IC-NRLF 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 PAPERS READ BEFORE 
 THE LITERARY CLINIC 
 
 Published by 
 
 THE LITERARY CLINIC 
 Buffalo, 1916 
 
COPYRIGHT 
 By 
 
 THE LITERARY CLINIC 
 
 1916 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO 
 THE MEMORY OF 
 
 CHARLES P. CLARK 
 DUANE B. TUTTLE 
 FRANK B. CARLTON 
 GOOD CLINICIANS ALL 
 

CONTENTS 
 
 Foreword 
 
 Shakespeare's England 
 Hamlet 
 
 As You Like It 
 King Lear 
 Romeo and Juliet 
 Othello 
 
 v The Tempest 
 These Our Actors 
 A Tribute 
 
 Char Its Elbert Rhodes 
 
 f Pauline H. Nichols 
 ( Bray ton L. Nichols 
 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 F. Hyatt Smith 
 
 346457 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 THE Literary Clinic, now fourteen years old, has 
 heretofore refused to heed the many requests to 
 publish some of its papers. It has not been am- 
 bitious to rush into print. It has been content to have its 
 productions typed and bound for its own archives only. 
 
 The Shakespeare Tercentenary, however, with its na- 
 tural and most fitting emphasis upon the life and works of 
 the greatest writer in our language, has made such a de- 
 mand upon us that we have decided to break our rule and 
 allow others to share some of the good things which we 
 have enjoyed. Hence this volume. It is our modest con- 
 tribution toward the word-wide offering of praise, appre- 
 ciation, and gratitude for Shakespeare. We give it with 
 the hope that it may mean to others something like what 
 the various papers have meant to the Clinic members. If 
 this hope is realized, Shakespeare will occupy a larger 
 place in the lives of such as know and appreciate his 
 matchless work, his interpretation of man to mankind. 
 
 We count ourselves fortunate in having, among our 
 charter members, one who is a ripe Shakespearean 
 scholar, F. Hyatt Smith. Most of his papers included 
 in this volume have been offered orally, as lectures, at the 
 various Chautauquas and other assemblies, at the Uni- 
 versity of Buffalo, where Mr. Smith was the first lecturer 
 in English Literature, and before many literary clubs and 
 other organizations, as well as before The Literary Clinic. 
 Those who have heard them, will now be able to read and 
 to study them. Perchance they will be of still greater 
 value in this more lasting form. 
 
 The paper on Shakespeare's England, the joint work of 
 Mr. and Mrs. Brayton L. Nichols, has been read before 
 the Highland Park Literary Club, the Buffalo Center of 
 
the Drama League and other clubs. When read before 
 the Clinic, it was at once and unanimously decided not 
 only to include it in this volume, but to place it first as an 
 introductory essay. It really introduces to Shakespeare, 
 his times, and his haunts. 
 
 The brief tribute to Shakespeare is of interest to Buf- 
 falonians, because it is the only tribute of its kind, so far 
 as we know, included among the Shakespeare memorials 
 at Stratford. For this, also, we are indebted to Mr 
 Smith. 
 
 The picture of Ann Hathaway's cottage, on the cover, 
 was taken by the president of the Clinic during the sum- 
 mer of 1912. 
 
 CHARLES ELBERT RHODES, 
 
 President of the Literary Clinic, 
 
 Buffalo, N. Y., 
 April, 1916. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 BY 
 
 PAULINE H. NICHOLS 
 BRAYTON L. NICHOLS 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 THE spacious times of great Elizabeth," is the way 
 Tennyson designates the age of Shakespeare, in 
 his Dream of Fair Women. Tennyson was a 
 master of the adjective. Note the fine fitness of that word 
 "spacious," with its suggestion of breadth, ampleness, 
 scope. No other word could so well describe the Eliza- 
 bethans, who dared everything and did so much. 
 
 To understand Elizabethan England, learn what the 
 Elizabethans thought and believed. See what a few years 
 did for them. Not much more than half a century before 
 Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, the New World 
 was discovered. Then came the Reformation. In the 
 1520*8, the first man sailed around the globe. Then came 
 King Henry's break with the Church of Rome. In 1549 
 telescopes were invented, and other worlds swam into 
 the ken. In 1572, when Shakespeare was a boy of eight, 
 the tidings of the massacre of St. Bartholomew came. 
 In 1580 Sir Francis Drake came sailing home, the first 
 Englishman to encompass the earth. All this time Eng- 
 lish seamen were coursing the seas, founding English 
 commerce, and winning the supremacy of the ocean for 
 England, and year in and year out bringing home 
 knowledge of strange countries. In 1588 England estab- 
 lished her power to think for herself, by defeating the 
 Spanish Armada. Tobacco came in, and the potato, and 
 a myriad of other strange commodities, along with usages 
 and fashions from the ends of the earth. Think of the 
 educational value of these things ! The Elizabethan lived 
 in a world without limits. He dared attempt anything. 
 
 That is why the age is so full of great men. Quaint old 
 Fuller, writing half a century afterward, said : "Observe 
 how God set up a generation of military men, both by 
 
 ii 
 
-SHAK'ESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 sea and land, which began and expired with the reign 
 of Queen Elizabeth, like a suit of clothes made for her 
 and worn out with her; for Providence designing a 
 peaceable prince to succeed her, so ordered the matter 
 that they attended their mistress before or after, within 
 some short distance, unto her grave." That was the 
 greatest generation of Englishmen, the generation of 
 Drake and Frobisher, Bacon and Hooker, Shakespeare and 
 Marlowe. As Sir Walter Raleigh says, "If Elizabeth's 
 men were stricken from the roll of fame, England would 
 be robbed of half her glory." 
 
 -That is why Elizabethan England was so full of tumult 
 and riot and imagination. Fortunes were made in a 
 twinkling. It was as restless an age as that of the dis- 
 covery of gold in California. It was a get-rich-quick 
 age, and it is no wonder that Elizabethan literature is so 
 full of the cheat and fraud and impostor, parasites who 
 always swarm in such times. The activity and spirit of 
 innovation, the increase in comfort and luxury, the big 
 fortunes and great benefactions, made it the most Ameri- 
 can age (as it might be called) in English history. "What- 
 ever your status, your birth, trade, profession, residence, 
 religion, education or property,, in the year 1564, (when 
 Shakespeare was born)," says Prof. W. A. Neilson, "you 
 had a better chance to change these than any of your 
 ancestors had ; and there was more chance than there had 
 ever been that your son would improve his inheritance. 
 The individual man had long been boxed up in guild, 
 church, or the feudal system ; now the covers were opened, 
 and the new opportunity bred daring, initiative and ambi- 
 tion/' The sea rovers were typical Elizabethans, but the 
 poet, priest, merchant, and politician had scarcely less 
 share of adventure. "The individual had no such 
 opportunity for fame in England before or since." The 
 
 12 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 nineteenth century is the only one which equals it in 
 rapidity of changes in ideas and modes of life. But the 
 Victorian age was an age of reaction and doubt of spirit 
 the Elizabethan was an age of hope. 
 
 Understand these things, and we understand the 
 conditions of Elizabethan England. These are the foun- 
 dations. 
 
 ****** 
 
 We get our knowledge of life in those days from a 
 variety of sources ; not so much from dramatists as might 
 be thought. They did not make exact pictures of the 
 life of their time, any more than Bernard Shaw or George 
 Cohan draw detailed pictures of the domestic machinery 
 of the present time. Charles Lamb, who loved the 
 familiar and ancient and homely, expresses regret that 
 Shakespeare and some of his brother dramatists hardly 
 ever chose as their theme the simple daily life of the 
 England about them. But if they had done so, there 
 would have been no great English drama and no Shakes- 
 peare. The Elizabethan looked outward, was a citizen 
 of the wnr!f] T and drew his plots largely from foreign 
 parts. It is from account-books and registers, the satir- 
 ists like Stubbes and Gosson, and the homely recorders 
 like the Rev. William Harrison, that we get the details 
 of Elizabethan life. 
 
 When Shakespeare was born, there were four or five 
 million persons in England. It was an agricultural coun- 
 try for the most part; manufacture of the modern kind 
 was just beginning. The waters were pure, and the sky, 
 clouded only by wood smoke, was clear, as clear as an 
 English sky can be. 
 
 Stratford-on-Avon was a village of about two thousand 
 souls. The streets were lined with buildings of a pic- 
 turesque kind, mainly what are called timbered or half- 
 
 13 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 timbered houses. These were mostly of wood, just as 
 American villages today are chiefly built of wood. But 
 instead of being clapboarded, the Elizabethan houses had 
 timbers, or studs, running up and down, a few inches 
 apart, and some horizontally, with the spaces between 
 filled with plaster or, in poor houses, clay. Perhaps the 
 whole was plastered over the outside, and maybe the 
 inside was finished with mortar and maybe not. But a 
 change in architecture was going on in England at that 
 very moment. It was no longer the fashion to build 
 castles, with narrow slits of windows, these were not 
 needed, for the fighting days were over. The finer houses 
 were now mere houses built of brick and stone, with 
 wider and more numerous windows, more light and more 
 comfort. 
 
 The general effect of an Elizabethan street was more 
 picturesque than most streets now. The people of that 
 day built more for the pleasure of the wayfarer and 
 the passer-by, by decorating their housefronts, and less 
 for comfort within, than we do now. The Elizabethan 
 manors, set in great parks, were a different thing, how- 
 ever. They were of brick, with many windows. Many 
 of them had wings at right angles to the main part of 
 the house, and so had the shape of the letter "E" a 
 delicate . compliment to Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 Window glass was just coming into common use in 
 Shakespeare's day. Before that, the windows were mere 
 open spaces, or were closed only with horn or, much 
 more generally, with lattices of wicker or strips of oak 
 set checkerwise. Where wood was plentiful enough for 
 strong rafters, the roof was covered with tiles, or with 
 slate if quarries were handy. Otherwise the roof was 
 thatched with reeds, sedge, or straw. Even in the houses 
 where window glass was used, good care was taken of it. 
 
 14 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 Glass was expensive. When the Northumberland family 
 left Alnwick Castle for London, the windows were taken 
 out and laid up in safety. 
 
 The house known as Shakespeare's birthplace certainly 
 belonged to Shakespeare's father, and Will Shakespeare 
 was born there if he wasn't born somewhere else. It 
 has been altered and 'restored so much that but little of 
 the original material remains in it, probably, and the 
 arrangement has been changed more than once. 
 
 But let us see what the old house can tell us. As you 
 enter it, you find yourself in a main room with a stone 
 floor and an immense chimney-piece ; and behind it is a 
 kitchen with another big chimney. Let us hope that little 
 Will Shakespeare had the pleasure of snugging up to a 
 blaze in these fireplaces. But the chimney corner, which 
 suggests so much of domestic comfort to us, dates only 
 from this very reign. Chimneys were rare in ordinary 
 houses when Elizabeth came to the throne; before her, 
 smoke got out of the house through the door or window 
 or a hole in the roof. 
 
 The stone floor of this main room in the Shakespeare 
 house had a dressing of sand in summer and a layer of 
 rushes in winter, no other carpet probably. The furni- 
 ture was strong rather than beautiful. There was no 
 table cloth except on state occasions, and the platters, 
 dishes and bowls were probably of wood, easily scoured 
 with sand. The spoons may have been of wood, but 
 tin spoons were beginning to come in, just as pewter 
 platters were beginning to be the style. There were no 
 forks. The meat and vegetables got to the mouth on 
 the tip of the knife which every member of the house- 
 hold possessed; the left hand did general work in the 
 platter when necessary. If Shakespeare ever used a fork, 
 it was when he was well along in life. Forks did not 
 
 15 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 come in until the beginning of the seventeenth century; 
 and then from Italy. As was natural, the new-fangled 
 contrivance was at first looked on as effeminate, perhaps 
 worse. Some preachers denounced forks, it being obvi- 
 ously an insult to Providence to keep fingers and meat 
 from getting acquainted. 
 
 Up stairs is the little room where Shakespeare was 
 born (according to tradition). In the little lattice win- 
 dows are still some greenish lights of ancient glass. Will 
 Shakespeare himself looked through glass as greenish, if 
 not greener. 
 
 Everything was produced in this house that could be 
 made at home. The whir of the spinning wheel was no 
 novelty to Shakespeare's ears. Watching the brewing 
 was probably a regular occupation with him. The Rev. 
 Mr. Harrison tells us how the beer was made for the 
 small household of a clergyman "with forty pounds a 
 year." Mistress Harrison ground eight bushels of malt 
 in her quern, added half a bushel of wheat meal and 
 half a bushel of oatmeal, and poured upon it three suc- 
 cessive hogsheads of boiling water, of eighty gallons each ; 
 and added at the proper time hops and arras and bay- 
 berries and other commodities, and at the end she had 
 two hundred or more gallons of good beer. This for a 
 year's supply? No; "it is once a month practiced by my 
 wife," says the good Mr. Harrison. 
 
 Stratford had a weekly market and a semi-annual fair, 
 like most villages. Shakespeare saw a motley life at 
 these fairs and markets. The villages and the highways 
 of rural England were full of ballad singers, acrobats, 
 dancing dogs, trained bears, wandering players, to whom 
 fair-time was harvest time. The city fathers regulated 
 the affairs of the town spasmodically, like most city 
 fathers, but were gradually growing more strict as Puritan 
 
 16 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 influences became stronger. They were specially severe 
 on rebellious servants, idle apprentices, shrewish women, 
 the pigs that ran in the streets, and, after 1605, upon 
 persons guilty of profanity. Regular church attendance 
 and fixed hours of work were required, and the council 
 was kept busy regulating the alehouses, of which there 
 were some thirty. There were public bowling alleys and 
 archery butts, and the council was strict as to the hours 
 of using them. Hunting, hawking, cockfighting, bull- 
 baiting, dancing and other sports delighted the villager and 
 the small boy. 
 
 Back of the Shakespeare house were probably Mr. 
 Shakespeare's tan-pits and pigsty. The condition of the 
 yard and highway, in front, may be guessed from the 
 fact that in 1552 John Shakespeare was fined twelve pence 
 for having too big a muckhill before his door, and in 
 1558 four pence for not cleaning out his gutter. Other 
 Stratford citizens fell victims to the spasmodic cleaning-up 
 fever of the council at the same time. Fire and pestilence 
 were the two great enemies of English villages at that 
 time, as well as of English cities ; and Stratford suffered 
 more than once. The plague always left the streets 
 cleaner, because it led to a cleaning up. 
 
 Near the market cross in Stratford stood a pump, and 
 housewives were often to be seen "washing of clothes" 
 there and hanging them on the cross to dry ; the butchers 
 might occasionally be detected hanging meat there. But 
 the corporation did not approve of such practices, and 
 finally forbade them. Also near the cross were the stocks, 
 pillory and whipping post, for malefactors. 
 
 Stratford was well shaded with elms. The gardens of 
 the citizens were separated by mud walls, not very durable, 
 which sometimes provoked quarrels. Fruit trees were 
 generally set about the house; and flowers and a few 
 medicinal and cooking plants were grown. 
 
 17 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Inventories of the furniture of houses in Shakespeare's 
 day, made for executors' sales, show much the same 
 utensils that our forefathers brought into this region 
 when it was young, andirons, candlesticks, etc. The 
 frequency of brewing utensils, and of looms for weaving 
 wool, tells its own story. One interesting item is "painted 
 cloths," or arras, made to nail up in place of wallpaper; 
 these cloths always had "wise sayings painted on them." 
 And the abundance of napkins, of flax, hemp and diaper, 
 is significant. There were no forks then. 
 
 There was no garbage service in Stratford. The 
 inhabitants made up for this lack by laying the refuse 
 in the streets and lanes; but after 1563 the householder 
 might be fined 3s.4d. for this. There were, however, 
 six places in the town set apart legally for amassing the 
 refuse. These muckhills were to be removed twice a 
 year, before Pentecost and about Michaelmas, in defer- 
 ence to sanitary science. These muckhills were right in 
 town, so placed as to be handy to citizens. 
 
 Garrick described Stratford in 1769 as "the most dirty, 
 unsemmly, ill-pav'd wretched looking town in all Britain." 
 This must have been exaggeration. Yet Stratford could 
 not have been neat. The town delegated the cleaning of 
 its streets to its citizens, and they attended to it when 
 they were speeded up, with fines. But the town itself 
 looked after the cleaning of the bridge, the market place 
 and the space before the chapel door and Guild Hall. 
 The "White Wings" of Stratford in Will Shakespeare's 
 day consisted of the Widow Baker. She got 6s.8d. a 
 year from the corporation, and a shovel, a broomstick 
 and twigs were thrown in at municipal expense. She 
 attended to the market place. A man named Raven swept 
 the bridge, assisted occasionally by Widow Baker. When 
 the roof of the chapel was fixed in 1604, the spirit of 
 
 18 
 
. SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 improvement carried the corporation to greater lengths, 
 and Anthony Rees, Mistress Rees and Goodwife Wilson 
 were hired to sweep away the cobwebs and wash the seats. 
 Otherwise the chapel was rarely contaminated with water. 
 
 And water was regarded as injudicious in many cases 
 of sickness. Perhaps it was looked on then, even gen- 
 erally, with more suspicion than it is nowadays. Good 
 soap was hard to get, moreover, in Shakespeare's day. 
 But the Elizabethans had a substitute for soap : they used 
 perfumery. 
 
 One of the books that Shakespeare must often have 
 seen gives an idea of the medicine practised at that day. 
 It was Dr. Andrew Borde's Breviary of Health (1575). 
 Dr. Borde was a popular physician of Henry VIII's day. 
 He was something of a joker, and called himself jocularly 
 Andreas Perforatus (perforated Andrew or Andrew 
 bored). Medical treatment, as he pictures it, is a mixture 
 of theory, superstition and white magic. It is a sort of 
 popular science, not far removed from the advice given 
 in almanacs today. The medicines mentioned by Dr. 
 Borde include such commodities as oil of scorpion and 
 grease of fox. "Bloodshot eyes," "privation of wit," 
 "sneezing out of measure" are some of the things for 
 which the doctor prescribes. His science is lightened 
 occasionally with levity. For a scolding wife the doctor 
 says the only cure is "God and great sickness." For itch- 
 ing he recommends "long nails and scratching." Con- 
 cerning diseases of the tongue he remarks: "It hath 
 many other impediments, but none worse than lying and 
 slander." 
 
 For scolding wives the corporation of Stratford did not 
 trust to Dr. Borde's specific. The village had among its 
 possessions a substantial "ducking stool," of the kind then 
 general throughout England. It had iron staples, lock 
 
 19 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 and hinges. The shrew was attached to it, and by means 
 of ropes, planks and wheels was ducked two or three 
 times in the river Avon. The prescription ran : "Repeat 
 when needed." 
 
 Not far away from the Shakespeare home was an in- 
 institution that Will Shakespeare must have known well, 
 the Stratford Free Grammar School, so called because 
 Latin grammar was taught there. There were a great 
 many such schools in England then ; Harrison says "there 
 is hardly a corporate village but has one." State educa- 
 tion did not dawn in England until 1832, but guilds and 
 individuals established these free schools in early centur- 
 ies. Of course, only villagers profited by them, for the 
 most part. Education was then practically a privilege of 
 the elite the elite either by birth or intellect. And girls 
 girls did not need an education, except in spinning, bak- 
 ing and brewing. Highborn girls might get, from tutors, 
 as advanced an education as any boy. Ascham tells us the 
 pretty story of finding little Lady Jane Grey in her cham- 
 ber "reading Phaedon Platonis in Greeke, and that with 
 as moch delite as some jentlemen would read a merie 
 tale in Boccace." Queen Elizabeth could talk Latin and 
 French and Italian, and even sidestepped gracefully in 
 Greek when an Oxford orator addressed her in that lan- 
 guage. But for the ordinary girl, it was fine time for 
 studying Domestic Science. 
 
 We know that Shakespeare must have gone to this 
 Stratford grammar school, because we find evidence of it 
 in his plays. At such schools they began with Lily's 
 grammar, reached Aesop's fables in the third year and 
 Ovid in the fourth. Now, we find in the plays quotations 
 from or references to the grammar and the fables, and, 
 specially, to Ovid. Shakespeare \vas not a scholar ; there 
 is evidence that when a translation was to be had he 
 
 20 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 went to the translation always, rather than to the original 
 Latin. But the way in which, in his immense vocabulary, 
 he coins words from the Latin, or shows other knowledge 
 of the derivation of words, proves that he did know some- 
 thing about Latin. And we can guess how Will Shakes- 
 peare looked, when he went to grammar school mornings, 
 and what was his speed. Chance remarks of the melan- 
 choly Jaques in As You Like It, and of Romeo, indicate 
 that he "crept like a snail/' 
 
 Had Shakespeare's family been prosperous, he might 
 have gone on to the university from school. The gram- 
 mar schools were the ladder to the universities, of which 
 there were then three in England. But Shakespeare had 
 to go to work. 
 
 Having looked at village life as Shakespeare, saw it, 
 let us see what he learned in the pleasant Warwickshire 
 countryside about Stratford. North of the Avon was the 
 Forest of Arden then largely cut away like most English 
 forests and south of it was a plateau full of the homes 
 of the gentry. Legends of outlaws and English cham- 
 pions filled the Warwickshire countryside; it was one of 
 the homes of ballad poetry, and rustic pageants and fes- 
 tivals kept the spirit of poetry alive. Many of the fine 
 roads of today were entirely lacking; others were ill- 
 defined, winding ways through dense thickets and bogs. 
 
 One striking feature of the present-day landscape was 
 lacking. Shapespeare saw no carriages when he went 
 rambling! All travel on the poor roads was on foot or 
 horseback. Goods were carried on packhorses. When 
 Elizabeth rode into London from Greenwich, she rode on 
 a pillion behind her Lord Chancellor. Afterward came 
 a great improvement, in the form of a rough cart with- 
 out springs, the box sitting on the solid axle. Queen Bess 
 rode to her fifth Parliament in such a contrivance. 
 
 21 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Coaches came in toward the end of the century. Eliza- 
 beth had lumbering gilt coaches; but when she went 
 about the country in her stately progresses, she fairly 
 crept along the muddy roads, and her coach was followed 
 by several hundred carts containing the luggage of her 
 train. Great was the interest in good-roads improve- 
 ments just then, in the districts she was to visit ! Beside 
 the first coaches used to run, afoot, the footmen, carrying 
 staves wherewith to pry the wheels out of the mudholes. 
 
 But even before the coaches, we hear of the delightful 
 inns which won the praise of all foreigners. Where travel 
 was so slow, the inns had to be numerous. 
 
 In the Warwick country Shakespeare saw picturesque 
 two-roomed cottages, of wattle or stone with thatched 
 roofs. Now and then he might see a shepherd, in russet 
 coat with red sleeves, and a bag of salt dangling at his 
 side. He would hear singing everywhere; would listen 
 to grewsome stories of witches, and might hear even of 
 the burning of a witch somewhere in England. Most 
 persons then believed in witches, and it was a risky time 
 for homely old women. The countryside was full of 
 superstition. We read in the chronicles of the time of 
 all sorts of strange things. For instance, of how at Kin- 
 naston in 1575, "on the I7th of February at 6 o'clock in 
 the evening, the earth began to open and a Hill with 
 a Rock under it (making at first a great bellowing noise 
 which was heard a great way off), lifted itself up to a 
 great height and began to travel, bearing along with it 
 the trees that grew upon it, the sheepfolds and flocks 
 of sheep; having walked in this way from Saturday in 
 the evening until Monday noon, it then stood still." The 
 Elizabethan rustic believed these tales, as did most per- 
 sons not rustics. It was a credulous age, stimulating to 
 the imagination ! 
 
 22 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 There was surprisingly good living even in the humble 
 homes along the way. The Englishman always aston- 
 ished the foreigner by the amount of what he ate and 
 drank. But wages were not high. The magistrates were 
 empowered to fix, in quarter sessions, the wages of 
 artisans and farm laborers. In the sixty years following 
 1583, the average weekly wage of the carpenter was 
 6s. 2*^d., while the mason and the bricklayer got a little 
 more, and the ordinary farm laborer got only 35. 5%d. 
 And wages did not go up and down as fast as the prices 
 of food, and the farm laborer had to stick to his job, 
 instead of hunting a new one, until the magistrates gave 
 leave. This power given to the magistrates in Tudor 
 days explains why the squire and the rector occupy the 
 awful station that they do in the English country novel 
 of even today. 
 
 A picture of Henry Hastings, a country .squire of Dor- 
 setshire a little after this time, will show what was the 
 life in the squires' halls that Shakespeare passed. "His 
 (Hastings's) clothes were always of green cloth. His 
 house was in the midst of a large park, well stocked 
 deer, rabbits and fishponds. He had a long narrow 
 bowling green in it; here, too, he had a banqueting room 
 built, like a stand, in a large tree. He kept all sorts of 
 hounds, that ran buck, hare, otter and badger; and had 
 hawks of all kinds. His great hall was commonly 
 strewed with marrow bones, and full of hawk perches, 
 hounds, spaniels and terriers. The upper end of it was 
 hung with foxskins of this and last year's killing. Here 
 and there a polecat was intermixed. The parlor was a 
 large room, completely furnished in the same style. On 
 a broad hearth, paved with brick, lay some of the 
 choicest terriers, hounds and spaniels. One or two of 
 the great chairs had litters of cats in them, which were 
 
 23 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 not to be disturbed. Of these, three or four always 
 attended him at dinner; and a little white wand lay by 
 his trencher, to defend it if they were too troublesome. 
 In the windows, which were very large, lay his arrows, 
 crossbows and other accoutrements. At the upper end 
 of the room stood a small table with a double desk ; one 
 side of which held a church Bible, the other the Book of 
 Martyrs (published 1573). On different tables about the 
 room lay hawks' hoods, bells, old hats with their crowns 
 thrust in and full of pheasants' eggs; dice, cards and 
 store of tobacco pipes. At one end was a door into a 
 chapel, which had been long disused for devotion; but 
 in the pulpit, as the safest place, was always to be found 
 a cold chine of beef, a vension pasty, a gammon of 
 bacon, or a great apple pye with thick crust well baked. 
 His table cost him not much, though it was good to eat 
 at. His sports supplied all but beef and mutton, except 
 on Fridays, when he had the best of fish. He drank a 
 glass or two of wine at meals; put syrup of gillyflowers 
 into his sack ; and always had a glass of small beer stand- 
 ing by him, which he often stirred with rosemary." 
 (This is from Hutchins's History of Dorsetshire.} 
 
 The country clergyman, like the lower orders of clergy 
 generally, was distinguished by the title of Sir, which was 
 purely honorary. The condition of the minor clergy was 
 never lower in England, and the house chaplains were 
 little better than servants. The standing of the clergy 
 may be judged to some degree (perhaps) by this entry 
 in the books of the Stationers' Company in London in 
 1560: 
 
 Item, payd to the preacher 6s. 2d. 
 
 Item, payd to the minstrell 125. 
 
 Item, payd to the coke 155. 
 
 24 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 One feature of the rural English life must not be 
 overlooked. It tended to Shakespeare's education. The 
 kingdom was full of players. The old miracle plays were 
 acted largely by amateurs, in the streets and. squares of 
 towns. The moralities and interludes were performed by 
 roving companies, at first in open spaces, afterward in 
 the banqueting rooms of the gentry. And so the way 
 was led to the professional companies, attached to the 
 households of lords at first and then doing business for 
 themselves. 
 
 In 1568, when Will Shakespeare was four years old, 
 the players came to Stratford. Probably they came, like 
 most traveling companies, on foot, with their luggage 
 carried on one or two packhorses or mules. There were 
 no women in the company, of course. Of the two com- 
 panies of these players who came, one received 9 shillings 
 from the town, the other 12 pence; for they came under 
 the patronage of the village. We do not know, that 
 Shakespeare saw these plays, but probably he did; boys 
 all over England were enjoying such sights then. We 
 can imagine the long low Guild Hall, lighted by guttering 
 .candles and smoky torches; the stage, only a few inches 
 above the floor, -aad without scenery and with few prop- 
 erties ; and wide-eyed little William looking on. 
 
 Play-acting had long been common through rural Eng- 
 land. Miracle plays were given at Coventry, not far 
 from Stratford, up to 1580, and perhaps Shakespeare 
 saw Quince and Bottom there. And very likely young 
 Shakespeare, when he was eleven years old, saw the most 
 famous of all the royal entertainments of Elizabeth's day, 
 that, which the Earl of Leicester gave in honor of Eliza- 
 beth at Kenilworth castle (or Killingworth, as it was 
 often called), eleven or twelve miles from Stratford. 
 
 25 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 The "princely pleasures of Kenilworth" were the high- 
 water mark of the shows of sixteenth-century England. 
 They lasted eighteen days and cost the earl a thousand 
 pounds a day, say the contemporary chroniclers. There 
 were sports of all kinds : fireworks, bear-baiting, pageants 
 and plays, morrice dances, tilting, hunting, a rural wed- 
 ding, everything that could please and entertain the 
 queen, from the allegorical welcome when she came to 
 the farewell show at the end. There were floating islands 
 and other contrivances on the lake beside the castle. 
 People of every kind flocked to Kenilworth for the 
 spectacle. Robert Laneham, a dandy who held a minor 
 office in the queen's train, wrote a letter to a friend that 
 contains a detailed account, day by day, of the entertain- 
 ment offered to Elizabeth. One thing that Laneham 
 describes is this: . . . "And the Lady, with her two 
 nymphs, floating upon her movable island (Triton on his 
 mermaid skimming by), approached toward Her High- 
 ness (the Queen, who was upon a bridge), chiefly to 
 present Her Majesty with this gift, which was, Arion, 
 that excellent and famous musician, in tire and appoint- 
 ment strange, riding aloft upon his old friend the dolphin, 
 that from head to tail was four and twenty feet long, 
 and swam hard by these islands." 
 
 That is a fair specimen of Elizabethan prose. Fifteen 
 or twenty years afterward William Shakespeare gave a 
 fine illustration of Elizabethan poetry, when he made 
 Oberon say in A Midsummer Nigth's Dream : 
 
 "Thou remember 'st 
 Since once I sat upon a promontory 
 And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back 
 Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath 
 That the rude sea grew civil at her song, 
 And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, 
 To hear the sea-maid's music." 
 
 26 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 Does it not seem as if Shakespeare was present at Ken- 
 ilworth in 1575? 
 
 In that same passage of A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, Shakespeare makes Oberon speak of a "fair 
 vestal thron-ed by the west," at whom Cupid shot a 
 dart in vain : 
 
 "And the imperial votaress passed on, 
 In maiden meditation, fancy-free." 
 
 The fair vestal was, of course, Queen Elizabeth. It was 
 the fashion of the poets of the day to exalt and to wor- 
 ship the maiden queen, and it was the fashion of the 
 common people, too, to look up to her and almost to 
 ru &&p her. There was an Elizabethan legend, just as in 
 later days there was a Napoleonic legend. 
 
 It is somewhat shocking to discover the difference 
 between the Elizabeth of fancy and the Elizabeth of fact. 
 Really, Queen Elizabeth was the best man in the king- 
 dom. She could hunt all day and then dance all night, 
 or watch masques and pageants, till the "knees of strong 
 men trembled under them as they wearily waited upon 
 her." She kissed whom she pleased ; she tickled the neck 
 of Leicester once as he knelt before her. She swore like 
 a trooper when she was angry ; nor did she content her- 
 self with words, her ladies and the highest officers in 
 the land felt the weight of her hand. She collared Hat- 
 ton, and she spat upon the courtier's coat of Sir Matthew 
 Arundel when his foppery displeased her. One day in 
 1598 there was a stormy time in her council when she 
 and the favorite Essex differed about an Irish appoint- 
 ment. She addressed him sarcastically. He turned his 
 back upon her with an expression of contempt. There- 
 upon she gave him a good stinging box on the ear and told 
 him to "go to the devil." 
 
 27 
 
t 
 
 SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 She called the members of her privy council by all 
 sorts of nicknames. The Bishop of London once thought 
 her finery unfitting to her age, and in a sermon endeav- 
 ored to raise her thoughts from the ornaments of dress 
 to the riches of heaven. The "fair vestal throned by 
 the west" thereupon told her ladies that if he touched 
 upon that subject again, she would fit him for heaven, 
 and that he would go there without his staff and would 
 leave his mantle behind him. Such was Spenser's 
 Gloriana in real life. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Our country boy, Shakespeare, finally went up to Lon- 
 don in the '8o's, to earn a living. He saw a London 
 we would not recognize. It had fewer than two hundred 
 thousand inhabitants. It was a medieval city, surrounded 
 by a wall, which was guarded by the Tower at one 
 end and by the Fleet ditch and Blackfriars at the other, 
 with the cathedral crowning all. It lay on the north side 
 of the Thames, and the wall made a circuit of two 
 miles about it. Seven gates pierced the wall to the 
 north, and the houses stretched along the roads a long 
 way out into the country. Westward along the river 
 were palaces, and a muddy road which led to the adjacent 
 city of Westminster. The Thames, famous for fish and 
 swans, was crossed by only one bridge, which was 
 crowded with houses. A sight near the center of the 
 bridge was the Nonesuch House, of gilded and carved 
 wood, built in the Low Countries and brought to London 
 in parts and set up with wooden pins. The bridge was 
 so crowded that the river was the great highway. On 
 it plied small boats; there were from two thousand to 
 four thousand watermen (according to varying estimates), 
 a rude and quarrelsome lot of men. When one went to the 
 theater, he took a boat and was rowed across to the 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 south side, where were the rings for bear-baiting and 
 bull-baiting, the theaters and other places of amusement. 
 The city fathers would not allow the playhouses within 
 the city limits, for fear of fire, or of pestilence which 
 might be disseminated by the crowds, so the actors built 
 their places just outside the limits; and the rabble went 
 to them in boats, just as Buffalonians cross to Fort Erie 
 to see horse-racing. 
 
 Shakespeare, on reaching London, perhaps saw the 
 heads of traitors and felons drying over the city gates 
 and at the end of the bridge. He saw narrow streets, 
 with open sewers or ditches, and wooden houses with 
 many gables. As he walked along, perhaps pails of 
 slops fell upon him from overhanging buildings. They 
 had simple ways of disposing of refuse in London then. 
 
 And what a strange throng he saw in the streets! 
 There were apprentices in swarms, in the blue gowns 
 that they were compelled by ordinance to wear; there 
 were gallants and dames in all the colors of the rainbow, 
 only the clergy and thu? lawyers then limited themselves 
 to black; there were women in masks, and fops wearing 
 bracelets and earrings ; there were seamen home from the 
 tropics; merchants with chains of gold, and merchants' 
 wives, who shocked the Puritans and the gentry by their 
 elegance of apparel; university youths come up to town 
 to win a fortune with the pen; country squires marveling 
 at the sights and storing away wondrous tales to 
 tell at home of the "chimes at midnight"; and states- 
 men, courtiers and ambassadors. Countless processions 
 threaded the narrow streets. Perhaps Shakespeare saw 
 a seminary priest, or a counterfeiter or other criminal, 
 being drawn to Tyburn in a cart, to be hanged, drawn 
 and quartered. The pillory for necks and hands, the 
 stocks for feet, told of minor offenders. Chains fas- 
 
 29 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 tened up at one side of the street marked preparations 
 for blocking the way, to stop the march of mobs. 
 
 The shops were little booths open in front like bazaars ; 
 the shopkeepers stood before them and invited the 
 passers-by to enter with a "What do ye lack?" The 
 tobacco shops became one of the sights of the metropolis 
 about this date; in 1614 there were declared to be seven 
 thousand of them. The expert tobacconist took young 
 gallants as pupils and taught them how to load their pipes 
 and how to blow balls and rings of smoke. Tobacco 
 ran a swift course in Elizabethan England ; it was a medi- 
 cine, next a pleasure, and then a vice, all in a few years. 
 
 ,We know that the painted faces of the women were 
 one of the things that struck the notice of the country- 
 man from Stratford. The fashions were never more 
 wonderful than in Shakespeare's England. In the middle 
 ages, women had fanciful headgear, but their dresses 
 were plain. But under Queen Bess things were different. 
 The great ruff was a feature of the age. Like most 
 striking features of the time, it was adopted from Spain. 
 It began as a loose cambric collar, and grew so enormous 
 that it troubled the wearer by its flappings. Wires were 
 inserted to hold it out and up from the neck, and in 
 its palmiest days it reached up to the top of the high- 
 dressed hair and had three or four minor ruffs, rufflets 
 so to speak, to fill the space between it and the shoulders. 
 Toward the end of the century, a clever Belgian woman 
 taught Londoners how to starch, and goffering irons, or 
 "poking sticks of steel," were likewise invented about 
 the same time; and by degrees the ruff became a stiff 
 frill. The shocked Puritans called starch "the Devil's 
 liquor/' and one of them, Stubbes, tells a warning story 
 of a young lady of Antwerp who fell into the power of 
 the devil because he taught her improved ways of setting 
 
 30 
 
SHAKESPEARE 'S ENGLAND 
 
 the ruff. After she died her coffin was opened, andV ,. 
 "they found the body to be taken away and a black cat, /> /^ 
 very lean and deformed, sitting in the coffin, setting of 
 great ruffs and frizzling of hair, to the great fear and 
 wonder of all beholders." 
 
 Queen Elizabeth had red hair, and later in life wore ^j 
 an auburn wig to recall old times. Of course, false hair ' 
 became fashionable. She was pale and fair, and women 
 in general, therefore, desired a "pale bleake color," and 
 to that end swallowed gravel, ashes and tallow, so we 
 are told. And her long waist and narrow chest gave to 
 all English womanhood a pinched look. 
 
 Both men and women wore enormous ruffs; and to 
 balance these they swelled out below, so that a gallant 
 of Elizabeth's time had the outline of a fat mandolin. 
 A modified form of the "farthingale," or^hoop^ for vfr. 
 
 women, was introduced in 1545. With greater expansion 
 there was greater opportunity for jewels and ornaments 
 and embroidery ; and Elizabeth's girth steadily grew, and 
 at the end of her reign there was a "wheel" farthingale, 
 by which the skirt was drawn out at the top, in a right 
 angle with the body, and formed a sort of table on which 
 the arms could rest. Elizabeth's dress was covered with 
 ornaments, quiltings, slashings, jewels, etc. It may be 
 mentioned that looking glasses were first introduced in 
 this reign, to supersede the mirrors of polished steel; 
 they probably encouraged dress. 
 
 The gallants aped the women in extravagance of dress. 
 Their breeches, or galligascons, were stuffed to such an 
 extent that stooping was difficult. They were moreover 
 cut and slashed like the ladies' gowns. Stubbes, hearing 
 that a hundred pounds had been paid for a pair of 
 breeches, cries "God be merciful unto us!" The men 
 had fancy stockings that cost 205. a pair; painted or 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 embroidered shoes with roses on them ; and were specially 
 dainty in the matter of hats. The lower orders copied 
 the higher. Lord Keeper Edgerton said in 1596 in a 
 case in the Star Chamber: "The excess of apparel in 
 merchants' wives and daughters, and in all degrees, is 
 a pestilent canker in the commonwealth; a means by 
 which persons of small estate do prodigally waste their 
 patrimony." But efforts to regulate dress were of no 
 avail; hurly-burly Elizabethan times were too much for 
 them. John Bulwer tells the story of a gallant who rose 
 from his chair to salute some ladies. There was a nail 
 in the chair, and bran began to pour from a tear in his 
 immense breeches as "from a mill that was grinding," 
 and he shrank and shrank and his breeches settled and 
 settled until finally he stood there a mere spindle. 
 
 One of the sights of London that Shakespeare must 
 have enjoyed was the stalls of the booksellers in St. Paul's 
 churchyard. This was the first age in human history, be 
 it remembered, in which common people were able to 
 buy and read books for entertainment. In St. Paul's, 
 the life of London was to be seen best. The church 
 had become a sort of club, or general meeting place. 
 Mules and horses were no longer to be found there, as in 
 Bloody Mary's reign; but the center aisle was the resort 
 of all London as a place for gossip and business. Paul's 
 Walk, as it was called, was crowded for an hour or so 
 before dinner at noon, and for three hours in the after- 
 noon. To see everybody and to be seen, go to Paul's 
 Walk! 
 
 The different classes rubbed shoulders more, in the 
 little London of Elizabeth, than afterward; but they 
 intermingled less, each class kept within its limits, bar- 
 ring the eternal disposition of the citizens' wives to ape 
 their betters. The importance of the court in the city 
 
 32 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 life is hard to realize today. The court was continually 
 before the eyes of the citizens; its retainers made up 
 much of the population; and it was producing some 
 gorgeous spectacle or other all the time. Queen Eliza- 
 beth courted popularity and she loved gayety, and did 
 not avoid showing herself in London. She was fond of 
 dancing, and when she was a wrinkled old woman with 
 black teeth, she was seen one day practicing a dance step 
 alone, to keep up the limberness necessary to impress 
 foreign ambassadors with her vitality. 
 
 Taine calls the England of the time "a den of lions." 
 With all the life and rude jollity, and considering the 
 national temper, it is no wonder that, in the playhouses 
 across the Thames, the wild and reckless Elizabethan 
 drama broke the shackles of the classical rules that the 
 scholars tried to fasten upon it. It aped life itself, and 
 the rough crowds in the theaters now shouted at buf- 
 foonery, now listened silently to a Hamlet's soliloquy, 
 and moved from Egypt to England in the space of a 
 minute with no regard to unities of time or place. And 
 note how versatile the men of the age were: Raleigh, 
 courtier, soldier, explorer, poet, historian, was an example 
 of them. And note the Wild Western uncertainties of 
 life. Take the poets Surrey, Wyatt, Raleigh, Marlowe, 
 Sidney, Spenser, Jonson : only two of them, Spenser and 
 Jonson, died in their beds, and Jonson had killed a man 
 in a duel. 
 
 As one of the sights of London, let us go to the theater. 
 They are all afternoon performances, what we should 
 call matinees, because it is hard to light the theaters and 
 there would be more danger of fire at night. We go 
 across that curious old London bridge, between the lines 
 of houses, past the queer Nonesuch House and the water- 
 works built at the middle of the bridge, and under the 
 
 33 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 warning row of bleaching heads of criminals. We go 
 along the south bank .of the river to one of the round, 
 three-story buildings of wood where the players carry 
 on their business. A flag flying from the top of the 
 building lets us know that a performance is to be given. 
 ^_ Shall we pay a penny and go into the pit, and stand up 
 two hours or so to hear Falstaff jest or Pistol rant ? Or 
 shall we pay more, even up to half a crown, and get a 
 place in a gallery or box, or even show ourselves off 
 upon the stage, where we can sit at the -sides and observe 
 (and be observed of everybody) ? The theater resembles 
 the inn yards where the English drama passed its child- 
 hood. There is a pit, open to the weather; tiers of 
 galleries surround it; and the stage, protected by a little 
 roof, projects halfway into the pit. There is no scenery 
 and there are no women actors. Boys take the women's 
 parts. The Elizabethan dramatist can change the scene 
 as often as he wishes, with no fears of a Belasco. All 
 that is necessary for the scene-shifter to do is to come 
 out on the stage and hang up a sign with "Venice" or 
 "Vienna" written on it, and your imagination will have 
 to do the rest. But the actors wear sumptuous costumes. 
 Probably the coat upon that actor cost more than the 
 playwright has received for his play. There may be 
 music between the acts, but there are no long waits, and 
 of course there is no thumping of scenery and there is 
 no dizzying test of the spot-light. 
 
 What a lively, jostling, rude, unmannerly audience it 
 is! Painted ladies; gallants in huge breeches and with 
 strange beards; apprentices, quick to approve and quick 
 to jeer; bef rilled wives of citizens; stray countrymen; 
 a pit full of "rascality," catcalling and throwing missiles. 
 But let us do the thing rightly and go up on the stage, 
 "on the very rushes where Comedy is to daunce," as 
 
 34 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 old Dekker puts it. There is where you really enjoy 
 the performance. You can get a good stool for a six- 
 pence. There is where the "best and most essentionable 
 parts of a gallant (good clothes, a proportionable leg and 
 a tolerable beard) are perfectly revealed," as Dekker 
 again informs us. There you can hiss or applaud in the 
 sight of everybody ; can see what is going on in the 
 dressing-rooms, and watch the play as almost a part of 
 it ; can pose as a critic ; can ask in a loud voice what the 
 play is about; can examine the lace on the actors' suits 
 while they are ranting their lines. The scarecrows in 
 the pit may mew and hiss at you, even throw dirt from 
 the ground at you; but do not be frightened away, 
 everybody notices you. 
 
 Dekker gives some advice to the gallant upon the 
 stage: "Before the play begins, fall to cards." If you 
 have a spite against the playwright, get up from your 
 stool at a crisis in the plot and go out; or, if the weather 
 is bad, stay and tickle the ears of your neighbors with 
 a straw and make them laugh. "Mew at passionate 
 speeches, yawn at merry ones, find fault with the music, 
 whew at the children's actions, whistle at the songs." 
 While you are doing this, the groundlings in the pit will 
 howl, at you and the players impartially. 
 
 It is amid such scenes that you listen to a Hamlet or a 
 Tempest. 
 
 One of the great features of the reign was the 
 progresses made by Queen Elizabeth to towns and 
 universities. She was parsimonious and enjoyed "visit- 
 ing round," and she liked the gifts and the shows; and 
 not many years passed by without such journeys, which 
 introduced the court to the country. The town account- 
 books of the time contain many interesting details which 
 picture to us rural England. What a scrubbing up there 
 was along the line of march! 
 
 35 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 The biggest single expense of the towns, when the 
 queen came, was the gift to Her Majesty thirty to 
 forty pounds in gold, generally. The queen's servants 
 went ahead to survey the town against her coming, and 
 they had to be fee'd. There were trumpeters to be paid, 
 -and yeomen of various kinds, the yeomen of the bottles 
 first, then those of the mace and sword, and musicians 
 of various kinds. Men had to be paid for fixing the 
 roads, and for paving the market place perhaps. At 
 Leicester the town council ordered that "the Mayor, and 
 such as have been Mayors, meet her in scarlet gowns, 
 and the rest of the twenty-four aldermen shall wear black 
 gowns, made of a new comely fashion ; also the forty- 
 eight members of the common council to wear coats of 
 fine black cloth and to be guarded with velvet, and to 
 meet Her Majesty on horseback. And that every house- 
 holder forthwith amend and beautify the fore fronts of 
 their houses, and amend the pavement." At Worcester 
 the council ordered the city gates to be painted ash color, 
 with Her Majesty's arms without and within, and "also 
 that every person having any dunghills within the liber- 
 ties shall cause the same to be carried away." 
 
 Many records of that time indicate the prices that the 
 Elizabethans had to pay for what they ate. For instance, 
 at Norwich in 1561, the Earls of Northumberland and 
 Huntington were entertained at the Duke of Norfolk's 
 castle. The records of that entertainment contain the 
 following items: Eight stone of beef (a stone is 14 
 pounds), 8d. ; cheeses, 4d. each; butter, 2^/2 d. a pint; a 
 hind quarter of veal, lod. ; a fore quarter, 5d. ; leg of 
 mutton, 5d. ; six pullets for a shilling ; eight rabbits for 
 is. 8d. ; eight partridges, 2s. ; 34 eggs for 6d. ; a bushel of 
 flour, 6d. ; a peck of oatmeal, 2d. ; sixteen loaves of white 
 bread, 4d. ; barrel of table beer, is.; sixteen oranges 
 
 36 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 
 
 (which were then often called Portingales), 2d. ; gallon 
 of white wine, is. And the cook got is. 2d. Yet 
 probably the housewives of Queen Elizabeth's day talked 
 as warmly of the cost of living as we do today ! 
 
 People rose early then. Four was the regular time, 
 with breakfast at five, when the men went to work or 
 business. Dinner was about noon. And people went to 
 bed earlier than now, because candlelight did not encour- 
 age late hours. The great drink of Shakespeare's Eng- 
 land was beer ; there was no great excess of drunkenness 
 until Holland gin was imported. There were four kinds 
 of white bread, which the gentry ate; the poorer folk 
 ate bread of rye, barley, or even oats and acorns. All 
 foreigners wonder at the abundance of the Englishman's 
 table and his liking for good cheer. All of them, too, 
 speak about the prettiness of the English women, with 
 their white skins. They also mention, with general 
 approval, the practice of kissing the lady of the house 
 when you called and again when you went away; even 
 grave Erasmus, in an earlier reign, remarked this custom 
 with commendation. 
 
 We read that the Earl and Countess of Northumber- 
 land, when in the country, used to breakfast together at 
 7 o'clock in the morning. They had upon the table "a 
 quart of ale, a chine of beef and a quart of wine." How 
 they divided it, and whether they had bread, does not 
 appear. But we are sure of one thing, and that is, that 
 they did not have coffee or tea. These did not come in 
 for nearly a century. Samuel Pepys records in his diary 
 for Sept. 28, 1660: "I did send for a cup of tee (a 
 China drink), of which I had never drank before." And 
 two years later he records: "Home, and there find my 
 wife making tea, a drink which Mr. Pelling, the Pothe- 
 cary, tells her is good for her cold and defluxions." 
 
 37 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 With a gay, pleasure-loving queen, a rough population 
 which lived more out of doors than people do now, and 
 which loved sports, Shakespeare's England was a merry 
 England at least as merry as any England before or 
 since. But the Puritans were coming in, to frown on 
 theaters, bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and other sinful 
 pleasures ; and Bishop Corbet was to write : 
 
 At morning and at evening both, 
 
 You merry were, and glad ! 
 So little care of sleep, or sloth, 
 
 The pretty ladies had. 
 When Tom came home from labor, 
 
 Or Ciss to milking rose ; 
 Then merrily, merrily went their tabor, 
 
 And nimbly went their toes. 
 
 Witness, those rings and roundelays 
 
 Of theirs, which yet remain, 
 Were footed, in Queen Mary's days, 
 
 On many a grassy plain ; 
 But since, of late, Elizabeth, 
 
 And later James came in, 
 They never danced on any heath 
 
 As when the time hath been. 
 
 An age that ate and danced and an age that dared, 
 
 with a grey Puritan cloud rising in the sky that was 
 
 Shakespeare's England. 
 
HAMLET 
 
 - BY 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
HAMLET 
 
 THE fundamental idea of this immortal play is/the 
 greatness of action. The dramatist teaches that con- 
 sideration robs action of its power. ^The native 
 hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of 
 thought."l\ The'basis of Hamlet is profoundly theological. 
 Divine will and human freedom perpetually interplay. The 
 problem of life is presented before us like a vast land- 
 scape. S^cre|_guilt is also portrayed with a power 
 excelled only in Macbeth- *"Foul deeds will rise though 
 all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes." 
 
 Gervinus ingeniously declares that the drama has two 
 moral themes: "that intentions, conceived in passion, 
 vanish wjt)*PT:he emotions^ and that the human will 
 changes and is influenced and enfeetled by delays." 
 
 There have been four views concerning the play ; first, 
 that Hamlet's delay was due to external causes. This 
 falls down, for there is no reference to it, and he planned 
 the play scene to convince himself ; second, that he was 
 restrained by conscience from revenge, but against this 
 is Act V, scene 2, line 63 ; third, that a lovely nature 
 without strength of nerve sinks under a great burden; 
 this is inadequate; fourth, Coleridge's view that Hamlet 
 is the tragedy of reflection, that irresolution^ isj:he cause 
 of his ddayT^nd thatTiis is the resjilt_jof - jpeculaiipn 
 in an introspective^ mind. Coleridge first brought this 
 explanation forward and it is now generally accepted. 
 If we add an inherited melancholy and exquisite_sensi- 
 bility, the drama is as wide as humanity and as enduring 
 as time. 
 
 The style is that of Julius Caesar, very weighty and 
 sokmn. "The play contains 3924 lines. Macbeth is the 
 shortest of the tragedies. The scene of Hamlet is Elsi- 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 nore, a seaport of Denmark, on the island of Zealand, 
 not far from Copenhagen, where a statue to Hamlet may 
 be seen. Scarlet was the royal color and hence the 
 Queen and Claudius oppose the appearance of Hamlet in 
 black. Alone among Shakespeare's plays Hamlet has a 
 northern atmosphere. The dramatist loved the warmth 
 and beauty of southern climes, and the melancholy Dane 
 alone is set beneath gray skies and cloudy nights. 
 
 The first Act discloses$Denmark's condition, Hamlet 
 appears and utters his^first solilo^uy^phelia^enters, 
 (j)Polonius gives his wonderful advice to his son, ancrHam- 
 let meets the ghost. 
 
 The second Act shows^Hamlet 's influence on Ophelia, 
 fae has put the aatic disposition onj^he players arouse 
 his determination^Ophelia thinks hisJjrain unhinged by 
 love,Mie plans to test the guilty king/he 
 iqto^fury, and a night passes before the crisjk. 
 
 The third AcTgives theQgfeaF soliloquy, which, is the 
 finest debate on man and suicide in all literature) 
 talks with Ophelia^ne goes to his mother's chamber 
 
 wl*. /^2\ 
 
 finds the king prayingJome kills old PoloniusSygives 
 advice to the players^fand the court play follows^ 
 
 The fourth Act shows < PH^imlet leaving for England ; 
 we ha^re therttiird^>lilo^^ is now insane, she 
 
 dies ; arid the KmgarmLaertes conspire against Hamlet. 
 
 Thejifth Act gives the^grave-digging scene, Hamlet is 
 prostrated, but "there's a divinity that doth shajpe^ouf 
 ends rough hew them how we wilF\g)Hamlet and Laertes 
 meet, they fence, Hamlet is struck down, but kills the 
 Kine: the Queen drmks the poisoned cup by mistake; 
 Laertes dies, then Hamlet, and the tragedy ends. Some 
 think that the entire action included but ten days. 
 
 This play shows Shakespeare's / great knowledge of 
 "" mental philosophy. The* pangs of despised love, the law's 
 
 42 
 
 \ 
 
HAMLET 
 
 delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns which patient 
 merit of the unworthy takes, these are still the source 
 of melancholy and the cause of madness. V^\\\ is fafc% 
 and when will abdicates, chance rules. We have the 
 nothingness of reflection. The great monologue o 
 cide and doubt is followed by another equally remarkable 
 on reason and resolution. Tennyson thought Hamlet the 
 first creatlorT in~ a1t~tfterature. Thinking creates more 
 problems than it solves. "[.Enormous intellectual activity 
 and aversion to real action are here combined with 
 exquisite power.J[ 
 
 The S9lilogj^utfh4hc^gra_ve^ard is the best of sermons 
 on the vanity of life. And where else is conscience so 
 portrayed? Hamlet knew the force of conscience and 
 instructed the players; he watched the features of the 
 guilty monarch. The voice of his brothers blood cries 
 to him from the ground. "O my offence is rank and 
 smells to heaven." The Queen shudders as Hamlet holds 
 up before her his father's picture. The criminal lawyer 
 who would force a confession from the accused, can 
 have no better textbook than this play. And we 'are 
 taught that ^thinking without action destroys belief \ 
 Hamlet lays hold of nothing with energy. His very faith 
 becomes clouded and transitory, because he never acts. 
 He is the type of thousands who waver between immor- 
 tality and despair, ft 
 
 This great play alone reveals the indebtedness of the 
 King James version of the Bible to Shakespeare. He 
 came when the Bishop's Bible was in use and he used 
 it freely; indeed all the secular authors in the world 
 combined do not give so much evidence of the reading 
 of the sacred volume as the great drargatjst alone. "It 
 Jiath the primal eldest curse upon't, a w*hfi*s murder" 
 is the curse of Cain. The noblejipostrophe to man_m 
 
 43 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Act II. is almost a paraphrase of the Psalms. VThere's 
 a divinity that shapes our ends rough hew them how we 
 will," is an echo of Romans and its doctrines. J"The 
 world is weary, stale, flat and unprofitable," recalls 
 Ecclesiastes. * All the functiojis_of repentance are given 
 in that speech of the king in Act III. -'The soul is called 
 immortal. Jepthah and his daughter illustrate Act II. 
 We hear of a time in Rome when the graves stood ten- 
 antless as in Jerusalem. There is a "special providence 
 in the fall of a sparrow" is a direct quotation from our 
 Lord. 'The Ghost confined to fast in fires till the foul 
 crimes are burnt and purged away, is a conception of 
 Purgatory. Hamlet's cry on seeing the apparition, 
 "Angels and ministers of grace defend us," is from the 
 Book of Hebrews. N"The devil hath power to assume 
 a pleasing shape," is an echo of St. Paul who says, 
 "Satan can transform himself into an angel of light." 
 Polonius' familiar advice to his son is the practical wis- 
 dom of St. James. "We are arrant knaves all," said 
 Hamlet to Ophelia. 
 
 The Scriptures assure us that all have sinned. Con- 
 science does make cowards of us all. Nowhere are the 
 efficacy and purpose of prayer better delineated than in 
 this play. "Words without thoughts never to heaven 
 go." ""There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes 
 it so," what is that but "as a man thinketh in his heart so 
 is he?" "The undiscovered country from whose bourne 
 no traveller returns," shows that Shakespeare was think- 
 ing of Job, "I go whence I shall not return even to the 
 land of darkness and the shadow of death." Hamlet 
 calls the human body a temple as does St. Paul. "O 
 shame! where is thy blush," is a skillful turn of the sub- 
 lime, "O death where is thy sting?" Our literature will 
 never regain body and force and majesty until men drink 
 
 44 
 
HAMLET 
 
 long and deep of the English Bible, the source of power 
 and beauty in Shakespeare, Byron, De Quincey, Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, and Ruski 
 
 In Claudius the jjflg" we hav^a man regal, dignified, 
 with lofe^ manners and never sfcaall ; yet treacherous, 
 faithless, and untrustworthy. The^ohost calls him seduc- 
 tive. When Hamlet meets him, his denunciations dissolve. 
 He is a large and attractive man, yet lives in dread of 
 death and makes his way by murder. He is the Cain 
 of Shakespeare. Polonius is a type of the politician in 
 his dotage, a statesiflarroUt of repair, a man of intrigue 
 and self-interest, to whom Hamlet is a constant mystery. 
 He is always hunting for some plot to guide. Hence 
 he perpetually trips himself. No trace of^ the real dip- 
 lomatist is in him. He agrees with everyone and "cannot 
 see~when he is justly ridiculed! His "famous advice to 
 his sonpartially redeems this hesitating~arid negative 
 character. Here Shakespeare is rivalled only by Burns 
 in his lines to a young friend. 
 
 Horatio^ is a very Apollo in moral beauty. Disin- 
 terested, loyal, prompt, fearless, oF"deepfeeling, true 
 to his convictions, ready to warn Hamlet at his own risk, 
 utterly unselfish, just, tender, strong, and yet of sur- 
 passing modesty. Shakespeare seems to have drawn in 
 him the ideal friend : one who indeed I/is not passion's 
 slave and who in suffering all suffers nothing, with 
 no revenue but his good spirits/' and well does Hamlet 
 wear him in "his heart's core."/^ 
 
 fl Laertesjives close to the earth. He is a pure materia 
 tyMfet. "Be wary, best safety lies in fear," he says. He is 
 '^economical : V'And for my means, I'll husband them 
 ' well they shall go far with little J\ Trained in France, 
 he is a man of the world, destitute of spirituality, fond 
 of music and fencing, false to his friends, ungenerous, 
 
 45 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 unreflective, but of prompt energy and decision. In the 
 whole play he is the only opposite of Hamlet. This 
 shows Shakespeare's wisdom^ 
 
 Weakness, irresolution, a willingness to buy stolen 
 goods, the puppet of the King, having a flexible con- 
 science, and incapable of lastingrepentance^ such is tlie 
 Queen. We are ever disappointed in this woman of 
 paste. Yet she surprises us once when she nobly 
 addresses Ophelia, scattering "sweets to the sweet" on 
 her grave. And she is Hamlet's mother and the more's 
 the marvel. We are not told her share in the awful 
 crime, ^er weakness crowns her son's sorrow. 
 
 ."A bloody deed, almost as bad, good mother; as kill 
 a king and marry with his brother !" 
 
 Poor Ophelia ! In all the list of Shakespeare's women 
 where is there one so pathetic? Too good for earth, too 
 pure for life, never disclosing her love, and ending her 
 spotless career in madness; she is too delicate and 
 unworldly to analyzQy-a fragile shell, a momentary dream. 
 Her wreck is the climax of sadness. Her hopes bud only 
 to droop! Hermind disintegrates like Prospero's vision. 
 Perhaps no character in literature has so awakened pity. 
 
 4 She cannot rise from calamity, like Hero ; but sinks 
 beneath it, like a sensitive plant. 
 
 And what of Hamlet? Is he not Shakespeare's 
 riddle? Confessedly his master creation, he has attracted, 
 enthralled, and puzzled the first intellects of the world. 
 "Hamlet is Shakespeare," says Taine. "Hamlet is Ham- 
 let," says Hebler. "It is we who are Hamlet," says 
 Hazlitt. At the beginning, and before his mind has been 
 shocked by his father's apparition, he ponders on the 
 emptiness of this life and the solemn mysteries of the 
 life to come. "O that this too too solid flesh would 
 melt!" This is the natural outcome of his reflective 
 
 46 
 
HAMLET 
 
 soul. In the earliest passage in which he communes with 
 himself, he broods on the advisability of suicide. He 
 was marvelously sensitive to all the miseries of life. "O 
 that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self- 
 slaughter." To him it was a hollow pageant: "how 
 weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the 
 uses of this world." 
 
 Out of the dim unknown streamed the influences to 
 which he was singularly responsive. Open is he to all 
 those occult forces "There are more things in heaven and 
 earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 
 Brooding melancholy, the poetic temperament, a spiritual- 
 ized intellect, a womanly softness, an enfeebled will, a 
 princely grace, a piteous humor, and a mighty heart: all 
 meet in this most subtle creation of the world's most 
 i, gifted mind. Grief breaks his heart. \ He is charged 
 ( with a filial duty for which his will is inadequate. As 
 Goethe said, "he is an acorn planted in a vase.'^ His i 
 outlook of the universe is so vast that his sense of respon- 
 sibility is paralyzed and his ability, for action is arrested. 
 Great is his thinking, but it is without purpose. He 
 roams in the twilight between reason and madness. 
 Heaven enraptures him, and Hell haunts him. No char- 1 
 acter, it is said, since Christ, has ever formed an object 
 of such absorbing interest to men. Apart from his set- 
 ting he would still be Hamlet. Grand in his conceptions, 
 lonely in his grandeur, desolate in his pain, he is the 
 eternal mouthpiece for all men who confess the universe 
 a complexity, a paradox, a puzzle. "To be or not to 
 /No sadder feature in Hamlet appears than his inabilit 
 to find solace in love.// Ophelia is incompetent to under- 
 stand him, and loneliness again is his atmosphere. Men, 
 to him stand self -revealed. "Suit the action to the word,' 
 the word to the action hold the mirror up to nature,"- 
 
 47 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 these words are the model for the stageV He pulls off 
 men's disguises as easily as he casts aside his own cloak. 
 In passages that defy criticism, he uncovers motives, 
 ends, hopes, fears, virtues, defects, and somehow our 
 experience always throbs "yes" in response. Hamlet is 
 never at rest. All things to him are shadows. Like 
 Paul, he saw that the things which are seen are temporal. 
 Yet his spirit is indomitable. Distracted and irresolute, 
 he never surrenders. He stands, a lofty soul, perplexed 
 by life's mystery, depressed by affliction, awed by the 
 nearness of the other world, yet confronted by the stern 
 duties of the hour. The parting from Ophelia is desolate 
 and tragic, and flashes a light into his inner heart. "I 
 loved Ophelia, forty thousand brothers could not make 
 up my sum." 
 
 Beneath all of Hamlet's words, like the rocks beneath 
 the soil, we may discover a great mental force and a 
 courtly elegance, as native to him as beauty to the rose. 
 Sometimes he is dull and inert ; again he is all life. Grief 
 corrodes his grandeur. In the Ghost-scene he is super- 
 stitious : "I'll watch tonight, perchance 'twill walk again." 
 With Ophelia he is tender; when Polonius dies, he is 
 furious ; "How now ! a rat ? Dead, for a ducat, dead !" ; 
 at Ophelia's grave he is in despair. Predisposed to medi- 
 tation on the vanity of life, his soul was crowded with 
 august and portentous fancies, weird as the witches in 
 Macbeth; and he sways like a balloon when he is in touch 
 with these unearthly powers. "Angels and ministers of 
 grace defend us !" Princely in action, exalted in manner, 
 tearful in humor, incomparable in thought, his power to 
 execute is completely benumbed, and fate reigns over will. 
 
 No real thinker can study Hamlet and remain an 
 agnostic. There is patient sweetness. There is wonder- 
 ful pathos. There is vital attachment to Horatio. There 
 
HAMLET 
 
 is love for his father's memory. There is a sense of 
 earth's misery, of the instability of all things about us, 
 that almost remind one, at times, of Christ's lament over 
 Jerusalem. He is man at the apex of his development, 
 disappointed, unsatisfied, shrouded in doubt, struggling 
 for the light, with a tender heart, a vacillating purpose, 
 
 comprehensive vision, and a paralyzed will. 
 
 And Hamlet is conscious of his own defects. He is 
 forever analyzing his emotions. He gazes into his con- 
 science and says: "Thus conscience doth make cowards 
 of us all." The engine works, but the driving wheel is 
 still. He is never spontaneous, exuberant, healthy. He 
 is always self-conscious, introspective. moMdT~ Thought 
 replaces action. He sees the good in evil and the evil 
 in good so clearly that he makes no choice between them. 
 
 He is a warning to every man in whom reflection has 
 usurped duty, and who conceives that talking is activity. 
 Such men are not rare. The real world, to Hamlet, is 
 obscured by the mental haze in which he moves. Indif- 
 _ference leads to feebleness r feebleness tn inability 
 
 inability to disaster. Notice that his continual declaration 
 
 none. Never was the W^ 
 
 critical instinct so carefully anoyexactly developed. lago 
 is critical, but he has purpose JHLaertes raises a mob and 
 destroys the security of a palace, but Hamlet only ponders. 
 He lives in the future only. * He is a great sceptic because 
 he has no faith in t himself, Moreover, soon after he 
 sees his father's spirit he doubts immortality. He doubts 
 even Horatio, and swears him to secrecy at the sword's 
 point. He doubts Ophelia and asks: "Are you honest?" 
 Mr. J. R. Lowell has noticed Hamlet's irony. It is like 
 the irony of Socrates and is the result of his temperament. 
 He wonders if men are not made in jest. He talks of 
 suicide but cannot kill himself; he refuses to kill the 
 
 49 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 king while praying, for fear his soul will therefore be 
 saved. He goes to England for no reason but removal 
 from a disagreeable duty. Chance alone brings him to 
 his end. He is a man of genius, per se, and has all the 
 eccentricity of his class. The philosophical spirit in him 
 is supreme. He foresees, analyzes, 
 
 movement of his enemies, aTid this gives him great 
 delight. 
 
 "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, 
 That ever I was born to set it right" ! 
 And he goes no further to set it right. How many 
 Hamlets there are in morals, in politics, in business, in 
 religion, perpetually in the bloom of critical conviction, 
 ever budding caustic criticism, sitting in judgment on 
 other men, yet lifting not so much *as a hair's weight to 
 relieve humanity, or to purge it of its faults. Hamlet 
 would have made a good editor, or a political declaimer, 
 or a general pessimist at large. Salvini thought that in 
 Hamlet the intellect completely took the place of the will. 
 
 Was Hamlet's madness real or assumed? Polonius, 
 a shrewd observer, says: "Tho this be madness, yet 
 there's method in't." One thing is certain: if Hamlet 
 is irresponsible the whole play is a farce. Gervinus 
 thinks that his madness was feigned. If he was mad, 
 then he and three-fourths of men are alike. Taine says 
 that, "the hinges of his mind .were twisted, not broken." 
 We must confess that he acts his part well, for he 
 deceives even his examiners by telling them unwelcome 
 facts. Edgar, in King Lear, pretended insanity, and so 
 did Hamlet, says Lowell. If so, this course permitted 
 him to drift along in the channel of his inactivity, and 
 shows the profound subtlety of his mind. 
 
 Edwin Booth believed Hamlet fitfully insane, that this 
 was his recurring cloud, allowing him the clearest and 
 
 50 
 
HAMLET 
 
 loveliest vision, only to be followed by the most melan- 
 choly depression. Granting this, he is a type of thou- 
 sands, for Voltaire tells us that "insane asylums were 
 designed to prove the rest of the world sane." Hamlet 
 said to the Queen, ''Essentially I am not in madness, but 
 mad in craft." Thus the character baffles us at every 
 turn. But surely the gEfiat-sekfrgiiy was nn?rH in n 
 sane^ moment, else the play is bedlam and has no force. 
 Hamlet walks the borderland of Dryden : 
 
 "Great wit to madness sure is near allied, 
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 
 
 Hamlet lies close to Shakespeare's heart. It gives us 
 the dramatist's view of the stage, of life, of men, as does 
 no other of his plays. No play is so often quoted, and 
 none has so universally affected mankind. To select any 
 one line is like selecting one rose from a thousand. It 
 is the tragedy of thought. No commentator on this play, 
 among the hundreds who have written, has risen to its 
 true level. Perhaps if one had we should have had a 
 second Shakespeare. Hamlet was produced when the 
 master had passed the day-dreams of life, and was musing 
 on its perplexities and sorrows. It is not golden but dark. 
 
 The French have never understood it. The Germans 
 have most deeply appreciated it. Not until Coleridge 
 threw upon it the searchlight of his genius, did the English 
 rise to its true worth. If Lear teaches the differenc 
 between justice and generosity; if Macbeth shows the 
 eternal Nemesis that follows secret sin; if Othello reveals 
 the abyss into which jealousy may plunge a noble mind; 
 then Hamlet, Shakespeare's masterpiece, teaches men that 
 sands no more surely glide through a glass, than the 
 best intentions through a paralyzed purpose, 
 cem^urjesjpass he sounds to them the janger of d^fay r - 
 
 Si 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 If Hamlet is the consummate flower of the world's 
 greatest mind, it is as truly the perfection of the actor's 
 art. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Betterton, 
 when acting Hamlet, turned from a ruddy hue to unnat- 
 ural white, and made his audience shudder in their seats 
 on seeing the Ghost. Talma, in Paris, was so vivid in 
 his delineation of the character that women fainted and 
 screamed. Robert Wilkes, David Garrick, John Kemble, 
 Edmund Kean, Tommaso Salvini, these were all great 
 representatives of Hamlet. 
 
 But it was reserved for our own land and time to 
 witness an impersonation of the character that has never 
 been surpassed. In all the elements of intellect, fancy, 
 grandeur, tenderness, mystery, delirium and grace, the 
 Hamlet of Edwin Booth was the very crown of that great 
 actor's art. Sustained power, marvellous variety, match- 
 less eloquence, facial play, spontaneous delivery, refined 
 gasticulation, all combined to form an impression that 
 once seen could never be effaced. The poetic imagina- 
 tion, the reflective mind, and the melancholy temperament 
 of the Dane, precisely fitted Booth's genius, and he gave 
 it an individuality quite his own. His exquisite ten- 
 derness to Ophelia; his weird meeting with the Ghost; 
 his quiet study of the king's face in the play ; his unriv- 
 alled rendering of the soliloquies; his manly love for 
 Horatio, these were and will ever remain the priceless 
 glory of the American stage. 
 
 Booth was Hamlet. He revealed its spiritualized intel- 
 lect, its feminine softness, its autumnal gloom, perhaps 
 more than any man before him. There was a pathetic 
 emotion, an awful reality, a poignant suffering, and, above 
 all, an indefinable dreaminess that charmed while it sub- 
 dued. There was no bald realism, no spectacular frenzy, 
 no gaudy glitter, about it; it was the portrayal of a 
 
 52 
 
HAMLET 
 
 great mystery, spiritualized, illumined, inspired, and shot 
 through and through with rare sentiment that played 
 upon the text like light upon the lawn. There were flashes 
 of great energy, when the hearers sat transfixed with 
 terror; there were silvery notes of sadness, that melted 
 men to tears ; there were passages of awful power, when 
 the audience were amazed : and there were colossal explo- 
 sions, when the whole house rose and cheered. You felt 
 that Booth's spirit was a mirror that reflected every 
 varying mood of Hamlet's complex personality, and that 
 when you saw him you saw the very character itself. 
 From the first, his imagination was haunted, the Ghost 
 scene transfigured him into horrible suspense, his cry on 
 killing Polonius froze the soul, and the desolate calm as 
 he stood over Ophelia's grave was beyond all imitation 
 or description. It fascinated all men everywhere, and 
 once ran one hundred nights successively with an interest 
 that never flagged. To all who have seen this immortal 
 representation, each subsequent Hamlet fades from the 
 eyes, and the great American tragedian walks the stage 
 once more. 
 
 EDWIN BOOTH 
 
 I cannot forbear, in closing, to present a few words 
 of tribute to the man who did more than any other to 
 elevate, and purify, and adorn the American stage. Pri- 
 marily a gentleman, his appearance is deeply engraven 
 on the memories of all who were so fortunate as to see 
 and know him. Of incomparable grace, with a voice like 
 a silver bell, he had a high forehead, a wealth of waving 
 hair, a stern yet mobile mouth, and eyes deepset, hazel, 
 expressive as diamonds, now melting with tenderness, 
 
 53 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 and now aglow with frenzy ; while his bearing, dignified, 
 Athenian, and refined, swayed men as by magical power. 
 To the very last, a roll of those eyes,or one of his wonder- 
 ful gestures, evoked a peal of spontaneous applause. He 
 had a delicate humor, a cheerful patience, a lofty ideal. 
 He was stately yet not austere; dignified yet not cold; 
 proud yet not repelling. He never descended to the spec- 
 tacular or the low. He was generosity itself. He was 
 a very embodiment of honesty. Grave, contemplative and 
 sweet, he was as sensitive as a girl, and shunned all 
 compliment and applause. His artistic purpose was 
 unswerving, lofty and pure. Isolated by reason of his 
 somber, spiritual temperament, profoundly affected by his 
 brother's awful crime, introspective and inheriting a tinge 
 of deep melancholy, he possessed the dreaminess of the 
 poet and the contemplation of the philosopher. 
 
 His devotion to his wife is seen in all his letters, and 
 his attachment to his friends is their priceless heritage. 
 He saw, with sorrow, the decline in the public taste that 
 now seems to have reached a regretful culmination, and 
 used to say that he "never gave the theater-going world 
 what it wished but what it needed." For forty-two 
 years he fascinated, instructed, and elevated men, women 
 and children by the surpassing power of his great art, 
 and never condescended to a single representation that 
 could bring a blush to the purest maiden's cheek. 
 
 He has left no successor, and lies among the great 
 dead in Mt. Auburn. Above his grave the robins carol, 
 and on its grasses the snowflakes fall. Yet the first are 
 no sweeter than his voice, and the second are no purer 
 than his life. Surely we may say of him, as Horatio said 
 of Hamlet: "Good night, sweet Prince, and flights of 
 angels sing thee to thy rest." 
 
 54 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 BY 
 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 IT is the sweetest and happiest of all the comedies, a 
 rest for the imagination, a tonic for the heart. 
 Founded on a graceful story, wit and mirth, song and 
 sense, philosophy and tenderness, love and melan- 
 choly, gravity and drollery, absurdity and truth, are so 
 perfectly blended and intermingled, that misfortune is 
 lightened, love is heightened, wisdom is deepened, and 
 nature welcomes her tired children beneath the trees 
 and beside the streams. 
 
 The Forest of Arden covered much of Warwick- 
 shire from the Avon northwest of Stratford, one of 
 the loveliest landscapes in the world, with towering 
 trees, manyhued flowers, trembling breezes, and haunt- 
 ing fancies in nook and dell. With his mother's name 
 the great alchemist associated an ideal and fanciful 
 life, robbed of all conventionality and restraint. We 
 breathe the blossom-laden air; we lie on couches of 
 moss; under melancholy boughs we moralize on the 
 artificialities of existence, the imagination becomes 
 soft and delicate; the wit runs riot in idleness, caprice 
 and fancy reign here ; the critical and destructive spirit 
 is banished from this Arcady; it is a return to the 
 Promised Land from the Egypt of formalism and pre- 
 tense. Stern necessity flees away, the cares and echoes 
 of the harsh world disappear, the very atmosphere 
 wakens philosophic poetry, and "this our life, exempt 
 from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in 
 the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in 
 everything." 
 
 We have thus a poetic pastoral, an enchanting 
 masque, lions are introduced from France and serpents 
 and palm trees are added. Fantastic imagery casts 
 
 57 
 
f 
 
 SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 over the whole a robe of iridescent beauty. The inten- 
 tion of the comedy is to extol self-mastery and equani- 
 mity and self-command. Town life is contrasted with 
 rural abandon. We are led into the country of con- 
 tentment where our anxieties drop from us like 
 needles from the scented pine. We are solicited to a 
 return to nature. It is the joy of childhood, the fresh 
 delight of innocence, the sport of frolicsome lambs. 
 Here too is love, in its many phases, and humor, natu- 
 ral and professional and morbid. There are gleams of 
 the simplest humanity and of the profoundest philoso- 
 phy. No play more appeals to our primal instincts 
 and none more to our better impulses. 
 
 Through the treachery and violence of a brother, 
 a noble and generous prince has been driven into exile. 
 Friendship, stronger than blood, induces several of 
 his subjects to share his banishment. From the soli- 
 tude of society they escape into the solitude of nature. 
 The daughter of the prince is also driven forth to the 
 vicinity of her* father. Her cousin, the usurper's 
 daughter, accompanies her, drawn by a sisterly devo- 
 tion. They persuade a witty court fool to be their 
 companion. A shepardess, a country wench, two ser- 
 vants, and three young men, complete the society 
 of Robin Hood's land. We have love and disguise in 
 Rosalind and Orlando, love and folly in Audrey and 
 Touchstone, and love conventional in Phebe and 
 Silvius. There is the natural humor of Rosalind, the 
 professional humor of Touchstone, and the morbid 
 humor of Jacques. 
 
 ( Tke^ old_JDukeJFrederick is a man of harsh and 
 illiberal mind, destitute of the finer instincts, and a 
 real robber of his brother's property; he suspects all 
 good men, he is jealous, hasty, bitter and designing. 
 
 58 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 The banished Duke converts exile into repose, he 
 rises above all discomforts, he is cheerfulness in mis- 
 fortune, he thinks these woods "more free from peril 
 than the envious court"; "these are councillors that 
 feelingly persuade me what I am"; "sweet are the uses 
 of adversity, which like the toad, ugly and venomous, 
 wears yet a precious jewel in his head", an allusion to 
 the old tradition that the toad was a remedy for 
 disease, with its imagined gem set between its eyes. 
 
 He thinks Jacques nowhere like a man; he pene- 
 trates his sly humor with "what fool is this", he tells 
 him of his former life, he memorizes on their former 
 better days when with "holy bell they were knelled to 
 church and sat at good men's feasts, and wiped their 
 eyes of drops that sacred pity engendered" ; yet he 
 asks all the sylvan company to sit down in gentleness 
 and take their food" ; he is a humane man and notes 
 that "this wide and universal theatre presents more 
 woeful pageants than the scene wherein we play in". 
 He solicits music from Amiens who answers, "Blow, 
 blow, thou wintry wind, thou art not so unkind, as 
 man's ingratitude; thy tooth is not so keen, because / 
 thou art not seen, although thy breath be rude". 
 "Freeze, freeze, thou winter sky, that dost not bite so 
 nigh, as benefits forgot ; though thou the waters warp, 
 thy sting is not so sharp, as friend remembered not". 
 This is the finest verse in the world on the pangs of 
 broken attachment and the hollowness of human devo- 
 tion. Who has not repeated them when deceived and 
 neglected and forgotten? They recall the sorrowful 
 lines in Lear. 
 
 He pierces through Touchstone's folly and uncovers 
 all his wit. And at the very close, when his fortunes 
 are returned to him, with what dignity and modera- 
 
 59 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 tion he offers to share all his unexpected gain among 
 the companions of his enforced exile! And all closes 
 with a rustic dance. 
 
 Here is Shakespeare's picture of the man whom no 
 reverses can subdue, no sorrows embitter; whose 
 humanity rises with his own loss, whose inborn gentle- 
 ness conquers every obstacle, a grand portrai^of the 
 superiority of character over possessions and of soul 
 over title, a perpetual lesson of stability, endurance, 
 dignity, manliness, and truth. Stripped of his rightful 
 estate, banished to the wilderness, his real wealth he 
 finds in himself, the cover of heaven is sweeter than 
 his palace roof ; losing his domain he finds it within ; 
 his mind makes its own world, and he proves that the 
 intellectual man furnishes his own surroundings and 
 can never be depleted of the best. 
 
 Orlando is a young gentleman, brave, modest and 
 magnanimous ; his only thought of his ancestry is never 
 to dishonor it; he a sort of Horatio in adversity; the 
 very highest type of friend ; never schooled but 
 learned ; his humblest servant is his highest eulogist ; 
 he tilts with Jaques in wit ; he is as wise as humorous ; 
 trained like a peasant by his brother and_treated like 
 a slave,jretjn angerjie_is-jn aster of himself, he defends 
 his old retainer with the sword ; he is always self-con- 
 tained, healthy, a perfectly balanced man. He thinks 
 little of himself. Concerning his possible death in the 
 wrestling match, he says: "I shall do my friends no wrong 
 for I have none to lament me ; the world no injury for in 
 it I have nothing; only in the world I fill up a place 
 which may be better supplied when I have made it 
 empty". The sight of Rosalind entrances him, his love 
 developes, he hangs his ditty to her upon the tree ; 
 "Oh Rosalind! these trees shall be my books, and in 
 
 60 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 their barks my thoughts I'll character, that every eye 
 which in this forest looks shall see thy virtues wit- 
 nessed everywhere ; Run, run Orlando, carve on every 
 tree, the fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she." 
 
 "Her stature," he says, "is just as high as my heart"; 
 he tells her there is no clock in the forest; he tells her 
 again that he is loveshaked and asks her the remedy; 
 he admits to the disguised girl that he wrote the verses 
 on the tree ; neither rhyme nor reason can express his 
 love; he would have her cure it by counsel and when 
 she tells him she would cure him if he would but call 
 her Rosalind, and come every day to woo her, he re- 
 plies, "tell me where you live." 
 
 The love scene in Act IV is delicious, natural, a 
 model for novelists, without strain or stilt or conven- 
 tion. When Celia marries them in fun, and he repeats 
 the formula after her, it is the sweetest bit in all 
 Shakespeare, with a forest for a church, and flowers for 
 wedding bells, and a witty woman for a priest. Then 
 the real marriage with Hymen's hymn, "you and you 
 are sure together, as the winter to foul weather," ; and 
 the song, "wedding is great Juno's crown," and the 
 felicity is consummated. 
 
 Rosalind is a delightful blending of subtle womanly 
 traits, defying analysis, like the rainbow. She breathes 
 of youth and youths' sweet prime. She is as witty 
 as Beatrice, but her wit bubbles like a fountain. It 
 is the carol of a bird. Tenderness and mirth exquisite- 
 ly interplay in her, and she is affection, raillery, teas- 
 ing vivacity, sauciness, audacity, impatience, fondness, 
 propriety, grace, and abandon, in turns. She has all the 
 swift changes of an April day. We think of her "a 
 gallant curtleaxe upon her thigh, a boar spear in her 
 hand"; she has not the sober eloquence of Portia, 
 
 61 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 nor the demure wisdom of Isabella; her shortest talks 
 are her best; yet she is both volatile and voluble, 
 like Keat's Madeline, "to her heart her heart was 
 voluble, paining with eloquence her balmy side." 
 
 She is a strange, queer, lovely creature, a beautiful 
 romantic animal ; she briskly springs and runs and 
 leaps; she plays lightly over all things with her deli- 
 cate wit; it is irrepressible and gushes like a brook in 
 the glade; it catches force from the clouds and is a 
 compact of maidenly fancy and cheerfulness ; even in 
 her tears an arch of playfulness spans that perfect 
 mouth. No trial can break her spirits, no storm can 
 chill her enthusiasm ; she is perfect composure ; the 
 contradiction between her assumed dress and her 
 sex but heightens her attractiveness. Her part is 
 played with infinite zest. She roams the forest like 
 some wood nymph. Nor is she in any degree mannish 
 or prudish. 
 
 She is a lovely girl, freed from the conventions of 
 the court, liberated into nature's wide domain and un- 
 fettered from all restraint, yet still a woman with a 
 woman's sense of propriety and truth. We cannot 
 imagine her wearing Portia's sedate air, or Hermione's 
 matronly gravity, or Cordelia's solicitude for the sorrow- 
 ing. Her freedoms of speech are the rarest proofs of 
 her delicacy; she hazards just enough to conceal 
 her real personality. Her modesty speaks more freely 
 than it feels, as false modesty feels more freely than 
 it speaks. She is love in disguise forevermore, a 
 mountain zephyr, a swaying shadow in the sun. She 
 would be out of place in a city mansion, the woods are 
 her natural setting. Fortune robbed her of her wealth, 
 and when she finds in Orlando one struck by the same 
 fate, her heart is taken unawares and yields. She 
 
 62 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 vanquishes him before he conquers her. Her friend- 
 ship with Celia is a perfect pastoral. This it is which 
 brings forth her native cheerfulness under every stress. 
 She is too impulsive for deep reflection, she is too 
 adroit for delay, she masters her passion by giving 
 rein to her mind and imagination. Thus she shields 
 herself from all melancholy and preserves a due de- 
 corum. Her laugh is wholly unlike that of any other 
 of Shakespeare's heroines, silvery, tinkling, teasing, 
 taunting. She is his most enchanting coquette. She 
 could not be merry, however, until she had joined her 
 banished father. She can rejoice in Celia's greater 
 fortune, proving her total unselfishness. Orlando was 
 the son of her father's friend and this cements their 
 attraction. 
 
 How dashing is the picture of the splendid girl who 
 would have a "swashing and a martial outside", to be 
 called Ganymede in the forest, going in content to 
 liberty and not to banishment, true as a star to her 
 cousin, defying all that may await her in the free and 
 untried life ! She slyly hints that she must comfort 
 the weaker vessel, as "doublet and hose ought to show 
 itself courageous to petticoats." She seeks refresh- 
 ment for Celia in the shepherds' hut and buys the hut 
 for a place of refuge. Can you not see her reading, 
 "From the east to western Ind, no jewel is like Rosa- 
 lind; her worth being mounted on the wind, through 
 all the world bears Rosalind; all the pictures fairest 
 lin'd are but black to Rosalind" ! 
 
 The whole wilderness suddenly becomes a library. 
 
 verses on every tree. And she knows the laws of 
 
 "pSeffy"" too "for some of the verses had in them 
 
 more feet than the verses would bear". She cries; 
 
 "Is he of God's making? What manner of man? Is 
 
 63 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 his head worth a hat, or his chin worth a beard?" 
 Learning that her love poet was Orlando, she quickly 
 inquired; "What said he? How looked he? Did he 
 ask for me? Where remains he? Answer me in one 
 word". Cold and unconcerned at first she becomes a 
 torrent of curious solicitude in an instant. She tells 
 Celia that when a woman thinks she must speak. 
 "Time trots hard," she says, "with a young maid 
 between the contract of her marriage and the day it 
 is solemnized; time ambles with a priest that lacfcs 
 Latin, and a rich man that hath not the gout; and he 
 gallops with a thief to the gallows; and he stays still 
 with lawyers in the vacation". How delicious is this! 
 She says to the wondering Orlando that she dwells 
 with her sister the shepherdess in the skirts of the 
 forest "like a fringe upon a petticoat". And this rol- 
 licksome and teasing girl "thanks God she is not a 
 woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as 
 he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal" ! And 
 then those marks of love, where are they equalled? 
 "A lean cheek, a blue eye and sunken, an unquestion- 
 able spirit, a beard neglected, hose ungartered, bonnet 
 unhanded, sleeve unbuttoned, and everything about 
 you," she says to the wondering swain, "demonstrating 
 a careless desolation," "But are you he who hangs 
 verses on the trees wherein Rosalind is so admired?" 
 "Love is merely a madness, yet I profess to cure it by 
 counsel." "Did you ever cure any so?" "Yes, one, and in 
 this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mis- 
 tress, and I set him every day to woo me; at which 
 time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be 
 effeminate, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, 
 apish, shallow, inconsistent, full of tears, full of smiles, 
 would now like him, now loathe him ; then entertain 
 
 64 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 him, then forswear him ; now weep for him, then spit 
 at him; and thus I cured him"! "I would cure you, 
 if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day 
 to my cote and woo me" ! 'The oath of a lover," she 
 tells Celia, "is no stronger than the word of a tap- 
 ster." 
 
 She tells Jaques that she would rather "have a fool 
 to make her merry than experience to make her sad." 
 She dismisses the amazed Orlando saying, "I'd as lief 
 be wooed of a snail, for though he comes slowly he 
 carries his house on his head", besides "he brings his 
 destiny with him". Then "come woo me, woo me, 
 for now I am in a holiday humor and like 
 enough to consent." When he threatens to kill him- 
 self, the saucy enchantress replies; "Men have died 
 from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but 
 not for love" ! She tells him how to begin the mock 
 marriage ceremony beneath the trees; and when she 
 anticipates the disguised priest, coyly says; "there's a 
 girl goes before the priest, and certainly a woman's 
 thought runs before her actions." "Make the jdoors 
 upon a woman's wit and it will out at the casement; 
 shut that, and 'twill out at the keyhole; stop that, 
 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney". Once 
 she sums up the whole tender transaction; "for your 
 brother and sister no sooner met but they looked, no 
 sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they 
 sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another 
 the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they 
 sought the remedy; they are in the very wrath of 
 love; clubs cannot part them." 
 
 In the Epilogue, this inimitable creature says that her 
 way is "to conjure and not to beg." This is the key to 
 her character, for she is a dainty, deft, tantalizing 
 
 65 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 enchantress, vivacious and sprightly, coming and going 
 like a dream, provoking and rebuking, always self-pos- 
 sessed, never caustic, playful as a kitten, dazzling and 
 alarming, pouring forth her ceaseless raillery like a bird, 
 fluttering over every subject, saucy as a page, wise as a 
 statesman, with a profound knowledge of all the intrica- 
 cies of the heart, and yet steadied and sobered by a 
 womanly conviction and reserve that redeem her nature 
 and enhance its beauty. 
 
 The melancholy Jaques! We all know him. He is 
 wholly unique and individual. A song carries him out of 
 his senses ; the fool convulses him ; he has neither hatred 
 nor love, all things suggest melancholy to him; he loves 
 himself too well to hate anybody, among the cheerful 
 cheerless only he. Happy faces but whet his philosophic 
 meditation; he mistakes his own self-love for compas- 
 sion, and his pity does not include its object. The 
 sufferings of others but open the fountains of his easy 
 tears, he would inflict pain to weep over it, he has been 
 a libertine and now pensively stands aloof from the 
 world; he is the sauce of the entire pudding. His irony 
 is tempered with good-nature and he is a pure senti- 
 mentalist. 
 
 His melancholy is not earnest, but assumed ; "a melan- 
 choly," he says, "of mine own, compounded of many 
 simples, extracted from many objects," he is a puzzle 
 to the Duke and a challenge to Rosalind; he was the 
 forerunner of Lawrence Sterne. His entire life is 
 unsubstantial and a mockery, he thinks he can banish all 
 reality, he was born a hypochondriac, all things dis- 
 content him, he knows the shadow side of every age and 
 temperament, and censures all he sees. 
 
 He is without patience in a life of contemplation, was 
 never fitted for activity, never learned self mastery, he 
 
 66 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 can "suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks 
 eggs," "from hour to hour we ripe and rot, and thereby 
 hangs a tale." His brain is as dry as the remainder 
 biscuit after a voyage; he sits down and rails at the 
 misery of mankind ; he ridicules marriage, like all of his 
 successors; he has "neither the scholar's melancholy 
 which is emulation, nor the musician's which is fantas- 
 tical, nor the courtier's, which is proud, nor the soldier's 
 which is ambitious, nor the lawyer's which is politic"; 
 thus he runs the gamut of pensive brooding and reflects 
 every temperament. 
 
 He has given us the unrivalled "All the world's a 
 stage, and all the men and women merely players," yet 
 Shakespeare for this surpassing paragraph drew upon 
 Solon and a Jewish commentator. Man's life was divided 
 into seven parts by many earlier authors; this is the 
 summary of human life from the cynic's standpoint; duty 
 and religion are omitted; the end is second childishness 
 and mere oblivion, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans 
 everything." For a magnificent refutation of Jaques' 
 conclusion read Hamlet's "What a piece of work is man !" 
 
 Jaques has still his thousands of counterparts, young 
 men in whom the springs of obligation and the sense of 
 nobility and the longing for action are obliterated by the 
 dust of indifference and criticism and scorn ; to whom the 
 universe is a glittering pageant, a passing show, an unreal 
 panorama. And all such inevitably have Jaques' mis- 
 anthropy, morbidity, indecision, and censure; they despise 
 love and marriage and tenderness and hope and heaven. 
 
 In Touchstone, Shakespeare gives us a fool wholly 
 unlike his others. The fool in All's Well That Ends 
 Well is a prophetic clown. Those in Twelfth Night 
 and Lear are more expert and conscious of their wit. 
 Speed and Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
 
 67 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 are a pair whose wit is professed and studied. Shakes- 
 peare could laugh. But there are many modes of 
 laughter. Hogarth has depicted a group in the pit of a 
 theatre laughing at the play on the stage. Each face 
 shows a different emotion. The habitual enjoyer of 
 the comic is abandoned to his mirth without stint. By 
 his side is his female companion, fairly overcome, tickled 
 into a climax of merriment. Beyond sits one who has 
 passed the culmination and wipes his eyes. A girl of 
 twenty has her vacant intellect captured, and gazes 
 expectantly for a new sensation. Near is a man whose 
 half opened gaze and winking lid betoken reflection and 
 curiosity. And a woman in the distance laughs because 
 she is too dull to know just what excites her risibilities. 
 And a peak nosed person of refinement condemns the 
 whole circle for their vulgarity. 
 
 Thus the dramatist gives us the whole range of humor, 
 many-sided, complete, temperamental, not a shade is 
 missing. With Jaques, he rails at the world ; with Timon, 
 he turns against it; in Petruchio, we have the tempest 
 of high spirits ; in Romeo and Juliet, the nurse lets loose 
 her wanton tongue; in the Merry Wives of Windsor, 
 Falstaff reaches the very height of pure humor. 
 
 The history of Shakespeare's laughter is the history 
 of himself. At first it is that of a young man; then it 
 is coalesced with fancy; then it is a union of all the 
 faculties ; then it is pathetic ; then it is the joy of power ; 
 then it becomes irony; then it is musical, and, finally, it 
 is tragic and terrible. Touchstone stands on the edge 
 instinct and consciousness, he is called both "a 
 a fnn1 ; et the folly of others is the source 
 
 of his withe assumes th^appearanre of soun^ wisdom, 
 ,Jiis folly he calls his .tf a 1king horse. Sometimes he vents 
 the deepest philosophy. He is a complex and most .inter- 
 esting character. 
 
 68 
 
AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 In Phoebe and Silvius, we have the rustic love of the 
 shepherds, far beneath the intellectual amorousness of 
 Rosalind and Orlando. Audrey is a coarse creature of 
 the woods, in love with William, the country fellow, 
 thus there are three pairs of lovers : Jjie^LCfifined f the 
 rustic, and the low. Where else could you find such 
 subtle delineation? And in old Adam, we have the per- 
 fect servant, serving two generations, devoted to both 
 father and son, giving of his earnings to his master, 
 whose age is as a lusty winter, frosty yet kindly, and 
 who is sure of that "He that doth the ravens feed and 
 providently caters for the sparrow, will comfort his 
 declining years." Well does Orlando tell him, "Thou 
 art not for the fashion of these times, where none will 
 sweat but for promotion, and having that, do choke their 
 service up, even with the having." 
 
 Celia is Rosalind's opposite; this shows Shakespeare's 
 genius in contrast, more quiet and retired, she yields 
 to her, is less witty, and more unobtrusive, yet full of 
 intelligence and sweetness, she disdains all envy and 
 jealousy, is a Horatio to Rosalind's Hamlet. She is 
 always striking and animated, she tells us that she and 
 Rosalind have slept together, rose at an instant, learned, 
 played, eat together, and wheresoer we went, like Juno's 
 swans, still we were coupled and inseparable. It is a 
 splendid study in female friendship. Her love for Oliver 
 was love at first sight, it needed no fires, it refused all 
 raillery and banter, it was artless and complete. She 
 thinks tears do not become a man, that kisses are Judas' 
 children, that men only swear love because there is no 
 truth in them, and that to say "aye" and "no" to all Rosa- 
 lind's questions is more than to answer in a catechism. 
 
 As You Like It is the comedy of romantic life. 
 Scarcely any other play is more often quoted. We are 
 
 69 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 in the wide world of nature, and cry with Emerson, 
 "Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home!" Giant oaks 
 with their umbrageous foliage ; purling brooks lulling to 
 measureless content; the stag with his horns; the 
 wounded hart; the quiet hut thatched with straw; the 
 pillow of flowers ; the roaming sheep ; the green pastures ; 
 Amiens under the greenwood tree; the sportive winds; 
 Jaques watching his face in the silver stream ; the long 
 velvet sward; the plants and hawthornes; the osiers by 
 the river; the spring time and chorus of birds; these 
 lure us all from the city's noise and contention and 
 untruth into that "cathedral boundless as our wonder, 
 whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply; its 
 choir the winds, its organ thunder, its dome the sky". 
 "When I am stretched beneath the pines, where the 
 evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and pride 
 of man, at the sophist school and the learned clan; for 
 what are they all in their high conceit, when man in 
 the bush with God may meet?" 
 
 It is the function of this great pastoral to recall the 
 primary joy in nature, the fresh incentive to meditation, 
 the glory of flower and leaf and piney bough. 
 
 "The world is too much with us, late and soon 
 Getting and spending we lay waste our powers ; 
 Little we see in nature that is ours ; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 The sea that bares her bosom to the moon, 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers 
 For these, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not great God ! I 'd rather be a Pagan 
 Suckled in a creed outworn ; so might I, 
 Standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea. 
 Or hear old Triton blow his weathered horn." 
 
 70 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 BY - 
 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 MACBETH is the most rapid, and Hamlet is the 
 slowest of Shakespeare's plays. Lear is hurried 
 and long, it has a barbarous background, a gi- 
 gantic setting, the whole play resembles a stormy night; 
 nature and humanity are in convulsion. In it Shakes- 
 peare rivals- Sophocles, man is the play of the elements, 
 pity and terror alternate. The first intellects of the 
 world have studied it in awe. Lamb thought it too 
 colossal to be acted, and indeed there have been few who 
 could reproduce it effectively. 
 
 The story is an old one. Lear was a ruler of ancient 
 Britain, with three daughters, Cordelia and Goneril and 
 Regan ; he called all before him and asked how well they 
 loved him ; the first two answered hypocritically, pledging 
 what they did not feel. Cordelia, last and youngest and 
 best beloved, was too sincere and womanly to bribe him by 
 false professions. She refuses to say what was not in her 
 heart, her natural reserve becomes her fatal snare, she will 
 only love him as a natural father, and the blinded man, 
 stung to rage and dominated by passion, divided his king- 
 dom between the false sisters and cut off the child who, 
 when all others had betrayed and deserted him, took him 
 to her heart, a broken and demented monarch, falling like 
 an oak in the forest. 
 
 It is the great tragedy of ingratitude. In it Shakes- 
 peare surpasses himself. The play was first published in 
 1608. From the references to the eclipse of the sun we 
 judge that it was written in 1605. Sir Philip Sidney, in 
 his Arcadia, had employed the same plot which Shakes- 
 peare illuminated by his genius. That the effect might 
 not be insupportable, the dramatist introduced a second- 
 ary plot, and we have Gloster and his sons Edgar and 
 
 73 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Edmund; by Edmund he is tortured and wronged and 
 by Edgar he is tended and supported. The under plot 
 alone would have made a tragedy, but here it relieves the 
 awful blackness of the main action. 
 
 Edmund is a^ minor lago, destitute of feeling, a monster 
 of vindictiveness ; his knowledge of his shameless birth 
 rankles in his soul. Edgar assumes madness to be the 
 companion of the outcast king. He is light as his brother 
 is darkness. Kent is incarnate devotion to truth and duty. 
 He is one of Shakespeare's noblest men. Cornwall, a 
 coward, is a fit mate for Regan, and is finally killed by a 
 servant, to our relief. Goneril married Edmund and the 
 union was designed in hell. Oswald is a mere factor yet 
 at times faithful to his trust Thus we have five awful 
 characters as a background to^the main actors. 
 
 Of all Shakespeare's fools, the fool in Lear is the most 
 wonderful. He is no comic buffoon, no circus clown. His 
 wild babblings conceal the most weighty conclusions. He 
 is an inspired idiot, only Shakespeare could have drawn 
 him, he is half comic and half serious, we take refuge in 
 his sallies when the anguish for Lear overpowers us, and 
 his devotion to Lear in all his wanderings touches the 
 heart. 
 
 Goneril and Regan are furies in their hate, hags of mid- 
 night horror, fiends destitute of kindness, awful portrait- 
 ures that even surpass Lady Macbeth in bald villainy and 
 cunning. The imagination shudders to admit that such 
 creatures may exist among women. Yet have they not 
 their modern analogues ? Surely the inner history of our 
 insane asylums, where a weak and helpless father is not 
 infrequently confined by his children, proves that the filial 
 ingratitude of one age may reappear in another age in a 
 different form. 
 
 74 
 
KING LEAR ^ 
 
 Lear is almost beyond analysis. It is profanation to 
 touch him. He is a ship driven by .the waves, a man of 
 rash haste and furious passion and colossal pride, a giant 
 torn by feeling, a monarch pushed forth by inhuman 
 daughters into a storm that harmonizes with his distracted 
 mind. Beneath all his aberrations is a basis of fact; his 
 remorse for his petulant rejection of the faithful one in- 
 creases with the action of the play, our compassion is ex- 
 hausted when we see the wandering beggar exposed to the 
 pitiless hail, his bodily and mental powers gone, a man 
 "more sinned against than sinning." Few can read the 
 last act without tears ; when his wits desert him he sees it, 
 some of his speeches surpass in pathos anything in litera- 
 ture, his tender recognition of Cordelia at the last is the 
 climax of sorrow. HLs impatience at first produces his 
 misfortunes.. We see the precipice on which he stands ; 
 he is pushed off and our pity begins. Blindly incredulous, 
 rashly importunate, violently impetuous, yet to the last he 
 is every inch a king. 
 
 And Cordelia, where is her counterpart? She unites 
 the love of truth and the devotion to duty, woman's high- 
 est attributes. Faithful daughter and wife, too modest 
 to proclaim her devotion, she will prove rather than pro- 
 fess. She begs her sisters to treat her father well, she 
 sees their vileness yet calls no names ; her's was a deep 
 and unfathomable nature, of all Shakespeare's heroines 
 she knew the least of joy. Her character is too fine for 
 words, her heart is a well of unsounded devotion, she 
 could not envy or hate or blame, she appears in but a few 
 scenes yet the result is ineffable and complete. She is 
 governed by the loftiest of motives, she approaches the 
 ideal, she must be known to be loved and love.d to be 
 known, she irradiates the blackness of the tragedy like the 
 sunlight after a storm. 
 
 75 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 The subdued quietness and the veiled shyness over all 
 her emotions make her something to be studied and ad- 
 mired and loved ; her eloquence is silence, her voice is 
 characteristic, ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent 
 thing in woman. She surpasses Imogen in her sensi- 
 bility and tenderness and fortitude and magnanimity, she 
 has more strength than Katherine, she has more grandeur 
 than Portia, she has more devotion than Hermione ; the 
 intensity of her feeling is concealed beneath the dignified 
 calmness of her deportment. 
 
 Like Abdiel in the great epic, "among the faithless, 
 faithful only he"; at the conclusion of the play she re- 
 appears a ministering angel, and passes from our sight a 
 glorified saint. Only the Antigone of Sophocles is worthy 
 of comparison with her. 
 
 The motif and exposition are given in the first act. The 
 haughty king would divide his territory. Goneril and 
 Regan express their false devotion in lines that are the 
 consummation of hypocrisy. Cordelia will love and be 
 silent. She cannot heave her heart into her mouth. 
 Threatened with rejection, she will give her father half of 
 her love, reserving the other for him who may win her 
 hand and heart. Not even the wise Kent can dissuade the 
 infuriated Lear; he disowns and curses her. Burgundy 
 would marry Cordelia for her cjowry, but France takes 
 her, for she in herself is a dowry, most rich being poor. 
 Then follows the great picture wherein Gloster discerns in 
 the late commotion in the heavens the presage of discord 
 among kingdoms and families. Edmund answers that 
 "we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and 
 the stars, as if we were villains by necessity"; here is 
 medieval astrology and its influence. Goneril and her 
 sister plot against their father, Kent declares he will serve 
 Lear in all seasons, and now appear touches of Lear's 
 coming insanity. 
 
 76 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 The Fool gives the first of his speeches : "Have more 
 than thou showest, Speak more than thou knowest, Lend 
 less than thou owest, Ride more than thou goest, Learn 
 more than thou trowest, Set less than thou throwest, and 
 thou shalt have more than two tens to a score." Note 
 that Goneril cannot bear the mouthings of the Fool, for 
 villainy never can endure simple wit. She would send 
 the old man forth. He utters an awful curse upon her. 
 "Turn all her mother's pains and benefits to laughter and 
 contempt, that she may feel how sharper than a serpent's 
 tooth it is to have a thankless child!" 
 
 The Fool tells Lear that the snail has a house to put his 
 head in, not to give away to his daughters and leave his 
 horns without a case. No play so abounds in maledictions 
 and references to the lower animals. In Act 2 Edmund 
 lies to his father as the sisters lied to Lear. 
 
 Indeed the whole action is like a greater and lesser 
 storm proceeding at the same time. Edgar flees from his 
 brother, he grimes his face with filth and faces the perse- 
 cutions of the sky ; his madness is assumed most perfectly, 
 while Lear's madness is real. In Edgar's ravings we see 
 a practical purpose in view, while in Lear's we have the 
 constant brooding on one great anguish; so well did 
 Shakespeare know the mind. 
 
 Lear, in despair, now turns to Regan for protection. 
 Abandoned by one child, he turns to the other. Alas, she 
 defends her inhuman sister, she calls her father old, and 
 begs him to implore Goneril's forgiveness. Our pity in- 
 creases. He and the Fool now go out into the storm the 
 elements rage, "spit fire, spout rain, nor rain, wind, thun- 
 der, fire, are my daughters, I tax you not with unkind- 
 ness. I never gave you kingdom, called you children I, 
 a poor, infirm, weak, despised old man." 
 
 77 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 The 4th scene is a convention of agonies. External 
 nature convulsed, Lear insane, the babbling of the Fool, 
 Kent faithful and tender no such scene can be found 
 elsewhere. Only Michael Angelo or Dante might have 
 conceived it ! Nature howls the woes of humanity. Kent, 
 Lear and the Fool enter a rude hovel. Lear says: "O! 
 that way madness lies: Let me shun that!" Yet even 
 then he prays for other defenseless wretches that bide the 
 pelting of this pitiless storm. Edgar enters disguised as a 
 madman. The debate between him and Lear, interrupted 
 by the mouthings of the Fool, surpasses all art. Gloster 
 appears, and Edgar says "the prince of darkness is a 
 gentleman." Lear asks him what is the cause of thunder? 
 Edgar's feigned madness surpasses that of Hamlet. And 
 he leaves, saying, "Childe Roland to the dark tower 
 came." 
 
 Then follows the wonderful imitation trial. It is a 
 medley in which all take part. Edgar is the Judge, the 
 Fool sits by his side, Goneril and Regan are summoned in 
 spirit. Lear cries: "She kicked the poor father." The 
 trial proceeds, it is the climax of sorrow. Edgar can 
 scarcely conceal his tears, Lear sees little dogs bark at 
 him and babbles unintelligibly saying, "We'll go to supper 
 in the morning." 
 
 The Fool is the soul of pathos in a sort of comic set- 
 ting, yet his fun contrasted with Lear's agony is idealized 
 into tragic beauty. We seem to gaze on something sur- 
 passing earth and time; here, is humanity deserted, old 
 age abandoned, while pity weeps and folly smiles. Lear 
 knows that "you cannot fetter strong madness in a silken 
 thread, charm ache with air, and agony with words." It 
 is tremendous realism. In an awful scene that follows, 
 Gloster is captured, Regan pulls out his beard, and puts 
 out his aged eyes; he says "he can smell his way to 
 
 78 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 Dover." Gloster is all dark 'and comfortless now. The 
 servants note the deed, and predict that women will all 
 turn monsters. 
 
 In Act 4 men are the sport of the gods. All is con- 
 fusion. We learn that it is better to be despised than to 
 be despised and flattered. The unsubstantial air is sweeter 
 than human scorn. The strange mutations of life make 
 us willing to leave it. Edgar utters a profound piece of 
 philosophy in "the worst is not so long as we can say 
 this is the worst." This was a favorite passage with Ed- 
 win Booth. The fellow feeling that prevails among the 
 destitute is beautifully shown by the solicitude of the 
 sightless Gloster for Lear and the Fool. "As flies to wan- 
 ton boys are we to the gods they kill us for their sport." 
 
 This hapless quartette in misery, surpassing anything in 
 fiction or in poetry, have lost faith in man and in deity; 
 only the storm accords with their inward anguish. Lost 
 to the world and to themselves, they have found kindness 
 in the biting wind and comfort in the driving rain. Noth- 
 ing more is needed to deduce the fall of man from his 
 original estate than this miserere of despair. How many 
 hapless vagrants since have welcomed the play of the 
 elements after man's ingratitude ! It is the very crown of 
 the dramatist's art that he so pierces to the core of human 
 neglect, and that with the increasing sum of sorrow he 
 compels the heavens to weep at man's stony-hearted 
 attitude. 
 
 If the play teaches anything, it is that nature is after 
 all kind in her rudest moments. Madmen now lead the 
 blind and Edgar leads Gloster to Dover's cliffs. There is 
 a world in the lines : "Give me thy arm, poor Tom shall 
 lead thee !" It were impossible that such a pair as Goneril 
 and Albany, her husband, should long agree. He fears 
 her disposition, and she calls him a milklivered man. She 
 
 79 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 reminds us of Lady Macbeth, yet she surpasses her in 
 cool and defiant sin, in calculating and unfeeling hate. 
 Milton never drew such a woman, in whom the springs of 
 s6c were dry and the fountains of goodness congealed. It 
 is a picture of the under world. She is a tigress, "deform- 
 ity seems not in the fiend so horrid as in woman." Albany 
 is not wholly sold unto Satan, he relents a little. He up- 
 braids his wife. "What have you done? Tigers, not 
 daughters, a father have you madded. Thou art a fiend, 
 a woman's shape doth shield thee !" 
 
 As Hugo well says, "Shakespeare takes ingratitude and 
 gives the monster two heads." Goneril is the calm wielder 
 of pitiless force, Regan is the smaller and shriller malice. 
 Even in their love they are odious. Their caresses are 
 the blandishments of serpents. To the last Goneril is true 
 .to her nature. Regan is killed by her sister, who takes her 
 own life, and boldly enters the undiscovered country. All 
 through the play the noble Kent walks the high table-land 
 of devotion and manliness and truth. He relieves the 
 darkness. Without him we would faint under the ac- 
 cumulation of horrors. 
 
 Sweet is the story that comes from France, where the 
 lovely Cordelia seated on her throne hears of the woes of 
 her distant father. "An ample tear trill'd down her deli- 
 cate cheek. You have seen rain and sunshine at once; 
 her smiles and tears were like a better way." Once she 
 cried: "Sisters! Sisters! shame of ladies! Sisters!" But 
 not a word of hate or recrimination. Never was such 
 magnanimity portrayed before nor since. This was Cor- 
 delia. Kent charges all the tragedy to the starry influence. 
 "It is the stars above us that govern our conditions." 
 
 There is a picture of the medical science of that rude 
 age in the interview of Cordelia and the doctor. 
 
 So 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 She asks: "What can man's wisdom in the restoring 
 of Lear's bereaved sense ? He that helps him takes all my 
 outward worth." He answers, "There is means, madam ; 
 our foster nurse of nature is repose, the which he lacks." 
 It reminds us of Macbeth's "can'st thou minister to a mind 
 diseased, pluck up the memory of a rooted sorrow ?" In- 
 deed the whole tragedy turns about a mind unhinged by 
 unparalleled misfortune and neglect. Cordelia shines the 
 one star in this black night. Gloster would cast himself 
 off from Dover's high cliff, but Edgar leads him carefully 
 below. He does not yet know his faithful son whom he 
 disowned. 
 
 Lear enters dressed in wild flowers, yet every inch a 
 king. Nothing in all literature approaches this scene for 
 kingly grandeur, Mad and deserted, lonely and uncrown- 
 ed, his heart gnawed by filial ingratitude, his mind unhing- 
 ed, great thoughts still flicker in his brain. Gloster would 
 kiss his sovereign's hand, but Lear says : "Let me wipe it 
 first, it smells of mortality." What a touch! Thus the 
 two poor outcasts talk, the one blind and the other insane, 
 yet Lear pities him, for even the blind may see how this 
 world goes. Then the great passage: "Robes and furr'd 
 gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold and the strong lance 
 of justice hurtless breaks; arm it in rags and a pigmy's 
 straw doth pierce it. Get thee glass eyes and like a scurvy 
 politician seem to see the things thou dost not. Now, now, 
 now, pull off. my boots." It is reason in madness. 
 
 The last scene of this act is like a breath of heaven. 
 Lear is in a tent softly sleeping, Cordelia and the doctor 
 work over him; she thanks honest Kent for her father's 
 preservation, and cries "O you kind gods, cure this 
 great breach in his abused nature! O my dear father! 
 Restoration hang thy medicine on my lips, and let this 
 kiss repair those violent harms that my two sisters have 
 
 81 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 in their reverence made." Then "Was this a face to be 
 opposed against the warring winds? Mine enemy's dog, 
 though he had bit me, should have stood that night against 
 my fire." Lear then wakes, saying "You do me wrong 
 to take me out of the grave." 
 
 Cordelia : "Sir, do you not know me?" Lear : "You are 
 a spirit, I know; when did you die?" Cordelia: "O look 
 upon me, sir, and hold your hands in benediction o'er me." 
 Lear: "I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and 
 upward, and to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect 
 mind. . . . Do not laugh at me, for, as I am a man, 
 I think this lady to be my child Cordelia !" Cordelia : 
 "And so I am, I am." 
 
 Was ever such a scene portrayed? The aged father 
 returning to reason, the angelic daughter bending above 
 him to heal his malady with a kiss, their mutual tears, 
 her delight at his recognition and his awakening to her 
 voice ; his contrition for his mistake of long ago, her 
 boundless love that floods her being and his like an ocean 
 with its forgiveness, it is the sublimation of love and ten- 
 derness, generosity and recognition. All the past is obliter- 
 ated, the poor prodigal outcast comes to himself, and sup- 
 ported on the only breast that ever beat for him he totters 
 away. Well did Sir Walter say, "Woman is like ivy 
 the greater the ruin the closer she clings." 
 
 Would that the play might have closed here ! Then we 
 would have had a duet of birds and a sunset of hope. But 
 the final act must now come. Goneril sinks lower and 
 lower, she plots Regan's death, there is a great battle. 
 Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoners by the hostile 
 forces, "truth is on the scaffold, wrong is on the throne." 
 Yet Cordelia, courageous to the last, exclaims : "We are 
 not the first who with best meaning have incurred the 
 worst. Shall we not see these daughters and these sis- 
 
 82 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 ters?" Here she discloses the wonderful patience and 
 nobility of her nature. It is a touch of sarcasm but how 
 exquisitely veiled. 
 
 Lear would away to prison: "We two alone will sing 
 like birds in the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, 
 I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live 
 and pray and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded 
 butterflies and hear poor rogues talk of court news ; and 
 we'll wear out in a walled prison packs and sects of great 
 ones that ebb and flow by the moon." He wanders in his 
 mind now, and the two disappear under guard. Edgar 
 kills Edmund, Goneril and Regan are brought in dead, 
 Edgar would rescind an order to kill Lear and Cordelia, 
 but it is, alas, too late, and the aged father enters bearing 
 his murdered angel in his arms. 
 
 Lear's speech here surpasses anything in Shakespeare, it 
 is the frenzy of a Titan, the roar^ot^-giant, it even exceeds 
 the awtuTwlnds uf OlhcttoT^Howl. howl, howl, O you 
 are men of stones U-Had^T}^ourtongues and eyeTT^Hise- 
 them so that heaven's vault should crack. She's gone 
 forever! I know when one is dead and when one lives. 
 She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass; if that 
 her breath will mist or stain the stone, why, then she 
 lives." "A plague upon you murderers, traitors all! I 
 might have saved her ; now she's gone forever ! And my 
 poor Fool is hanged ! 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 ! Do you see this ? 
 Look on her, look her lips, look there, look there !" And 
 the great heart breaks and the tortured soul passes into 
 the beyond. 
 
 Thus the tragedy ends without relief. In Othello, lago 
 is led away to torture, but here the innocent are tortured 
 and the guilty ascend the throne. Is \^t just? It is in- 
 
 83 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 scrutable. There is little trace of Providence as in Hamlet, 
 the air is heavy, the stars are hidden and nature is con- 
 vulsed; it is a vast battle that is too great for human 
 comprehension. Tennyson called it the catastrophe of a 
 world. Here the dramatist let loose all his superhuman 
 powers. It is a whirlwind of passion, the good go down, 
 our thoughts are in anarchy, petrified indifference is con- 
 trasted with swollen anguish, human compassion is ex- 
 hausted, humanity is stripped of all its honors and left 
 a prey to scornful power. Cordelia's death is the consum- 
 mation of cruelty, surely the catastrophe is terrible ! Yet 
 is she not a saint prepared for heaven? No one would 
 wish to see Lear's sufferings prolonged. Who would wish 
 to place a crown on that head that lightnings had scarred ? 
 And is not martyrdom the only crown for such a life as 
 hers? What is life? Is it to get or to give, to gain or to 
 bless, to possess or to suffer ? What had Lear to offer to 
 the Fool ? No kingdom nor estate, no gold nor power, no 
 joy nor peace. Only the life of a wanderer, homeless and 
 childless, a thatched hovel and straw, persecution, aban- 
 donment, hatred, neglect, a beggar's couch and a beggar's 
 fare. 
 
 When the fatal word was spoken that drove the old 
 king out into the heath, and all the world rejected the in- 
 sane man, it was the faithful Fool who said : "That, Sir, 
 which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for 
 form, Will pack when it begins to rain, And leave thee in 
 the storm. But I will tarry; the Fooi will stay; And let 
 the wise man fly ; The knave turns fool that runs away, 
 The Fool no knave perdy." As Lear's insanity grows, the 
 Fool would banish it by his mirth. When the night de- 
 scends wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch and the 
 unbonneted monarch runs, it is the Fool who attends him, 
 who rallies and supports him, saying: "He that has a 
 
 84 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 house to put his head in has a good headpiece." When 
 Lear sees his wits desert him, the faithful servitor laughs 
 and says : "He that has and a little tiny wit, With hev ho! 
 the wind and the rain, Must make content with his for- 
 tunes fit, For the rain it raineth every day." Never does 
 his cheerfulness flee. Inky skies, tumultuous thunder, the 
 quaking earth, blinding flashes of lightning, sheets of 
 water and showers of hail, is this a setting for the at- 
 tachment of two souls, is this the condition to cement two 
 aching hearts ? Yet, like Hagar and Ishmael driven forth 
 by Abraham, hand in hand go these miserable men, a 
 naughty night to swim in their tattered rags dripping, 
 twin companions in sorrow and want, bereft of all com- 
 fort and denied life's necessities, never to part until the 
 one is hanged for his devotion, and the other dies on his 
 daughter's lips. It would seem that Shakespeare in de- 
 rision would hold up the example of a Fool to men and 
 say: "This is attachment, where is your vaunted friend- 
 ship?" Strip the richest of their property, strip the wisest 
 of their knowledge, strip the handsomest of their beauty, 
 and where are their friends ? But go farther, and strip a 
 regal mind of its powers, make the intellectual cathedral 
 totter and the judgment wander, transform a harmonious 
 thinker into a disconnected babbler, push reason from its 
 throne there remains no refuge but an asylum with 
 grated windows and guarded walls. 
 
 If a friend is the one who comes in when all the world 
 goes out, where will you find the counterpart of this wise 
 Fool, who clung the closer when the rain increased, and 
 who loved the more when insanity clouded the brain? 
 Byron's truest friend was his dog, and Shakespeare's 
 greatest friend was a Fool, What a satire is this upon our 
 carpet attachments, our church civilities, our opera greet- 
 ings, our veneered and lacquered amenities, our family 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 professions, our altar pledges "until death doth us 
 part!" From the nameless grave of a nameless Fool we 
 must pluck the roses of an unchanging friendship, from 
 the steamy rags of a dripping outcast we must catch the 
 drops of holy water, through the perforated roof of a 
 squalid hut w r e must see the stars appear. Who among 
 us knows the friendship of nature? Timon found the 
 forest a relief from the flatteries of men, the Duke read 
 sermons in stones and books in the running brook, Lear 
 found midnight thunders sweeter than palace lies. 
 
 As Othello warns us that refinement and education may 
 become the very artifices of hell to allure and enslave a 
 noble mind, as Hamlet warns us that procrastination be- 
 numbs the will and freezes the resolution, so Lear warns 
 us that all our boasted pride of wealth, if unsupported by 
 personal sacrifice, is but the glittering maelstrom to en- 
 gulf each unreflecting soul. Goneril gained and lost ; 
 Cordelia lost and won. Regan expelled herself when she 
 drove her father out in the storm. He that saveth his life 
 shall lose it. Cordelia died for a principle, she disdained 
 the primrose path. 
 
 What a satire on the flimsy gains and estates of men is 
 this immortal play! Albany sits on Lear's throne, while 
 its just possessor is the pitiless sport of the hail. Were 
 all the property in the world suddenly to change hands 
 and to pass to its rightful owners, what a hurrying and 
 confusion, what shame and mortification would ensue! 
 Cordelia was rich though poor, for she owned herself. 
 Principle is more than self-preservation, " 'tis man's per- 
 dition to be safe when for the truth he ought to die." 
 
 Wendell Phillips thought that no ardent Christian could 
 die at ease in his bed. He called Christianity a battle, not 
 a dream. Our morals are nickel-plated, we admire 
 Regulus but we do not imitate him, we ponder Emerson 
 
 86 
 
KING LEAR 
 
 but we do not dare to follow him. Cordelia's end horri- 
 fies us because martyrs are less plentiful than misers. 
 "For a 'cap and bells our lives we pay, bubbles we buy with 
 a whole soul's tasking ; 'tis heaven alone that is given away, 
 'tis only God may be had for the asking." Shakespeare 
 knew the human heart. He knew that only character and 
 thought are real property. In the whole length and breadth 
 of his immortal works there is no wealth but achievement, 
 no success but truth, no estate but character. 
 
 You cannot find a character in all Shakespeare who is 
 sublimated by vice, nor one who is degraded save by him- 
 self. Timon of Athens indicts us for our feverish wor- 
 ship of gold. Wolsey indicts us for our reckless ambi- 
 tions. Prospero indicts us for our domination by the ma- 
 terial. Portia indicts us for injustice to the weak. His- 
 tory is a spiral, what is lost in one age is regained in the 
 next, the centuries are beads on time's string and not of 
 equal value. Shall we take our ethics from the morning 
 paper? 
 
 I have heard how Truth once learned of the threaten- 
 ing and incursion of her foes, and she determined to mus- 
 ter her servants and review their weapons, and beyond 
 all her expectations she found everything prepared. There 
 was a vast host of armed men, weapons which they exer- 
 cised admirably, brightly flashing from afar. But as she 
 drew nearer, she sank into a swoon ; what she had thought 
 iron and steel were mere toys ; the swords were made of 
 the mere lead of words ; the breastplates of the soft linen 
 of pleasure; the helmets of the wax of plumed vanity; 
 the shields were of papyrus scrolled over with opinions; 
 the spears were thin reeds of weak conjecture ; the colors 
 were spider webs of philosophical systems; the cannon 
 was Indian reed; the powder was poppy seed; the balls 
 were of glass Through the indolent neglect of their lead- 
 
 87 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 ers they had sold their true weapons and substituted these. 
 "What avails me," she cried, "your faith, since your 
 actions are worthless; of old when I led naked unarmed 
 combatants to the field, one martyr, one warrior, faithful 
 to death, was worth more to me than a hundred of you in 
 your gilded and silvered panoplies !" 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 BY 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 THERE is nothing new under the sun. The Ara- 
 bians had malleable glass which they twined 
 around their wrists; Cicero saw the entire Ilaid 
 written on a skin so small that it was carried in 
 a nutshell ; Nero used a gem in his ring for an opera 
 glass ; the Egyptian colors seem immortal ; artists 
 have lost Titian's method of mixing pigments ; 
 English lancets cannot endure the atmosphere of 
 India unless gilded, while the Damascus blades are as 
 perfect as when made in the oldest city in the world; 
 Saladin drew a sword that severed a down-pillow with 
 a single stroke; Pompey's pillar weighed a ton and was 
 hung in air ; the ancients built canals far superior to ours ; 
 the Egyptians had locks that opened for the passage of 
 their boats ; no man knows how the Pyramids were ven- 
 tilated, nor their gigantic stones quarried and erected ; 
 the railroad dates back tb Memphis ; every social question 
 was debated in Thebes; Solomon's Temple was guarded 
 by lightning rods ; the spinning machine is two thousand 
 years old; a Hindoo princess wore seven garments so 
 diaphonous that her father thought her scarcely covered ; 
 stearn must have been used in Assyria ; no man can now 
 make a perfect mirror of bronze; the ruins of Pompeii 
 disclose cut glass of wonderful patterns ; the best modern 
 puns may be traced to Greece and Rome ; the story of 
 Cinderella is old as the race ; and Shakespeare borrowed 
 most of the plots on which he erected his unfading crea- 
 tions. 
 
 It is more difficult to be up to antiquity, than up to 
 date. A Neapolitan writer in 1476 described a young 
 man named Mariotto, who was enamored of a citizen's 
 daughter named Giannozza, and was loved by her in 
 return. The Fates opposed their union, but they were 
 
SHAKESPEARE * STUDIES 
 
 secretly married by a monk. Soon Mariotto killed the 
 girl's kinsman and was banished to Alexandria. In his 
 absence, her father urged her to accept the hand of a 
 rich suitor, but in distress she turned to the friar, who 
 gave her a powder which cast her into a three days' 
 slumber resembling death. She was buried in a church. 
 Meanwhile, the absent Mariotto broke from exile, an,d 
 hurrying to the church where she lay entombed, flung 
 himself on the grave. Here he was discovered and taken 
 for a thief and beheaded. The agonized girl entered 
 a convent and died of a broken heart. 
 
 Upon this early story Shakespeare built the greatest 
 love tragedy in the world. Romeo and Juliet is set in 
 Italy, the land of passion and romance. The moonlit 
 nights have a peculiar warmth and lustre, the fruit trees 
 are tipped with silver, the nightingale sings in the pome- 
 granate boughs, the masquers are on the palazzo, in the 
 streets at noon the light glares, and the blood is stirring 
 in men's veins, and the rapier leaps from the scabbard, 
 the perplexities of love and hate are swiftly solved by the 
 poignard and the poison-phial. 
 
 The play was published in 1597, and is said to have 
 been the master's first attempt at tragedy, when youthful 
 ardor and ambition fired his energies, and love gilded 
 every scene. It is a tragedy of high and natural passion, 
 of alternate rapture and despair, of maiden loveliness and 
 manly hope, of festivity and foreboding, of embrace and 
 death. It is his only tragedy built upon a love tale. v It 
 has the sweetness of the rose, the languor of the mid- 
 night bird, the softness of the southern spring. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet are in love, but they are not love-sick. 
 There is no insipid interchange of superficial sentiments, 
 no saccharine smiles and sighs, but the health and glow 
 of two fervid natures, the heart beats, the blood courses, 
 
 92 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 all that was to come was theirs; their hopes were of 
 air and their passions of fire. We have a .picture of 
 human life as it is in the order of nature. Inexhaustible 
 passion is checked by bitter experience, and the nuptial 
 coUch becomes the untimely grave. The time is midsum- 
 mer and the action takes but five days. 
 
 The prologue calls the main actors a "pair of ill-starred 
 lovers," and indeed from the very beginning the heavens 
 are unpropitious, quarrel follows quarrel, Fate is the 
 undertone of all the rapture and ecstasy; all is done in 
 youthful haste; superstition and the supernatural have 
 full sway; the poetry is the richest possible, splendid 
 imagery throngs each act, nature is wildly prodigal, 
 intense heat and impetuous power and throbbing desire 
 vivify the lines, there is no chill mist and northern 
 gloom as in Hamlet, but brilliant color glows throughout 
 and all the forms of the language come from the dreamy 
 south. We are taught that the affections are given us 
 to heighten our enjoyment of life, but if too far pursued 
 they transform all blessing into curse and chaos. 
 
 On a dark background of family rivalry and hate that 
 fills Verona with uproar and blood, the tragedy is based, 
 but the youthful lovers do not share the ancient antipathy, 
 and on this desolating soil their love grows more luxuriant 
 and intense. From early times the Montagues and Capu- 
 lets have warred, and the first scene introduces the 
 Prince who quells a fracas in the street. Romeo is 
 already touched by the melancholy of love; he walks 
 abroad in the mornings "adding to clouds more clouds 
 with his deep sighs." Mercutio questions what lengthens 
 his cousin's hours. He is told it is not having that which 
 having makes them short. "Love is a smoke raised with 
 the fume of sighs, being purged a fire sparkling in lover's 
 eyes; being vexed a sea nourished with lover's tears, a 
 
 93 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 madness most discreet, a choking gall, and a preserving 
 sweet." 
 
 Thus he is already ripe for the heavenly impression. 
 And Shakespeare makes him the victim of an earlier 
 passion, here as always true to nature. Juliet is now 
 but fourteen and her ambitious father would have her two 
 years hence the bride of Paris. Hamlet lived in the world 
 of thought ; Romeo lives in the world of emotion. He lives 
 and moves and has his being in love. When he meets 
 Juliet it is love at first sight. All our modern con- 
 ventions, our place and form, our social regulations, 
 Shakespeare avoids; the tide of passion leaps like a 
 spring, crystal-pure from the vernal earth, he sees his 
 queen first at a ball and says, "her beauty hangs upon 
 the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear" ; 
 both are masqued ; they kiss ; she says, "Sin from my lips? 
 O trespass sweetly urged, give me my sin again." She 
 asks the nurse his name; "If he be married, my grave 
 is like to be my wedding bed." Yet even now his mind 
 misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars, "tho 
 He that hath the steerage of his course directs his sail." 
 What a picture of man's helplessness and the guidance 
 of God! 
 
 The great garden scene follows. It is enchantment. 
 Juliet betrays her feelings in soliloquy, and shrouded by 
 considerate night; Romeo can hope for an interview only 
 at the peril of his life; innocence struggles with desire; 
 she gives and withdraws ; speaks and retracts ; manifests 
 her love and yet is not unwomanly; declines his oaths 
 and remembers the falseness of his sex ; she steps out 
 of the enclosure of decorum but is thus led by her nature 
 as a childish innocent, by impelling necessity, and by her 
 good intentions. Not an unbecoming word tarnishes her 
 lips. 
 
 94 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 Nowhere in the world is the charm and shame of inno- 
 cence so perfectly blended as here. "Thou knowest the 
 mask of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush 
 bepaint my cheek for that which thou hast heard me 
 speak to-night. O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pro- 
 nounce it faithfully; or if thou thinkest I am too quickly 
 won, I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay." 
 "My love is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; 
 the more I give to thee the more I have; for both are 
 infinite." This one passage reveals all the girlish nature. 
 It is a more vehement confession than that of Miranda 
 in The Tempest. She does not pine in thought with 
 a green and yellow melancholy. Her passion is a moun- 
 tain torrent sweeping all before it in resistless flood. The 
 action of the play is now fairly begun and on it rushes 
 to its sad consummation. 
 
 Into this world of love, Shakespeare introduces the 
 gray-haired Friar Laurence, the oracle of experience and 
 age. He is the chorus in the tragedy, teaching that excess 
 in any enjoyment, however pure, transforms the sweet 
 into bitterness. In his first soliloquy, as he muses in his 
 garden, we have wonderful truths gathered like his own 
 herbs from the ground and touching all human life. 
 "Naught so vile that on the earth doth live, but to the 
 earth some special good doth give ; nor aught so good 
 but strained from that fair use, revolts from true birth 
 stumbling on abuse; virtue itself turns vice being mis- 
 applied, and vice sometimes by action dignified; within 
 the infant rind of this fair flower, poison hath residence 
 and medicine power; two such opposed kings encamp 
 them still in man as well as herbs, grace and rude will ; 
 and where the worser is predominant full soon the canker 
 death eats up that plant." 
 
 95 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Here we learn that the ground is filled with remedies 
 for man and implanted for a wise purpose ; and that the 
 triumph of will over grace always marks the decline of 
 a well balanced nature. He is sympathetic with the 
 lovers, looks with a kindly eye on their ardor, chides 
 Romeo for forgetting Rosaline, and warns him that "they 
 stumble that run fast." 
 
 The nurse and Peter are a contrast in their low esti- 
 mate of love to the prominent actors. She advises Juliet 
 that the Friar waits in his cell to unite her with the 
 object of her adoration, and she hastens to meet him 
 there. They are made one in secret by the holy man. 
 Mercutio falls a victim of Tybalt, the coarse bully. 
 Already the passion of the lovers has produced a deadly 
 hate that issues in murder. Mercutio cries, "a plague 
 on both your houses !" Romeo comes, learns of the death 
 of his friend, and avenges it with Tybalt's death. This 
 is the climax of the play. 
 
 For this crime he is banished by the Prince. The won- 
 derful soliloquy of Juliet follows; "Come gentle night, 
 come loving blackbrowed night, give me my Romeo, and 
 when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little 
 stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that 
 all the world will be in love with night." 
 
 What an antiphony of bird voices do we hear in the 
 fifth scene: Juliet at the window and Romeo beneath in 
 the garden : "Wilt thou be gone ? it is not yet near day ; 
 it was the nightingale and not the lark, believe me, Love, 
 it was the nightingale. It was the lark, the herald of 
 the morn; look, Love, what envious streaks do lace the 
 severing clouds in yonder east; I must be gone and live, 
 or stay and die. Yon light is not daylight I know it; 
 I, therefore, stay, yet thou need'st not to be gone." She 
 seems to see the coming tragedy; "O God I have an 
 
 96 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 ill divining soul ; methinks I see thee now thou art below, 
 as one dead in the bottom of a tomb." Thus they part. 
 
 She is betrothed to the unloved Paris, and must be 
 married on Thursday next, and in. despair she seeks again 
 the wise Friar for a way out of the maze, and he gives 
 her the vial of stupefying liquor that shall "make the 
 roses in her lips and cheeks to fade, her eye's windows 
 fall, each part deprived of supple government, stiff, stark, 
 and cold, appear like death ; thus she shall continue two 
 and forty hours and then awake as from a pleasant 
 sleep." 
 
 It was a rare device well worthy of an Italian monk. 
 She had been bent on suicide. Only a woman deeply 
 devoted and wrought up to a pitch of passion could have 
 accepted such a hazardous ^lan. The crafty Friar had 
 foreseen that the impetuous pair would be entrapped by 
 Fate. But he was their best friend as many a minister 
 has been since that day. Perhaps the new therapeutics 
 will be employed in similar emergencies at long range and 
 with less risk, hypnotic suggestion may be used to conceal 
 and preserve the lady from the imperious demands of 
 ambitious parents, and restore her to the arms of her 
 desired spouse. Here is a new and profitable field for 
 clergymen, a Gretna Green of the New Thought. 
 
 Juliet has little forethought, she is ardent abandon, 
 eager affection, a thing of love fresh as the daisy on the 
 grass ; passion takes whole hold of her being, she is soft 
 and fair and flexible, small and delicately formed, lan- 
 guorous and inexperienced, natural and unconstrained, 
 not simple like Miranda, nor grand like Isabel, nor 
 fanciful like Viola. She has a tender heart and a vivid 
 imagination, she invests her mate with all the graces of 
 nobility; he is the object of her dreams and the summit 
 of her hopes; she is pure virgin love unsophisticated 
 
 97 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 and destitute of weariness; subject to superstitious influ- 
 ences, passion makes her poetical, she is all in each act of 
 her soul ; her first thought always is of Romeo's danger ; 
 women have fewer elements in their composition than 
 men, and thus are better poised. Juliet is the nearest 
 approach we have to Cleopatra, but pure ; she is impatient 
 for self-surrender; with her, wisdom cannot overcome 
 love; her's is an Amazon torrent that bursts its bounds, 
 a cataract of passion that will not be stayed. We love 
 her for her ingenuousness, for her dew of , youth, for her 
 tireless vigil of ardent devotion, for her unstinted wealth 
 of affection, for her charming simplicity, for her immature 
 freshness, maidenly attachment, and grand loyalty to the 
 very last. 
 
 Love, or its counterpart, is bought and sold; it is 
 bandied about on rude lips and .in suggestive hints; it 
 is a thing of the mart and. parlor and counting-room 
 and ball. Our modern Juliets and Priscillas weight with 
 dainty accuracy all the accessories of marriage, all its 
 emoluments, all its risks and rewards. Too soon their 
 love alters when it alteration finds. But not so our 
 heroine, she never suspects a price or cost or separation ; 
 her soul and his rushed together like an alkali and an 
 acid; the voice of nature to them was the voice of God. 
 And Romeo was rich in having such a jewel, as twenty 
 seas if all their sands were pearl, their water nectar, and 
 their rocks pure gold. She was his till death did them 
 part. 
 
 As an offset to Juliet, we have the great picture of the 
 nurse, crafty and vulgar, garrulous and sympathetic, a 
 devoted family servant impatient of delay, knowing her 
 young mistress' age to an hour, "the prettiest babe that 
 e'er she nursed," . she calls Paris "a man of wax," and 
 this completely sums him up and many others since j her 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 own relations with' the common Peter are far from com- 
 mendable,, but she puts her mistress on a pedestal and 
 defends her continually. Rosemary and Romeo have the 
 same letter, she leads him on with clever hints and sly 
 observations, "my mistress is the sweetest lady, I anger 
 her sometimes and tell her Paris is the properer man," 
 she gets the ladder for the eager Romeo to mount in 
 the garden; she apprises Juliet of the death of Tybalt 
 and significantly says, the smooth dissembler: "There's 
 no trust, no faith, no honesty in men ; all perjured, all 
 forsworn, give me some aqua vitae!" She unites her 
 cunning with the monk's wisdom to preserve the sorrow- 
 ing girl. She praises his learning with a flattering smile, 
 even a monk, she knows, is susceptible. How she simu- 
 lates amazement in the morning when Juliet cannot be 
 wakened; "Why lamb, why lady, fie you slugabed! What! 
 not a word? How sound she is asleep! I needs must 
 wake her; Madam, madam, madam! Alas, alas, my 
 lady's dead, O well a day that ever I was born !" 
 
 I know nothing in the whole range of the dramatist's 
 work more perfect than this delineation, as true today as 
 three centuries ago. 
 
 Romeo's first passion for Rosaline was a waking dream, 
 a fantastic revery; his second and real attachment was 
 a deep and permanent reality, he was elevated to the 
 third heaven, or hurried on to abject despair. He is 
 Shakespeare's unlucky man, with the best intentions and 
 highest hopes, he is perpetually unfortunate, failing in 
 every aspiration, exerting himself to the utmost only to 
 fall anew. Ill fortune marked him for her own. He 
 was himself the Banquo at the feast. He prophesies his 
 own failure. Vainly does he try to pacify Tybalt, vainly 
 does he decline the proffered duel. Mercutio takes up 
 the abandoned quarrel and Romeo's ill-omened interfer- 
 
 99 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 ence slays his friend. When the dying Mercutio asks, 
 "Why the devil came you between us?" he only offers 
 the excuse, "I thought all for the best". He is a victim 
 of stubborn wilfulness. Oppressed by society, hateful to 
 him, of refined and generous mind, he repels relatives 
 and friends who seek him, is disdainful of advice, mel- 
 ancholy, laconic, always foreboding the worst, his nature 
 blossoms with Fate, his parents are aloof from him; he 
 and Tybalt stand like opposing crags, when he has killed 
 him he cries, "I am fortune's fool". 
 
 After Juliet's death he burns with a grand defiance, 
 and it is this event that rouses the embers of his latent 
 courage. He is banished by the duke and is wholly 
 crushed, while Juliet rises to the emergency like a true 
 woman; and not only comforts but commands him. He 
 is steeped in love as Hamlet in meditation ; a man of the 
 soft and sunny south. He cannot maintain his will in 
 successive disasters; he is Hamlet in love. He involves 
 others in his ruin; he is a creature of haste; he dies by 
 poison and even then in a hurry. If less in a hurry he 
 might have lived, he leaves all to heaven, and falls. He 
 trusts the flattering truth of sleep, when Juliet's body 
 sleeps in Capulet's tomb he cries, "I defy you stars !" For 
 forty ducats he buys a dram of poison and, against the 
 law, tells the poor apothecary, "The world is not thy 
 friend, nor the world's law ; the world affords no law 
 to make thee rich; then be not poor but break it and 
 take this." "There is thy gold, worse poison to men's 
 souls." 
 
 At the tomb he rises into majesty, the former man is 
 transformed, Paris intrudes and Romeo slays him; he 
 utters a grand eulogy on the dead girl; "O my love, my 
 wife, death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath 
 hath had no power yet upon thy beauty; thou art not 
 
 100 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 conquered, beauty's ensign yet is crimson in thy lips and 
 in thy cheeks; and death's pale flag is not advanced 
 there; I never from this palace of dim night depart again ; 
 here, here will I remain with worms that are thy cham- 
 bermaids; O here will I set up my everlasting rest and 
 shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world- 
 wearied flesh; eyes look your last! arms take your last 
 embrace ! and lips, O you, the doors of breath, seal with 
 a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death; 
 here's to my love! O true apothecary! thy drugs arc 
 quick, thus with a kiss 1 die." 
 
 Juliet faintly hears and rouses herself in the tomb. She 
 kisses him. Then she snatches his dagger and falls life- 
 less on his lifeless form. Friar Laurence tells us all; 
 the riddle is solved ; he reproaches Capulet and Montague 
 for their ancient feud; they join hands; Juliet is to have 
 a golden statue; Romeo shall be laid at her side, "a 
 gloomy peace this morning brings, for never was a story 
 of more woe than this of Juliet .nd Romeo." 
 
 Byron sang,. "Man's ^ve is of his life a thing apart; 
 'tis woman's whole existence". Shakespeare's men are 
 studies and they grow ; his women are quickly trans- 
 formed and seem immediate creations. The great orchard 
 scene is the loveliest in al\ literature. She will be his, 
 "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." 
 
 Mercutio is a great masterpiece, a man of little culture, 
 rude and ugly, scornful of love, despising dreams' and all 
 presentiments, gifted with extraordinary wit, perceiving 
 the humorous in all things, even dying he- jokes with his 
 last breath. In the scene with Benvolio he predicts that 
 with such a foe he would not live an hour; and this 
 prediction is soon fulfilled with Tybalt. His great tribute 
 to sleep is\ well known and matchless ; a O then I see 
 Queen Mab hath been with you ; she is the fairies' mid- 
 
 I0f 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 wife and she comes in shape no bigger than an agate 
 stone, on the fore finger of an alderman; drawn with 
 a team of little atomies athwart men's noses as they lie 
 asleep; her waggon spokes made of long spinner's legs, 
 the cover of the wings of grasshoppers; the traces of 
 the smallest spider's web, the collars of the moonshine's 
 watery beams, her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of 
 film, her waggoner a small grey coated gnat, not half so 
 big as a round little worm pricked from the lazy finger 
 of a maid ; her chariot is an empty hazel-nut, made by the 
 joiner squirrel or old grub; and in this state she gallops 
 night by night, through lover's brains and then they dream 
 of love; o'er courtiers' knees that drearn on courtesies 
 straight ; o'er lawyers' fingers who straight dream on fees ; 
 o'er ladies' lips who straight on kisses dream ; sometimes 
 comes she with a tithe pig's tail tickling a parson's nose 
 as lies asleep, then dreams he of another benefice, some- 
 times she driveth o'er a soldier's neck and then dreams he 
 of cutting foreign throats, of breaches, ambuscades, 
 Spanish blades, of healths fivejigithom deep; I talk of 
 dreams which are the children of an idle brain, begot of 
 nothing but vain fantasy ; as thin of substance as the air, 
 and more inconstant than the wind." This wonderful 
 whimsicality and grotesque raillery have always com- 
 manded the admiration of readers. 
 
 An old smoky tavern is now said to stand upon the 
 palace of the Capulets and at the end of the courtyard the 
 lovers are said to lie. Thousands go thither each year. 
 Such is the immortality of genius. 
 
 This play gives love as God made it. It depicts a piti- 
 less struggle against evil destiny. The Friar says, "A 
 greater Power than we can contradict hath thwarted our 
 plans for safety." "We cannot accuse any blind fate 
 for it is tumultuous nature alone which shattered the 
 
 102 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 helm." Over the grave of the ill-starred pair all feud and 
 dissension disappear and peace is finally restored to the 
 long-disturbed city. 
 
 The play is not so flawless as A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, nor so harmonious. But it is the great and 
 typical love story of the world. It rises far above all 
 attempts to supercede it. It was done in Shakespeare's 
 adolescence, before he has seen the sear, the yellow leaf ; 
 it reflects the exuberant passion and ardor and daring of 
 the young man ; it is a fine contrast to his second tragedy, 
 Hamlet; the heroes are precisely opposite in all respects ; 
 in Hamlet love is disappointed, in Romeo love is fully 
 satisfied ; Hamlet's friend, Horatio, is grave, well-balanced 
 and strong; Romeo's friend, Mercutio, is all brilliance, 
 wit, effervescence of spirit; poor Ophelia, crazed, seeks 
 a muddy death ; Juliet passionately desires an end to all 
 her misadventures; both Hamlet and Romeo are whirled 
 along the tide of destiny like leaves on a stream. Neither 
 can rule his events,^^ ^ ^ 
 
 We feel, all througlA|ae nve acts, a thunder-storm 
 brooding; a pall of Nemesis hangs above us; nature is 
 exactly adapted to the action, for it is her languorous 
 and heated season when each hour is high-colored and 
 intense. Shakespeare always uses external nature as the 
 medium and milieu of human passion. In King Lear, 
 we have terrible storm, and wind, and rain, and flood, 
 and all nature is convulsed. In Macbeth, Duncan 
 unsuspiciously enters the castle, lulled by the martlet- 
 haunted portals and the sweet-scented air; in Julius 
 Caesar the central figure of the world falls after a night 
 of prodigy and portent when even graves were mysteri- 
 ously disturbed; in The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo 
 and Jessica sing their love strains under a star-sown sky, 
 every orb in which is quiring to young-eyed cherubims, 
 
 103 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 while the moonlight sleeps upon the verdant bank ; in As 
 You Like It, the deer approaches the pool, Jacques 
 reclines on a grassy couch, the pines drop their slender 
 needles, and adversity itself is soothed by green haunts 
 and woody shades and mysterious elves ; in Pericles, 
 the water ever utters its tender tones of monition and 
 complaint; in The Tempest, it is the scented isle of 
 enchantment that prepares us for Prospero and Ariel and 
 Miranda and the flitting spirits that throng the sky. 
 
 The great dramatist once said that "the lunatic, the 
 lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact." 
 In Romeo's nature the emotional atmosphere is more 
 important than the reality itself, he walks in a world of 
 fancy, while Juliet lives far from the golden haze of 
 enchanting ecstasy and is alarmed by the excess of delight. 
 He is never fully delivered from his self-consciousness; 
 Juliet, on the contrary, is self-possessed in every act. 
 
 Shakespeare never gave us the development of a 
 woman's soul, no Rorp A. n^|Mag^^ nor Dorothea. If 
 we except Cleopatra, his vtomejAre not a complexity of 
 faculties like his men ; he venercrted the feminine element 
 of humanity as the higher and the more divine. It is 
 
 Juliet who takes the lead and proposes and urges the 
 sudden marriage. She is eager that the deed should be 
 quick and irreversible. She never had an adviser or 
 sustainer. Her mother is a proud Italian matron who 
 had not married for love, and whose nature is cold and 
 deadly. 
 
 One of the first lessons of this tragedy is that every 
 ^ strong emotion which exalts the life of man also exposes 
 
 * the entire life to increased risk. 
 
 One sometimes enquires which of Shakespeare's women 
 he loved the best. Was it Perdita who never knew a 
 sorrow, with the flowers and field air about her? Was 
 
 104 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 it Miranda, the child of nature, in her heavenly isle listen- 
 ing to songs celestial, and watching that wand that could 
 evoke spirits from the vasty deep? Was it Cleopatra, the 
 gorgeously robed and intoxicating queen, in her barge 
 of burnished gold ? Was it Lady Macbeth, that amazing 
 combination of energy, self-control, and desperate resort? 
 Was it fair Ophelia, bringing her flowers and pining away, 
 too fragile for earth? Was it Portia in her majesty 
 and truth, the loveliest judge in all the world? Was it 
 Desdemona, the true, dying like the swan and the victim 
 of unfounded jealousy? Was it Cordelia, regal and 
 faithful, and the rarest daughter ever painted? Was it 
 Katherine, the womanly, resenting the haughty Cardinal? 
 Was it Hermoine, the calm and forgiving wife, who saved 
 her foolish husband and redeemed his better self? Was 
 it Cressida, the light bubble of vanity and grace without 
 depth or purpose? Was it Isabella, the embodiment of 
 conscience, or Helena, the embodiment of will? 
 
 And why should we concern ourselves about the love 
 of a boy and girl six hundred years ago in Verona? 
 What makes this play perpetually attractive, year after 
 year? Is it not that in the development of their joy and 
 pain we see the powers that stir all animated nature, the 
 shadow of a great law that bounds all human desire and 
 delight? 
 
 Had Romeo been a little less impetuous and Juliet a 
 little more prudent, had they been ceremoniously married 
 in some fashionable church, had they begun life Jn a 
 handsome establishment, our interest in them would surely 
 wane. They were violent and hare-brained and foolish ; 
 hence we love them. They prove that "all the world loves 
 a lover," that the choice they made in the face of death 
 is an emblem of the great law of sacrifice, old as the 
 world itself, and lifting our prosaic existence above the 
 market-place and counting-house. 
 
 105 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Only five days are sufficient to carry the ill-starred 
 couple from the heights of rapture to the grave of despair. 
 It is the sublime principle of atonement that the dramatist 
 would emphasize. Lovely in their lives, in their death 
 they are not divided. The grave cannot part two such 
 devoted hearts. 
 
 Contrast the perfect purity of Juliet throughout all the 
 many scenes, with the bold audacity and unwomanly 
 coarseness that deface the creations of some recent play- 
 wrights whose names are blazoned in the press. The 
 tenderest girl can see this great tragedy without a blush. 
 It is true to the higher nature, not false to virgin modesty 
 and maidenly -repose. Thus we have purity of heart and 
 imaginative ardor united with sweetness and dignity of 
 manner; passionate violence with simplicity and truth. 
 IvThere is nothing coy nor coquettish nor affected; it is 
 V frank, for there are no thoughts to conceal. Innocence 
 ] reposes in strength, on affection; delicacy does not 
 \ consist of coldness and reserve, but of warmth and glow 
 | and voluptuous sensibility. 
 
 When Edmund Kean delivered the soliloquy at the 
 tomb, the whole house rose. A century ago Helen Faucit 
 fascinated Londoners with her wonderful rendition of 
 Juliet. It is not strange that this old love tale should be 
 the perpetual standard in fiction for the naturalness and 
 unaffectedness of love in its truer notes. We uncon- 
 sciously measure the novel of affection by this great 
 norm. Scott said that woman is like ivy, the greater the 
 ruin the closer she clings. Juliet was such a woman. 
 Romeo, banished, was but made the dearer, exiled by 
 the state and sought by the law, a bounty on his head 
 and deprived of all honor, she clung the closer, as the 
 storm descended and the floods fell. What God had 
 joined together no force could put asunder. 
 
 106 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 The play is a splendid tribute to constancy and marital 
 purity and unchanging attachment. It is a fadeless ser- 
 mon from age to age, never more needed than now. 
 
 Do we rule our destiny, or does our destiny rule us?^* 
 This is an old theme for debate. Romeo and Juliet seem, / 
 from the very start, the heirs of misfortune, each strug-/ 
 gles ineffectually against overwhelming odds. Some stu- ) 
 pendous power overrules the play, it is like Macbeth in 
 the interplay of supernatural forces, the old conception 
 o the influence of the stars on man's career is here 
 in all its force. We have the star-crossed lovers in the 
 prologue, earthquakes are noted, the mind misgives some 
 consequence yet hanging in the stars, the boat is tossed, 
 yet God directs its course, "this day's black fate on more 
 days doth depend, this but begins the woe others must 
 end." Romeo is fortune's fool, he cries, "more light and ] 
 light; more dark and dark our woes!" Dry sorrow 
 drinks the blood, and the tragedy ends in a cataclysm of 
 
 in. 
 
 The dramatist teaches that there's a "divinity doth 
 shape our ends rough hew them how he will.'** Prospero, 
 
 in ^frg Tempest, is Providence watching the game 
 
 played by Miranda and the Duke, and directing the 
 moves. Hamlet oscillates like a pendulum between fate 
 and free will, uttering magnificent soliloquies on destiny, 
 and swaying like a balloon in the presence of the super- 
 natural. Macbeth feels himself a chip on the tide of 
 irresistible Nemesis and goes down in the awful flood. 
 Wherever in all his many works, man opposes the moral 
 law written in the heart, he succumbs to a power that 
 he cannot defy, for Shakespeare was a profound believer 
 in the basal truths that neither time nor place nor custom 
 can disregard. 
 
 107 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Much is now said of the higher law, but the higher 
 law in Shakespeare is the divine mandate uttered on Sinai 
 and still echoing through the world. And this great 
 tragedy teaches the need of moderation. Romeo and 
 f Juliet loved "not wisely but too well." What a contrast 
 was their feverish attachment to the union of Brutus and 
 Portia, steady as the pull of the moon on the tides, resist- 
 ing every turn of misfortune, most powerful in disaster, 
 the ideal wedlock of a strong and devoted man and a 
 faithful and sagacious woman. As Shakespeare grew in 
 years and wisdom, he left his youthful creations and 
 perceived the underlying principle that must ennoble and 
 preserve the tender passion to make it enduring and true. 
 "These violent delights have violent ends, and in their 
 triumph die, like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, 
 consume; the 'sweetest honey is loathsome in his own 
 deliciousness and in the taste confounds the appetite, 
 therefore love moderately; long love doth so; too swift 
 arrives as tardy as too slow. " 
 
 108 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 BY 
 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 S Hamlet is the tragedy of the will, Othello is the 
 tragedy of the emotions. The, story was taken 
 from a work of Giraldi Cinthio published in Sicily 
 in 1565. Shakespeare enlarged this plot and robed it in 
 beauty. We are in the period of Venetian supremacy 
 when the island of Cyprus was a dependence of that great 
 republic. The first act only is set in Venice ; the remain- 
 ing acts are placed in Cyprus. The time element has 
 caused much perplexity ; but the general consensus gives 
 three days for the action; the first day for Act I, the 
 second day for Act II, and the third day for the catas- 
 trophe. The conflict does not arrive until the last scene 
 of the first Act ; in the first half of the play the main con- 
 flict is developing and then goes hurrying on to its close. 
 The highest pathos comes in Act II, scene 3, on the eve 
 of the catastrophe. The construction is unique for the 
 murder is a long distance from Othello's death. 
 
 Shakespearean tragedy may present many persons, but 
 is primarily concerned with but one. It is a tale of 
 suffering usually leading to the hero's death. The hero 
 is always a prominent person; the calamities come from 
 actions ; men are the authors of their woe ; character 
 developes action; madness is seldom inherent, but de- 
 veloped ; the supernatural usually appears ; chance or ac- 
 cident have an influence at some point; men start events 
 that they cannot control ; there are often antagonistic 
 groups and plots; the hero seems predisposed in some 
 way and incapable of resistance ; only Richard and Mac- 
 beth do villainous wrong and know it ; we always mourn 
 the waste of opportunity, this is the tragedy's mystery; 
 Shakespeare painted the world as he saw it, not as he 
 
 in 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 would have liked it to be. Ghosts and God and hell 
 appear, but never shed light on the mystery. 
 
 The dramatist never gives us his own opinion. The 
 final power is more than Fate; men are responsible; the 
 doer suffers ; moral order rules the world ; the main 
 source of the catastrophe is evil. 
 
 Shakespeare never, like Milton, "justifies the ways of 
 God to man"; the world moves on to perfection, but 
 evolves evil that is only overcome by torture and waste. 
 Every tragedy has three parts : the first is the exposition 
 or state of affairs; then the beginning or growth of the 
 conflict; the final section is the issue in catastrophe. 
 The outward conflict first attracts attention; then the 
 inward. The great crisis usually comes in the middle 
 of the play : in Julius Caesar it .is the assassination ; in 
 Hamlet it is the play scene; in Othello it is the 3d scene 
 of the 3d act. Shakespeare knew the rules of tragedy, 
 but often broke them. He had his moods, and fre- 
 quently was hasty and careless as Milton and Tennyson 
 never were. He was between thirty-seven and forty-four 
 and musing on the miseries of life. The style of Othello 
 is similar to that of Julius Caesar; weighty and solemn. 
 '"The play is one of the longest, containing over three 
 thousand lines. Three actions are in force before the 
 beginning of this play: Bianca's relations with Cassio, 
 Roderigo's pursuit of Desdemona, and the love of Othello 
 and Desdemona. In the play lago is the centre of f c ur 
 intrigues: against Roderigo to get money from him ~nd 
 destroy him; against Cassio to get his place; agi t 
 Cassio to kill him; and against Othello. 
 
 The play opens with an admirable preparation of 
 Roderigo as lago's first dupe. The contrast of the pre- 
 cipitation of the one with the coolness of the other is 
 a happy stroke. The Duke appears and Othello defends 
 
 112 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 himself in a grand speech, before him and the council. 
 Desdemona perceives a double duty; Brabantio yields, 
 Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind, and to him 
 did consecrate her soul and fortunes. The speech dis- 
 closes moral strength. In confidence Othello leaves his 
 bride to the care of his lieutenant. 
 
 Then follows the great dialogue between lago and 
 Roderigo. Here the villain discloses his utter lack of 
 faith, his contempt for all virtue, his avarice and hypo- 
 crisy. "Virtue! a fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus 
 or thus. Love is but a lust of the blood, a permission 
 of the will. Put money in thy purse, put money in thy 
 purse!" "Desdemona," he says "will repent of her 
 choice; these Moors are changeable in their wills." And 
 the act closes with his great soliloquy : "he holds me well, 
 the better shall my purpose work on him; the Moor is 
 of a free and open nature, and as will tenderly be led 
 by the nose as asses are; I have it: it's engendered: hell 
 and night must bring this monstrous birth to light." Few 
 who heard Edwin Booth deliver those awful lines can 
 ever forget them. 
 
 In Act II we are in Cyprus. Our fears are rising; the 
 first scene appropriately opens with a storm, as before all 
 of Shakespeare's conflicts, this foreshadows the storm of 
 Desdemona's misfortunes. lago, Desdemona and Emilia 
 converse: the cynic, the angel and the common woman. 
 Desdemona seems to apprehend the portent of disaster, 
 "I am not merry" ; lago watches Cassio take Desdemona's 
 
 :\d "with as little a web as this will I ensnare as 
 great a fly as Cassio." The entrance of Othello shows 
 his measureless faith in his wife. It is a noble picture, 
 Adam and Eve before the fall. The serpent sees and 
 notes it aside. Now he winds Roderigo in his silken 
 skein, sows doubts of Desdemona's honor in his mind, 
 
 113 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 "watch you tonight!" The forces of hell are gathering. 
 Othello is welcomed with a bonfire and great celebrations ; 
 lago makes poor Cassio drunk he is Faust in the clutch 
 of Mephistopheles v . In lago's song "Let me the cannakin 
 clink, a soldier's a man, a life's but a span, why then 
 let a soldier drink" we have the grin of a death's head. 
 
 A quarrel ensues; Montano is wounded, from inciter 
 of the brawl lago changes like a chameleon to the de- 
 fender of order. Othello calms the disturbance. Cassio 
 is reduced from his rank and lago wins his first design. 
 Cassio has lost his reputation, the immortal part, with 
 the cry of a wounded spirit, he comes to himself, noth- 
 ing more plainly shows his open nature in contrast with 
 lago's duplicity than the cry "O thpu invisible spirit of 
 wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call 
 thee devil !" lago skillfully suggests to the broken man 
 to importune Desdemona for his reinstating and thus 
 another seed of jealousy is sown. The soliloquy that 
 follows matches the very hues of hell: "I'll pour this 
 pestilence in his ear ; so will I turn her virtue into pitch, 
 and out of her own goodness make the net that shall en- 
 mesh them all." 
 
 Shakespeare's women are a world in themselves. 
 Portia, grave and discerning and the embodiment of 
 mercy ; Rosalind, with her true heart and silvery laugh ; 
 Cordelia, the beauty of holiness and the apocalypse of 
 daughterly devotion; Hermione, the queen, mother and 
 wife, calm as a sunset and as lovely; Imogen, the union 
 of simplicity and enthusiasm ; Juliet, the symbol of ardent 
 and unreflecting love; Cleopatra, the gorgeous and en- 
 chanting child of the Orient; Katherine, whose simple 
 truth was no match for the wily Cardinal ; Lady Macbeth, 
 the very incarnation of designing power, masterly con- 
 trol and murdeous hate, from whose palm "the damned 
 spots will not out." 
 
 114 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 None of these resembles Desdemona, unless it be Juliet, 
 in her trustfulness, her inability to reason, her injured and 
 defenceless innocence, her artless devotion and predis- 
 position to wonder, and her surprising union with a dark 
 native of another race. Desdemona is simple and lovely, 
 the preordained victim of the fiend, a maiden never bold, 
 she suffers more than Imogen, sweetest of Shakespeare's 
 women and as innocent as Miranda, a child of nature, 
 she knows evil by name only, she has little recollection 
 and a grain of superstition, she makes no reply to 
 Othello's awful charges, she shows her womanliness when 
 she defends her choice to her father, she coyly deceives 
 her father in her marriage, and this gives the basis for 
 Othello's fear. 
 
 CSfte. was easily captivated by the stories of the brave 
 ano~soldierly Moor, sentiment and metaphysics mingled 
 in her courtship, gentleness is the prevailing tone of her 
 nature. There is too little energy and too little reflection ; 
 she is a passive character; she easily believes that the 
 fated handkerchief was a talisman ; softly credulous was 
 she; a sweet nature, she had little moral energy, like 
 Hermione, who defied the charges of infidelity, she is 
 so innocent that she cannot understand guilt in others; 
 accusation stuns, but does not rouse her; she makes no 
 defence, her love was her religion. 
 
 Never does she upbraid, nor bitterly deny ; words with 
 her denote sentiment and not reason; she was led as a 
 lamb to the slaughter, and "as a sheep before her shearers 
 is dumb so she opened not her mouth." Emilia is her 
 exact opposite, as lago's wife she is common, vulgar, 
 blunt; she parts with the handkerchief without protest, 
 she is stupid, till the very last careless of her own life, 
 and after the murder, transfigured by her bravery, she 
 redeems her mistake. 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Othello is a grand and romantic man, noble, tender and 
 generous, not easily jealous, but being wrought, perplexed 
 in the extreme, not a converted barbarian, but a royal, 
 mysterious man. He lacks Hamlet's speculative imagina- 
 tion, love crowns his success. Of simple mind, he is 
 dulled by devotion, absolutely trustful and determined 
 on revenge, he puts entire confidence in lago. His great 
 agony is not due to jealousy, but is caused by the belief 
 that hi& angel is impure. He struggles like Laocoon in 
 the serpent's coils; he is the author of his own fate; a 
 military man, he would take the life of the guilty. He 
 is the most greatly drawn and most heroic of the dra- 
 matist's characters. His passion, like a flood, overflows 
 all restraints until it issues in the awful murder, but even 
 here he is a priest at a sacrificial altar. He has as much 
 energy as Hamlet has indecision; his repentant sorrow 
 is the roar of outraged friendship, mingled with the 
 pathos of a soul almost dissolved. He does not trust 
 lago at once ; only when he thinks the evidence indisput- 
 able does he yield. He is not vindictive. When desolate 
 and despairing, with the blind hope of an anguished man, 
 he clutches at his last possession, his honor, which he 
 thinks demands the sacrifice of Desdemona and Cassio. 
 We see a grand and lordly nature writhing to death, fitting 
 material for destruction in the hands of the most con- 
 summate villain in all literature. 
 
 Ruskin said of the serpent that it "is passive to the sun 
 and shade, and is cold or hot like a stone ; it can outclimb 
 the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, out- 
 wrestle the athlete, and crush the tiger." Such is lago, 
 the intellect divorced from all morals. He is intense, 
 subtle, malignant, audacious, cynical, sneering, an Italian 
 devil, worse than Richard and Milton's Satan, only 
 rivalled by Goethe's Mephistopheles. 
 
 116 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 He revels in danger ; is a great egotist ; of supreme in- 
 tellectual power, he stands outside the moral world. He 
 is incapable of goodness; suspicious of his wife, without 
 feeling, defying torture, hating superiority in others; he 
 is will in intellect, as Hamlet is intellect destroying will. 
 
 He sneers at women (indeed all sarcasms in Shakes- ^ 
 peare against women come from villains) lago "is noth- 
 ing if not critical," and thus a warning to all ; he is Judas 
 and Pilate combined. He is the really jealous man in /^ 
 the play and the man who has no aim in life but his own 
 advantage. Thus the play revolves about a princely man, 
 a guileless angel, and an incredible fiend. 
 
 Act III is the spectacle of a fast gathering storm. 
 Shakespeare well introduces it by buffoonery, or we could 
 not endure the suspense. We have the last scene of 
 Othello's happiness. Desdemona promises to intercede 
 for Cassio and thus weaves a web about herself. The 
 catastrophe is now hinted at in lago's "Ha, I like not 
 that," to Othello. 
 
 At first he is vague, and dimly suggestive ; then dis- 
 quieting, "Did Michael Cassio when you wooed your 
 lady know of your love?" "Indeed, is he not honest?" 
 "Men should be what they seem, or those that be not, 
 would they might seem none." "Good name in man or 
 woman, dear my lord," "O beware, my lord, of jeal- 
 ousy," thus the artful spider enmeshes his victim in the 
 ever-widening web. Sometimes there flashes a line of 
 great truth, hinting a nature not wholly lost: as "poor y 
 and content is rich and rich enough." 
 
 But Othello's fears are roused when lago suggests, 
 "she did deceive her father marrying you." This lays 
 the track for the powder. Desdemona now gives Othello 
 the fated handkerchief to cool his fevered head, he drops 
 it, O fatal act ! Emilia picks it up. lago has asked for 
 this ; she will give it to him. He loses it in Cassio's room. 
 
 117 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Othello enters, and his mournful desolation rivals that 
 of Hamlet, "farewell the tranquil mind !" No grander 
 pathos can be found in all Shakespeare than these lines, 
 the cracking of a trusting heart. "Othello's occupation's 
 gone!" Here Salvini raged like an infuriated lion, and 
 Booth, as lago, was the incarnation of malignity and 
 hellish suggestion. It was an awful scene that often 
 made the hearers faint. 
 
 Othello is now between Scylla and Charybdis : love for 
 his wife and belief in his lieutenant. Even dreams in- 
 vented by lago rouse him on, "I'll tear her all to pieces !" 
 the handkerchief serves as proof, on such simple things 
 do life's tragedies depend, and the two men drop on 
 their knees and swear to the stars above to be true and 
 devoted in the detection of the suspected crime, and 
 Othello's soul is sold. 
 
 In the tender scene that follows, Desdemona is shown 
 wholly unconscious of her coming doom. Othello then 
 enters. He feels of her hand, and when he says it is 
 hot and moist she innocently replies, ' 'twas that hand 
 that gave away my heart." She is terrified by the mystic 
 value of the lost handkerchief that a sybil sewed in 
 prophetic fury. lago now sees Cassio importune her for 
 her influence with her husband. She defends Othello's 
 strange behavior with unsuspecting eagerness. Bianca 
 appears, and Cassio gives his mistress the fated handker- 
 chief to take the work out. 
 
 Act IV is the great catastrophe of the play. lago com- 
 bines all earlier proof, Othello says "she shall not live" ; 
 he swoons at lago's confessions of Cassio's intrigue ; lago 
 cries "Work on, my medicine!" Othello rages like a 
 wild beast, yet recurs to Desdemona's innocence, "O lago, 
 the pity of it !" Nothing approaches this scene in sorrow 
 
 118 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 and wounded confidence. Desdemona's doom is fixed. 
 She cannot understand her lord's frenzy; it is a great 
 contrast between the man's cruelty and the woman's tears. 
 Emilia defends her mistress to the raging husband who 
 is deaf to her words. He doubts all women now; life 
 is gone without his ideal. He thinks he has had oracular 
 proof, "had it pleased heaven to try me with affliction, 
 steeped me in poverty to the very lips ; but, alas, to make 
 me a fixed figure for the time of scorn to point his slow 
 unmoving finger at !" 
 
 His reason totters under the terrible load of suspicion. 
 He charges Desdemona with guilt. She is stunned, yet 
 half conscious of her fate, and asks lago, "am I that 
 name, lago?" It is the cry of the lamb that fears the 
 wolf. She begs her enemy to tell her how to win her 
 lord again, all unsuspecting his devilish villainy. "By 
 this light of heaven I know not how I lost him." Nothing 
 but a figure of adamant could have resisted such tears and 
 pleadings. When Desdemona robes herself for the night 
 and sings the Willow Song, we are reminded of Ophelia. 
 It is sorrow crowning sorrow, the lament of the swan. 
 The debate between the hunted innocent and the calloused 
 woman of the world is the contrast of purity and vice, of 
 snow and ink. 
 
 Act V is unsupportable. Witness the words of Othello, 
 "It is the cause, the cause my soul; she must die or 
 she will betray more men." Like Hamlet, he cannot kill 
 an unprepared soul and she must pray; he will not send 
 for Cassio to unravel the mystery of the handkerchief. 
 Rage, incredible and unrelieved, spurs him on. He 
 strangles her and Desdemona, dying, asserts her innocence 
 and defends her husband, saying she did the deed herself. 
 This is the consummation of saintliness and the very 
 wonder of wonders. With a prayer for her destroyer 
 
 119 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 she floats into the undiscovered country. As Emilia re- 
 veals to Othello how he has been duped, unravelling to 
 him all her husband's fiendish work, he roars like Lear 
 himself, "Cold, cold my girl! whip me, ye devils! blow 
 me about in winds, roast me in sulphur, O Desdemona 
 dead, Oh, Oh, Oh!" After wounding lago, he would 
 have him live, for "in his sense 'tis happiness to die." 
 The serpent refuses to speak, "What you know you know, 
 demand me nothing." 
 
 Then come those sublime closing words of the ruined 
 man: "Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate nor set 
 down aught in malice; then must you speak of one that 
 loved not wisely but too well; of one whose hand, like 
 the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his 
 tribe." He stabs himself and falls upon the bed "I 
 kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this, killing my- 
 self to die upon a kiss." lago is led forth to torture, and 
 the curtain falls. 
 
 Othello surpasses all other tragedies in the strength 
 of its dramatic effects, and is called the most thrilling 
 of the master's masterpieces. The play is like the fury 
 of the elements ; sympathy alternates with repulsion ; sick- 
 ening fear with flashes of hope. The play is scarcely re- 
 lieved, as Lear and Hamlet, with supernatural powers. 
 We are verily "hemmed in, cabbined, cribbed, confined" ; 
 the slightest instruments rouse the action. The subject 
 itself is painful. 
 
 In Act IV, we have chaos itself. Some critics haw 
 been horrified by a black Othello, yet Shakespeare uses 
 "negro" and "Moor" of the same person in the Merchant 
 of Venice. Lamb thought Desdemona was to be con- 
 demned for loving a black, and to us the union does seem 
 unnatural. Othello is made jealous against his will, while 
 Leontes, in The Winter's Tale, is jealous by nature. 
 
 120 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 Never before, nor since, was the progress of suspicion 
 in a noble mind so steadily, and progressively, and actu- 
 ally delineated. The bravery and credulity of Cassio are 
 balanced against the readiness and cowardice of Roder- 
 igo; Shakespeare has only to drop a handkerchief and 
 the mischief is done. Lear is the greatest effort of 
 Shakespeare, as a poet; Hamlet, as a meditator; and 
 Othello is the combination of the two. 
 
 Macaulay thought this play the greatest work in the 
 world. It gives a great moral lesson for all time. Hugo 
 called Othello night, Desdemona dawn, and lago dark- 
 ness. One can see the workings of conscience under' 
 lago's disguises like the works beneath the crystal of a 
 watch. Many actors have sensualized and brutalized 
 Othello. Until he becomes a lover, he is centred in in- 
 tegrity and calmness. Afterward, he is passion personi- 
 fied. His devotion had something of awe and self-abne- 
 gation. Forlorn was the swarthy warrior in the hands 
 of a mere girl. In the night of horror, he is like Jepthah 
 discharging an awful duty. It is the intellectual calcula- 
 tion in lago that commands our admiration. There are 
 lagos in council, in commerce, in banking, in common life. 
 
 Othello dies, yet lives, and lago lives but to die. Suf- 
 fering is less than incapacity for pain. Like Coleridge, 
 Othello found death in life and life in death. He warns 
 us against the folly of a mistaken vow. Like Abraham, 
 he went up with his offering to the sacrifice, but found 
 no substitute in the thicket. We are taught the tremend- 
 ous consequences that hinge on the most trivial circum- 
 stances, "trifles, light as air, are to the jealous confirma- 
 tion strong as holy writ." Jealousy may be the offspring 
 of love. What "damned minutes tells he o'er who dotes, 
 yet doubts; suspects, yet strongly loves!" 
 
 121 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 When Othello opened his heart to the first suspicion, 
 he surrendered his peace. A life of service for others is 
 the only corrective to the green-eyed monster. The little 
 island of our own concerns, washed by the seas of per- 
 sonal gain and flowered by the roses of family content, 
 where so many of us dwell in happy ignorance and selfish 
 ease, unwilling, like Columbus, to penetrate other waters 
 and survey other lands, may become the nest of envy and 
 hate and jealousy, a trinity of vipers, that mock the meat 
 they feed upon, unless we open our windows to the light, 
 give our talents expansion, dedicate our energies to 
 humanity, leave the Jerusalem of pleasure for the Jericho 
 of benevolence, and bind up the wounds of each suffering 
 traveller that we meet on life's road. 
 
 lago's infamous motto "put money in thy purse"- 
 we have adopted as our rule of life, and denuded action 
 of its motive, and nature of her treasures, and character 
 of its sweetness. This great drama repeats the truth, 
 elsewhere expressed by Shakespeare, that "virtue turns 
 vice being misapplied, and vice's by action sometimes 
 dignified." We are also taught that the whitest bosom 
 may conceal the darkest thoughts, "who has a breast so 
 pure, but some uncleanly apprehensions keep leets and 
 law days and in session sit with meditations lawful?" 
 "A good name is better than riches and its loss is the 
 greatest poverty." Boundless riches is as poor as winter 
 to him that ever fears he shall be poor. 
 
 In Macbeth, sleep is murdered that "knits up the 
 ravelled sleeve of care." Here "not poppy, nor mandra- 
 gora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world can medicine 
 the anguished mind, the sweet sleep it had yesterday." 
 Bacon says that knowledge is power, but we learn that 
 suspicion makes knowledge a weary weight. "Where 
 ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise." How few there 
 
 122 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 are in all the world who will speak of us as we are, "noth- 
 ing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice !" 
 
 In Hamlet and in Romeo and Juliet and in Othello we 
 have a touch of presentiment, of superstitious foreboding, 
 to which we all are responsive. Hamlet quivered like an 
 aspen when he was confronted by his father's apparition, 
 and poor Desdemona was frightened at the loss of the 
 magical handkerchief, dyed in liquor, conserved of 
 maiden's hearts. By the coarsest character in the play 
 all are taught that "'tis not a year or two shows us a 
 man." This is akin to Richter's great observation that 
 the best fruits, flowers, and feelings, develop slowly. 
 
 Burke says that confidence is the cheap defence of men 
 and nations, and on the sands of sinking confidence 
 Othello's nature suffers its frightful collapse. 
 
 There are crises when God seems all withdrawn. No 
 light appears. The Fates weave their web unforbidden ; 
 the air is filled with foreboding shapes ; and Providence 
 seems only a name. Over this play no all-controlling 
 power is seen ; the gods sport with innocence and youth ; 
 darker and darker grows the mystery ; evil looms larger ; 
 the Archfiend stalks unchecked ; and purity goes like the 
 Maid of Domremy to a cruel doom. "Truth forever on 
 the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." 
 
 We can no more explain the awful sacrifice than we 
 can explain the decimation of the chosen people through 
 the ages, their untold desolation and sorrow and pain. 
 The great dramatist well knew that character passes 
 through the fire, and that innocence must bear the cross 
 before it can wear the crown. This is the lesson of 
 Cordelia and of Desdemona. In the whirling wind of 
 passion, in the blinding mist of recklessness, the judgment 
 is benumbed and the reason dethroned. Othello has his 
 counterparts, many a husband has since fanned the flame 
 
 123 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 of unfounded suspicion until it became a devouring, roar- 
 ing conflagration, licking up the foundations of trust and 
 destroying all the props of hope. Infatuation too often 
 ends in hate. 
 
 This immortal play is a witness to the ages that some- 
 thing more than admiration for conquest and travel is 
 needed as a basis for the marriage tie. Brutus trusted 
 his wife, for he knew her. Leontes distrusted his wife, 
 for he never knew her. Intellectuality is in the air, and 
 we are urged to read and think and ponder. Yet lago is 
 the ineffaceable warning to our age of what the intellect 
 may readily become when unassisted, uncontrolled by 
 the moral faculties. Is it not significant that the most 
 dastardly villain in all literature was a profound thinker, 
 a master of the arts that are now deemed most honorable, 
 the embodiment of the American idea that exalts cunning 
 and self-interest and personal gain? 
 
 Shakespeare in this play is the lawgiver on Sinai. The 
 mountain again quakes. We have the sixth and seventh 
 commandments. lago sets up his golden calf only to 
 drink its powdered dust brackish with water, and is denied 
 an entrance into the promised land. Irresolution froze 
 the current of Hamlet's purpose, frenzied ambition 
 brought Wolsey to his fall, and malignant envy slowly 
 petrified lago's heart. Too many modern playwrights 
 make sin something to be expunged and atorfed, a stepping 
 stone for character, and a dash of deviltry seasons the 
 libretto. Not so is it with him who was not of an age 
 but for all time. Wickedness is sin and sin is damna- 
 tion ; the offence is rank and smells to heaven ; no guard 
 shall bar heaven's shafts, dalliance is dangerous. In the 
 corrupted currents of this world, offence's gilded hand 
 may shove by justice, but 'tis not so above; there is no 
 shuffling, there the action lies in his true nature, and we 
 
 124 
 
OTHELLO 
 
 ourselves are compelled, even to the teeth and forehead of 
 oun faults, to give in evidence. "The plays of Shakes- 
 peare are the voice of history, sounding across the ages, 
 the laws of right and wrong." 
 
 125 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 BY 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 OF all Shakespeare's plays, The Tempest is the most 
 original and striking. Written late in life, it is per- 
 vaded by the supernatural and traverses the border- 
 land of the unseen. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 
 actors wander in a maze of error led by mischievous 
 frolic. Here both human and imaginary characters, 
 both the dramatic and the grotesque, are perfectly 
 blended with the greatest art without any semblance 
 of consciousness. Here he gives to "airy nothing a 
 local habitation and a name." The preternatural part 
 resembles reality and the real events resemble a dream. 
 
 We are in a world of spirits, airy shapes flit about us, 
 singular portents throng the sky, the terrestrial but 
 serves to project the celestial, the earthly incidents are 
 but the scaffolding for the aerial structure. It is almost 
 impossible to represent. We have solemn grandeur, 
 unrivalled grace, and grave beauty. While the passion 
 and depth and expression of other compositions easily 
 surpass it, yet as a work of art, as a triumph of the 
 imagination, as a sustained unity and majesty, it stands 
 alone. It has no prototype in literature. 
 
 The action and progressive movement are minor in 
 this play. The scene of The Tempest lies in the fancy. 
 The fabled island may have been Lampedusa, in the 
 Mediterranean, 'still uninhabited, (and supposed ,by 
 sailors to be enchanted. Yet the island of the play sank 
 beneath the waves when the great magician broke his 
 staff. 
 
 The enchanted isle, the wonderful necromancer, the 
 beautiful girl, the mysterious sprite, the gross com- 
 posite of brute and demon, the stately king, the exact 
 
 129 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 seamanship knowledge, and the rude sailors, are all 
 the creations of that imperial mind whose empire knew 
 no visible bounds, and whose daring- penetrated earth 
 and sea and sky. The Tempest is the synonym for all 
 realms surpassing sense and defying space and vision. 
 It is Shakespeare's "Book of Revelation" , and as full 
 of enigmas as the Apocalypse. It is allied to St. Au- 
 gustine's "Civitas Dei", and to Bernard's "Walls of 
 Zion" con jubilant with song. 
 
 It hints a fourth dimension of space and a clair- 
 voyant sight. It inspired Poe's "Haunted Palace", and 
 his "City by the Sea." It resembles Plato's "Atlantis", 
 that mythical island that disappeared in a convulsion 
 of nature. It entices, intoxicates, hints, symbolizes and 
 haunts. Milton gives the dimension of angels, their 
 attributes, and their physical qualities. Shakespeare 
 lays open the world of spirits, he surpasses Coleridge 
 in the supernatural, he distances Shelley in his ethereal 
 visions, and he achieves in a phrase what the blind 
 Puritan labored to attain in a page. Puck girdled the 
 earth, but Prospero waves his wand and the invisible 
 appears. 
 
 Once a ruling prince, thirsting for knowledge, 
 devoted to the liberal arts, he forgot that the world 
 is hostile, and thus his brother deposed him from his 
 dukedom. He saved himself and his lovely daughter 
 and some of his books of magic upon a desert island. 
 Here his knowledge expands. Nature listens to him 
 and obeys him, zephyr-like spirits full of humor are 
 compelled to serve him, songs issue from nowhere and 
 ravish the ear, Ariel does his bidding, Caliban struggles 
 and repines, a thing of earth earthy, Miranda is virgin 
 simplicity and confidence and truth. Prospero is 
 Shakespeare himself in his calm temper, in his self- 
 
 130 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 mastery and gravity, in his sensitiveness to wrong and 
 his unfaltering justice, and in his remoteness from the 
 joys and sorrows of the world. 
 
 His occasional intellectual impatience, his flashes of 
 irritability, his memory of his injury, throw into greater 
 relief that altitude of thought from which he surveys 
 the whole field of human life, and ponders on its small- 
 ness apd its greatness. Paracelsus attains. He shares 
 the joy of his children to whom he is half-god and half- 
 father. In a dream existence he will still face each 
 duty with a smile. He is very wise and conducts his 
 intercourse equally well with friend and foe. 
 
 He is Shakespeare's nearest approach to deity. He 
 and his daughter came ashore by Providence divine. 
 When he breaks his staff and buries his book at the 
 end, we feel that we are again returned to earth and 
 the great vision fades. He can throw over whom he 
 will a magic sleep, and then he can awaken his subjects 
 like a hypnotist. He introduces us to the kingdom of 
 mind. He hints thought transference and mental sug- 
 gestion and realms unreached by wires and messages 
 from unseen heights. Prospero is man, liberated from 
 the bondage of the present, roused to a conviction of 
 his supernal powers, disdaining all that can be bought 
 or sold, responsive to far-off forces, and akin to distant 
 beings. He tells us that there are supersensible 
 spheres, spiritual energies, planets beyond and outrank- 
 ing our little ball. 
 
 By the discipline of trial and the loss of rightful 
 possessions, Prospero attains a kingdom which shall 
 endure. Deprived of gold and land he inherits him- 
 self. He dies unto the present, and reigns over the 
 future. He is the symbol of the intellectual man who 
 makes his own surroundings. His library is a dukedom 
 
 131 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 large enough. He echoes Richter's great observation 
 that whatever the mind of man may conceive, the will 
 of man may achieve. He emphasizes the old truth that 
 sacrifice is the pathway to success. 
 
 Prospero is the great prophet of Shakespeare, clad 
 in his robe of magic, a sort of Elisha with his staff, 
 and when he lays this upon the dead they come to 
 life. His simple island fare is far sweeter than all the 
 rich dishes that he once enjoyed. No music is so rare 
 as the winds that play about the isle, and the mys- 
 terious sounds that issue unexpectedly from caverns 
 and sea. Thoreau in his hut was a Prospero who 
 found enchantment in the pines and heard oratorios 
 among the birds. Power is proved by Prospero to be 
 in exact ratio to solitude. Bunyan was the Prospero 
 of the I7th century, immured in a narrow dungeon, 
 yet seeing the Wicket Gate and the House Beautiful 
 and the towers of jasper and beryl. "Stone walls do 
 not a prison make nor iron bars a cage, minds innocent 
 and quiet take that for a hermitage". Out of the lion 
 comes the honey. 
 
 Prospero is above all vengeance, he forgives his 
 brother^ he is harmonious and fully developed will. 
 Forgiveness and freedom are the keynotes of the play. 
 When, at the last, he leaves the fsland and returns to 
 the dukedom he had lost, he goes a purified man, the 
 bard himself, to his loved Stratford, matured and 
 taught and dignified, to await the end. In the Epilogue, 
 Prospero implores pardon. Was he Shakespeare feel- 
 ing the nearness of the other world, sensible of his 
 errors, and eager to be forgiven them ? Who can say ? 
 
 Miranda is abstract womanhood. She is modest and 
 tender, beautiful and unsophisticated, delicate and 
 refined. She is the Eve of an enchanted paradise. 
 
 132 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 She resembles nothing upon earth and has never beheld 
 any of her sex. She rises into loveliness from the rocks 
 and ferns. Her playmates are the billows and clouds. 
 Sprites speak to her, the air is vocal to her by her 
 father's art, she appears to others celestial. Her first 
 tears spring from compassion at the shipwrecked 
 sailors. Her first sigh is one of love. Her bashfulness 
 is the unfolding of a rose. 
 
 Like a child of nature, she is struck with wonder at 
 her own emotions when Ferdinand, the noble, seeks 
 her hand. He is the chivalrous in man, laying his gifts 
 at the feet of pure womanhood. Byron degraded 
 Haidee into a sensual toy, but Shakespeare made 
 Miranda a blossom sweet as the arbutus springing from 
 the hidden moss. Such a creature could only have had 
 a Ferdinand for a lover. Any other and less sincere a 
 man would have done violence to the play. Her prince- 
 ly father claims her as a thread of his own life, nay 
 "that for which he lives". She surpasses the Eve of 
 Milton for she is more natural. Possibly he studied 
 her for his great creation. She is the goddess of the 
 island. 
 
 She is the ideal teacher, opening the mind of the 
 dull Caliban, and with the sympathetic insight of girl- 
 hood interpreting his thoughts and giving them words. 
 Her patience with his ignorance, her vision of his possi- 
 bilities, her eagerness to lead him to the light, are 
 almost divine. Born a daughter of a Prince, bred on a 
 lonely island with a* magician and a monster for her 
 companions, she remembers her infancy, and when 
 Prospero lays down his mantle and tells her the story 
 of her removal, she is all attention and her great eyes 
 dilate. She marvels that he can raise or calm a storm. 
 He never permits his loved daughter to come too near 
 
 133 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Ariel, lest the effect of the unearthly sprite may over- 
 come her. He waves his staff and there ensues the 
 charming attachment between Ferdinand and the 
 lovely girl. 
 
 Ariel is wondrous. He revolves about Prospero like 
 his stellar namesake about Uranus ; and whenever he 
 would stray from his orbit the Master brings him back. 
 He is not an angel above man, nor a fiend below man. 
 He is a being with all the faculties of reason, yet im- 
 mortal. Did Shakespeare mean him to typify the soul 
 in its heavenly estate? Or is he the pure fancy, roam- 
 ing earth and sky, Shelley's skylark, a joy unembodied, 
 a blithe spirit ever on the wing? He is surely un- 
 earthly, ethereal and refined, imaginary power, and the 
 swiftness of thought. He drinks the air. 
 
 He has a sense of goodfellowship in all his employ- 
 ments. His songs sound as if invisible. He is frolic- 
 some and fairy, agreeable and open, mischievous and 
 capricious, daring and roguish, he thanks his master 
 for his release but his gratitude does not seem human, 
 he must be ever held in checlj. He is promised his 
 freedom in two days, and then his spirits recover their 
 old abandon. The old angels of literature weary us 
 with their ill-set wings and their stately speech. 
 Shakespeare manages this sprite with consummate tact 
 and naturalness. Ariel is the proper attendant for 
 Miranda. He and his fellows hover above her head, 
 they minister to her needs, they call up before her 
 pageants of great beauty. He is the image of the air, 
 and on air he feeds. He is the poet's thought, the poet's 
 intuition, the poet's insight. He anticipated the tele- 
 graph and leaps vast spaces. 
 
 If man shall ever conquer the air and ride in aerial 
 ships, looking down on continents and cities, then he 
 
 134 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 will share Ariel's powers and survey Ariel's domain. 
 He comes and goes; a spirit in the grasp of a mighty 
 enchanter. He feels his bondage. Unlike Goethe's 
 Faust, his energies are always employed for good. He 
 can fly, swim, and dive into the fire. He boards a 
 ship, dives into the cabin, rushes to the topmast, fol- 
 lows Jove's lightnings, makes old Neptune tremble, 
 causes a fearful storm, and the sailors cry: "Hell is 
 empty and all the devils are here!" Yet not a hair 
 perishes. He disperses the voyagers about the isle. 
 He can cool the air. He leaves all asleep. Prospero 
 has freed him from torment and he is eager for new 
 fields to conquer. Sometimes he appears as a water 
 nymph. 
 
 What wonderful songs are his; "Full fathom five thy 
 father lies, Qf his bones are coral made, Those are 
 pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth 
 fade, But doth suffer a sea change, Into something rich 
 and strange". The last three lines are appropriately 
 cut on Shelley's tomb. Prospero calls him his indus- 
 trious servant. He summons the peasants and Iris and 
 Ceres to the nuptials of Miranda and Ferdinand. When 
 urged by his master he says, "I go, I go". He confines 
 the king and his followers distracted and dismayed ; he 
 makes tears run down their beards like winter's drops. 
 Indeed he would pity them were he human. Immedi- 
 ately Prospero orders their release. They must again 
 be themselves. Ariel fetches them. He sings: "Where 
 the bee sucks, there suck I, in a cowslip's bell I lie, 
 there I couch when owls do cry, on the bat's back I do 
 fly, after summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I 
 live now, under the blossom that hangs on the bough." 
 
 Now he awakens the shipmaster and boatswain 
 under the hatches of the ship; he goes and returns be- 
 
 i35 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 fore twice the pulses beat ; he stands invisibly by when 
 the seamen say they were in a dream, and he asks his 
 master "was it well done?" This is our last view of 
 the singular sprite until Prospero delivers all and says, 
 "My Ariel, chick, to trie elements be free and fare 
 thou well !" From the air he came and to the air he 
 returned. He is the most fascinating and unworldly 
 and blithesome creature in all literature. 
 
 Precisely opposed to Ariel is Caliban. The one is a 
 Mayblossom suspended in the azure ; the other is half 
 man and half brute, condensed and gross in feeling, 
 he has the dawnings of understanding without reason 
 or the moral sense, he shows the approach of the 
 brutes to the mental powers of man. He is malicious 
 and cowardly and false; yet different from Shakes- 
 peare's merely vulgar knaves. He is rude but not vul- 
 gar; he always speaks in verse. He has a vocabulary 
 of his own. 
 
 Caliban is one of the dramatist's masterpieces. He 
 has attracted attention from the first thinkers of every 
 age. He is wild, deformed, irregular, neither man nor 
 brute, the essence of grossness without vulgarity. He 
 comes from the dark soil, of the earth earthy, the isle 
 with its haunting noises he hears with delight : "sounds 
 and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not; some- 
 times a thousand twanging instruments will hum about 
 mine ears and sometimes voices". Here is a savage 
 with a child's simplicity. What a curious mixture of 
 devil and man and beast! Evil he desires for its 
 piquancy. He thinks gross injustice has been done him 
 and believes himself a slave. 
 
 The idea of murder gives him delight, for he 
 imagines that it would make a great noise and com- 
 motion. He is laughably horrible, a specimen to be 
 
 136 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 examined more than a creature to be execrated; at 
 times he shows great prudence, and again he roars with 
 hate. Yet Shakespeare grants him some instincts of 
 goodness, we meet him when full grown and a victim of 
 heredity. Miranda taught him, and Prospero stroked 
 him when young. He is a land-fish, a dullard, service 
 to him is slavery; his fins are like arms, some have 
 thought him the missing link between man and brute. 
 
 He seems the understanding in prison ; awaiting the 
 light. He represents the grosser passions and appe- 
 tites. 
 
 He is the natural man, uneducated and untrained, 
 the creature in the rough, the material for evolution, 
 allied to the ape, and ages will be required to lift him 
 to his proper height. Prospero sends pains on him, and 
 cramps, and side-stitches. He has memory, for he 
 recalls how he was taught to name the bigger light, 
 and how the less ; he knew all the springs and brine-pits 
 of the mystic isle. Language was taught him but he 
 uses it only to curse. He is amazed at the shapes 
 he sees ; for every trifle they are set on him ; they 
 chatter at him and bite him ; adders wound him as he 
 treads. 
 
 When Stephano sings, "The master, the swabber, the 
 boatswain and I, the gunner and his mate, loved Mall, 
 Meg, and Marian and Margery, but none of us cared 
 for Kate ; for she had a tongue with a tang, would cry 
 to a sailor 'go hang !' then to sea, boys, and let her go 
 hang!" (Is this Kipling's model?) Caliban feels him- 
 self tormented and cries aloud. He thinks Trinculo his 
 god, and will kiss his foot. He will fish for him and 
 get him berries and wood enough. Man to him is 
 w r ondrous. He knows too the jay's nest and the clus- 
 tering filberts. 
 
 137 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 He is wise enough to know that Prosperous power 
 depends on his books and staff; without them "he's but 
 a sot as I am ; burn all his books." This is Shakespeare's 
 tribute to the immeasurable superiority of the think- 
 ing man, for he represents this product of soil as 
 separated in his own opinion from the mighty magician 
 only by his intellectual treasures. Is it not significant? 
 We learn that Caliban's mother was a witch; she 
 could control the moon, make flows and ebbs, and deal 
 in her command without her power. A flash of intelli- 
 gence irradiates his mind at the last and he says, "I'll 
 be wise hereafter and seek for grace." Thus he departs. 
 
 As Ariel represents the ethereal and spiritual, and 
 Caliban the earthly and material, so Shakespeare, by 
 the enormous gap between them, would signify by 
 what slow and persistent and patient stages all educa- 
 tional forces must proceed. Perhaps our Teutonic 
 ancestors were Calibans, drinking blood from their 
 enemies' skulls, and beating tomtoms as they advanced 
 half-clad into battle. Each idiot is a Caliban, and 
 every son of Adam in whom development is arrested. 
 They who live close to the earth, who "eat and drink 
 for tomorrow they die", are akin to this island monster. 
 May we not go farther and say that he to whom the 
 visible earth bounds all, who is anchored more firmly 
 to the ground by each drill that cuts the rock, or each 
 spade that uncovers the mine, who magnifies only ter- 
 restrial forces, who ignores, or denies, the existence of 
 anything beyond the reach of theorems or tubes, to 
 whom "a primrose by the river's brim, a yellow prim- 
 rose is to him, and it is nothing more", is a Caliban, not 
 indeed in a hideous and repulsive form, but in soul, in 
 aspiration, in mental equipment, in the loss of the finer 
 and ultimate energies of life? 
 
 138 
 
THE TEM PEST 
 
 Wherever a city is so intent on present good and 
 present pleasure that it omits and loses the uplift of 
 art and letters and music, and the refinements that 
 chasten and elevate and subdue, there is a civic Caliban, 
 breathing smoke and cinders and the oppressive air of 
 feverish gain, wallowing in the mire of sordid ambition, 
 and content to sell its divine birthright for a mess of 
 pottage, Philistinism not Hellenism, willing to obli- 
 terate the landscape, or pare away the waterfall or 
 denude the forest, "for the jingle of the guinea heals 
 the hurt that honor feels". "The Lord let the house 
 of a brute to the soul of a man, and the man said, 'am 
 I your debtor?' And the Lord, 'not yet, but make it as 
 clean as you can and then I will give you a better'." 
 
 There is a lovely picture in this play, where the noble 
 Ferdinand and the sweet Miranda sit in the cave play- 
 ing chess; Prospero discovers them, he smiles be- 
 nignantly for he knows each move they make ; a pretty 
 pair, and he their controller and disposer. The great 
 Persian sang: "we are but pieces on the game he plays, 
 upon this checkerboard of nights and days, and hither 
 and thither moves and checks and slays, and one by one 
 into his closet lays". This is pessimism and despair. 
 But Prospero is kindly Providence, he oversees the 
 board, each advance and each decline is by his wise 
 decree, he rules and overrules for his creature's good. 
 "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew 
 them how we will". 
 
 The punishment in this immortal work is for disci- 
 pline and never for revenge. The sea rages, but the 
 sailors are preserved. Ariel can go just so far but no 
 farther. Over the whole is suspended an atmosphere of 
 benevolence. Much is now said of the Fatherhood of 
 God and the Brotherhood of Man. But Shakespeare 
 
 139 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 taught these three centuries ago in the magnanimous 
 generosity and forgiveness and equality of Prospero. 
 
 In the second act we have the vices that debase civili- 
 zation. Antonio and Sebastian are bad men, and the 
 intended assassination of Alonso and Gonzalo is an 
 exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and 
 Lady Macbeth, only pitched in a lower key. Thus we 
 Jiave the crimes of earth with the inspirations and aims 
 of men at their best. All the elements that compose 
 our modern life are here pictured and contrasted with 
 great effect. The sordid in Caliban with the unselfish 
 in Prospero ; the criminal in Antonio with the angelic 
 in Miranda ; the poetic in Ariel with the commonplace 
 in Stephano. The island is a world. An inferior artist 
 would have peopled it with angels and beings above 
 all sin. But Shakespeare was true to nature and to 
 fact. The mob appears with its follies and temper, but 
 Shakespeare is not angry with it, he regards it as a 
 simple phase of life, he never promulgates any party 
 tenets. Out of all the divergent forces issues complete 
 harmony, and he bids us never to despair. He knew, 
 as well as Emerson, the great law of compensation. 
 Trinculo and Stephano are good-for-nothing drunkards. 
 
 The sailors are like most men of their class. They 
 set the leading actors in greater relief. The plot against 
 Prospero is but a feint, for his magic robe is his sure 
 protection. This robe is honor and truth and justice. 
 The good man cannot fall. Over all is suspended Ariel 
 with his paradoxical songs and his cheerful wit, show- 
 ing the immeasurable power of good nature in a world 
 of complexity. Society is conceived of as an aggrega- 
 tion of conflicting forces whose ultimate outcome is 
 regeneration. What a stimulus and hope for our age ! 
 
 140 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 Gonzalo was a socialist. He might well be studied 
 by his modern followers, for he would have nature 
 bring forth of its own kind ; no riches nor poverty, nor 
 contract, succession, magistrate; no occupation nor 
 sovereignty. But in Prospero he recognizes the distinc- 
 tions wrought by talent and genius, the value of gov- 
 ernment, the rights and liberties of the subject, and the 
 necessity of individualism. 
 
 In the tumult of the storm, with which the play 
 opens, the bravery of the sailors, their energy, their 
 daring, the fall of the topmast and the howling of the 
 winds, the coarse conversation, and the cry : "all's lost, 
 to prayers, to prayers", we have a just introduction to 
 the sedate basis of that which follows, and a perfect 
 picture of a tempest. Yet Prospero who raised the storm 
 restrains it so that no soul is lost. The perfect balance 
 of taste and feeling in this play is unusual with Shakes- 
 peare, and shows that with his maturity came a more 
 intense respect for form. It is like the Greek drama ; the 
 English is made as flexible as the Attic. 
 
 In no play does the function of prayer to avert trouble 
 more prominently appear. Shakespeare's conception of 
 prayer would form a theme of surpassing interest. How 
 the sense of justice is dignified by the rescue of Ferdi- 
 nand who proves to be the son of the King who made a 
 league with Antonio ! Mercy becomes the great enchanter 
 as nobly as the graceful Portia. When Ferdinand would 
 draw his sword, Prospero suddenly holds his arm sus- 
 pended in space ; the king is a marionette in his power. 
 
 There is the finest picture in literature of a swimmer, 
 beating the surges under him, treading the water, his bold 
 head above the contentious waves, his arms in lusty stroke 
 for the shore. Compared with this Byron is tawdry and 
 melodramatic. At Ariel's touch the men sleep, their eyes 
 
 141 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 are open yet a singular drowsiness possesses them. Sud- 
 denly waking they hear the sprite: "While you here do 
 snoring lie, open-eyed conspiracy, his time doth take ; if 
 of life you keep a care, shake off slumber and beware, 
 Awake, awake!" They leap to their feet as if a cannon 
 had dinned in their ears. One imagines he was dropped 
 from the moon. 
 
 Ferdinand illustrates the dignity of labor. When set 
 to the removal of wet logs, he refreshes his labor by sweet 
 thoughts, surely "sweet are the uses of adversity, which 
 like the toad ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious 
 jewel in his head." Prospero watches the spell of love 
 descend on the gracious king who calls it morning when 
 Miranda walks at night. She would wish no companion 
 in the world but him. Both prattle deliciously under the 
 mighty necromancer's power. She weeps at her unworthi- 
 ness ; he loves and prizes and honors her beyond all limit 
 in the world. She does not shrink from the great declara- 
 tion, for she is untaught nature and says : "I am your wife 
 if you will marry me". And the happy father is rejoiced 
 beyond measure, and returns to his solitary vigils amid 
 his magical tools. Would that all infatuations might be 
 thus guided! 
 
 What a picture is that in Act III. Where strange shapes 
 bring in a banquet (the sailors think them unicorns) 
 leave the viands, and depart at Prospero's bidding. It is a 
 supernatural feast. Ariel claps his wings upon the table 
 and the food vanishes to the consternation of all. Then 
 he plainly tells them that they are mad, and that he made 
 them thus, their plot against Prospero is revealed, they 
 hear it in the winds and thunder and billows : here is the 
 Nemesis and certainty of detection of all crime. It is not 
 the Nemesis of Macbeth walking the earth with leaden 
 tread and avenging form ; it is the remorse of conviction, 
 for judgment belongs to Prospero alone. 
 
 142 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 No gaudy gifts and no servile offerings are brought to 
 the nuptials of the happy pair. But the treasures of 
 Ceres, the goddess of plenty, wheat, rye, barley, vetches, 
 oats and peas, all nature contributes of her store, honey- 
 drops, refreshing showers, even the peacocks come with 
 their gorgeous tails and feathers to the ceremony. Then 
 the loveliest song that nuptials ever heard save Spenser's, 
 "Honor, riches, marriage blessing, long-continuous and 
 increasing; hourly joys be still upon you, Juno sings her 
 blessings on you ; spring comes to you at the farthest, in 
 the very end of harvest ; scarcity and want shall shun you, 
 Ceres blessing so is on you!" 
 
 As the singular celestial visitors depart Prospero says : 
 "These our actors as I foretold you were all spirits and 
 are melted into air, thin air; and like the baseless fabric 
 of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous 
 palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea all 
 which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial 
 pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such 
 stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded 
 with a sleep." Coleridge thought these lines the most 
 majestic in all literature. Alone they prove Shakespeare's 
 title as the first thinker of all time. 
 
 Now dogs throng the sky, hunters above the clouds 
 appear, and Caliban and his companions run for their 
 lives. The project of the magician prospers and the end 
 is near. His enemies languish in a cave : the "rarer action 
 is in virtue than in vengeance" ; he is more magnanimous 
 than Hamlet ; he will save and restore those whom he has 
 punished. "Go release them, Ariel, my charms I'll break, 
 their senses I'll restore and they shall be themselves." Is 
 not this the grand end of all penal discipline, and have we 
 of the 2oth century yet learned it ? 
 
 J43 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 Then follows the magician's farewell to his servants 
 and to his art : "Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, 
 and groves, you demi-puppets that by moonshine do the 
 green sour ringlets make, whereof the ewe not bites ; and 
 you whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms that 
 rejoice to hear the solemn curfew ; I have bedimmed the 
 noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, and 'twixt 
 the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war; to 
 the dread rattling thunder have I given fire, and rifted 
 Jove's stout oak with his own bolt; graves at my com- 
 mand have waked (their sleepers, opened, and let them 
 forth by my so potent art. But this rough magic I here 
 abjure: and when I have required some heavenly music, 
 I'll break my staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, 
 and deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my 
 book." This apostrophe is only comparable to the Lord 
 speaking in the Book of Job. 
 
 The miracles have served their august purpose, the 
 enchanter is merged in the man, the mount no longer 
 quakes with fire. Perhaps this was Shakespeare's fare- 
 well to the theatre. His mighty creations were well nigh 
 ended, the staff was broken, the book was buried, his 
 secret he concealed certain fathoms in the earth, and none 
 among the sons of men has yet discovered it. Prospero 
 unrobed is Joseph revealing himslf to his erring brothers, 
 a reconciliation follows, and peace is restored. What a 
 sublime lesson, that even supernatural powers can have 
 only a merciful aim ! Like the Man of Galilee, Prospero 
 used his miraculous gifts for humane and illuminating 
 ends only. 
 
 Nature appears in her rarest dress, birds sing, flowers 
 bloom, and with the harmony of man nature herself 
 shares. Never play had happier ending. Alonso asks 
 the gentle maid's forgiveness and she grants it. Wonder- 
 
 144 
 
THE TEMPEST 
 
 f ul isle on which all the actors find themselves ! Ariel has 
 repaired the broken ship, while the sailors slept all was 
 changed, new masts and rigging waited their astonished 
 eyes, the restoration of the shattered vessel was Ariel's 
 last achievement, and worthy of his powers. Caliban is 
 freed, and his spell untied. Into his cell the hospitable 
 Prospero invites all for one night. He feeds his former 
 enemies, he tells the story of his life and they listen like 
 Desdemona and her aged father, we can almost see them 
 before the fire as the shadows illumine their bronzed 
 features, it is a marvellous experience. Ariel wings his 
 way to the realm from which he came, and Prospero 
 returns to Milan where every third thought of his shall 
 be his grave. 
 
 The deeper we mine in this play the richer is the ore. 
 It is as replete with truth as Golconda with gems. No 
 critic has ever sounded its shore for no plummet is of 
 sufficient length. It embraces the world that now is and 
 that which is to come. We, like the denizens of the 
 enchanted island, are the victims of delusions, we are 
 dominated by the cloud-capped towers and the gorgeous 
 palaces, slaves to time and sense, cowards when no real 
 danger is nigh, we are frightened by each seeming calami- 
 ty, only a Prospero can read the riddle, and only a mind 
 based on Providence is assured of sanity, proportion and 
 peace. In each Caliban of the streets we should seek a 
 rough diamond, for the vilest conceals some redeeming 
 grace. "There dwells some soul of goodness in things 
 evil." The ideal father is here portrayed, who so subtly 
 weaves the web of confidence and affection about his 
 children, that all his words are heeded. Ferdinand was 
 richer in the cave than on this throne. He could sing with 
 old Dyer : "My mind to me a kingdom is", and defy storm 
 and want. Cooped in our conventional huts, Ariel invites 
 
 145 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 us forth into the liberal and embracing air, to gather the 
 sweets of intellectual delight, and to roam fields as yet 
 untrodden. The supreme intellectual faculty is the imagi- 
 nation, and it is almost bankrupt in an age that sees no 
 higher than a building of stone, that drowns the song of 
 the thrush with the scream of the train, and that haunts 
 "the market place, the eager love of gain, whose aim is 
 vanity and whose end is pain". We need to have "the 
 love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet 
 serenity of books." Beyond all, stretches and allures the 
 vast domain of mind, the unconquered realm that awaits 
 the present century. 
 
 Man has brought fire from the clouds; he paints his 
 pictures with the sunbeams ; he unrolls the rocks ; and he 
 pushes his trains with vapor; while harmless lightnings 
 illuminate his towns. Even the planet seems subjugated 
 to him while it bears him in silence and smoothness along 
 the vast aerial spaces. Master of terrestrial forces, he 
 swells with pardonable pride; inventions multiply, com- 
 merce spreads her white sails, unseen wires transmit his 
 thought beneath the seas. 
 
 But with all this mastery has come a corresponding 
 doubt of the overworld, the invisible is pushed farther off, 
 and the attraction of the physical pulls the thought from 
 ethereal heights. We smile when told of lands that tele- 
 graphs cannot reach, and forces that scales cannot weigh. 
 Even the popular philosophy takes but little cognizance 
 of the immaterial and spiritual and immortal. Conscious- 
 ness is considered a function of the brain and conscience 
 itself is robbed of its ethical import. The "thrones, domi- 
 nations, princedoms" of Milton, the burning marie and the 
 crystalline sky and the sapphire pavilion, streaming with 
 august splendor, seem to many as idle tales to charm a 
 child to sleep. Dante's snowy rose of saintly multitudes, 
 
 146 
 
THE TEM PEST 
 
 with faces of flame and wings of gold, ever ascending, 
 perishes beneath the relentless gaze of the critic. The 
 iridescent lights of the Iliad, and all the glory of armor 
 and helmet and shield, with its undertone of aspiration and 
 suspense, appeal only to the eager scholar, and are mean- 
 ingless to the average man. The transcendent mood of 
 the spirit, when at the close of day every grass blade is 
 oracular, and the orange and crimson heavens suggest 
 Him "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns", when 
 the liberated soul is no longer fretted with wasting cares 
 and easily mounts to celestial heights, this and this only 
 is the source of all that is highest in thought and endeavor 
 and hope. 
 
 Without this, poetry is commonplace; art is no longer 
 transfigured; and buildings are no longer sermons in 
 stone. The consciousness of immortality has ever been 
 the vital and quickening impulse of all lordly effort. Thus 
 Angelo hung the Pantheon in air ; thus Correggio painted 
 his Holy Night; thus the Crusaders sought to rescue the 
 Saviour's tomb from the Saracen; thus the Hollanders 
 defied the Spaniard and the sea. 
 
 A conviction of the supernatural is the supreme lesson 
 of The Tempest. Without it, life would lose its sacred 
 charm. Without it, eloquence falls to the level of vapid 
 disquisition. Without it, society loses its aspirations and 
 is drowned in animalism which exactly keeps pace with 
 its wealth. As Wordsworth puts it : 
 
 "The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
 
 Little we see in nature that is ours ; 
 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 
 The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
 
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES 
 
 For this, for everything we are out of tune ; 
 
 It moves us not, Great God! I'd rather be 
 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 148 
 
"THESE OUR ACTORS 
 
 - BY 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
"THESE OUR ACTORS" 
 
 TEMPEST Act IV, Scene I 
 
 Slowly the great procession passes. Hamlet, with his 
 ."bourne from which no traveler returns", musing on the 
 destiny of life ; Portia, with gravity and womanly sweet- 
 ness, teaching the ever new lesson of human mercy ; Mac- 
 beth, with empty hand and leaden heart, lamenting he 
 hath murdered sleep; Lady Macbeth, the guilty enchan- 
 tress, from whose slender palm the fated stains will not 
 out; Lear, storm-swept and deserted, with his faithful 
 fool, and his mind darkened by madness, crying "I am a 
 man more sinned against than sinning"; lago, incarnate 
 evil, masterpiece of villainy, whose life motto is Ameri- 
 can : "Put money in thy purse" ; Desdemona, a creature of 
 stainless purity, laid on the altar of unfounded suspicion ; 
 Ophelia, that fragile shell on Shakespeare's endless shore ; 
 Rosalind, with her silvery laugh and honest heart; Fal- 
 staff, coming from the tavern, rubicond and rolling; 
 Helena, the combination of intellect and will in perfect 
 harmony ; Juliet, at the window, fairer than the nightin- 
 gale, and drinking the fatal draught at last in the stately 
 tomb ; the Witches, dancing in weird and fantastic move- 
 ment, and singing "When shall we three meet again, in 
 thunder, lightning or in rain?"; Brutus, a great man in 
 ruins, dying at the climax, like Judas, by his own hand ; 
 Caesar, bestriding the narrow world like a Colossus, "the 
 foremost man of all the earth", singularly resembling 
 the Son of Man in his betrayal by those He loved, and in 
 his supposed ascension and subsequent rule of Rome 
 from the land of the immortal gods; Timon, with his 
 awful indictment of the yellow metal that poisons all our 
 modern life; Wolsey, falling like a bright exhalation in 
 the evening, and crying to the ages, "Fling away ambi- 
 

 tion" ; Richard the Third, abhorred of man, and deserted 
 of God, appalled at the ghost in the tent ; Friar Laurence, 
 learning from the rind of a flower the whole divine dis- 
 pensation of grace; Richard the Second, whose Pilates 
 cannot wash away their sins ; Hermione, the combination 
 of dignity without pride, love without passion, and tender- 
 ness without weakness; Autolycus, with his wisdom con- 
 cealed in doggerel; Viola, the embodiment of love and 
 youth in every shifting color; Cordelia, faithful and true, 
 pillowing her aged father's head on the only heart that 
 ever throbbed for him; Imogen, with her sword in the 
 cavern's mouth; Horatio, the model friend in disaster; 
 Mercutio, with his raillery; Bassanio, before the three 
 caskets, making a wise decision; Polonius, with those 
 lines of worldly advice that compass all of life; and the 
 Fools concealing beneath their silly badinage, golden 
 nuggets of philosophy and truth. 
 
 152 
 
A TRIBUTE 
 
 BY 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 A Tribute by * 
 F. HYATT SMITH 
 
 OlHAKESPEARE is the riddle of literature, the 
 j^ miracle of mind. His ancestors were yeomen, 
 his handwriting would disgrace any school boy, 
 he belonged to no church and no party, took no 
 apparent interest in his works, mingled with the irregu- 
 lar characters of London, and when life waned, he 
 retired to Stratford, among the tavern-keepers and 
 rustics of the town. Without education he educates 
 the world, untraveled he traverses the universe, unread 
 he is read in every land, untrained he trains all men. 
 Three million copies of his works are sold each year, 
 hence he would have been the greatest wealth producer 
 in history had he had a complete royalty on his immor- 
 tal plays. He portrays every human passion, longing, 
 art, profession, industry, court and camp, mart and 
 belief, sounds the sea and conquers the air, all customs 
 and myths and habits and faculties, the lives of kings 
 and peasants and philosophers and mechanics and 
 senators and sorcerers and politicians and priests. 
 Hamlet is the tragedy of the will, Othello is the 
 tragedy of jealousy, Lear is the tragedy of ingratitude, 
 Macbeth is the tragedy of remorse, Julius Caesar is 
 the tragedy of politics, Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy 
 of love, The Tempest is the colossal picture of the super- 
 natural. His works are the best English history and a 
 great commentary on the Bible. Indeed, many words 
 in the King James Version are from him. He can only 
 be compared with himself, "the man not of an age, but 
 for all time." His sweep and range and imagery and 
 
 * Note on page 156 1 
 
pathos and beauty are simply Shakespearean. His 
 characters do not resemble life, they are life itself. He 
 holds the mirror up to nature and echoes all the aspira- 
 tions of the soul. He himself is Prospero in The 
 Tempest, who broke his staff and buried his magic 
 book, crying: "They are melted into air, thin air; 
 and like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud- 
 capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn tem- 
 ples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, 
 shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant 
 faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as 
 dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with 
 a sleep/' 
 
 Presented by the Author 
 
 To MR. WM. BENNETT 
 
 Stratford, England 
 
 156 
 
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