic Britain,
but it is a milder era than that which confronted us in
men.
the earlier play. As in Lear, the country has to face the
ordeal of foreign invasion, though now the enemy is not
France but imperial Rome. Thus Cymbeline, by virtue of
its enveloping political plot, puts the finishing touch to the
Plutarch series of plays. We have glimpses of Julius Caesar
in his rôle of conqueror of Britain, and, as in the drama named
after him, we see him even after death a mighty force among
The empire whose bounds he had stretched to the limits
of the world is now organized by Augustus Caesar, and we
appreciate the results of that astute politician's triumph over
'Cleopatra and her Roman' (a picture of whose meeting at
Cydnus adorns Imogen's chamber-walls) when we witness the
legionaries enforcing the imperial claims from Britain to
Pannonia. But this segment of historical fact stands out
awkwardly amidst the fine-spun tissues of the principal action,
and it was a sense of this incongruity that led Johnson into
his trenchant condemnation of the drama, when he declared
'the fiction foolish, the events impossible, the conduct absurd,
the faults of the drama too evident for detection, and too gross
for aggravation.' Gervinus has set himself to demonstrate the
injustice of such a verdict on a work which is to be compared,
in his opinion, with the most excellent of all that Shakspere
has produced.' He assigns to it an epic character, and asserts
that not alone in its whole inward' bearing, but even in its
outward construction, it appears as a companion piece to Lear,
as the Odyssey to the Iliad. Gervinus, however, in his anxiety
to vindicate the claims of a play which had been unduly de-
preciated, has overshot the mark. Lear does combine epic and
dramatic features: its two kindred plots deal with actions and
passions of colossal proportions, and the workmanship never
slackens for a moment in its Titanic energy. But the fortunes
of Imogen belong to the sphere of romance, and the pastoral
C
508
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
idyll claims Guiderius and Arviragus for its own. Ingenious
criticism may discover a relation between the plots, but it cer-
tainly is not visible on the surface, and neither can, without
an abuse of terms, be brought within epic scope. Nor is all the
diversified material equally caught up into the poetic heaven
of Shakspere's invention, The perspective is at times confused
by the bewilderingly rapid succession of incidents, and speeches
are introduced more to enlighten the spectators than to satisfy
a stringent dramatic demand. But Cymbeline, when extravagant
claims have been set aside, is a work of singular interest and
charm. The idyllic scenes are bathed in the dewy freshness
of the mountain side; the dénouement unravelling the tangled
skein of the various intrigues is a masterpiece of dramatic skill;
and in Imogen, the heroine of the main plot, Shakspere has
drawn so exquisite a picture of womanhood, that her presence
goes far to blind us to the repulsive features of Boccaccio's tale.
The opening dialogue between two gentlemen of the British
court (which is, in effect, an extra-dramatic prologue) informs
us of the state of Imogen's fortunes, and of the peculiar
domestic situation within the palace walls. Cymbeline, the
king, whose weak dependence is a complete contrast to the
imperious self-will of Lear, has lately taken as his second wife
a beautiful and clever, but absolutely unscrupulous widow, to
whom he is enslaved by an excess of uxorious infatuation. To
please her he has pressed on a match between her son Cloten,
a high-placed boor, a swaggering, dissolute blockhead, ‘a thing
too bad for bad report,' and Imogen, his only daughter, who
has been left heir to the throne by the mysterious abduction
of her two brothers twenty years ago. Imogen has, however,
foiled this scheme by a marriage with Leonatus Posthumus,
a poor but well-descended gentleman, who had been left an
orphan in infancy and had been reared by the king. In her
own phrase, she 'chose an eagle and did avoid a puttock.' The
courtiers, though for politic reasons they curve their faces into
frowns, are secretly rejoiced at the event, for Posthumus has
'Liv'd in court
(Which rare it is to do) most prais'd, most lov'd;
A sample to the youngest, to the more mature
A glass that feated them.'
XVI]
509
Cymbeline.
The king, furious at the defeat of his plans, sentences Imogen to
imprisonment (though the penalty proves very nominal) and
banishes Posthumus from the court. The artful stepmother,
pretending to pity the pangs of barred affections, gives the
lovers an opportunity for a last interview, but only that she may
inflame Cymbeline's fury by leading him to the spot where they
are locked in each other's arms. Imogen bears her father's
reproaches with calm dignity, and declares that it is he who is
responsible for her choice of a husband:
'Sir,
It is your fault that I have lov'd Posthumus:
You bred him as my playfellow; and he is
A man worth any woman; overbuys me
Almost the sum he pays.'
Thus the love of Imogen is the growth of years of familiar
companionship. It is not the sudden flame of youthful passion,
as with Juliet, nor the fruit of the imagination, as with Des-
demona. Therefore even the critics who trace the misfortunes
of these tragic heroines to their filial disobedience have to
admit that Imogen has a warrant for her conduct, though they
think it necessary to add that she proves her sense of family
obligation by remaining at the court, instead of accompanying
Posthumus. But this is special pleading. Imogen's sentence
of imprisonment is a bar to her leaving the palace, where it is
intended that, in spite of her previous marriage, Cloten should
secure her as his bride. And apart from this, Imogen's
separation from her husband is so essential to the cardinal
incident in the story, that it is quite beside the mark to invest it
with special significance.
Pisanio's account of his master's departure on board ship,
and of his signalled farewells, forms a charming picture of loyal
affection turning its last lingering gaze towards all that it is
dearest to it on earth:
'So long
As he could make me with this eye or car
Distinguish him from others, he did keep
The deck, with glove, or hat, or handkerchief,
Still waving, as the fits and stirs of his mind
Could best express how slow his soul sail'd on,
How swift his ship.'
Yet Posthumus' behaviour when he reaches Rome seems
510
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
strangely out of keeping with these tender demonstrations, or
with the glowing eulogies of his friends. He enters into a wager
which involves an attack on his wife's honour, and no con-
sideration of the peculiar conditions can entirely overcome our
instinctive repugnance to such an act. But Shakspere found
the incident in Boccaccio's novel, and all that he could do was
to make it as credible and inoffensive as might be. He thus
represents it as the outcome of an earlier, more chivalrous
challenge in France, when Posthumus had offered to maintain
Imogen's superiority to the rest of her sex at the sword's point.
There chances to be in Rome an eyewitness of this scene, who
recalls it to Posthumus, whereupon Iachimo, one of the company
present, a typical Italian profligate, undertakes to corrupt the
honour of this 'unparagoned mistress.'
unparagoned mistress.' As he protests to
Posthumus, he is not animated by any personal motive against
Imogen, but by the desire to expose the frailty of the female sex.
'I make my wager rather against your confidence than her
reputation and to bar your offence herein too, I durst attempt
it against any lady in the world.' Thus, as Gervinus has justly
said, 'it is the deep indignation of Posthumus' moral nature
which inclines him to accept the offered wager;' in doing so he
is the champion of the honour of womanhood against the
slanders of a shallow sensualism.
At first sight of Imogen Iachimo's insolent self-confidence
deserts him:
'All of her that is out of door most rich!
If she be furnish'd with a mind so rare,
She is alone the Arabian bird, and I
Have lost the wager. Boldness be my friend!
Arm me, audacity, from head to foot!
Or, like the Parthian, I shall flying fight;
Rather, directly fly.'
Boldness is certainly his friend in inspiring his fancy sketch of
Posthumus as 'the Briton reveller,' who amidst his licentious
enjoyments has entirely forgotten his bride. And still more
audacious is his immediate dedication of himself to Imogen's
'sweet pleasure, that she may revenge herself on this runagate
to her bed.' The base proposal betrays to the noble woman the
falsehood of this saucy stranger's' tale, and she spurns him
from her with righteous fury. But the crafty Italian, realizing
XVI]
511
Cymbeline.
that his tactics have miscarried, dexterously pretends that his
slander of Posthumus was devised to test her constancy to
her husband, whom he now extols as 'a descended god'
amongst men. Imogen, easily duped by praises of her lord,
readily pardons the offender, and even grants him a favour,
which enables him to effect an undiscovered entrance into her
bedchamber. The scene in which Iachimo at dead of night
creeps from his hiding-place to survey the room, and snatch
from the sleeping woman's arm the apparent evidences of her
guilt, recalls the passage in Lucrece where Tarquin strides
towards his victim's bed. But the pregnant compression of the
description in the play, with such lifelike touches as the book
folded down midway in the tale of Tereus and Philomel, shows
a marvellous advance on the studiously elaborate workmanship
of the poem. The details of the room's furniture and orna-
mentation are, with true dramatic instinct, not recorded at this
moment of breathless suspense, but are reserved till Iachimo's
lying narrative, on his return to Rome, of his triumph over
Imogen's honour. The bracelet and the ring which he produces.
play the same part in convincing Posthumus of Imogen's guilt
as the handkerchief in the case of Othello. But Posthumus,
though, unlike the Moor, he has learnt to know his bride's
nature through years of unchecked communion, is won far more
quickly than the tragic hero to a belief in her unchastity. The
paroxysm of fury in which he is eager to tear her limb-meal'
has in it nothing of Othello's solemn, sacrificial resolve. It is
merely the wild thirst for vengeance on one whose seeming frailty
has shattered at a blow his belief in the virtue of her sex:
C There's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
All faults that may be nam'd, nay, that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all: but rather, all.'
Even had Imogen been guilty of the foulness laid to her
charge, the stratagem by which Posthumus sccks to secure her
punishment would alienate all sympathy from him. To write o
512
[сн.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
his wife announcing his return to Milford Haven, and urging
her to meet him there, while he at the same time orders his
servant to murder her on the journey, is an act of infamy which
Shakspere found in Boccaccio's narrative, and whose repulsive.
features, it must be admitted, he has not in the least softened
down. Indeed, Posthumus' treachery is thrown into the darkest
relief by the innocent, girlish glee with which Imogen receives.
her husband's message:
'Say... how far it is
To this same blessed Milford: and by the way,
Tell me how Wales was made so happy, as
To inherit such a haven: but, first of all,
How we may steal from hence; and, for the gap
That we shall make in time, from our hence-going
And our return, to excuse :-but first, how get hence?'
6
Her eagerness to fly to Posthumus on a horse with wings' is
quickened by the longing to be free of the hateful suit of Cloten,
which is to her as fearful as a siege.' Beside this lout, the
other rejected wooers in Shakspere's plays, Aguecheek, Slender,
and Roderigo, show like gallants of the finest water. Asinine
though they be, they have the saving grace of disbelief in their
own capacities, but Cloten is a bullying coxcomb, insanely
puffed up by his sudden elevation to princely rank. He goes in
constant fear of doing something that will be a 'derogation' to his
novel dignity, and his version of noblesse oblige is summed up in
the words, 'it is fit I should commit offence to my inferiors.' At
bowls and cards, which are his chief occupations, his anxiety is
to win the stakes, and it is in a similarly mercenary spirit that
he pays court to Imogen. His amorous tactics are as inept as
the rest of his conduct. He wakes her with a serenade because
he has been advised to give her music o' mornings,' and with
brazen effrontery tries to bribe one of her waiting women to be
his accomplice. Imogen meets his advances with a studied.
attempt at politeness till he begins to abuse Posthumus as 'a base
slave, a hilding for a livery,' whereupon, angered beyond control,
she retorts in kind, and ends with the scathing outburst,
'His meanest garment
That ever hath but clipp'd his body, is dearer
In my resect, than all the hairs above thee,
Were they all made such nien,'
XVI]
513
Cymbeline.
Thus the prospect of getting beyond the reach of this odious.
persecution gives added keenness to Imogen's rapture at the
thought of meeting Posthumus at Milford. How agonizing
then is the reaction when she discovers that his message is
a feint to lure her to destruction! As Pisanio, when he shows
her Posthumus' letter, cries,
'What shall I need to draw my sword? The paper
Hath cut her throat already.'
Indignantly she repels the charges against her honour, and
then, content to lose a life that has been robbed of all its sweet-
ness, she plucks from before her heart the 'scriptures' of her
husband, now 'all turned to heresy,' and bids Pisanio strike
at it.
'Look!
I draw the sword myself; take it, and hit
The innocent mansion of my love, my heart.
Fear not, 'tis empty of all things but grief;
Thy master is not there, who was, indeed,
The riches of it. Do his bidding; strike.'
But the faithful servant, sure that Posthumus is the victim of
some fraud, has devised a plan for his mistress' safety. He
provides her with a boy's apparel, and counsels her in this dis-
guise to seek service with the Roman ambassador, who is about
to re-embark at Milford, and who will carry her in his train to
the imperial city, where she may learn how matters go with
Posthumus in his exile. Thus the dramatist ingeniously links
together the main-plot and the enveloping political action, and
provides a motive for the introduction of the under-plot. For
Imogen, losing her way to Milford, is brought by chance to
the cave where her brothers Guiderius and Arviragus dwell
with their foster-father, Belarius.
Ten years had passed since Shakspere had handled an idyllic
theme in As You Like It, but his treatment is marked by the
same breadth and originality as before. Belarius, a soldier who
had done splendid service in the Roman wars, had been ban-
ished twenty years ago by the hasty-tempered king upon a false
charge of treachery. In revenge he had stolen Cymbeline's
infant sons, and fled with them to mountain solitudes, where he
rears them in the belief that he is their father, and teaches them
I. l
514
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to scorn the life of court and camp, whose hollowness he has
himself proved.
'O! this life
Is nobler than attending for a check;
Richer than doing nothing for a bribe;
Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk.
No life to ours!'
But in characteristic opposition to the conventional Tudor
pastoralism, Shakspere makes the princely youths dissatisfied
with their mentor's one-sided doctrines, and eager to taste the
forbidden fruit of worldly experience'. As Guiderius trenchantly
retorts to his foster-father's lecture
'Haply this life is best,
is
If quiet life be best; sweeter to you
That have a sharper known, well corresponding
With your stiff age; but unto us it
A cell of ignorance, travelling a-bed;
A prison for a debtor, that not dares
To stride a limit.'
Similarly Arviragus laments that their uneventful life will
provide them with no stock of memories for old age, and that,
bred among beasts, they have a share in none but 'beastly'
qualities. Belarius has to own that instinct is more powerful
than discipline :
'Though train'd up thus meanly
I' the cave wherein they how, their thoughts do hit
The roofs of palaces; and nature prompts them,
In simple and low things, to prince it much
Beyond the trick of others.'
These words guide us to what is (more than any other) the
central idea binding together the two sections of the play.
Nature will have her rights, and it is useless to seek to arbitrarily
override them. The princely youths, though reared in a cave,
pine for the court, which is their native air, while Imogen, whom
the accident of their abduction has made heiress to the throne,
yearns for the seclusion of domestic life, and thus has chosen
¹ Contrast Spenser's treatment in the conventional pastoral style of a
similar situation. In The Faerie Queene, Bk. VI. 9, the old shepherd
Meliboee, who had spent ten years of his life at court and seen its 'vainness,'
discourses to Sir Calidore on the superiority of the 'lonely, quiet life' of the
country. The knight hangs on his words, and at once resolves to abandon
the world's gay shows and betake himself to this 'safe retire.'
XVI]
515
Cymbeline.
a man of humble fortunes as her husband. She had even longed,
in the pain of separation from Posthumus, to be 'a neat-herd's
daughter,' with him as their neig bour shepherd's son. Her wish
is, in essence, fulfilled when, in her disguise, she enters Belarius'
cave, and is made a member of the rustic household. She
feels drawn by a subtle spell towards the two youths whose noble
bearing belies their surroundings, and she takes part with zest in
the simple duties of this primitive life. Guiderius is enthusiastic
about her neat cookery, which cuts their roots in character, and
sauces their broth till it is a diet for the gods. How happy
could she be with such companions, were it not for the sorrow
that wrings her heart and eats her strength away! To cure her
feebleness, she partakes of a potion for whose virtue Pisanio has
vouched, but which has the effect, unknown to him, of producing
for a time the appearance of death. Thus Arviragus, returning
from the hunt, finds her stretched, stark, with pillowed cheek,
and arms 'leagued' across her breast. He bears her forth
reverently to burial, and in a scene of exquisite elegiac tender-
ness vows to sweeten her sad grave with summer's fairest flowers,
pale primrose, harebell, and eglantine. And the climax of
idyllic beauty is reached when the princely pair 'sing to the
ground' the brother' who has been taken from them, while
the white-haired Belarius throws 'strewings' into the open grave.
But the lovely ceremonial is not all in vain, for fortune has
given Imogen the strangest of partners in these obsequies.
Cloten, arrayed in a garment of Posthumus, had pursued her to
Milford, bent on carrying out an odious scheme of revenge, but
had fallen in with Guiderius, who, provoked to an encounter by
his ribaldry, had cut off his head. Belarius, recognizing in him.
the queen's son, bids him be buried as a prince, and thus he is
laid in the same grave as Imogen. When the latter wakes
from her trance, it is to find herself lying, as she thinks, beside
the headless body of her husband, and in a not very conse-
quential monologue she charges Pisanio with being his murderer.
In the midst of her frantic outcries she is found by the Roman
ambassador, of whom she had formerly been in search, and who
takes this supposed page, mourning for a dead master, into his
service.
L12
516
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
But it is no longer needful that, to be near her husband,
Imogen should be carried to Rome. Cymbeline's refusal of
tribute has produced an invasion of Britain by the imperial.
troops, with Iachimo as leader, and Posthumus enrolled as
a volunteer. The latter (whose complete disappearance from
the scene during Acts iii. and iv. is a serious defect in plot-
construction) has repented of his outburst of murderous fury
against his wife, and is now anxious to atone for it as best he
may. Thus, though he has enlisted in the Roman ranks, he
arrays himself before the battle as a British peasant, and in this
disguise seeks an inglorious death, while fighting on behalf of
his country. But the heroic exploits of Guiderius and Arvi-
ragus, and of their foster-father whom they have persuaded to
join in the fray, give victory to Cymbeline's forces, whereupon
Posthumus, bent on courting his expiatory doom, resumes his
Roman uniform, and lets himself be captured by his countrymen.
The vision which appears to him in prison, introducing a deus
ex machina of the most frigid type, and bequeathing the material
legacy of an oracular scroll, is a strange excrescence, unworthy
to precede the marvellously dexterous final scene in which all
the tangled knots are untied. The deathbed confession by the
queen at this crisis of her nefarious purposes has perhaps too
much the air of a theatrical coincidence; and Iachimo's similar
repentance is curiously sudden. But his open recital of his
misdeeds in the presence of his two disguised victims is intensely
dramatic, as is Posthumus' sudden, fierce outcry of self-accusa-
tion and agonized mourning over his lost Imogen, 'his queen,
his life, his wife.' Then follows the supreme stroke of the
play, when Imogen flings herself with an appealing cry upon
her husband's breast, and, maddened by what he deems the
mocking play of a 'scornful page,' he strikes her to the ground.
But Pisanio is at hand to tell his master, he 'ne'er killed Imogen
till now,' and in a moment Posthumus' arms are around the
bride, whose forgiveness he has done more to earn than most of
Shakspere's erring lovers. The sky is again for an instant
overcast by the sentence of death that follows Guiderius' con-
fession of having slain Cloten. But Belarius reveals the identity
of the princely youths, and Cymbeline's joy is only surpassed by
XVI]
517
Cymbeline.
that of Imogen, who thus 'loses,' as she had longed to do,
a kingdom,' and gets instead 'two worlds.' The whole situation
is summed up in Cymbeline's graphic description:
'See,
Posthumus anchors upon Imogen ;
And she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye
On him, her brothers, me, her master, hitting
Each object with a joy the counterchange
Is severally in all.'
:
The scene of reconciliation and reunion is crowned when
Posthumus, the forgiven, forgives in turn Iachimo, and Cymbe-
line, carrying out his maxim that 'pardon's the word for all,'
grants his prisoners their liberty. Even the political issues are.
affected by the prevailing spirit of harmony, and Cymbeline,
though victor on the field, submits to Caesar, and agrees to pay
the tribute which had been withheld at the instigation of the
dead queen.
So quixotic a surrender of the fruits of a hard-
fought campaign is a fitting close to a work whose fantastic
remoteness from ordinary experience gives it much of its peculiar
charm —a charm which is ill-served by the criticism that seeks
in this dramatic romance the same profound moral significance
as in the tragedies or historical plays '.
1 Thus Gervinus asserts that the play 'treats uniformly throughout two
opposite ideas or moral qualities, namely, truth in word and in deed
(fidelity), and untruth and faithlessness, falseness in deed or perfidy, falseness
in word or slander.' He illustrates this at length, with much ingenuity,
and it is true that it is one of the recurring motives of the play. But it is
only by a forced method of interpretation that the idyllic under-plot can
be brought to centre round the principle of fidelity, apart from the fact that
Gervinus' analysis gives an exaggerated importance to Pisanio. Kreyssig
finds the key to the play in the principle that motive rather than outward
character determines the moral worth of an action. Thus Imogen disobeys
her father about her marriage, to preserve her nature from the violation
of an odious union; the court physician deceives, with good intent, the
queen who has bidden him prepare poisons; Pisanio disobeys his master's
instructions to murder Imogen, and is thus more faithful than if he carried
out his orders; Imogen gives a feigned account of herself to the Roman
ambassador, and trusts the gods to pardon a harmless falsehood. Similarly,
in the under-plot, Belarius steals the boys of Cymbeline, to bring them up
in heroic virtue; the boys commit the apparent offence of loving Imogen,
their true sister, better than their supposed father, and they disobey Belarius.
when he tries to keep them away from the battle where their true duty
lies. But though Kreyssig's principle of interpretation thus embraces
much of the play, it does not cover what is the chief incident-the wager
on Imogen's chastity. Another connexion of idea between the plots has
518
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
THE WINTER'S TALE, which was first printed in the
Folio of 1623, was seen by Forman at the Globe on May 15,
1611. He does not say that it was a new piece, but its metrical
characteristics assign it to this or the preceding year. It has no
rhyme in the dialogue, the percentage of double endings is.
3109, and of light and weak endings together is 5'48. It was
- probably the last complete play that Shakspere wrote, though it is
convenient to treat it before The Tempest, in which the drama-
tist's final mood finds its ideal expression. The source of the
drama is Greene's novel Pandosto, or, as it was afterwards named,
Dorastus and Fawnia. It is a piquant coincidence that Shak-
spere should thus, at the close of his career, have again ‘beautified
himself' with his old rival's 'feathers.' It looks like a farewell
demonstration of his supremacy by the upstart crow' of twenty
years back, which must have been enough to make Greene turn
in his grave. The unfortunate 'Roberto' has not however gone
quite unavenged. His story, in spite of its great popularity
with the reading public, was in many respects a damnosa hereditas
to a dramatist, and even Shakspere could not transform it into
a play with unity of motive or of action. In fact his alterations
have gone far to rob the tale of such cohesion as it possessed in
its original shape, for the charm of numerous scenes must not
blind us to the violation of all structural principles in a play
made up of two totally dissimilar parts united by a merely
mechanical bond. The Winter's Tale exhibits, beyond any
work of Shakspere, the characteristic defects of Romantic
drama, and it could not have been written at the period when
he was working with energies strung to their highest intensity.
The original of As You Like It, as of The Winter's Tale, was
a novel combining the pastoralism made fashionable by the
Arcadia with the Euphuistic sententiousness and mannerism
of speech. But how unequal is the power shown in dramatiz-
ing the two tales! As You Like It is wanting in incident,
but it is a piece of exquisitely harmonious design, flawless in
been suggested in the text, but it does not extend over all parts of the play.
In fact, Cymbeline, like The Merchant of Venice, introduces variations on
more than one theme, but it is useless to seek for a single dominant motive
giving complete moral or dramatic unity to its composite materials.
XVI]
519
The Winter's Tale.
its perspective, and steeped throughout in one atmosphere.
Yet Shakspere departs from the original story less than he
does in The Winter's Tale, where more drastic changes fail
to produce an equally successful result. In Greene's novel
Egistus, King of Sicily, visits Pandosto, King of Bohemia, who
is inflamed with a sudden jealousy of his guest and his own
wife Bellaria. Egistus escapes his fury, but his wife dies in
consequence of the treatment to which she has been subjected.
Her new-born child, Fawnia, has meanwhile been committed to
the waves and winds, and is borne to the coast of Sicilia, where
she is reared up by honest shepherds. It is with her subsequent
fortunes that the main part of Greene's narrative deals. Dorastus,
Egistus' son, is destined by his father to marry a Danish
princess, but he sets love at defiance, and Cupid, in revenge,
leads him, when hawking, into the presence of Fawnia. He
becomes enamoured of her, and before his father has discovered
their attachment, escapes with her on board ship. On the same
ship is the shepherd, carrying trinkets that prove her true origin.
A storm drives them to Bohemia, where Pandosto falls in love
with his own daughter. When all is explained, he commits
suicide in despair.
Shakspere, to whom unnatural complications of passion were
abhorrent, eliminates the entire episode of Pandosto's (Leontes')
incestuous love, and substitutes his reunion with Bellaria (Her-
mione), who, in the play, does not die, but lives concealed for
sixteen years. Such an ending is far more satisfactory to our
moral sense, and the scene where the living statue steps down
from the pedestal into her husband's arms is one of the most
beautiful in the dramatist's writings. Yet the change is not
altogether an artistic improvement. In Greene's story the
jealousy of Pandosto towards his queen had been the prologue to
the main narrative, of which Fawnia is the centre. In the course
of her tangled love-romance, the girl not only secures happiness
for herself, but is made by destiny, who is the presiding genius
of the story, the instrument of vengeance for her mother's
wrongs. This effective bond between the opening incidents of
the tale and its later stages is lost in Shakspere's version,
where the relations between the jealous king and his wife are
520
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
lifted into the foreground of the action, and the fortunes of their
daughter become a subordinate and almost entirely detached
episode.
It is on the count of faulty general design that The Winter's
Tale must make its serious reckoning with criticism, which will
grant it a ready absolution for its audacious defiance of historical
and geographical proprieties. In that continent unknown to
map-makers where Bohemia has a sea-shore, and Delphos is an
island, the daughter of the Russian emperor may well have her
statue carved by the Italian Julio Romano, and the oracles of
Greece may flourish side by side with the Warwickshire Whitsun
pastorals. Such a fantastic medley of periods and places is one
of the recognized 'properties' of the romance-writer, and to
solemnly assail it is merely to tilt at windmills, especially as
Shakspere does not here repeat the error made in Cymbeline
of introducing a section of real history which fits awkwardly
into the rest of the airy fabric.
It is only in a region outside the normal conditions of human
life that the jealous passion of Leontes could originate. Othello's
antecedents and the circumstances of his marriage conspired
with Iago's fiendish arts to plunge him into an agonized frenzy
of suspicion. Even Posthumus has some plausible grounds for
his loss of faith in Imogen's virtue. But Leontes' jealousy is
sheer midsummer madness. Because Polixenes, his friend from
childhood, after having refused his request to tarry longer in
Sicily, yields to the entreaties of Hermione, he concludes that
the pair are guilty of misconduct, and lets his fancy run riot in
sensual imaginings for which there is no shadow of a pretext¹.
The courtesies of intimate friendship he wilfully misconstrues.
Into lascivious dallyings, though the woman whom he thus
Insanely suspects of dishonouring herself and him has given
every hostage of chaste fidelity in love. The daughter of an
emperor, she has the stately composure of one born in the
purple, though she can unbend in playful merriment with those
1 The origin of the king's jealousy is far less plausible in the play than
in Greene's novel, where we are told of Egistus and Bellaria's constant
intercourse while Pandosto was occupied with state affairs. They grew
to such a secret uniting of their affections that the one could not well be
without the company of the other.'
XVI]
521
The Winter's Tale.
(
who are dear to her. Her passions,' as Mrs. Jameson has said,
' are not vehement, but in her settled mind the sources of pain
or pleasure, love or resentment, are like the springs that feed
the mountain lakes, impenetrable, unfathomable, and inexhaust-
ible.' She had not been quickly moved to bestow the treasure
of her heart's loyalty upon Leontes. As he himself reminds
her,
'Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,
And clap thyself my love: then didst thou utter,
"I am yours for ever.
Thus the pledge of her troth was, with a nature like hers, no
impulsive outburst, but the solemn, irrevocable surrender of her
whole being. She may with right claim that she loves her
husband 'not a jar o' the clock behind what lady she her lord.'
All about her feel the singular spell of her character, which
blends in such rare perfection majesty and sweetness. The
terms by which she is addressed 'most sacred lady' and 'dread
mistress' tell of the reverence in which she is held by the
members of the court, and Paulina in the closing Act gives voice
to the common judgement when she cries,
'If one by one you wedded all the world
Or from the all that are took something good
To make a perfect woman, she you kill'd
Would be unparallel'd.'
Hence when Leontes suddenly blurts out the foulest accusations
against this high-souled matron, even his regal authority cannot
overawe his subjects into assent. The old lord Camillo roundly
declares that he would not stand by to hear his sovereign
mistress clouded so without taking instant vengeance. He is
aghast at Leontes' suggestion that he should poison Polixenes,
and merely feigns compliance that he may warn the intended
victim of the plot, and hasten his departure before his life is
taken.
Leontes instantly concludes that Camillo, who has joined
Polixenes in flight, has been an agent in the intrigue between
his visitor and the queen. He bursts into the chamber where
Hermione is making merry with Mamilius, and in the presence
522
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
of her boy and her waiting-women flings the vilest epithets in
her face. Hermione does not cower, like Othello's timid bride,
under the torrent of her husband's calumny, nor does she flash
out into indignant recrimination. She meets his gross charges.
with dignified calm :
'How will this grieve you
When you shall come to clearer knowledge that
You thus have publish'd me! Gentle my lord,
You scarce can right me throughly then to say
You did mistake.'
Even the heartless and insulting order for her imprisonment
cannot break down her stately self-restraint. Her eyes do not
moisten with 'vain dew,' but lodged at her heart is the honour-
able grief' which burns worse than tears drown.' Nor would
she have her women bewail her fortunes:
'Do not weep, good fools;
There is no cause: when you shall know your mistress
Has deserv'd prison, then abound in tears
As I come out.'
But though Hermione disdains to plead her own cause,
she
has eager advocates in the Sicilian court, whose singularly
wholesome and genuine atmosphere-the very antithesis to that
of the palace at Elsinore-makes Leontes' paroxysm of jealousy
all the more wanton. An unnamed lord offers to stake his
life on the queen's innocence, and Antigonus roundly asserts
that
'Every inch of woman in the world,
Ay, every dram of woman's flesh is false,
If she be.'
But Hermione's most energetic champion is Antigonus' wife,
Paulina. She is entirely a creation of Shakspere, and were she
not warranted a Sicilian, we should take her to be a kinswoman
of Kent in King Lear, whom she resembles alike in her loyalty
and her unbridled freedom of speech. She bears into the king's
presence the daughter born before its time to Hermione in
prison, and heedless of his threats and appeals to her husband
to silence her, she speaks her mind with an intemperate candour
that stirs Leontes to yet more ungovernable rage. In his frenzy
of suspicion he charges Antigonus with having incited his wife
XVI]
523
The Winter's Tale.
to this hot-headed outburst, and orders him, as a penalty, to
carry the new-born babe to some desert place, beyond Sicilia's
borders, 'where chance may nurse or end it.' In one respect
only does Leontes' conduct support his statement that he is not
a tyrant. He consults the oracle of Delphi on the question of
his wife's guilt¹, and in open court whither he hales her
'To prate and talk for life and honour 'fore
Who please to come and hear,'
he bids Apollo's message be unsealed and read aloud. The god
does not, after his wonted fashion, take refuge in ambiguities,
but pronounces an unequivocal verdict in the queen's favour.
Leontes, in baffled rage, denies the truth of the oracle, and bids
the sessions proceed. But his impiety is swiftly punished. A
servant rushes in with the news that Mamilius, who had pined
away through grief at the dishonour done to his mother, has
that moment died. Leontes sees in this the judgement of the
powers above upon his profane defiance of their declared will:
'Apollo's angry, and the heavens themselves
Do strike at my injustice.'
He repents of his insane suspicions as impetuously as he had
conceived them, and thinks to repair quickly the evil that he has
wrought. He will be reconciled to Polixenes, 'new woo'
Hermione, and recall the good Camillo. But the path of repen-
tance is not made so smooth for wrong-doers in these last
plays as in the comedies, and Leontes, in especial, has to atone
for his misdeeds by the long-drawn discipline of a 'saint-like
sorrow.' Hermione has fainted at the news of Mamilius' death,
and has been borne off in her swoon. Paulina declares that the
shock has been fatal to her, and bids the king betake himself to
¹ Greene with greater consistency makes Pandosto consult the oracle not
of his own initiative but at Bellaria's entreaty. Shakspere probably felt
that such an entreaty would not come appropriately from the lips of the
stately Hermione. The dramatist has however made great improvements
on the novelist's account of the announcement of the oracle. Greene makes
Pandosto at once repent, when Apollo's message has been read, and shortly
afterwards tidings come of the death of his son Garinter. How infinitely
finer is Shakspere's version, where Leontes at first defies the oracle, and
is only made to bow to the divine verdict, when the news is brought of
Mamilius' death.
524
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
nothing but despair. But it is a device of the quick-witted
woman to wring Leontes' heart with the extremity of repentant
anguish. Hermione is still living, and is destined to a reunion
with her lord, though sixteen years must first roll over their
heads. If the incidents of the play were supposed to conform
to any standard of probabilities, we might wonder not only how
the queen's presence close to the palace could be so long entirely
concealed, but how Paulina's impulsive nature could bear the
burden of her momentous secret till after Perdita's recovery.
Shakspere, however, is not concerned to give plausibility to
these strange events of his own devising, and all curious ques-
tionings are stilled in our rapt concentration upon the impressive
closing scene. Hermione's stately repose of bearing fits her in
unique degree to impersonate her own statue, and the dramatist.
has heightened the effect of the episode by the most subtle
strokes of his art. Leontes' criticism that Hermione was not so
wrinkled, as she appears in stone, and Paulina's answer that the
sculptor has carved her as she would look had she lived; his
instinctive desire to kiss her hand, checked by the warning that
the statue is but newly fixed, and the colour not dry; his
growing wonder at this mockery of life by an art so rare that it
can counterfeit breath and the motion of the eye;—all these
touches intensify the agitation of the scene, and prepare us for
the startling climax, when the statue steps down from the
pedestal, and proves capable of movement and of speech. But
with fine instinct Shakspere does not lengthen out this episode.
After Hermione's long seclusion few words befit her lips, and
a silent surrender to her husband's embrace, followed by a prayer
of blessing on her daughter's head, are sufficient tokens to those
who know her nature of the measureless joy that floods her
being at this reunion with those she loves.
The idyllic episode of Perdita's fortunes is on an entirely
different plane from the wellnigh tragic history of her parents.
Antigonus, whom Shakspere substitutes for the blind agency of
fate in Greene's romance, carries the babe to Bohemia, because
a dream has led him to believe that Polixenes is its father. His
mission ended, he is got rid of by a bear which opportunely
appears, while his companions meet their fate in an equally
XVI]
525
The Winter's Tale.
seasonable storm. Thus Perdita is abandoned, and is found
by honest shepherds, who, enriched by the treasure left for her
support, grow prosperous and rear her in the simple graces and
enjoyments of the country-side. But though this queen of
curds and cream' is the most purely pastoral figure amongst
Shakspere's characters, the dramatist has not here, more than
elsewhere, transported us into a conventional atmosphere.
Greene, in spite of fresh and natural touches which are never
wanting in anything that he wrote, portrayed Fawnia and
Dorastus as the typical Arcadian nymph and swain, whose
long-drawn amorous soliloquies and dialogues leave little room for
the more matter-of-fact concerns of rural existence. But the love-
story of Florizel and Perdita is played out against a background
which is borrowed in the main from the realities of Warwick-
shire life. Thus Perdita's foster-father's description of his old
wife's conduct at a sheep-shearing feast suggests to us no sylph,
but a buxom dame ready to turn her hand to anything, and
showing the effects of ale and exercise:
'She was both pantler, butler, cook;
Both dame and servant; welcom'd all, serv'd all;
Would sing her song and dance her turn; now here,
At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle;
On his shoulder, and his; her face o' fire
With labour and the things she took to quench it,
She would to each one sip.'
Dorcas and Mopsa with their free tongues and ready trust in
the marvellous, so it be set down in print, are typical country
wenches, and the clown, Perdita's supposed brother, is a thick-
witted yokel, who cannot do a simple sum without counters,
and who loves a 'ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter
merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung
lamentably.' It is small wonder, and no such great pity, that he
and his like should be eased of their spare cash by so bewitching.
a rascal as Autolycus, who skips nimbly in the rear of the long
line of Shak pere's merry-makers. The purses of country
bumpkins are the natural perquisite of this inimitable rogue, of
whom Gervinus is far too harsh a censor when he declares that
the gallows were his due. Dowden treats him with more dis-
criminating leniency: the art of thieving as practised by him.
526
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
is no crime, but the gift of some knavish god. He does not
trample on the laws of morality, but dances or leaps over them
with so nimble a foot that we forbear to stay him.' He has
qualified for his avocation of 'a snapper-up of unconsidered
trifles' by an apprenticeship to varied crafts. He has been
servant to Prince Florizel, and when whipped out of court has
been ape-bearer, process-server, and bailiff. One trade is as
good as another to this light-hearted and light-fingered vagabond,
who just at present finds a pedlar's pack the most convenient
introduction into those circles of rustic society where purses are
to be had for the picking. What door is there that can remain
shut against so welcome an intruder, who hath ribands of all
the colours i' the rainbow, inkles, caddisses, cambrics, lawns,'
and who sings them over, as they were gods or goddesses?
Who can withstand an invitation to buy, so musically warbled,
or when all the other senses are stuck in ears,' can be aware
of nimble fingers stealing in and out of well-filled pockets?
It is amidst these fresh and breezy surroundings that Shak-
spere has set the idyll of Perdita's wooing. Even this he has
shorn of its more artificial elements. The preliminary sighings
and searchings of heart which fill so many pages of Greene's
romance have but the faintest echo in the drama, and the lovers
are shown to us at once in the fulness of their bliss. The
sheep-shearing feast, of which Perdita is the queen, is an
exquisitely appropriate addition to the story. It is in these dainty.
ceremonial rites that rural life catches a transient tinge of
Arcadian hues; and Perdita, 'most goddess-like pranked up' in
her festal weeds, belongs alike to the real and the idyllic worlds.
As she scatters her flowers among the guests at the feast, she
seems to us, as to her lover, 'no shepherdess, but Flora peering
in April's front,' and the inmost spirit of the English woodlands
haunts the lines in which she bewails her lack of the springtide
blossoms :
'Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength.'
XVI]
527
The Winter's Tale.
So fond is she of these lovely children of Nature that she will
not plant gillyvors among them, because they owe their pied-
ness partly to art. What, we wonder, would she have said
to the tree 'alphya,' the herb 'anita,' the herb 'ephemera,' and
the similar portentous botanical species, which, following the
precedent of Lyly, Greene strewed plentifully through his novel.
We doubly enjoy the fragrant charm of Perdita's woodland
posies when we realize that they are Shakspere's substitute for
the bastard growths of the Euphuistic forcing-house.
The mixture of dignity, modesty, and tact with which the
mistress of the feast plays her part impresses even those who
have come to it with wrath against her in their breasts. Polix-
enes and Camillo attend the gathering in disguise, to entrap
Florizel in the company of his humble mistress, but they are
fain to admit her charm:
'This is the prettiest low-born lass, that ever
Ran on the greensward: nothing she does, or seems,
But smacks of something greater than herself:
Too noble for this place.'
How fully she merits such praise is shown when Polixenes
reveals himself and denounces Florizel for proving false to his
duty as a sceptre's heir. Her high spirit resents the slur which
the king casts on the shepherd class, to which, as she thinks, she
belongs:
'I was not much afeared: for once or twice,
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly
The selfsame sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on all alike.'
Yet she has no wish to be wedded to a lover whose fortunes
she will mar. She bids Florizel be gone, and leave her to milk
her ewes and weep. But with the fine disregard of a true hero
of romance for everything but the promptings of his heart, he
clings closer to his mistress in adversity, and, careless of all
other ties, takes flight with her over seas.
At Camillo's sugges-
tion he puts in at Sicilia, where Perdita's true origin is speedily
revealed, and the lovers united amid paternal benedictions. In
Greene's novel Dorastus had to pay for his escapade by a period
of imprisonment, but Shakspere spares Florizel this ordeal.
Kreyssig is, in fact, scandalized that a youth who has thrown to
528
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the winds his filial and princely obligations should be so richly.
rewarded, but romance has its own standards of right and
wrong, and within its borderlands the lover who, come foul,
come fair, is true to his heart's queen, has performed the whole
duty of man.
THE TEMPEST was probably written towards the close of
1610. In the summer of 1609 a fleet under the command of Sir
George Somers had been overtaken by a storm, and the admiral-
ship the Sea-Venture' had been separated from the other
vessels, and driven on the Bermuda coast, where it became fast
lodged and locked between two rocks. The crew escaped, and
having built themselves two boats of cedar, set sail for Virginia,
where they re-embarked for England in June 1610. An account
of the wreck entitled A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise
called the Ile of Divels, was written by Sylvester Jourdan, one of
the survivors, and published in October 1610.
So many
passages in The Tempest recall Jourdan's descriptions that
Shakspere must have had them before him. Thus we have the
allusion to the still-vexed Bermoothes' (Act i. 2); the ques-
tion of Stephano on his first encounter with Caliban, 'Have we
devils here?' the separation of the King's ship from the rest of
the fleet, and the miraculous preservation of the shipwrecked
mariners. These and similar coincidences between play and
pamphlet cannot have been accidental, and The Tempest, it is
reasonable to conclude, was written while Somers' perilous
adventure was still an eager topic of discussion. The internal
evidence supports this view. The style and metre have all the
characteristics of Shakspere's last period. The percentage of
double-endings is 33, as compared with 31 in The Winter's
Tale; of light and weak endings together it is 4.59, while in
The Winter's Tale it is 5.48. Probably The Tempest is slightly
the earlier of the two plays ¹.
¹ An ingenious argument in favour of this view was first stated by Collier.
In The Winter's Tale Shakspere does not represent the infant Perdita as set
adrift at sea in a rudderless boat, though this incident occurs in Greene's
novel. The plausible inference is that, having used this device in The
Tempest, the dramatist did not care to repeat it, and introduced a vari-
ation in the later work. In any case the two plays are not far apart in
date, and they are classed together by Ben Jonson in his sarcastic references
XVI]
529
The Tempest.
Besides the hints in Jourdan's pamphlet we do not know of
any source for the incidents of The Tempest, though Shakspere
probably found the name Setebos in Eden's History of Travaile,
and he may have borrowed details in his description of the
enchanted island and its inhabitants from Hakluyt's collec-
tion of Voyagers' Tales. There is, however, a remarkable.
similarity between the main plot of The Tempest and a German
play, Die Schöne Sidea, by Jacob Ayrer of Nürnberg, who died
in 1605. English actors were in Nürnberg in 1604 and 1606,
and performed a Sedea in good German' in 1613. Thus it is
by no means unlikely that Shaksperę heard an account of
Ayrer's play from some member of a travelling company, and
made use of it for his own purposes.
The Tempest is akin in theme to the other dramatic romances.
It tells of cruel wrongs from kinsman to kinsman, of exile and
severance, of strange reunions after many years. But in form
and method it is a singular contrast to Pericles or The Winter's
Tale. In these dramas romantic licence is pushed to its ex-
treme limits; the scene shifts across long leagues of sea, and Act
in The Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614): If there be never
a Servant-monster i̇' the Fayre who can helpe it, he sayes: nor a nest of
Antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that
beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drollerics. Another quotation from
Ben Jonson has been made by Elze (Essays on Shakspere, pp. 1-29) the
starting-point of an elaborate attempt to prove that The Tempest was
written not in 1610 or 1611 but in 1604. In Volpone (Act. iii. 2) acted
1605, an allusion is made to thefts by English authors from Montaigne.
The principal passage in Elizabethan literature borrowed from the French
essayist is Gonzalo's speech in The Tempest (Act ii. 1) describing his ideal
Utopian commonwealth. Elze considers that Jonson is alluding to this
passage, which Shakspere had found in Florio's translation of Montaigne,
1603. In support of his theory that the play dates from 1604 he points to
the similarity between Prospero's prophecy beginning like the baseless
fabric of this vision' and some lines in Darius, a tragedy by the Earl of
Stirling, 1603. He asserts that Stirling's lines made a great impression
upon Shakspere and involuntarily dropped from his pen while still fresh
in his memory.' But this parallelism may easily have been accidental, for
the transitoriness of all earthly things is a commonplace of thought; and
with regard to the argument from Volpone, it is most unlikely that Jonson,
in speaking of thefts from Montaigne, could have been alluding to a passage
in which the essayist's description of an ideal commonwealth is finally
turned into ridicule. Elze is obliged to allow that the play must have
belonged to the period when Shakspere was severing his connexion with
the stage; but to escape the consequences of this admission, he arbitrarily
antedates Shakspere's retirement to Stratford.
M m
530
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
is parted from Act by the interval between infancy and maiden-
hood. For this extravagant looseness of structure The Tempest
substitutes the compact framework of a classical play satisfy-
ing the strictest demands of the 'Unities.' The action occupies
about three hours, and takes place within the narrow bounds
of a desert island. We are almost tempted to believe that
Shakspere was bent on demonstrating by a tour de force with.
what triumphant ease he could turn from one dramatic method
to another. But he had in reality a weightier motive. In
a piece where enchantment was to be the dominant agency, he
aimed at a wise economy in its display. The human mind
finds it difficult to realize the supernatural, especially in its most
exalted aspect of omnipotent power. In bringing it in this
form upon the stage Shakspere sought to give it plausibility by
confining its operation to a single spot and to the briefest period
of time.
Similar had been his treatment of magical influences in
A Midsummer Night's Dream, and, as in this early play, he does
not plunge us straightway into an enchanted atmosphere. The
drama opens with a realistic scene of storm and shipwreck
which transports us from the outer, every-day world, into the
mystic domain where natural law is shut out. It is a desert
island, set in a lonely sea, whither by accident most strange at
rare intervals ships are drifted by ocean currents or unruly winds.
The only dwelling is a cell weather-fended by trees; the food is
the simplest that nature yields-fresh-brook muscles, 'crabs'
and pignuts, clustering filberts, and 'young scamels from the
rock.' Its scenery is richly varied. It has 'hills, brooks,
standing lakes and groves,' meadows with 'lush and lusty'
grass, jungles of 'toothed briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss and
thorns.' The atmosphere is of a 'subtle, tender, and delicate
temperance, and there float through it mystic melodies, lulling
those who hear them into dreamy repose'.
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again.'
xvi
531
The Tempest.
Haunting every inch of the enchanted ground, though rot to be
seen of mortal eye, are fairy forms, footing it featly on the
yellow sands, or treading by moonlight the greensward into
magic ringlets. These are the sole aboriginal denizens of the
island, and of their kin is the dainty Ariel. As his name tells, he
is a spirit of the air, though he has affinity too with the element
of fire. 'Like air and fire he can penetrate everywhere,
treading the ooze of the salt deep, running upon the sharp
wings of the north, doing business in the veins of earth when it
is baked with frost. His natural speech is music or waves of
air. His ideas are the ideas associated with the atmosphere—–
liberty and omnipresence: to be "free as mountain winds," to fly
on the bat's back merrily, couch in the cowslip's bell, live under
the blossom that hangs on the bough'.'
But the island had been invaded by spirits of another sort.
The blue-eyed hag, Sycorax, banished from Argier for 'sorceries
terrible,' had been abandoned by sailors on the desert shore,
and there had borne a 'freckled whelp,' with the devil for sire.
Ariel she had made her servant, but because he was 'a spirit
too delicate' to act her abhorred commands, she had imprisoned
him within a cloven pine. Ere his release she died, leaving her
son Caliban lord of the island. This monster, 'not honoured
with a human shape,' is the complete antithesis to the Being of
air and fire. He is connected with the lower elements of earth
and water, as is shown by the terms in which he is addressed.
But if he thus typifies the grosser natural forces, he also
represents (by a curious anticipation of modern theories already
foreshadowed in Lear and Timon) primitive humanity only risen
an inch above the brute stage, and made to all appearance more
animal than the beasts of the field by the gift of faculties which
enlarge its scope for evil. Caliban is doubtless an anagram for
Cannibal; and with his merciless derision of visionary Arcadian
fancies, Shakspere was probably substituting this uncouth sketch
of barbarism in its natural colours, for the idealized pictures of
the noble savage' which were being palmed off then, as later,
upon a too confiding public.
1 Moulton, Shakspere as a Dramatic Artist, p. 257.
M m 2
532
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
For a time this creature, half-monster, half-man, had ruled
the island, and been as he proudly claims his own king.' But
the dynasty of the savage had been overthrown-and in Shak-
spere's time there were abundant instances of this in East and
West--by the advent of civilized man. He too had come in
the form of a refugee. Prospero, Duke of Milan, ‘rapt in secret
studies,' had thrown all the cares of government upon his
brother Antonio. For this neglect of his duties he had paid
a heavy penalty. Antonio, covetous of the ducal title as well as
power, had done homage to the King of Naples, and with his aid
had thrust Prospero from the royal seat. Hurried through the
gates of Milan at dead of night, the deposed ruler, with his
infant child Miranda, had been stowed in the 'rotten carcass of
a butt' and left to the mercy of wind and wave. They had
been drifted to the shores of the desert island, and there Prospero
had begun life anew. He had learnt the sharp lesson of
adversity, and henceforth he shows himself a master of circum-
stances, swift to act and inflexible of will. Still possessed, through
Gonzalo's friendly offices, of his precious books, he had learnt.
their inmost secret, and attained to supernatural dominion over
the forces of earth and sky. But, unlike Marlowe's Faustus, he
had not used his power for personal ends. He had worked
a beneficent revolution in the island, freeing Ariel from his
captivity, and seeking to educate Caliban to a higher level. The
history of the intercourse between the civilized man and the
savage in most epochs is epitomized in the relations of Prospero
and the son of Sycorax. It had begun with an interchange of
benefits; as Caliban declares:
'When thou camest first,
Thou strok'dst me and mad'st much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in 't; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I lov'd thee
And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place, and fertile':
But his further progress in education had given far from satis-
factory results.
The 'native' is always apt to be demoralized
in the transition from his instinctive barbarism to a civilization
XVI]
533
The Tempest.
he imperfectly comprehends. So it had been with Caliban.
His 'profit' from learning language is that he knows how to
curse, and his gratitude for Prospero's care of him is shown
in an attack upon Miranda's honour. Thereupon follows his
degradation to slavery. In dread of stripes and torture he
performs menial offices, and his last state is undeniably worse
than his first.
Such has been the ancient history' of the island, unfolded to
us in the second scene of the play, which serves the purpose of
a classical prologue. Even this remote spot, we thus realize,
is not an uneventful Arcadia; it has had its rise and fall of
dynasties, it has known conflict, passion, and crime. And now
another momentous crisis is at hand. By accident most strange,
Prospero's enemies, on their return from the marriage of
Alonso's daughter to the King of Tunis, have been drifted close
to the island, and the storm with which the play opens is no
natural outburst of elemental fury, but the product of enchant-
ment, a device of the great magician for bringing his foes within
the immediate circle of his power. That power has no limits:
and thus in The Tempest we miss one main source of dramatic
interest, the struggle between man and circumstance. But we
get rich compensation. Prospero, without Satanic aid, has
realized Faustus' aspiration; he is the sound magician' who
by virtue of his art is a 'mighty god.' Thus he can order events
at will; and in his actions we see Shakspere's conception of
a divine being's attitude towards the mortals under his sway.
For the shipwrecked company contains varied types of
humanity, from youthful innocence to the most hardened
villany, and Prospero, holding them in the hollow of his hand,
metes out to each, as he thinks due, punishment, reward, or
pardon.
In Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, his infallible insight
detects a prince of truly noble strain, graced alike in form and
soul. Such a one, grown to peerless manhood among the cor-
rupting influences of his father's court, merits a peerless guerdon,
and Prospero deems him worthy of his daughter, a 'thrid' of
his own life. It is an unparalleled tribute, for Miranda is
'created of every creature's best'; she is the wonder-child of the
534
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
enchanted island, wellnigh too ethereal to be mated to any of
the sons of men. Reared among the 'untrodden ways' she has
drawn into her blood the influences of this tropical solitude;
she might have inspired the modern poet's vision of a maiden
moulded into grace by the silent sympathy' of elemental
things:
'The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."
Save her father, and the half-brute Caliban, whom she fears
to look on, she has known no human creature, and her char-
acter is without the complexity bred by artificial surroundings.
The primal instincts of womanhood, as Shakspere conceived.
them, tenderness, modesty, simple faith in good, alone stir
her breast. So unlearned is she in worldly experience that
when Ariel's music draws Ferdinand to her father's cell she
takes him for a spirit, 'a thing divine.' The prince, in equal
amaze, salutes her as 'the goddess on whom these airs attend.'
Thus at the first sight,' as Prospero whispers, 'they have
changed eyes'; but even on the desert island Shakspere will
not permit a purely idyllic courtship. The enchanter, lest too
light winning make the prize light, puts Ferdinand's mettle to
the test; he has to give more solid proof of his loyalty than
amorous vows and sighs. Spite of Miranda's pleading, he is
imprisoned in the cell, and set to the rough task of log-piling.
But confinement and drudgery are blithely borne for his sweet
mistress' sake; and, though sore wearied, he gallantly forgoes
the help she tenderly proffers him in his toil. He knows that
the truest freedom can only be found in bonds-the bonds of
self-sacrificing love:
'Hear my soul speak:
The very instant that I saw you did
My heart fly to your service; there resides,
To make me slave to it; for your sake
Am I this patient log-man.'
Similar is the spirit that prompts Miranda when with 'the
XVI]
535
The Tempest
plain and holy innocence' befitting a child of nature she lays
her whole allegiance at her lover's feet:
'I am your wife, if you will marry me;
If not, I'll die your maid; to be your fellow
You may deny me; but I'll be your servant
Whether you will or no.'
Thus, in absolute self-surrender, the two young hearts find
a higher, holier liberty than of old, and as Prospero gazes
unseen at this fair encounter of two most 'rare affections,' his
'rejoicing at nothing can be more.' Ferdinand has nobly
stood his probation, and the enchanter may now throw off the
mask, and entrust Miranda to his tested loyalty. A pageant
played by spirits celebrates this contract of true love,' and the
marriage blessings invoked upon the twain had probably here,
as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, more than a purely dramatic
significance.
6
Ferdinand in his new-found joy shows a surprising unconcern
about the loss of his relatives, but they too, after different
fashion, are experiencing the effects of Prospero's dispensation.
Alonso, his brother Sebastian, and Antonio are three men of
sin,' but there are degrees in their guilt, as is speedily shown.
The King of Naples, heart-broken by the belief that his son is
drowned, already feels prickings of conscience for past mis-
deeds, and would fain still them in slumber. 'I wish mine eyes
would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts.' The strains of
Ariel's music soon lull him and others of his company to sleep,
but Antonio and Sebastian remain wide awake. It seems as if
Prospero had deliberately created a situation to lure them on to
display the full depth of their villany. For Antonio, as he sees
Alonso at his mercy, and thinks of Ferdinand sunk beneath the
waves, spies his opportunity for a deed of blood that will set
Sebastian on the throne of Naples, and free Milan from the
tribute that its new overlord will gratefully remit. He has just
overcome the scruples of his less stalwart associate in crime,
and their swords are already at their victim's breast, when Ariel's
music awakes the sleepers, and the King's life is saved. But
not 'for one repulse' will the twain forgo their purpose;
they are resolute to 'take throughly' their next advantage at
536
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
nightfall. Ere then, however, they learn that even in these
solitudes there is an eye that watches guilt. The supernatural
banquet to which the shipwrecked company, wearily exploring
the island, find themselves bidden by strange shapes, suddenly
vanishes amidst thunder and lightning; and to their bewilder-
ment they are confronted instead by Ariel in harpy-form,
denouncing their past misdeeds, and threatening them with
'lingering perdition worse than any death,' whence their only
loop-hole of escape is 'heart-sorrow and a clear li'e ensuing.'
Again we see the grades among the 'three men of sin.'
Antonio and Sebastian, in a spirit of reckless defiance, rush
eagerly with drawn swords after the vanishing 'fiend.' Alonso
is stricken into an agony of remorse:
'O, it is monstrous! monstrous !
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i' the ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.'
But the wrongdoers are to 'taste' yet further the 'subtilties
o' the isle.' Their power of action is suddenly suspended, and
they are drawn by irresistible influence to the grove that
'weather-fends' Prospero's cell, where for a space they are left
entranced.
Meanwhile another conspiracy has been on foot, for the
island which Gonzalo innocently pictures as the seat of an
Arcadian commonwealth seems to have a revolutionary infec-
tion in its air. Stephano and Trinculo, two rascally Neapolitans.
washed ashore from the wreck, fall in with Caliban, and one
draught from the drunken butler's bottle is enough to make
the 'moon-calf' his abject worshipper. Again Shakspere roughly
brushes away any fancies concerning unsophisticated humanity.
We see the savage, on whom the higher gifts of civilization had
been vainly showered, welcoming rapturously its least desirable
product. Prospero's lessons, moral and mental, had not con-
soled Caliban for the loss of sovereignty, but he is eager to sell
his birthright for a mouthful of 'celestial liquor':
XVI]
537
The Tempest.
I'll kiss thy foot; I'll swear myself thy subject,
I'll show thee the best springs, I'll pluck thee berries;
I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!
I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,
Thou wondrous man.'
Thus the standard of revolt is raised against Prospero's rule,
and to celebrate the event Caliban roars out a drunken Ode to
liberty:
'No more dams I'll make for fish;
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring,
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish:
'Ban, 'Ban, Ca-Caliban,
Has a new master: get a new man.
Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! freedom! hey-day, freedom !'
The demi-brute cannot grasp the conception of true freedom
consisting in service, which, as Dowden has suggested, is a
thought running through the play. And a fit echo is provided
in Stephano's chant, the Marseillaise of the enchanted island':
Flout 'em and scout 'em
And scout 'em and flout 'em ;
Thought is free.'
But the event proves unworthy of these opening heroics.
A triple alliance based upon a bottle is shaky from the outset,
and the high contracting parties are soon at cross purposes.
The spell of Ariel's music leads them a dance through thorns
and briers into a 'filthy-mantled pool,' whence they struggle
out with the 'infinite loss' of their bond of union. Caliban has
at least the merit of being firm to the original plan of campaign,
but his partners are easily lured from it by the bait of some
paltry plunder, and the conspiracy pour rire ends in fiasco
at the mouth of Prospero's cell.
Thus the enchanter has the criminals, high and low, in his
power awaiting sentence from his lips. A god in might, shall
he not also prove a god in forgiveness?
The rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.'
Prospero's is the divine justice, already held up for man's
example in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure,
538
[CH.
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
wherein mercy has the foremost place. Yet it is a mercy
without weakness, for though all sins are pardoned, the chief
offender, Antonio, is sternly rebuked and bidden surrender the
fruit of his misdeeds:
'For you most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault: all of them; and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce, I know
Thou must restore.'
The scene recalls in certain aspects the 'pageant' of the Last
Judgement in the Miracle Cycles. Here as there an omnipotent
being pronounces doom upon the creatures summoned before
his bar, though, under Prospero's dispensation, mercy is not
withheld even from the demi-devil' Caliban.
The parallel suggests a wider inference. The world has agreed
to recognize in the enchanter's speech abjuring his 'rough magic'
the farewell not only of Prospero to the wonderful island, but of
Shakspere to the stage. And even though The Tempest be not
strictly his last work, the popular instinct can scarcely be quite
at fault:
'Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.'
What graves could let forth their sleepers, even at magic's
command, in the unpeopled island? The sepulchres unclosed
by the enchanter's spell are not to be sought there, but in the
dark backward and abysm of time'; and the sleepers resum-
moned to the upper world are the bloodless phantoms of the
past thrilled by the elixir of genius into a second, more splendid
life. Theirs is an imperishable renewal of youth fed from the
deepest sources of existence. For amidst the tumultuous riot
of the Renaissance age Shakspere towers in massive strength,
like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved.' His hands are stretched
to gather in the full heritage of the world's experiences, but his
feet are planted, like the feet of his ancestors, firm on the
pedestal of moral reality. He is at the core a true child of his
race. His is the supreme type of the Anglo-Saxon organizing
genius, employed in the imaginative not the material sphere.
Others, of his own day, began the expansion of England over
XVI]
539
The Tempest.
seas, but what appanage has ever been added to the British
crown, so marvellously ordered throughout, or so inalienable,
as the magnificent dominion shaped in twenty short years by
the imperial faculty of the Stratford dramatist out of the seething
elements of the 'new-birth'? With that dominion we could not
part, were it to gain
'Another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite.'
The most patriotic of Roman poets, as he sang of the eternal
city and her mission among men, claimed for her triumphs in
war and government, but not in art:
'Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera;
Credo equidem; vivos ducent de marmore vultus ;
Orabunt causas melius; coelique meatus
Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.'
With Shakspere for her own, England has to make no similar
renunciation. To conquer and colonize is instinctive in the
veins of the sea-kings' sons, but it was an unparalleled grace
of fortune that predestined the mightiest Teutonic ‘organizer of
victory' to the creative, not the active sphere. The glories
of the Armada and of Waterloo may be repeated, but whence
shall be born a second Hamlet or Othello? How then take
more fitting farewell of their creator than in his own words:
'Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?'
APPENDIX A.
The relation of Henry VI, Parts II and III to The First Parts of the
Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York.
(This appendix is chiefly based on Miss J. Lee's paper on Parts II
and III of Henry VI and their originals in the Transactions of the New
Shakspere Society, 1875).
Parts II and III of Henry VI appeared for the first time in the
Folio of 1623. They are recasts of two older quartos, The First Part
of the Contention, published 1594, and The Tragedy of Richard, Duke
of York, published 1595. Out of 3075 lines in Henry VI, Part II, some
520 were taken from The Contention without any change, and some 840
with but little alteration. In Part II!, out of 2902 lines, about 1010 were
transferred from The True Tragedy, besides 871 which were slightly
altered. It has been asserted by some critics, of whom Mr. Fleay is the
latest, that the quartos are merely imperfect transcripts of Henry VI,
Parts II and III, instead of being earlier plays out of which the latter were
developed. But there are conclusive reasons against this view: (1) The
versification of The Contention and The True Tragedy belongs to the
pre-Shaksperean era, and we should have to assume that the transcriber had
mentally dropped back into the metrical style of an earlier period of
dramatic poetry. (2) Particulars are related in The Contention and The
True Tragedy of which there is no mention in Henry VI, Parts II and III,
and which a transcriber would not have invented and inserted. (3) Some of
the finest passages in Henry VI, Parts II and III are omitted in The Con-
tention and The True Tragedy, though inferior lines occurring in the same
speeches are given at length. It is incredible that a transcriber should have
left out material of high poetic value while accurately reproducing far
inferior stuff. There can thus be no doubt that the quartos are not merely
spurious copies of Henry VI, Parts II and III.
But the more difficult question follows: Who wrote the four plays?
The answers that have been given fall into the following chief groups.
(a) Theobald, Johnson, Steevens, Knight, Schlegel and Tieck, followed in
more recent times by Ulrici and Delius, ascribe all four plays to Shak-
spere. (6) Halliwell-Phillips, Clark and Wright, Grant White, and
Appendix A.
541
Swinburne, consider that Shakspere wrote Henry VI, Parts II and III, and
that he had a hand in the authorship of The Contention and The True
Tragedy. Grant White, who has supported this view with much ability,
holds that Shakspere wrote The Contention and The True Tragedy in
partnership with Marlowe, Greene, and possibly Peele, and that in taking
passages and sometimes whole scenes from these plays for his King
Henry VI he did little more than reclaim his own. (c) Malone, Hallam,
Collier, Gervinus, and Kreyssig consider that Shakspere wrote Henry VI,
Parts II and III, but had no part in The Contention and The True Tragedy,
which they ascribe to Marlowe or Greene. Miss J. Lee adopts a modified
form of this view. She denies to Shakspere any share in The Contention
and The True Tragedy, which she looks upon as the work of Marlowe and
Greene (with the possible help of Peele), and she claims for Marlowe
a share with Shakspere in Henry VI, Parts II and III. Her reasons for
ascribing the authorship of the quartos solely to Marlowe and Greene are
as follow: (1) The True Tragedy (and probably The Contention) were
acted by Lord Pembroke's men, who produced none of Shakspere's plays.
(2) They were published by Millington, and afterwards by Pavier, who
printed none of Shakspere's undoubted works. (3) Neither the edition of
1594-95 nor of 1600 bore Shakspere's name, though none of his undoubted
plays were issued anonymously after 1598. (4) Lord Pembroke's men
performed plays by Greene and Marlowe. (5) Greene's attack upon
Shakspere in the Groatsworth of Wit as 'the upstart crow, beautified with
our feathers, with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide,' implies that
the younger man had appropriated work done by him and his friends.
The italicized line is a parody of the line 'The tiger's heart wrapped in
a woman's hide,' which occurs both in The True Tragedy and in Henry VI,
Part III; and the most natural inference is that in the latter play and in
Henry VI, Part II, Shakspere had adopted some of Greene's contributions
to The True Tragedy and The Contention. It is probably to this that the
writer of some lines entitled Greene's Funeralls refers, when he declares:
'Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him,
Nay more, the men that so eclipst his fame
Purloined his plumes: can they deny the same?'
(6) The scanty proportion of rhyme in The Contention and The True
Tragedy points to Marlowe as one of their authors. (7) In both plays
there are a number of grammatical constructions and turns of phrase which
are common with Greene and Marlowe, but are seldom or never found in
Shakspere's writings. (8) A number of lines are reproduced with little or
no alteration from Marlowe's works, and there are remote allusions and
proverbial sayings which have their parallels in Greene.
On these grounds Miss Lee ascribes The Contention and The True
Tragedy to Marlowe and Greene, and attempts a division of plays in which,
speaking broadly, she assigns the characters of King Henry VI, Beaufort,
York, Suffolk, Margaret, Richard, and the Cliffords to Marlowe, and Duke
542
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
Humphrey, Eleanor, Clarence, Edward IV, Elizabeth and Jack Cade to
Greene. She admits however that Cade has no prototype in Greene's un-
doubted works, and it is almost incredible that the creator of the Pinner of
Wakefield should have given so unsympathetic a sketch of the representative
of popular aspirations and grievances. The temper of the 'Cade' scenes is in
complete harmony with Shakspere's treatment of mob-leaders, and if he had
any hand in the old plays it is probably here that it is to be found.
That it was Shakspere who, out of these old plays, created Henry VI
Parts II and III, cannot be doubted. Heminge and Condell would not
have included them in the Folio of 1623 unless they knew for certain that
Shakspere had written the chief portions of them; and moreover, in the
Epilogue to Henry V the dramatist alludes to the events of Henry VI's
reign-
'Which oft our stage hath shewn, and for their sake
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.'
He thus asks for favour to his play of Henry V because a drama dealing
with Henry VI, and evidently written by himself had become popular.
Internal evidence confirms the Shaksperean authorship of the plays. Many
of the epithets and phrases which occur in them can be paralleled from
Shakspere's undoubted works. Dr. Furnivall has drawn attention to the
extensive use of animal metaphors and similes' in the plays, and is
inclined to question whether these are from Shakspere's hand. But other
of the dramatist's early works, especially the Lucrece, present something of
the same feature, which is due partly to recollections of Stratford life, and
still more to the predominant influence of Euphuism, whose most peculiar
note was the extravagant use of natural history for purposes of comparison.
But in the remodelling of The Contention and True Tragedy into
Henry VI, Parts II and III, Shakspere almost certainly had the help of
Marlowe, for a number of passages occur in the revised plays which bear
his stamp. The lines for instance in Part II of Henry VI (iv. 1) beginning,
The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day,' must have been written by him,
or by some unusually successful imitator of his style. And the incorpo-
ration of so much of the older plays in the revised versions is more easily
accounted for on the assumption that Marlowe, who had the chief share in
The Contention and The True Tragedy, contributed certain portions to
Henry VI, Parts II and III.
APPENDIX B.
PERICLES.
HENRY VIII. THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN.
To Shakspere's last period belong certainly two, probably three, plays,
of which he was only in part author. PERICLES was published in 1609
in quarto, with an elaborate title-page, naming Shakspere as the writer, and
stating that the play had been acted by 'His Majesty's Servants at the
Globe.' Other quartos followed in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635. The play
is omitted in the first two folios, but is introduced into that of 1664, with
six other dramas, none of which are by Shakspere. Its appearance in this
suspicious company might well throw doubt on its genuineness, for which
the name of Shakspere on the quarto editions is an insufficient guarantee,
owing to the fraudulent practice in vogue of recommending plays or poems
to the public, by ascribing them to some favourite writer. Still the pre-
sumption is that a drama, acted by Shakspere's company, and issued with
his name during his lifetime, was at any rate in part by him, and we find it
expressly ascribed to him by Shephard in 1646, Tatham in 1652, and
Dryden in his prologue to Davenant's Circe, 1677. Dryden's words are
remarkable, for they explicitly speak of Pericles as one of Shakspere's
carliest productions:
'Your Ben and Fletcher, in their first young flight,
Did no Volpone, nor no Arbaces write,
Shakspere's own Muse his Pericles first bore,
The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moor.
"Tis miracle to see a first good play:
All hawthorns do not bloom on Christmas day.'
Yet when internal evidence is brought to bear upon the authorship of the
play, we find that in so far as it supports Shakspere's claim, it proves the
work to belong not to his first but his last period. The incidents of the
birth of Marina at sea, her separation from her parents and ultimate
recovery, and the restoration of Thaisa, as from the dead, to her husband's
arms, are so strikingly similar to the events in The Winter's Tale that it is
evident that the scenes in which they occur must have been written by the
same author within the same period of his career. This is fully borne out
544
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
by the metrical evidence; the language in these portions of Pericles, which
include the greater part of Acts iii to v, has the elliptical pregnancy
characteristic of Shakspere's final period; there are few rhyming lines, and
the percentage of light and weak endings is 4.17. If, therefore, the play
was an early production of the dramatist, the last three Acts must have
been completely remodelled about 1608-9, just before the issue of the first
quarto, and it would be in the first two Acts that we must look for the
youthful Shakspere's handiwork. When we turn to them we find them
indeed marked off from the rest of the play by a looser rhythm and by the
frequent occurrence of rhymed lines in the dialogue. But the metrical
effect is not akin to that of Shakspere's earlier plays; double endings are
too frequent, and, as Delius has pointed out, the rhyming couplets are
often introduced into the middle of speeches in a manner unusual with
Shakspere. Moreover, the incidents in these first two Acts, the visit of
Pericles to the palace of the incestuous King Antiochus, his guessing of the
riddle, his subsequent wanderings, his shipwreck near Pentapolis, and his
achievements at the court of Simonides, have scarcely any connexion with
the later events of the play. Had Shakspere been revising a youthful
production of his own it seems improbable that he would have left us this
dramatic hotch-potch as the result of his labours.
It is thus wellnigh certain that Acts i and ii are by another hand, and
Fleay argues with great force that they must have been added after the
Shaksperean scenes were written. But his and Delius' identification of
this inferior collaborateur with George Wilkins is very doubtful. Wilkins
in 1608 published a novel entitled 'The Painful Adventures of Pericles,
Prince of Tyre, being the true history of the Play of Pericles, as it was
lately presented by the worthy and ancient poct John Gower.' This novel,
which, as the title sets forth, is directly founded on the play, is styled
by Wilkins in his dedication' a poore infant of my braine.' From this the
critics mentioned have drawn the extremely hazardous inference that
Wilkins was part-author of the original drama. But if he was, why did he
not mention the fact in a less equivocal phrase, and why did he suppress all
mention of his fellow-workers? Why should Wilkins, supposing he had
written part of the play, have turned it into a novel at all? and do not
his own words, if interpreted naturally, apply better to an original prose
rendering of a story dramatically treated by others than to a recast of
materials already handled in any way by himself?
Admitting then that Acts i and ii and the Gower chorus introducing
Act iii are by a second writer, whom we cannot identify, we have still to
inquire whether there are evidences of a third hand in the play. For the
majority of Gower's speeches in Acts iv and v are in five-foot instead of
four-foot measure, as in the preceding Acts, and their language is free from
the studied use of antique phrases so noticeable in the earlier choruses.
Moreover, the highly unpleasant scenes 3, 5, and 6 of Act iv, which there
is a natural repugnance to ascribe to Shakspere, seem yet to be the product
of a more powerful pen than that responsible for Acts i and ii. It is
Appendix B.
545
therefore possible that a third hand may have contributed these portions,
but their Shaksperean authorship is not to be so decisively rejected as
some critics assume. The most repellent features in the scenes mentioned
may be paralleled from Measure for Measure, and here, as there, they are
not introduced from sheer love of foulness. They throw the virginal figure
of Marina into brilliant relief, by exhibiting her untainted purity amidst
the most contaminating surroundings. And in the dialogue there are
touches worthy of the great dramatist, e. g. the sudden rise from prose to
verse in Act iv. 6, when Marina appeals to Lysimachus in lines that have
a true Shaksperean ring:
'If you were born to honour, show it now;
If put upon you, make the judgement good
That thought you worthy of it.
O that the gods
Would set me free from this unhallow'd place,
Though they did change me to the meanest bird
That flies i' the purer air.
So too the opening chorus of Act v, describing her occupations after her
escape from captivity, contains distinctively Shaksperean expressions and
ideas: e.g.
'Deep clerks she dumbs; and with her neeld composes
Nature's own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry,
That even her art sisters the natural roses;
Her inkle, silk, twin with the rubied cherry.'
Here the use of the word 'inkle' which occurs in The Winter's Tale and
the description of Marina's needlework as counterfeiting nature to the life,
Loth suggest the hand of Shakspere, who always adopts this realistic
criterion of art.
Pericles is too much of a patchwork to offer much scope for aesthetic
criticism. It contains, as Dowden has said, 'the motives of much that was
worked out more fully in later dramas, and may be said to bear to the
Romances somewhat of the same relation which The Two Gentlemen of
Verona bears to the comedies of love which succeeded it in Shakspere's
second dramatic period. Marina, like Perdita, is a child lost by her
parents, and, like Perdita, we see her flower-like with her flowers-only
these flowers of Marina are not for a merrymaking, but a grave. The
melancholy of Pericles is a clear-obscure of sadness, not a gloom of cloudy
remorse like that of Leontes. His meeting with his lost Marina is like an
anticipation of the scene in which Cymbeline recovers his sons and daughter;
but the scene in Pericles is filled with a rarer, keener passion of joy. And
again, the marvellous meeting between Leontes and Hermione is anticipated
by the union of Pericles and his Thaisa.'
KING HENRY VIII may be assigned with practical certainty to
1612-1613. A letter of Thomas Lorkin to Sir T. Puckering, on June 30,
1613, mentions the burning of the Globe Theatre during a performance of
N n
546
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
the play: No longer since than yesterday, while Burbage and his company
were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII, and there shooting of
certain chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched it.' From another
contemporary letter, of Sir Henry Wotton, we learn that the piece was of
recent date: 'I will entertain you at the present with what happened this
week at the Bankside. The King's players had a new play called All is
True, representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which
was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty.
Now King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's house,
and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other
stuff wherewith one of them was stopped did light on the thatch where . . .
it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming, within less than
an hour, the whole house to the very ground.'. Wotton mentions the play
by what evidently was its second title, explained by the repeated assertion
in the Prologue that the audience are to witness a representation of
'chosen truth.' This explicit external evidence is confirmed by metrical
tests, which place Henry VIII among Shakspere's very latest works.
Setting aside the scenes which, as will be shown, are beyond reason-
able doubt from another hand, we find that the proportion of double
endings is 1 to 3, of unstopt lines 1 to 2-03, the percentage of light
and weak endings together 7.16, and the number of rhymed lines 6.
In face of such a conclusive combination of external and internal
evidence no weight can be attached to Elze's theory, in his Essays on
Shakspere, that the play with its apology for Henry, its glorification of
Anne Boleyn, and its apotheosis of Elizabeth' must have been written to
commemorate some festive occasion towards the end of the maiden queen's
reign, probably the seventieth anniversary of her mother's wedding, April
12, 1603. The death of Elizabeth on March 24 prevented, according to
Elze's view, the play being used for its original purpose, but in 1613 it was
produced in remodelled form, with the part of Katharine considerably
'written up,' and with the complimentary references to King James
inserted for the occasion.
A fatal objection to this theory is that no part of the play bears the
slightest trace of Shakspere's earlier manner. But, on the other hand,
eleven out of the seventeen scenes into which Henry VIII is divided have
metrical characteristics which do not appear in any of Shakspere's works.
Most prominent among these is the extraordinary frequency of double
endings, which in these scenes is 1 to 1.7. This is a peculiarity of
Fletcher's versification, and in the general structure of language and in
rhythm these portions of the play have the unequivocal stamp of the
younger dramatist's style. This was first pointed out by Spedding in his
paper on Henry VIII in The Gentleman's Magazine, August 1850, re-
printed in New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874. His conclusions
were immediately confirmed in No. 43 of Notes and Queries by Hickson,
who had arrived independently at exactly similar results. According to
both these writers, whose views have been endorsed by all later English
Appendix P.
547
critics, Shakspere is the author of Act i. Scenes 1, 2; Act ii. Scenes 3
and 4; Act iii. Scene 2 (to the exit of the King); and Act v. Scene I; the
rest of the play is from the hand of Fletcher.
This joint authorship goes far towards explaining the weak impression
made by the play as a whole. 'The interest,' as Spedding has said,
'instead of rising towards the end, falls away utterly, and leaves us in the
last Act among persons whom we scarcely know and events for which we
do not care. Our sympathy is for the grief and goodness of Queen
Katharine, while the course of the action requires us to entertain as
a theme of joy and compensatory satisfaction the coronation of Anne
Bullen and the birth of her daughter; which are in fact a part of
Katharine's injury, and amount to little less than the ultimate triumph
of wrong. . . . This main defect is sufficient of itself to mar the effect of
the play as a whole. But there is another, which though less vital, is not
less unaccountable. The greater part of the fifth Act, in which the interest
ought to be gathering to a head, is occupied with matters in which we
have not been prepared to take any interest by what went before, and on
which no interest is reflected by what comes after. The scenes in the
gallery and council-chamber . . . are utterly irrelevant to the business of
the play; for what have we to do with the quarrel between Gardiner and
Cranmer?' And what possible relation has this to the fate of Wolsey or
of Katharine, with which we have been hitherto concerned?
The question follows, on what plan did Shakspere and Fletcher conduct
their joint labours, for the outcome to be so unsatisfactory? Spedding's
hypothesis is as follows: 'It was not unusual in those days when a play
was wanted in a hurry, to set two or three, or even four, hands upon it;
and the occasion of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage (Feb. 1612–13) may
very likely have suggested the production of a play representing the
marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Bullen. . . . Since it is by Shakspere
that all the principal matters and characters are introduced, it is not likely
that the general design of the piece would be laid out by another. I should
rather conjecture that he had conceived the idea of a great historical drama
on the subject of Henry VIII, which would have included the divorce of
Katharine, the fall of Wolsey, the rise of Cranmer, the coronation of Anne
Bullen, and the final separation of the English from the Romish Church,
which being the one great historical event of the reign, would naturally be
chosen as the focus of poetic interest; that he had proceeded in the exccu-
tion of this idea as far perhaps as the third Act, which might have
included the establishment of Cranmer in the seat of highest ecclesiastical
authority (the council-chamber scene in the fifth being designed as an
introduction to that); when, finding that his fellows of the Globe were in
distress for a new play to honour the marriage of the Lady Elizabeth with,
he thought that his half-finished work might help them, and accordingly
handed them his manuscript to make what they could of it; that they put
it into the hands of Fletcher (already in high repute as a popular and
expeditious playwright), who, finding the original design not very suitable
N 1 2
548
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
to the occasion, and utterly beyond his capacity, expanded the three Acts
into five, by interspersing scenes of show and magnificence, and passages of
description and long poetical conversations, in which his strength lay;
dropped all allusion to the great ecclesiastical evolution, which he could
not manage and for which he had no materials supplied him; converted
what should have been the middle into the end; and so turned out
a splendid "historical masque, or shew-play," which was no doubt very
popular then, as it has been ever since.'
From the fragments of Shakspere's work in Henry VIII no very definite
conclusions can be drawn, except that if the dramatist had returned in his
old age to the composition of historical plays the language would have been
close-packed and elliptical, thus contrasting strongly with the diffuse rhe-
toric of Richard III and John, or the even, musical flow of Henry IV and
Henry V. Of the characters, Queen Katharine alone makes an entirely
consistent impression. Her unmerited sufferings, and the fortitude with
which she meets them, her quiet dignity, befitting the wife and daughter of
a king, united to her whole-hearted charity and power of forgiveness, make
her akin to Hermione, though she lacks something of the statuesque self-
repression of the heroine of The Winter's Tale. It is evident that if
Shakspere meant the play originally to turn on the separation of the
English from the Roman Church, the adherents of the latter would at least
have had no cause to complain of the picture drawn of one of its repre-
sentative figures. Wolsey appears in a much more equivocal light. In the
'o'er-great cardinal' Shakspere had the opportunity of drawing a type
which in earlier days he had handled with masterly skill in the Pandulph
of King John. But Wolsey does not stand out in as firm portraiture as his
predecessor. The main design of his character is that of an ambitious,
covetous prelate, with worldly instead of spiritual aims, arrogant towards
the old nobility, and an oppressor of the poor. Yet his summary arrest of
the Duke of Buckingham is proved to be fully justified, and in the matter
of the divorce the king entirely supports his assertion that he is innocent of
having broached the business to him, or having spoken a word to the
prejudice of Katharine. We are, therefore, quite unprepared for his
precipitate fall in the next Act, owing to Henry's accidental discovery of
an inventory of his vast wealth and the miscarriage of his letter to the Pope
begging him to stay the judgement. But it is to Fletcher, not Shakspere,
that is due the final reaction of sympathy towards him evoked by the
beautiful lines in which he bids a long farewell to all his greatness, and
counsels the faithful Cromwell to mark his fall and fling away ambition.
Henry, as he appears in the play, is a less interesting figure than either his
queen or his minister. His faults are tenderly handled, and he is repre.
sented as a masterful but law-abiding and conscientious ruler. He remits
the excessive taxation imposed by Wolsey, and grants to Buckingham, who
has threatened his life, a fair trial. He acknowledges readily the 'rare
qualities' of Katharine, 'the queen of earthly queens,' and presses for
a divorce purely from religious scruples and zeal for his kingdom's safety.
Appendix B.
549
Even his victims, Buckingham, Katharine, and Wolsey, pray, after their
fall, for blessings on him, though it is noticeable that in all three cases the
speeches are due to Fletcher, and are doubtless inspired in part by the Stuart
doctrine that the king can do no wrong.
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN was printed in 1634, and according
to the title-page, it had been 'presented at the Blackfriers by the King's
Majesty's servants with great applause,' and was written by the memorable
worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakspeare, Gent.'
This is the only piece of external evidence connecting Shakspere with the
authorship of the work. It is omitted in the folios, and did not, like Pericles,
appear during his life in quarto form. Hence we are thrown back upon
internal evidence for the decision whether Shakspere had in reality a share
in the work, and, if so, what parts are to be assigned to him. The problem
thus raised has produced some of the most original and suggestive Shak-
sperean criticism of this century. As early as 1811 Coleridge maintained
that there is the clearest internal evidence that Shakspere importantly
aided Fletcher' in the composition of the play, and in 1833 he declared
that he had 'no doubt whatever that the first Act and the first scene of the
second Act' are by him. In the same year the first systematic study of the
subject was made by Professor Spalding in an elaborate letter (reprinted in
the New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1876, with Forewords' by
Furnivall). Spalding discusses at length the respective characteristics of
Fletcher's and Shakspere's (later) style. He points out that Fletcher's
verse is sweet and flowing, with end-stopped and double-ending lines; that
he is diffuse both in his leading thoughts and in his illustrations, and, while
poor in metaphor, excels in picturesque and romantic descriptions. Shak-
spere's versification, on the other hand, is broken and full of pauses, with
a much more sparing use of double endings; his style is marked by energy,
obscurity, and abruptness; it is metaphorical to excess, but avoids similes
and elaborate narrative detail. These and other contrasts appear in various
parts of the play, and guided by them Spalding assigned to Shakspere Act i,
Act iii. 1, and Act v except Scene 2, the rest of the work being Fletcher's.
The choice of the main plot, taken from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, he attri-
buted to Shakspere on the ground that, unlike Fletcher, he dramatized
familiar stories, and that A Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and
Cressida, and Pericles are, like The Two Noble Kinsmen, classical tales
in mediaeval garb, while there is no other instance of a similar theme in
Fletcher's writings. The underplot, on the other hand, Spalding assigned
entirely to Fletcher, partly because the madness of the principal character,
the jailer's daughter, seemed to him a weak imitation of the madness of
Ophelia.
At a later date Spalding wavered in his conviction of Shakspere's part-
authorship of the drama. Writing in the Edinburgh Review, July 1847,
he declared: The question of Shakspere's share in this play is really
insoluble. . . . There are reasons making it very difficult to believe that he
550
Shakspere and his Predecessors.
can have had any concern in it; particularly the heavy and undramatic
construction of the piece, and the want of individuality in the characters.'
Meanwhile, however, Hickson, in April 1847, in an essay reprinted in the
New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874, had made a careful investiga-
tion of the whole problem. He supported the main conclusion of Spalding's
'Letter,' that Shakspere and Fletcher were the joint-authors of the work, but
he assigned to the former a larger share of the play, and a more prepon-
derating influence in its construction than the earlier critic had done. He
claimed for Shakspere the design not only of the main-plot but also of the
under-plot, and attributed to him Act ii. 1, Act iii. 2, Act iv. 3, which
Spalding had assigned to Fletcher. His arguments are forcible, and the
conclusions at which he arrives have been in the main supported by Little
dale in his Introduction to his edition of the play, 1882. But Littledale
detects revising touches by Fletcher in Act iii. 2 and Act iv. 3, as also
in Act v. 3 and 4, which both Spalding and Hickson had assigned entirely
to Shakspere.
The critics who thus, with differences in details, support the Shaksperean
authorship of part of The Two Noble Kinsmen, base their conclusions on
those features of style and versification which bear the hall-mark of the
master dramatist. It is perfectly true that in other respects the work is
unlike any of his undoubted writings. The heavy and undramatic con-
struction of the piece and the want of individuality in the characters,' which
gave even Spalding pause in later years, have been emphasized by many
critics, e. g. Furnivall, Stack, and Ingram. But these considerations,
however true in themselves, cannot overrule the argument founded on the
style of numerous scenes. The co-operation too of Shakspere and Fletcher
on Henry VIII lends plausibility to their similar co-operation on The Two
Noble Kinsmen, and had we fuller knowledge of their joint method of
work, we might be able to account in some degree for the peculiarities of
the piece. As things stand, Ingram's summing up of the matter (New
Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874, p. 454) cannot well be improved:
'In reading the (so-called) Shaksperean part of the play, I do not often feel
myself in contact with a mind of the first order. Still, it is certain that
there is much in it that is like Shaksperc, and some things that are worthy
of him at his best; that the manner, in general, is more that of Shakspere
than of any other contemporary dramatist; and that the system of verse
is one which we do not find in any other, whilst it is, in all essentials, that
of Shakspere's last period. I cannot name any one else who could have
written this portion of the play.'
INDEX.
Adam (a Norman Play), 3.
Addison, 465.
Aeneid, 25, 58.
Aeschylus, 1, 23, 286.
Alleyn, 45.
All's Well that Ends Well, 345-
357; also 172, 367, 394.
Alphonsus, King of Arragon, 77,
78, 80.
Amphitruo, The, 169.
Antony and Cleopatra, 473–484;
59, 133.
Arcadia, 30.
Ariosto, his comedy Gli Suppositi,
22, 68, 175; his Orlando Furioso,
78, 302.
Aristotle, 23, 29.
Armada, 33.
Arnold, Matthew, 237, 474.
Arraignment of Paris, The, 73, 75-
As You Like It, 328-343; also 61,
73, 86, 131, 132, 513.
Ayrer, 302, 529.
Bacon, 41, 127, 250, 386.
Bandello, 199, 302, 315.
Barbour, The Bruce, 286.
Bartholomew Fair, 123, 137.
Bates, Miss, 6.
Battle of Alcazar, The, 75-
Baynes, Prof. Spencer, 99, 100, 103,
159.
Beaumont, 322, 355.
Belleforest, Histoires Tragiques, 385.
Benoît de Sainte More, 371.
Beowulf, 368, 408.
Berners, Lord, 67.
Boccaccio, his Decameron, 216, 506;
the Filostrato, 371, 372.
Boisteau, Pierre, 199.
Brooke, Arthur, 199, 200, 201, 202,
203, 2:0, 214.
Browning, 19, 46, 89.
Burbage, Richard, 108, 122, 124.
Campaspe, 67, 68, 73.
Campbell, Lord, 104.
Castell of Perseverance, II.
Cervantes, 297, 384.
Chambers, Mr. E. K., 384, 411.
Chapman, 120, 378.
Chaucer, 3, 10, 15, 19, 20, 33, 161,
182, 371, 376.
Chester Plays, 4, 6, 10.
Chronicle of Edward I, The, 74, 75.
Cicero, 465.
Cinthio, 358, 423.
Cobham, Lord, 260.
Cohn, A., 110.
Coleridge, 311, 351, 358, 439, 449,
473-
Collins, Mr. Churton, 22, 40.
Colonna, Guido, 371.
Comedy of Errors, The, 168-172;
also 101, 132, 137, 173, 183, 184,
186, 197, 315.
Condell, 118, 124, 131, 137, 141,
542.
Confessio Amantis, 216.
Contention, The, First Part of, 540-
542; 144.
Coriolanus, 484-494; also 73, 502.
Council of Vienne, 4.
Coventry Plays, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 17,
97, 107.
Cunliffe, Mr. J. W., 23, 27.
Cursor Mundi, 6, 215.
Cymbeline, 506-518.
Cynthia's Revels, 122.
552
Index.
Dante, 61, 472.
David and Bethsabe, 75.
Decameron, The, 216, 506.
Defense of Poesy, 29, 31.
Dekker, 122, 190.
Delius, 114, 149, 190, 544.
De Quincey, 411.
De Regimine Principum, 236.
Devil (in Miracle and Morality
Plays), 8, 11, 13, 328.
Diana, by George of Montemayor,
190, 331.
Dickens, 322.
Dido, Queen of Carthage, 58-60.
Digges, Leonard, 322, 454, 457.
Doctor Faustus, 45-50; also 30, 58,
532.
Dowden, Prof., 89, 114, 131, 134.
190, 199, 237, 294, 342, 357, 444,
473, 525, 545-
Drake, Sir F., 32, 118, 480.
Drayton, 67, 96, 126.
Dryden, 543.
Dyce, 74.
Edward II, 52-57; also 74, 144.
Elizabeth, Queen, the centre of na-
tional life, 32-33; patron of the
drama, 34, 108; relations with
Shakspere, 121-122; compli-
mented by Peele, 74; by Lyly,
69-72; by Shakspere, 182-183.
Elze, Karl, 93, 102, 104, 110, III,
118, 128, 132, 183, 190, 216, 219,
233, 346, 352, 529, 546.
Endimion, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 183.
Euphues and Euphuism, 66-67, 68,
72, 73, 139, 273, 331, 527.
Euripides, 1, 25, 27, 30.
Everyman. 13.
Every Man in his Humour, 110,
I 22.
Every Man out of his Humour,
122.
Faerie Queene, The (see Spenser,
Edmund).
Faust, 30, 46.
Field, Richard, 110.
Fielding, 322.
Filostrato, 371, 372.
Fischer, Rudolf, 23, 63.
Fleay, Mr., 27, 35, 118, 121, 132,
133, 175, 411, 540, 544.
Fletcher, John, 195, 322, 355; his
share in Henry VIII, 545-549;
share in Two Noble Kinsmen,
549-550.
Fletcher, Laurence, 412.
Forman, Dr., 250, 410, 506.
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 80,
82, 86, 87.
Furnivall, Dr., 114, 133, 134, 542.
Gallathea, 67, 68.
Gammer Gurton's Needle, 21, 22.
Garnier's Cornelia, 62.
Gascoigne, George, Supposes, 22, 25,
68, 175.
3.
Geoffrey (Abbot of St. Alban's),
George a-Greene, 80, 83, 86, 87.
Gervious, 118, 262, 294, 350, 386,
439, 507, 517, 525.
Gesta Romanorum, 216.
Gilbert, Humphrey, 32, 41.
Goethe, 46, 49, 136, 387.
Gorboduc, 24-26, 40, 66.
Gosson, 27, 28, 216, 457, 505.
Gower, 216, 250; introduced as
chorus in Pericles, 544.
Greene, Robert, his dramatic works,
77-88; his wild carcer, 36, 37,
91; attack on Shakspere, 108;
probable share in Henry VI, 144,
540-542; his novel Pandosto the
source of The Winter's Tale, 518–
520, 523-526.
Grenville, 41.
Hakluyt, 33, 314.
Hales, Prof., 101, 190, 250, 411.
Hallam, 36, 114.
Halliwell-Phillipps, Mr., 89, 104,
114, 118.
Halpin, 71, 183.
Hamlet (old play), 63, 384.
Hamlet, 84-408; also 8, 17, 30, 38,
63, 65, 101, 110, 127, 131, 162,
345, 357, 457.
Hathaway, Anne, 104.
Hazlitt, 294, 439.
Heminge, 118, 124, 131, 137, 141,
542.
Henry IV, 259-279; also 83, 106,
132, 235, 236; its relation to Merry
Wives of Windsor, 292–297.
Henry V, 280-291; also 121, 235,
278,355.
Index.
553
Henry VI, 141-149; authorship of,
540-542; 108, 236.
Henry VII, 34.
Henry VIII, 545–549.
Henslowe, 108, 137, 214, 217, 370.
Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke,
118-120.
Hero and Leander, 60-61; also 132,
159, 328.
Hertzberg, 133, 137, 172, 190, 346,
352.
Heywood, John, 15-17, 20, 21.
Heywood, Thomas, 160, 162.
Hickson, Mr., 133, 547, 550.
Hilarius, 3.
Historia de Excidio Trojae, 370.
Historie of Error, The, 169.
Hobbes, 342.
Holinshed, the Chronicler, 9, 33, 52,
150, 236, 249, 272, 288, 411, 438,
454.
Homer, 61, 370°, 377.
Horace, 99, 100, 122, 123.
Hroswitha, 2.
Hughes, Thomas, 26.
Humanum Genus, IL.
Hycke-Scorner, 14.
Ingram, Prof., 133, 550.
Jaggard, William, 162.
James I, 410.
James IV, 80, 81.
Jameson, Mrs., 244, 312, 521.
Jeronimo, First Part of, 62, 63,
137.
Jew, The, 216.
Jew of Malta, The, 50, 216, 217.
Jocasta, 25.
Johnson, Dr., 107, 507.
Jonson, Ben, refers to the Vice, 13;
satirises Tamburlaine, 40; his ad-
ditions to The Spanish Tragedy,
64; references to Shakspere, 99,
121-123, 128, 130, 137, 250, 484,
528; his satire of the Puritans,
322.
Julius Caesar, 457-473; also 139,
454, 507.
Keats, 43, 61.
Kempe, 110, 122.
King Horn, 385.
King John, 238-249; 132.
•
King Lear, 438-453; also 24, 30,
66, 73, 79, 86, 131, 132, 495, 507.
Kirkman, Mr., 441.
· Knight's Tale, 182, 549.
Kreyssig, 118, 137, 206, 210, 219,
257, 294, 310, 341, 377, 386, 453,
517, 527.
Kurz, H, 110.
Kyd, Thomas, his writings, 62-66,
88, 136, 138; probable author of
the pre-Shakspercan Hamlet, 63,
384.
Lamb, Charles, 57, 323, 440.
Landmann, 167.
Langland, 87, 97, 250.
Lee, Miss J., 540.
Lee, Mr. S. L., 93, 126, 164, 217.
Leicester, Earl of, procures royal
patent for his company of players,
34; relations with Elizabeth, 69,
71, 183; death, 127, 345.
Liturgical Plays, 2.
Lloyd, Mr. Watkiss, 359.
Lodge, Thomas, writes part of A
Looking Glasse for London, 84-85;
his novel Rosalind, the source
of As You Like It, 328-343; re-
fers to old play of Hamlet, 63,
384.
Lover's Complaint, A, 163.
Love's Labour's Lost, 163-168; also
90, 100, 107, 114, 175, 188, 189,
302.
Love's Labour's Won, 132, 172,
346.
Love's Metamorphosis, 68.
Lucrece, 160-162; also 100, 113,
II8, 378, 5II.
Lucy, Sir Thomas, 105, 106.
Lusty Juventus, 14.
Lydgate, 161.
Lyly, John, his Euphues and its
influence, 66-67, 331, 527; his
comedies, 68-72; influence on
Shakspere, 73.
Macbeth, 410-423; also 8, 45, 132,
133, 198.
Machiavelli, 19, 37, 81, 151, 491.
Malone, 107, 133, 190, 314, 357.
Manningham, 314.
Marlowe, Christopher, his life and
writings, 36-61; probable share
554
Index.
in Henry VI, 144-148, 540-542 ;
65, 75, 77, 78, 86, 128, 136, 150,
159, 172, 209, 216, 226, 249, 328,
409, 532.
Massacre at Paris, The, 57, 58.
Measure for Measure, 357-369;
also 28, 104, 182, 345.
Menaechmi, 101, 169, 170.
Merchant of Venice, The, 214-234;
also 52, 78, 86, 111, 302, 368,
396, 424.
Meres, Francis, his allusions to
Shakspere, 113, 117, 132.
Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 292-
301; also 21, 87, 90, 100, 105,
121.
Midas, 67, 68, 71, 72.
Middleton, 72, 411.
Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 183–
190; also 8, 73, 122, 173, 214,
332, 337, 401, 496.
Miles Gloriosus, 10, 20, 71, 355.
Milton, 75, 270, 504.
Miracle Plays, 3-11, 15, 17, 27,
28, 33, 75, 538.
Mirror for Magistrates, The, 200.
Misfortunes of Arthur, The, 26.
Montaigne's Essays, 132.
Moral Interludes, 13-15.
Moralities, 8, 11-13, 17, 27, 28,
33, 328.
More, Sir Thomas, 41, 150.
Morgan, Maurice, 273.
Morley, Prof. H., 74.
Mother Bombie, 72.
Moulton, Prof., 154, 223, 228, 419,
531.
Much Ado about Nothing, 301-313;
also 86, 315, 328.
Mysteries, 2.
Nash, Thomas, his satire on Tam-
burlaine, 39; writes part of Dido,
58-60; satire of Kyd, 62, 63,
384; alludes to Henry VI, Part I,
108, 142.
Nature of the Four Elements, The,
14.
North, Sir T., 182, 454.
Norton, Thomas, 24.
Occleve, 236.
Old Wives' Tale, The, 75.
Orlando Furioso, 78, 80, 302.
Othello, 423-437; also 440, 520.
1
Ovid, 36, 100, 113, 122, 141, 159,
161, 182.
Painter's Palace of Pleasure, 27, 199,
346.
Passionate Pilgrim, The, 113, 117,
162.
Pater, Mr. Walter, 366.
Peele, George, his dramatic works,
73-76; 36, 144, 541.
Pericles, 543-545-
Philaster, 322.
Phillips, Augustine, 250.
Phoenix and the Turtle, The, 162.
Piers Penniless, 108.
Plautus, 1, 20, 22, 99, 101, 113, 169,
170, 314, 369.
Plutarch, his relation to Shakspere,
454-457; also 9, 101, 182, 465,
473, 476, 481, 485, 493.
Poetaster, The, 122, 123.
Pollard, Mr. A. W., 2, 13.
Promos and Cassandra, 28, 358.
Puritans, 322.
Raleigh, Sir W., 33, 127.
Ralph Roister Doister, 20, 21, 71.
Redford, John, 14.
Return from Parnassus, The, 113,
122.
Richard II, 249-259; also 57, 74,
121, 235.
Richard III, 149–157; also 132, 249,
390, 422.
Robin Hood, 329.
Rogers, Archdeacon, 4.
Roman de Troie, Le, 371.
Romano, Julio, 520.
Romeo and Juliet, 197-214; also
63, 111, 190, 241, 372, 474.
Rowe, Nicholas, 92, 99, 103, 105,
Icб, 122.
Sackville, Thomas, 24.
Sapho and Phao, 67, 68, 69.
Sarrazin, 62, 63, 385.
Satirical Interludes, 15.
Satiromastix, 122.
Saxo Grammaticus, 385.
Schlegel, 206, 235, 236.
School of Abuse, The, 28, 216.
Sejanus, 110, 123.
Seneca, his influence on English
Tragedy, 23-26; 29, 39, 65, 101,
113.
Index.
555
Sidney, Sir P., his advocacy of
classical dramatic methods in his
Defense of Possy, 29-31, 33, 35,
238; Sonnets, 115; Arcadia, 331,
439; death, 33, 345.
Simrock, 218, 232.
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 74.
Skeat, Prof. W. W., 329.
Soliman and Perseda, 62.
Sonnets, Shakspere's, 113-121; also
128, 163, 344, 389.
Sophocles, 1, 23.
Spalding, Prof., 549.
Spanish Tragedy, The, 63-66; also
62, 138.
Spedding, Mr., 133, 149, 546-547.
Sd,
his Faerie Queene,
33, 268, 302, 373, 438, 514; The
Shepherd's Calendar, 33, 331;
Sonnets, 115; Complaints, 344;
Mother Hubberd's Tale, 386.
Still, John, 21.
Stow, 33, 52.
Stratford-on-Avon, history of, 93-
96; Shakspere's life there, 98-
106, 124-126, 504.
Surrey, Earl of, 25, 200.
Swift, 383.
Swinburne, Mr., 114.
Sylvester Jourdan, 528.
Tale of Gamelyn, 328.
Tamburlaine, 38-45; also 30, 50,
58, 60, 62, 75, 77, 78, 79, 260.
Taming of a Shrew, The, 172, 174,
216.
Taming of the Shrew, The, 172-
181; also 22, ICO, 197, 302, 304,
347.
Tancred and Gismunda, 25.
Tasso, 19, 330.
Tempest, The, 529-539; also 73,
137, 506.
Ten Erinck, 6, 7, 439.
Tennyson's Princess, 167.
Terence, 1, 2, 20, 22, 99, 110, 369.
Theocritus, 330.
Thorpe, Thomas, 115, 118.
Timon of Athens, 494-503; 531.
Titus Andronicus, 137-141; also
100, 450.
Toulmin Smith, Miss, 6, 215.
Towneley Plays, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10.
Troilus and Cressida, 369-384 ;
also 162, 345, 474.
Troublesome Raigne of King John,
239.
True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of
York, The, 540-542; 144.
Twelfth Night, 313-328; also 105,
301.
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 190–198;
also 107, 176, 215, 315.
Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 549–550.
Tyler, Mr., 114.
Udall, Nicholas, 20.
Ulrici, 137, 183, 218, 540.
Venus and Adonis, 158-160; also
100, 110, 113, 161.
Vice, the, 13, 21, 82, 328.
Virgil, 99, 330.
Wakefield, 6.
Ward, Professor A. W., 22, 87, 126.
Webster, 434.
Werner, 386.
Whetstone, George, 28, 358.
White, Mr. Grant, 540.
Wilhelm Meister, 387.
Wilkins, George, 544.
Wilson, Professor, 424.
Winter's Tale, The, 518-528; also
73, 111, 505, 543.
Witch, The, 411.
Woman in the Moon, The, 67, 68.
Wordsworth, 87, 114.
World and the Child, The, 12.
Wright, Mr. Aldis, 385.
Wyt and Science, 14.
York Plays, 4, 5, 8.
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