THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 THE ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 
 
 1919 
 
 Shakespeare and the Maker 
 
 of Vi 
 
 a 
 
 Sir A. W. Ward 
 
 Fellow of the Academy 
 
 London 
 
 Published for the British Academy 
 
 By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press 
 
 Amen Corner, E.G. 
 
 Price Four Shillings net 
 
THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 THE ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 
 
 1919 
 
 Shakespeare and the Makers 
 
 of Virginia 
 
 By 
 Sir A. W. Ward 
 
 Fellow of the Academy 
 
 London 
 
 Published for the British Academy 
 
 By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press 
 
 Amen Corner, E.G. 
 
ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF 
 
 VIRGINIA 
 
 BY SIR A. W. WARD 
 
 FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 
 
 Read July 3, 1919 
 
 WHEN, Mr. President, the Council of the British Academy honoured 
 me with an invitation to deliver this year's Shakespeare Lecture before 
 an audience on whose indulgence I knew I could safely count, and to 
 deliver it on this day, it was not only the proximity of dates which 
 almost inevitably turned my thoughts as to a choice of subject for my 
 address in a particular direction. I do not know that any recent 
 event in the history of this Academy has surpassed in its significance 
 the kindly ' interchange of notes ', early in the present year, between 
 our own and the American sister-institution, or that a more legitimate 
 interpretation could be put upon this memorable proceeding than 
 that suggested, Mr. President, in a sentence of your own reply to the 
 pledge of friendship conveyed to us by the American Academy: 
 ' Comradeship in the cause of high ideals must be the best bond 
 of union between nations ; and it would be a declension from that 
 high ideal if we allowed disunion ever again to arise between the 
 English-speaking nations.' 
 
 Nor for the months speed quickly is it very long since, in the 
 friendly Hall where I am speaking, and thanks, I may venture to say 
 to the inspiration of one of its familiars, the Hon. Secretary of this 
 Academy which has quite recently felt itself honoured by the 
 honour conferred on him by the King a public meeting applied this 
 axiom in a way specially akin to the purpose of our Annual Shake- 
 speare Lecture. The immediate object of that meeting was the 
 institution of an Annual Shakespeare Day, to be kept as a holiday 
 by all and more especially by the young, both at home and in North 
 America ; and the proposal was supported by the presence and the 
 eloquent pleading of the late Dr. Page, then the United States 
 Ambassador to this country, and the descendant of a family of 
 historic renown in Virginia. To Dr. Page, a copy of the Second 
 Folio was, as many of you are aware, presented as a memorial of the 
 
 ix F 9 
 
4 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 occasion, and at the same time as a token of the widespread admiration 
 and regard entertained for the public services and the personal 
 qualities of the distinguished diplomatist and man of letters whom 
 we have since lost. Through the munificence of Sir Charles Wakefield, 
 our Academy has since, as has been stated to you this afternoon, been 
 enabled to commemorate the Raleigh Tercentenary by administering 
 a Eund singularly adapted for advancing the cooperation of American 
 and English historical scholarship. 
 
 One other recent manifestation of this sense of international unity 
 I venture to note, before entering on my immediate theme, to which 
 it seems peculiarly germane. Two years ago, 1917, the Royal 
 Historical Society published a volume of very great interest, intro- 
 duced by a weighty preface from the hand of our honoured late 
 President, Viscount Bryce, and containing a series of essays by 
 historical scholars of high eminence, commemorating, in connexion 
 with the seven hundredth-anniversary, in 1915, of the grant of our 
 great English Charter at Runnymede. None of these essays, I think, 
 surpassed in value that by a distinguished American jurist, now 
 a member of our Cambridge Professorial Body (Dr. H. D. Hazeltine), 
 who in this paper showed with perfect clearness how 'the growth 
 of the colonies in America meant, from the very beginning, the 
 extension of English institutions and laws to these little Englands 
 across the sea. To their birthright of the English traditions of the 
 sixteenth and earlier centuries was now added the gift of the consti- 
 tutional and legal principles established in seventeenth-century 
 England.' Thus it came to pass and this is a feature of English 
 colonial life without a parallel in the history of modern colonization 
 that ' in the political and constitutional controversy of the colonial 
 period" (of American history) 'the rights of the colonists as 
 Englishmen played a vitally important part'; that 'Magna Carta 
 and other English statutory guarantees of the subject were relied 
 upon as the source of political privilege and civil right ' ; and that, 
 as Professor Hazeltine told a Cambridge audience last summer, ' from 
 the very beginning of effective colonization in the early seventeenth 
 century, Englishmen in America . . . regarded the English Common 
 Law as their own birthright'; so that 'this incorporation of the 
 English conception of law into colonial thought and practice 
 constitutes one of the most fundamental of all the influences of 
 England upon America '.* A genuine and vital connexion of this kind 
 illustrates with supreme force the truth that nations may. be united 
 by something beyond their material interests, and goes far to just y 
 
 1 See the essay on English Influence on American Ideals of Justice and 
 in The America of To-day (Cambridge, 1919). 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 5 
 
 us, while deprecating, with Imogen, 1 any desire to exclude other 
 friendly nations from their place in the sun, in resolving that close 
 to our own place shall be and remain that of a people akin to us, 
 not only in blood but in some of the most enduring traditions of our 
 national life. 
 
 The critically decisive period of Anglo-American colonization, 
 in which, after a series of earlier attempts had been made and had 
 failed, the first enduring effort to plant what was an English political 
 community as well as a trade-settlement on American soil was, notwith- 
 standing many vicissitudes, at last crowned with success, covers, without 
 much stretch of reckoning, the maturer years of England's and the 
 world's greatest dramatic poet. You will not, I think, object to 
 counting those years from the close of the sixteenth century to 1616. 
 While, therefore, we may fairly, with Professor Hazeltine, regard 
 the grant of the first Virginia Charter in 1606 as marking the real 
 beginning of English settlement in America, and the opening of a new 
 era in the history of colonization in general, we may actually, in this 
 month of July 1919, celebrate the tercentenary of the first meeting 
 of the first Virginian, and the first colonial, representative legislative 
 assembly. In other words, the conceptions which, after a long 
 experience of tests and trials, have endured as the foundations of 
 Anglo-American political life, were developed (I do not say first 
 formed) and put into practice (I do not say fully carried out) by men 
 who were not only compatriots of Shakespeare, but contemporaries 
 of his manhood. In what measure and with what results he was 
 brought into contact with these ideas must be questions requiring 
 careful consideration ; but we shall enter upon this with the conviction 
 that one of the most distinctive elements in his genius was his power 
 of observing the mental and moral as well as the material phenomena 
 of the world around him, while another was the power of giving 
 expression, clear and full, to the results of such observation. 
 Whether, in this instance, he was in sympathy with them is a 
 further question ; but, even if he consciously stood aside or remained 
 detached from them, that fact, could it be established, would be 
 neither without interest nor without significance. 
 
 Those who think with me on these heads will, if they have not 
 already done so, not fail to take up with something more than 
 curiosity, a small volume by Professor C. M. Gay ley, of the University of 
 California, bearing the sufficiently comprehensive title of Shakespeare 
 and the Founders of Liberty in America. The book was published 
 at New York in 1917, and was therefore one which the recent war 
 
 1 Cymbeline, Act III, sc. 4. I do not know why the origin of the figure should 
 have repeatedly been thought to be found in Pascal. 
 
6 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 and its preoccupations made it necessary for most of us to lay aside, 
 so that in its reannouncement it appeals to us with a fresh attractive- 
 ness. Professor Gayley is one of those American scholars who at one 
 time outvied, and still kept pace with, our own in the assiduous 
 enthusiasm with which they have sought to rivet one of the strongest 
 of the bonds between the old country and the new the study of our 
 common literature and language ; and his labours (with which he has 
 done, some of us over here the honour of occasionally associating us) 
 are honourably known to all who prize the literary masterpieces 
 of our race. His present essay was, therefore, sure of a welcome here, 
 while he will find few of us to differ from his general conclusion, 
 as unfolded in his concluding chapter : that, whatever debt the 
 North-American colonies may have incurred elsewhere in the achieve- 
 ment of their destinies, the seed of the principles which assured their 
 political freedom was sown at home in England. But while we shall 
 readily accept the view that the influence of political ideas familiar, 
 in essence as in germ, to the later years of Elizabeth and the early 
 Stewart age, had an important liberating effect upon early Anglo- 
 American political life, we must proceed with more caution with 
 regard to the special thesis which this work was written to uphold. 
 Its purport is, in brief, that these political ideas, after finding their 
 most pregnant expression in the masterpiece of Hooker, were, largely 
 by his teaching, infused into the minds of a group of English 
 politicians whom Mr. Gayley I confess I cannot discover on what 
 authority calls ' the Patriots ', but who may be more safely described 
 as constituting the Opposition during the reign of our first Stewart 
 King, and who were eminently instrumental in 'making 1 Virginia, 
 by securing to the colony to which that name was ultimately restricted 
 a broad basis of political life. This demonstration is coupled and 
 here we reach the point in the argument, which seems to me to render 
 it specially suitable for your consideration to-day with a further 
 attempt to show that these ideas and principles, largely in consequence 
 of Shakespeare's personal relations with the politicians in question 
 (or some of them), found their way into his own mind and writings. 
 
 It may be well, before discussing these twin propositions, to 
 remind you of certain pertinent facts in the early history of the 
 Company with some of whose leading members and their friends we 
 are concerned. In what follows, full advantage has been taken 
 of the indefatigable labours of Mr. Alexander Brown, upon which, 
 indeed, the historical data of Mr. Gayley's volume are avowedly 
 based. His Genesis of the United States, accompanied by an 
 extremely useful biographical appendix, is a magnum opus of its 
 kind, and forms a tribute of rare completeness to the heroes of early 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 7 
 
 Virginian history. For authentic information as to the proceedings 
 of the Virginia Company during the eventful eighteen years of its 
 chartered life, divided into the Guelf and Ghibelline periods of the 
 Thomas Smith and the Sandys-Southampton regimes, the historical 
 student will turn to the Records of the Company, sumptuously 
 edited from the Manuscript in the Library of Congress, which they 
 had reached by a strange Odyssey, after being transcribed in just 
 apprehension of the danger menacing them by the far-sighted care 
 of Nicholas Ferrar; the 'Ferrar papers'* at Magdalene College, 
 Cambridge ; and the ' Manchester ' papers in the Public Record Office. 
 Miss Kingsbury's monumental edition is prefaced by Professor Osgood, 
 whose own American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century may claim 
 to be considered a standard work in the entire subject of which my 
 address to-night only touches a section ; while Mr. Newton's admirably 
 written Colonising Activities of the English Puritans treats its final 
 phase (the history of the Providence Company). On the other hand, 
 Professor W. R. Scott's remarkable work on British Joint Stock 
 Companies, though ranging over a far wider field than we have at 
 present in contemplation, and conducting an exceedingly complex 
 inquiry with close attention to the varying conditions of its several 
 parts, discusses that section of it which concerns the Virginia Company 
 with masterly conciseness, and may serve as a welcome guide through 
 more discursive methods of treatment. As to the general bearing 
 of this chapter of colonial upon the progress of English political life 
 in general, Gardiner's standard work, to which I like to appeal in 
 these walls, and which has just undergone the test of a searching 
 critical estimate from an able American pen, is not likely to be 
 left neglected. 
 
 I pass by, as of no immediate significance for our theme, the 
 earlier projects for, and attempts at, American colonization, which, 
 from Humphrey Gilbert's Limehouse schemes onwards, were in- 
 extricably mixed up with privateering designs against the Spaniards, 
 and, in one instance at all events, with a devout design of ' planting 
 religion beyond the seas '. After the tragic breakdown of Raleigh's 
 more systematic scheme, in 1587, in which Thomas Smith, after- 
 wards Treasurer of the London Virginian Company, had a share 
 (you may peradventure hear more of these designs when Lord Bryce 
 favours us with the Inaugural Raleigh Lecture in the autumn) there 
 was a pause ; and, when you call to mind that the Armada sailed 
 in 1588, this is not surprising. Thus it was not till 1602 that a 
 new series of voyages of ' discovery ' directed themselves towards the 
 northern coasts of what was then called Virginia, and commanded 
 successively by Bartholomew Gisnold, Martin Pring, and George 
 
8 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 Weymouth. Raleigh (who did not regard his rights under the charter 
 which he had obtained in 1584 as extinct) approved of some and 
 even ventured a ship in one of them ; but the whole series was 
 financed by the Earl of Southampton, whose name thus early 
 connects itself with the history of the New World, and a syndicate 
 of other distinguished personages, with most of whom we shall meet 
 again. The last of these discoverers, George Weymouth, returned 
 home in July 1605, bringing with him five native Indians, ' which 
 accident ', according to Sir Ferdinando Gorges in his day both a 
 participant in Raleigh's Guiana expedition and a Cavalier in the 
 Great Civil War ' must be acknowledged the means, under God, of 
 putting on foot and giving life to our plantation '. (Ever since the 
 sojourn in England some eleven years later of poor Pokahontas, 
 the stimulus of setting eyes upon a native, though below the rank 
 of a princess, has proved a distinct aid to colonizing enterprise.) 
 More to the point, however, is the remark of the same gallant 
 adventurer that the peace with Spain, concluded in the year 1604, 
 was ' the means ' as he again piously phrases it, ' under God ' of 
 making possible an English settlement of which Spain still, for many 
 a long day, contested the sovereignty. You know, of course, in 
 what capacity Shakespeare was concerned in the Peace Conference 
 which preceded the ratification of the treaty. He belonged to 
 the retinue ordered to wait upon the Spanish plenipotentiary, the 
 Constable of Castile, in one of the rooms occupied by whom in 
 Somerset House King James had caused to be affixed, for the benefit 
 no doubt of the ambassador rather than of his attendants, a tablet 
 inscribed Beati pacifici upon which device we are not, as the French 
 ambassador seems to have thought himself, called upon to put any 
 ulterior interpretation. The Spaniards signed, but the state of 
 Anglo-Spanish relations overseas survived to trouble the soul of 
 Oliver Cromwell. 1 
 
 The period was, in England, already one of colonizing efforts 
 which sought to ensure lasting success by means of an organization 
 
 1 Mention of the attendance of Shakespeare's Company as Grooms of the 
 Chamber at Somerset House was first made by Mr. J. O. Halliwell-Phillips in 
 the Athenaeum (July 8, 1871), and then in his Outlines (first printed 1881). The 
 authenticating 1 statement had been lost, but it was afterwards found in the 
 Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, by Mrs. Stopes and Mr. Ernest Law, 
 in each case independently. Mrs. Stopes first published the discovery in a letter 
 to i\ie Athencenm t March 12, 1910 (reprinted in her ///, r.v/"''//r'.y Industry (1916), 
 pp. 275-6). Mr. Law had discovered the source in July, 1907, but had not 
 published it before the appearance of his Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber 
 iu 1910, after the date of Mrs. Stopes's letter. As to the Conference, see also 
 Mr. Law's letter to The Sphere, May 3, 1913. He informs me that the Beati 
 Pacific! tablet is still preserved in an old house at Rousley, Derbyshire. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 9 
 
 connecting them directly with the support and authority of the Crown. 
 The first Charter for Virginia of which the date is 1606, six years 
 after that of the first Charter of the great East India Company was 
 in part the work of the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, but as 
 a whole it seems to have been drafted by Chief Justice Sir John 
 Popham, who plays a most conspicuous part in the history of the 
 Virginia Company, and whose name is one of those connecting its 
 annals with those of the Middle Temple, of which he was long 
 Treasurer. 'In this famous document', in Professor Hazeltine's 
 words, 'the King not only claimed the right to colonize a large 
 portion of the territory of the New World ; but ' and this is the 
 feature to which special attention should be directed in connexion 
 with our more immediate theme 'the principle was also asserted 
 that English colonists in this territory were to enjoy the same 
 constitutional rights as those possessed by Englishmen in the home* 
 land/ The recipients of the grants were two bodies of adventurers, 
 the one resident in London, and including Sir Thomas Gates, Sir 
 George Somers, and, a little later, Sir Thomas Smith ; the other, in 
 which Chief Justice Popham and Sir Ferdinando Gorges took a most 
 active interest, located at Plymouth. By the advice of Richard 
 Hakluyt (whose name, though he was in Orders, again associates 
 itself with the Middle Temple) the London Company planted a 
 colony at Jamestown ; the fortunes of the Plymouth Company, both 
 before and after the failure of its settlement at Sagadahoc, and the 
 rechristening of Northern Virginia as New England, lie outside our 
 theme, though you are aware of their I had almost said trans- 
 cendant interest for students of Anglo-American history. 
 
 Turning, therefore, south, we content ourselves with noticing that 
 the early operations of the London Virginia Company were little 
 more than tentative, and carried on under continuous apprehension 
 of the action of the Spanish Government, stimulated as it was by the 
 vigilance of King Philip's ambassador in London, Zuniga, to whom 
 the reported heretical encroachments were gall and wormwood, and 
 who lacked his successor Gondomar's suavity of temper or manners. 
 The slender array of settlers sent out by the Company shrank rapidly ; 
 and the appeals made in London on their behalf hung fire. In 1608 
 appeared the celebrated Tnie Rcldtlon by Captain John Smith, who 
 had been the actual leader of the colony almost from its outset he 
 liked the epithet 'true', and, if he has been charged with not always 
 practising the virtue in question, it was certainly to him that the 
 survival of the colony in its birth-throes was mainly due. In the same 
 year, 1608, a sermon was delivered at Whitehall by Mr. Symonds, 
 
 F3 
 
10 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 Preacher at St. Saviour's in South wark, with whose powers in the 
 pulpit, as the vigilant Professor Gayley says, ' Shakespeare may very 
 well have been acquainted'. Other literary or oratorial efforts 
 kept up the awakened public interest at home ; and it was soon 
 recognized by the leading spirits of the enterprise, that, in the first 
 place, a concentrated effort was necessary for a permanent settlement 
 in the mild climate of Southern Virginia and in the advantageous 
 strategical position on the banks of the James river ; and, secondly, 
 that the system of government adopted for the colony needed 
 a thorough revision. Hence the Second Charter of 1609, whereby 
 the London Virginia Company acquired many, though not all, of 
 the powers hitherto reserved to the^ Crown ; so that, although the 
 community of colonists in Virginia itself became possessed of no 
 considerable share of rights, the political control of the colony passed, 
 in a large measure, to the proprietary Company, now a body con- 
 sisting of 56 city companies and 659 noblemen, gentlemen, and 
 merchants, acting through its Council, which the Third Charter, of 
 161&, gave the Company express authority to elect. Thus, during 
 the remaining thirteen years of its existence, the Virginia Company 
 was a body in which liberalizing tendencies found full play for their 
 efforts to contend, in an unflinching struggle, with conservative 
 instincts ; and this statement may: be fairly said to summarize the 
 main part of the history of the Company, and of the Sandys- 
 Southampton party within it, whose long campaign in this narrower 
 sphere anticipated or accompanied that which the same men con- 
 ducted on the floor of Parliament. 
 
 Before, however, I try to illustrate the significance of this campaign 
 by the few personal references for which I shall find time, I must 
 carry you back for a moment, in what I think will not be considered 
 as altogether a digression, to the year 1609, the year of the Second 
 Charter. With a view to the contemplated enlargement of the 
 colony an expedition was sent out early in June of that year, with 
 Sir Thomas Gates, the designated ' sole and absolute governor ', 
 accompanied by Sir George Somers as admiral, and Captain Newport, 
 long familiar with these voyages, as vice-admiral. Unfortunately, 
 though grave objection had been made to the circuitous route by 
 the West Indies, the expedition, consisting of not less than nine 
 vessels carrying about five hundred intending planters, and bearing 
 with it the document of the new Charter, took Newport's old route. 
 Sixteen days after the ships 1 final start from Falmouth in the words 
 of Captain Argall, who had not long before safely reached Virginia 
 by a shorter route a ' most horrible and vehement storme, which 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 11 
 
 was a taile of the West Indian hontcano\ drove the fleet upon the 
 islands of the Bermudas (alias Bermoothawes, alias the Isle of Divels, 
 alias, from their first claimant, though not discoverer, the Somers 
 Islands). The admiral's ship, the Sea Venture, was wrecked ; nor did 
 Gates and Somers reach Jamestown till May, 1610. Here they 
 found the colony on the brink of dissolution, from which, however, it 
 was preserved by the speedy arrival of Lord Delaware, chosen as 
 Governor, we are told, for his rank, and apparently one of those 
 solid English noblemen to whose imperturbability the State has more 
 than once had safe recourse in critical moments of our history. 
 Through him William Crashaw, Preacher at the Temple, 1 'sent 
 salutation to Virginia : thou hast thy name from the worthiest 
 Queen that the world ever had ; thou hast thy substance from the 
 greatest King on earth.' Soon after Lord Delaware had taken 
 over the governorship of the colony, Sir Thomas Gates sailed for 
 England. 
 
 Without taking a side plunge into the question of the origin of 
 The Tempest, ' still- vext ' like the ' Bermoothes ' themselves, we may 
 agree with Professor Gayley that there is but one explanation 
 possible of the parallelism of phrase between Shakespeare's play and 
 the True and Sincere Declaration of the Estate of the Colony (entered 
 November 1610). This document was founded partly on Gates's own 
 report to the Virginian Council, but mainly on letters, then unpub- 
 lished, which had been sent home from the colony. The author of 
 the pamphlet and the dramatist must, alike, have had access to 
 a letter so sent home by William Strachey, a survivor of the wreck, 
 and secretary at Jamestown under both Gates and Lord Delaware. 2 
 Unless, then, we are to accept Mr. Rudyard Kipling's genial con- 
 jecture that Shakespeare derived his 'extensive and peculiar' knowledge 
 of the details of the shipwreck, as narrated by Strachey, from a tipsy 
 seaman, who must have conveyed it largely in the diction used both 
 by the official and the poet, we must accept Mr. Gayley 's well-argued 
 
 1 William Crashaw, a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, was the father 
 of the more celebrated Richard, fellow of Peter-house ; but his theological views 
 were directly contrary to those of the poet. 
 
 2 Strachey's letter, addressed to ' an excellent Lady in England ' (identified 
 by Mr. Gayley with Lady Howard de Walden), was not made public till 1625, 
 when, after the dissolution of the Company, it was brought out by Hakluyt in 
 Pttrchas his Pi/grimes. The official dispatch drawn up for the use of the Governor 
 Lord Delaware by Strachey a few days before he indited this private letter 
 coincides with it in its account of the condition of the colony and of the remedies 
 required by it, but does not touch upon the shipwreck. This dispatch, which 
 removes any doubt that might have existed as to the authenticity of Strachey's 
 information, remained in MS. till 1841). 
 
12 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 conclusion, which, by the way, had previously suggested itself to two 
 previous commentators on The Tempest, Professor Herbert E. Greene 
 and Mr. Morton Luce. If so, how did Shakespeare obtain a sight of 
 Strachey's letter ? That Shakespeare was more or less in touch with 
 certain prominent members of the Virginia Company, we shall find 
 no difficulty in allowing Mr. Gayley's book to have succeeded in 
 proving. Might not, then, the ' Excellent Lady ' to whom Strachey's 
 letter was addressed have shown it to some of the most active among 
 them perhaps to Southampton's foremost colleague, Sandys, and 
 might he not have shown it to Shakespeare ? Possibly. 
 
 The connexion of England and her trade with the Bermudas 
 began by the wrecking of the ship commanded by Sir George Somers 
 in 1609 commemorated in Shakespeare's Tempest. 1 A scheme was 
 soon afterwards put on foot for erecting a fort on one of the islands, 
 so as to leave the Virginians no longer dependent on supplies from 
 home. The settlement, which it was at first intended to call 
 Virginiola, was finally named the Somers Islands, and the design 
 was to place it under the control of a subsidiary or under- company. 
 But the scheme did not work, and though the Charter of 1612 
 attempted to unite the two bodies organically, a distinct corporation 
 was soon afterwards founded for the proprietorship of the Somers 
 Islands. The two companies henceforth worked independently, 
 though concurrently ; but many of the most important members of 
 the Virginia Company, notably Sandys and his associates, were also 
 members of the Somers Islands Company, which survived its elder 
 sister for nearly half a century. I could not pass it by here, in view of 
 the Shakespearean associations of its origin ; but its later experiences, 
 interesting as they are, lie beyond the range of these notes. 
 
 In Virginia, the prospects of the Colony there had at last begun to 
 improve with the arrival of Lord Delaware, whose place was, however, 
 soon taken by Sir Thomas Dale, transferred to this service from that 
 of the United Provinces in the capacity of Marshal. One of the 
 most important measures introduced by this vigorous administrator 
 was a change (to which we shall have to refer again) made by him, 
 manifestly with the support of what I have gone so far as to call the 
 liberalizing party in the London Virginia Council, in the system of 
 land-tenure, which could not but greatly affect the future of the 
 community. Hitherto, land had been cultivated on the system of 
 joint ownership, with which that of common trade went hand in 
 hand ; now, three acres of land were assigned to every settler as his 
 property. The reform was fostered by Sir Thomas Gates, when he 
 
 1 I am informed that the descendants of Admiral Somers ' still stick to the 
 sea', aiid that two of them were lost in the recent war. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 13 
 
 returned as Governor later in the year 1611, with large supplies; 
 and henceforth no breach occurred in the prosperity of the colony, 
 which was again ruled with firmness and ability by Dale, the founder 
 of Henrico, from 1614 to the year after which Shakespearean 
 allusions are impossible. 
 
 But the critical epoch, in the very midst of which falls the date 
 of Shakespeare's death, was full of effort on the part of the 
 London Council of Virginia and the friends of the enterprise at home. 
 In 1610, both parties in the Council the city interest as represented 
 by Sir Thomas Smith and the nobility and gentry, vrho might be 
 called the nucleus of the country party in the House of Commons, 
 headed by Southampton and Sandys united in what was perhaps 
 their most stirring public appeal. It asked for a sum of not less 
 than 30,000 to bring about ' a very able and strong foundation of 
 annexing another Kingdom ' not merely province ' to the Crown ' ; 
 and it did not omit to dwell on the desire of the promoters of the 
 enterprise to 'spread the Gospel among the Heathen people of 
 Virginia 1 . And in March, 1612, as already mentioned, followed the 
 Third Charter, presenting an army of adventurers in unprecedented 
 impressiveness (the merchants, it appears, paid up better than the 
 country gentry), and, as observed, considerably extending the 
 Company's rights of control over the affairs of the settlement. 
 Although, in accordance with the practice of the times, the Company 
 had claimed and obtained the right of instituting lotteries for its 
 benefit, and although there may have been adventitious occasions for 
 causing Virginia and its affairs to become the subject about this time 
 of London talk, yet there is abundant evidence in contemporary 
 literature, including that of the stage, that by this time the first 
 American colony was exciting something more than speculative 
 attention or idle curiosity. 
 
 In 1612 occurred the death of Henry Prince of Wales, who had taken 
 a special interest in the fortunes of the new colony. Henrico town, 
 with Henrico county (a designation familiar to readers of The 
 Virginians) had been named after him the names of his father, 
 arid of his younger brother, and of his sister the Princess Elizabeth 
 (the student of Raleigh) likewise at one time or another, found topo- 
 graphical commemoration there. In his Epicedium on the young 
 Marcellm of England, Chapman took occasion to refer to the 
 Bermudas catastrophe as ' less melting for all men ' than the death 
 of ' our poor Prince '. I need not detain you on the question whether 
 The Tempest itself, which was one of those plays performed at the 
 wedding of the Palsgrave and the Princess Elizabeth on St. Valentine's 
 
14 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTUKE, 1919 
 
 day, 1613, was written for that occasion, or, as seems more likely, 
 was first produced in 1611, but cast in its final form for the 
 nuptials of 1613, with the Masque in Act IV added. 1 In any case, 
 it seems far-fetched to regard Gonzalo's description (Act II, sc. 7) 
 of the Utopia which he would find in the island were he king of 
 it as alluding to the state of things in Virginia, before Dale's land- 
 reform. The fancy as a whole is, as you know, taken from Florio's 
 Montaigne, and calls for no particular application of the kind. 
 Another passage in The Tempest (Act II, sc. 2) has, with far 
 greater probability, been thought (by Sir Sidney Lee 2 ) to refer to 
 early Virginian experiences viz. Caliban's jubilant boast when he 
 believes himself to have shaken off Prosperous yoke : ' No more dams 
 111 make for fish.' By way of contrast, one further Virginian 
 reference of much the same date may be cited from the heights of 
 political literature. Although Bacon's essay Of Plantations was 
 revised for publication a decade later, it may fairly be assumed to 
 have been originally written near this time ; and its author cannot 
 have been a stranger to some of the broadsides issued by the London 
 Virginia Council for public consumption. In it is to be found a (not 
 very clear) reference to the risk of the overplanting in Virginia of 
 tobacco, which was introduced there in 1606. 3 What is of more 
 interest to us, Bacon's essav, in view no doubt of the benefits which 
 had accrued to Virginia from the strong rule of Dale and Gates, 
 dwells on the expediency of placing the government of a new colony 
 in the hands of one man, 'assisted with some counsel'; while, though 
 'speedy profit is not to be neglected' (we seem to know the sound 
 of such words), neither is it to be sought beyond what may ' stand 
 with the good of the plantation '. Above all, it is ' the simplest 
 thing in the world to forsake or destitute a plantation once in 
 forwardness '. 
 
 The great crisis in the history of Virginia happened after Shake- 
 
 1 On the whole question see Sir A. Quiller-Couch, Shakespeare's Workmanship 
 (1018),, pp. 337 ff. It seems hardly possible, by the way, that if The Tempest was 
 expressly written for the royal wedding, the name chosen for the lover in the 
 play should have been that of the Habsburg Archduke whom the Palsgrave was 
 before long to eject from the Bohemian throne. (M. Koch, I may add, conjectures 
 the original of the noble-minded Prospero to have been the alchemist Emperor 
 Rudolf II, at whose court several Englishmen sojourned before, like Prospero, 
 he was overthrown by the machinations of his brother.) 
 
 2 Life of William Shakespeare (ed. 1915), p. 433, note. 
 
 3 King James I's Counterblast, as Mr. Alexander Brown particularly reminds 
 us, was dated 1604, and could therefore not have been directed against Viryinian 
 tobacco. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 15 
 
 speare's death ; but we can hardly speak of the political principles at 
 work in the English colonisation of America in his later years, without 
 carrying our very imperfect references to early Virginian history 
 a little further. Although, in 1613, Gondomar still indulged the 
 hope that Virginia would be abandoned by the English, who in this 
 and the following year had much jealousy to confront on the part of 
 France as well as of Spain, the colony maintained its existence suc- 
 cessfully against foreign pretensions and protests. Meanwhile, the 
 Company would have been willing to see a closer union between its 
 interests and those of the State, and in May 1614 petitioned the 
 House of Commons in this sense. But, though an extremely lively 
 debate ensued, the Parliament it was the Addled Parliament, which, 
 as is known, in spite of the efforts of Sandys and the Opposition, did 
 not succeed in passing a single measure had to let the matter drop. 
 In 1616, as already noted, the cultivation of tobacco was introduced, 
 and a ' mania ' on this head ensued, which had disastrous results. 
 But at the root of the retardation of enduring commercial prosperity 
 lay Government corruption, carried to a shameless extent by Samuel 
 Argall, who was Governor from 1617 to 1619. This unscrupulous 
 profiteer carried out Bacon's advice as to 'one-man government' after 
 so thorough a fashion that he had in the end to escape to England in 
 a vessel of his patron Sir Robert Rich (afterwards Earl of Warwick), 
 of whom more anon ; and in July of the same year, 1619, as already 
 stated, the first Virginian Legislative Assembly the first Colonial 
 Parliament was summoned by his successor. 
 
 Closely connected with these transactions was the critical conflict 
 in the Company at home between the party of Sir Thomas Smith, 
 treasurer of the Company from 1609 to 1619, the representative of 
 the City interest and on good terms with the Court, and Sir Edwin 
 Sandys, who had led the Parliamentary Opposition to it almost from 
 the beginning of James I's reign, with Warwick's clique intervening, 
 but in the end returning into the conservative bosom. Sandys's 
 election in 1619 to the contested office of Treasurer marked the 
 progress of the policy of Resistance in this sphere, also, of public 
 life in 1620, when his name was up for re-election, King James had 
 advised a deputation, ' choose the Devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin 
 Sandys', and he had deemed it politic to allow the name of Southampton 
 to be substituted for his own. But the conflict between the Virginia 
 Company and the claims of the Crown continued, till in 1624 the 
 struggle, both within the Company and without, came to an end 
 with the dissolution of that body by royal Jiat. But the constitutional 
 liberties of the Colony, with their latest development into parlia- 
 
16 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 mentary institutions, could not be taken away ; and proved, as the 
 history of North America shows, a KrfjfjLa e? act. 
 
 It is high time for us to pass on to say something of the personal 
 claims to commemoration, as champions of the principles in question 
 in their application to Virginia, of those individual Englishmen of note 
 whose influence on Shakespeare's political thought exercised directly 
 by them or through the great teacher of the foremost among them 
 Professor Gay ley's book is more especially designed to demonstrate. 
 In speaking of this memorable group, I feel bound to premise that, 
 notwithstanding his close personal as well as public connexion with 
 at least one of its earlier leaders, Essex cannot in any true sense 
 be regarded as a member of it. Apart from his hatred of the ascen- 
 dancy of Spain, and certain ideas of foreign policy which he may have 
 derived from Anthony Bacon or from his great brother, he showed 
 himself in no way a harbourer of political designs, or still less, 
 a master of political thought. I may therefore relegate to a note 
 some remarks on his relations to the Puritans, and as to the use 
 made, on the occasion of his brief and ill-starred 'rebellion', of 
 Shakespeare's Richard II. 1 As for the political opinions expressed, 
 
 1 If the Puritans at one stage of Essex's career cherished hopes of him (as 
 they had of his step-father Leicester) and if, at another, these hopes were 
 heightened by the report that he was 'hearing sermons', it must he remem- 
 bered that, though on the scaffold he declared himself a Protestant, and though 
 at his trial the charge of his having worked for the restoration of Romanism 
 in Ireland was, virtually, passed by, he was certainly shown to have intended, 
 had he achieved success, to improve the treatment of Roman Catholics in that 
 kingdom. In any case, in spite of certain assurances of support from Puritan 
 ministers, his rising left the citizens of London cold. Equally ineffective had 
 been the curious appeal set on foot by himself and his immediate followers 
 to the ' constitutional ' or anti-despotic sentiments of his expected adherents, 
 whom we may conclude to have been, in the first instance, persons of his own 
 rank or condition of life the natural patrons of the players. 
 
 The fact is, of course, well authenticated that, two days before the outbreak 
 of Essex's rebellion, his supporters attended at the Globe Theatre a performance 
 of Shakespeare's Richard II specially bespoken by them. The historical parallel 
 between the unfortunate King and Queen Elizabeth was hardly striking enough 
 to suggest of itself the inference that she ought to be deposed like him. The 
 notion was no doubt originally due to the publication, in 1599, of Sir John 
 Hayward's narrative of the first year of the reign of Henry IV, which included 
 an account of the deposition of Richard II, and was dedicated to Essex. The 
 episode is said to have exercised a peculiar fascination upon him ; and it was 
 no doubt thus, and not only because of the sensitiveness which (as Professor 
 Firth recently showed you) she shared with other sovereigns of her age towards 
 attacks of the sort on the throne, that her suspicions were excited, and that she was 
 led to observe : ' Know ye not ? I am Richard II.' The book caused much talk, 
 and, though Essex wished it to be called in, the author was called before the Star 
 Chamber and imprisoned. (Hayward, as Sir Sidney Lee notes in his interesting 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 17 
 
 or thought to be expressed, in Shakespeare's tragedy, which is said to 
 have at this time gone through forty performances ' in open streets 
 and houses ', I will sav a word below. 1 
 
 But the name of Essex's paladin-in-chief, Southampton, as it were, 
 takes us at once into the heart of the argument, and bids us consider 
 both the association between the parliamentary and the colonial 
 Liberalism of the period comprising Shakespeare's later years, and 
 the inspiration drawn by this political group or school from a source 
 to which Shakespeare, too, is held to have resorted. On both heads 
 some note will have to be taken of what there is of external, and 
 what of internal, evidence. 
 
 In the case of Southampton, of whose intimate relations with 
 Shakespeare at one time of their lives no doubt can exist, we are 
 unfortunately without any proof of intellectual intercourse between 
 them in the later period with which we are here more especially 
 concerned. In Elizabeth's reign Southampton had been a prominent 
 figure at Court, and smiled upon by the Queen, the foremost favourite 
 of whose later years had, in his turn, consistently shown good-will to 
 the younger man. Southampton accompanied Essex on his expeditions 
 to Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), and sought, though in vain, 
 to be allowed to serve as general of the horse under him in Ireland. 
 He then took part in the conspiracy which brought his friend to the 
 scaffold and consigned himself to prison. Before this, Southampton's 
 patronage of letters and of the stage had been among the most 
 brilliant attributes of this Jios iwuentntis of the Elizabethan age, 
 when at the height of its splendour. His relations with Shakespeare 
 are familiar to all students of our literature, and I am not afraid to 
 set it down as an accepted conclusion that, whatever interpretation 
 may be put upon these relations, they inspired the majority of the 
 Sonnets. The remark of Mrs. Stopes, 2 that, after the commence- 
 
 article on him in the Dictionary of X. B., afterwards defended both the succes- 
 sion and the political principles of James I, and was a distinguished pleader 
 as well as historiographer at Chelsea College.) 
 
 1 With regard to Shakespeare's relations to Essex, it is more to the purpose, 
 though it cannot, intrinsically, he held of much significance, that, in 1599, the 
 dramatist had in his Henry V (Chorus of Act V), touched on the enthusiastic 
 welcome which London was prepared to accord to Essex on his victorious return 
 from Ireland. Still less weight need be attached to the probability that the popular 
 sensation caused by the arrest and execution, in 1594, of the Jewish physician 
 Roderigo Lopez, charged with having been concerned in a plot to poison Queen 
 Elizabeth and Essex's Spanish protege, Antonio Perez, suggested to Shakespeare 
 the character of Shylock, and even the Christian name of the Jew's intended 
 victim. 
 
 2 Shakespeare's Environment (1914), p. 158. We are looking forward to a full 
 Life of Southampton from the same distinguished writer. 
 
 IX F 5 
 
18 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 ment, in 1595, of Southampton's absorbing passion for Elizabeth 
 Vernon (whom he married three years later) ' the Sonnets gradually 
 ceased. . . . None seem to suggest his voyages, knighthood, marriage 
 and subsequent imprisonment 1 must surely, notwithstanding her 
 caveat, be modified on the last head, since Sonnet CVII can hardly 
 be dissociated from Southampton's release. But, though we have no 
 reason for assuming a break in Shakespeare's attachment to the only 
 patron to whom he dedicated any of his productions or who, in his 
 turn, is known to have extended to the poet any notable munificence, 
 we are ignorant as to the. relations between them in the days of 
 Southampton's maturity. 
 
 After his release from confinement on the accession of King James 
 in 1603, Southampton's wayward temper (he was under arrest in the 
 Tower for a few days in the same year for breaking 4 the peace of 
 the palace') seemed to show that maturity not to have yet quite set 
 in. But soon, under the continued sunshine of the royal favour, he 
 gave proof of his interest in public affairs, and showed a special 
 interest in the colonial schemes which formed the earliest, or 
 preliminary, stage in the making of the British Empire. 1 As a 
 matter- of course he was, from first to last, the staunch advocate of 
 a resolute anti-Spanish policy ; and in 1605, the year after that in 
 which peace had been signed with Spain, helped to fit out the early 
 expedition, already noted, of Captain Weymouth to Virginia, almost 
 the first sign of a systematic endeavour to supplant the Spanish 
 dominion in North America. 2 Southampton who, with at least 
 virtual consistency, 3 treated opposition to Spain as a vital element 
 
 1 It is about this date that one of the most attractive among the numerous 
 extant portraits of Southampton, that in St. John's College, Cambridge, seems 
 to belong, which shows him encased in armour, blue-eyed, and fair-haired, 
 in the commanding grace of early manhood. 
 
 2 For a long time, Spain could make a strong point of the fact (which Goudomar 
 did not fail to urge) that her territory was being invaded by English adventurers 
 without any warrant from their own Government. Not until the Virginian 
 Charter was annulled and the colony taken under the direct protection of the 
 Crown, was this argument unavoidably abandoned. But by this time (1624) 
 England was again at war with Spain. As Mr. Brown points out, every member 
 of the Council of War (in April 1624) was personally interested in the colony 
 of Virginia. 
 
 3 Southampton's scheme of a naval expedition against the Barbary pirates, 
 which for its success would have needed the collaboration of England and Spain 
 was, in Gondomar's opinion, really meant to bring about a reopening of 
 hostilities between them, together with the appointment of Southampton himself 
 as Lord High Admiral in place of Nottingham. (Cf. Gardiner, History of England, 
 &c., ed. 1883, Vol. Ill, p. 70.) Gondomar, it may be incidentally noted, who 
 for diplomatic or other reasons, observed a very gallaut bearing to the ladies 
 
O* THU 
 
 UNIVERSITY/? 
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 19 
 
 in the national policy, likewise shared in the detestation of Rome* 
 which, in the popular mind, was inseparable from hatred of Spain. 
 We have it on the authority of Peckard, in his Memoir of Nicholas 
 Ferrar (of whose connexion with the Virginia Company, immediately) 
 that 'the Earl of Southampton had been converted from popery by 
 Sir Edwin Sandys \ The advancement of the Protestant faith was 
 constantly present to the Virginian adventurers, and so early as 1617 
 Sandys himself was in at least indirect communication with the 
 Leyden separatists, 1 as a result of whose settlement New England 
 was in the end to set up an ecclesiastical system of its own. But 
 this is a side of colonial history which I must abstain from pursuing. 
 As for Southampton, we shall probably be right in attributing a 
 mainly political motive to his colonizing activity, although the 
 promptings of religious opinion may have cooperated. 2 
 
 With his later political career we have here no concern, except 
 in so far as it was associated with the colonial enterprise in which 
 he took a leading part. (His name was given to Southampton 
 Hundred, Hampton River, and Hampton Roads in Virginia. 3 ) In 
 1612, when he came up to town with the intention of furthering 
 Sir Henry Neville's chances of the Secretaryship, he and his friends 
 were disappointed in their hopes, and had to remain members of 
 what may be loosely called the Opposition. At all events, although 
 Southampton received divers honours and offices from the Crown, he 
 preserved considerable freedom in the way of giving vent to his 
 personal views. While, in Bacon's case, he showed himself stern 
 against maculate merit, he refused to bow his head to the ascendancy 
 of Buckingham. He braved the King's displeasure by his open 
 defiance of the favourite, and by his independent action in the 
 affairs of the Elector Palatine Frederick, and \vas once more com- 
 mitted to prison. Three years later (1624?), he died from malaria in 
 the Low Countries, soon after his eldest son, when in joint command 
 with him of a troop of English volunteers in aid of the Elector. 
 
 of the English Court, and (as I think I have read) professed a liking for the 
 wines prepared in this country, is also said to have been a reader of Shakespeare, 
 or at least to have possessed a copy of the First Folio, which he carried away 
 with him into Spain. 
 
 1 See Osgood, The American Colonies, &c., Vol. I, p. 105. 
 
 2 So late as 1623 he absented himself from a meeting of the Privy Council, 
 held for the purpose of exacting an oath against penalizing Catholics according 
 to law ; but he seems in the end to have agreed to take it. (Cf. Gardiner, 
 Vol. V, p. 69, and note.) 
 
 3 See ' The Youthful Career of Southampton ' in Sir S. Lee's Life of Shake- 
 spenre, p. GO'S. 
 
 IX F 6 
 
20 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 Southampton, after becoming a member of the London Virginia 
 Council in 1609, had, by the end of ten years, come to share with 
 his friend Sandys the full control of it. In 1620 he was chosen 
 Treasurer of the .Company without opposition, when it may still 
 have been hoped that he would be of great assistance in inducing 
 the King to lend ear to the desires or complaints of the Council. 
 But at that time the conflicts between the King and the political 
 party to which Southampton and his friends belonged were growing 
 more and more bitter, and it was against the royal wish that he was 
 re-elected Treasurer in 1624, the year of his death and that of the 
 annulment of the Virginian Charter. 
 
 With Southampton there cooperated in the Council of the 
 Company two other noblemen whose names have an indelible con- 
 nexion with that of Shakespeare. Of the brothers William and 
 Philip Herbert, successively Earls of Pembroke, the former had 
 served under Essex at Cadiz, but, unlike Southampton, took no part 
 in the rising of 1601. He was much interested in Virginian affairs, 
 and in 1620 (when both the brothers also joined the New England 
 Company) patented not less than 30,000 acres in Virginia, which the 
 elder undertook to fill with emigrants and cattle. The younger, 
 known before his brother's death as Earl of Montgomery, whose 
 course of action, whether it be called politic or selfish, in the Civil 
 War times drew down upon him the furious hatred of the Cavaliers, 1 
 was likewise a member of the Virginian Council, and, so late as 1643, 
 when he had definitively thrown in his lot with the adversaries of the 
 Crown, was one of the Commissioners appointed for the government 
 of the Plantation. The brothers' patronage of Shakespeare and of 
 his friends and colleagues, as evinced by the dedication to them of 
 the First Folio, and by the reference in that Dedication, to the 
 'likings' they had expressed for the 'severall parts when they were 
 acted ', and to the ' indulgence ' they had shown to their author, of 
 course invest their names with high literary interest. At the same 
 time, the theory that William Herbert was the 'begetter' of the 
 Sonnets may be regarded as extinct, and it should be noted that his 
 official relations with Shakespeare did not begin till 1615, when he 
 was appointed Lord Chamberlain ; so that the patronage of the 
 brothers was, almost certainly, of an essentially private nature. We 
 know that, at the turn of the century, Pembroke resided in a 
 mansion near to Blackfriars, and that he was the patron of other 
 
 1 Cf. the grossly satirical Last Will and Testament of the Earl of Pembroke, 
 printed in the posthumous works of Mr. Samuel Butler, Vol. II, London, 1715, 
 but, so far as 1 am aware, of doubtful authorship. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 21 
 
 poets besides Shakespeare of Jonson and Chapman, and among 
 non-dramatic poets, of the noble trtfolium of Donne, Herbert, and 
 Vaughan. 
 
 Southampton's imprisonment in the Tower for his participation in 
 Essex's rising was shared by Sir Henry Neville, already mentioned, 
 who, from 1607 to 1615, was a member of the Virginia Council. 
 Other political allies of Southampton, for the most part his juniors in 
 date of birth, and all of them interested in the Virginia Company, 
 were Sir Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, the patron of Jonson and 
 Drayton, in the works of both of whom references to Virginia are to 
 be found ; J Lord Delaware, whose services to the colony at the most 
 critical moment of its earlier history have been already noticed, and, 
 among counsel learned in the law, Christopher Brooke of Lincoln's 
 Inn and John Selden, who together drafted several of the later codes 
 of law and government adopted by the colony. Christopher Brooke's 
 figure is a prominent one in the fields, then still most intimately 
 connected, of law and literature, and his Ghost of Richard III offers 
 one of the most whole-hearted contemporary tributes offered to the 
 genius of Shakespeare from outside his own profession. As for Selden, 
 who was not less actively interested in politics, ecclesiastical and 
 general, than he was in legal science, his Liberalism was of all time, 
 and the play of mind distinctive of him could not have omitted the 
 future of England's colonial empire from his speculations. 
 
 Another legal and literary notable in the Company was Sir Dudley 
 Digges, who gave his services to the Company during the greater 
 part of the second and third decades of the century, and between 
 whom and Shakespeare at least an indirect connexion is suggested by 
 
 1 Jonson was joint author of the unlucky Eastward Hoe, played before King 
 James in 1604, in which figures Sir Petronell Flash, ' the first of a long and 
 illustrious line of Virginian colonels', whom Mr. Brown (I do not know on 
 what evidence) conjectures to have been impersonated by Shakespeare. In his 
 Staple of News (1625) there is a joke about Pokahontas (Act II, sc. i). Drayton 
 was Shakespeare's countryman by birth, and according to tradition was, like 
 Jonson, his boon companion to the last. By means of his Ode to the Virginian 
 Voyage, he, in Mr. Gayley's phrase, ' crowned himself laureate of the new English 
 world '. Mr. Gayley has an interesting passage on the allusions in our poetic 
 literature to Virginia and early American colonization, of which the most 
 striking is the quasi-prophetic eulogy of James I in the last scene of Henry VIII 
 (acted at the Globe in 1613, and acted once too often), which passage, however, 
 he, no doubt rightly, assigns to Fletcher. He adds that the figure of tree and 
 shade, of course biblical in its origin, also occurs in the Virginian Council's 
 True and Sincere Declaration of December 1609, as to which see ante. It is not 
 found in Strachey's long descriptive letter printed in 1625, and reprinted in 
 Hakluytus Posthitmus, or Purchase his Pilgrimes (Glasgow, 1906), Vol. XIX. 
 
22 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 the tributes by Sir Dudley's brother Leonard, the poet and Spanish 
 scholar, inserted in the 1623 Folio, and in the 1640 edition of 
 Shakespeare's Poems. On the interest taken in Virginia by Bacon 
 I have already touched, without drawing any Shakespearean infer- 
 ences from the fact ; nor can I connect Shakespeare's name with that 
 of a very different figure in the history of the age, very intimately 
 associated with the fortunes of the Virginia Company Nicholas 
 Ferrar. What stranger combination could suggest itself in the 
 records of mental effort than Change Alley and Little Gidding 
 and yet I think that Shakespeare himself might have supplied us 
 with the key to the character of an excellent man of business, with 
 a soul above earthly things. Nicholas Ferrar, whose father and 
 brother had long been closely connected with the business of the 
 Company, and whose family house had, so to speak, become the 
 head-quarters of the progressive party in the Council, after a long 
 spell of travel abroad, at first in the suite of the young Electress 
 Palatine on her way out to her new home, had placed his extra- 
 ordinary powers of observation and his singular quickness of resolve 
 at the service of the Company, and as its Deputy-Treasurer was the 
 chief and most trusted adviser of Southampton and Sandys, with 
 whom he also acted in Parliament. He saved the Company's records, 
 and had very nearly saved its Charter ; and might, had he chosen, 
 have played a considerable part in public life. But this prospect, 
 together with the (shall I say) lesser temptations of a rich marriage 
 and a mathematical professorship, he, as you know, sacrificed as 
 readily as he had taken the responsibilities of his earlier career upon 
 him, and, in the words of one of his biographers, gave ' a long fare- 
 well to the great and busy world V The life contemplative, which 
 in its turn is not necessarily an idle life, and which so many greater 
 and so many lesser men have desired, he achieved. 
 
 The above must, with a single exception which I feel sure you 
 have already anticipated, suffice as to the personal relations actual 
 or possible between the Virginia Company and the contemporary 
 world of letters more especially that part of it with which Shake- 
 speare was in touch. For I have no wish to follow Professor Gayley 
 or Mr. Alexander Brown into further conclusions or guesses of 
 a personal kind in connexion with the subject, 2 based on researches 
 
 1 Life ofN. Ferrar by Doctor Jebb (Mayor's Two Lives, &c., 1855), p. 221. 
 
 2 Mr. Gayley has something to say of the Convimum Philosophicum apostro- 
 phized (between 1608 and 1611) in amusing verse by Serjeant John Hoskins,, 
 which met at the Mitre Tavern, immediately in the rear of the house not long 
 before inhabited by Hooker. This club included, among many legal wits of the 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 23 
 
 either in Fleet Street or in Warwickshire, where it is certainly 
 attractive to find, in the near neighbourhood of Stratford, probable 
 or possible acquaintances of Shakespeare, who were also leading 
 adventurers in the Virginian enterprise. 1 The chief Warwickshire as 
 
 period, four who were members of the Virginian Council among them the 
 irrepressible Richard Martin. Another of its members was Hugh Holland, 
 a travelled fellow of Trinity and convert to Rome, who was also a member of 
 the Mermaid Club, and who prefixed a Sonnet to the First Shakespearean Folio. 
 Though the Mitre is more easily reached from the Inner Temple, I am bound 
 to add that the sister Society's historical connexion with the { Founders of Liberty 
 in America ' was, on the whole, more intimate. Apart from Drake, who seems 
 to have been connected with both Inns, the Middle Temple, besides including 
 in its list of members other names well known in early colonial history, can 
 also appeal to the tradition that Hakluyt first acquired his taste for geography 
 and travel by a visit to the chambers there of his kinsman Sir John Popham, 
 afterwards Chief Justice, and a Bencher and Treasurer of the Inn the relations 
 of the latter to the Company were long and close, though not altogether to 
 the credit of that legal luminary. Another Treasurer of the Middle Temple in- 
 terested in the affairs of the Company was Miles (afterwards Sir Miles) Sandys, 
 the younger brother of the Archbishop, and the uncle of Sir Edwin, who in 
 1589 joined the same Inn. Thomas Collett, a nephew of Nicholas Ferrar, too, 
 was of the Middle Temple. Finally, the pamphlet Virginia impartially examined 
 was composed in the interests of the Company by a barrister of that Inn, and 
 is preserved in its Library. (See an interesting article in The Times, January 30, 
 1919, f The Middle Temple and America', printed on the acceptance of 
 the present U. S. Ambassador as a Bencher of the Inn ; and cf., for additional 
 data, The Middle Temple and Sir Walter Raleigh, speech by the Master of the 
 Temple in the M. T. Hall on October 20, 1918.) 
 
 1 Among these names there is one which must not be left unmentioned, at 
 least in a note. Sir Fulke Greville (afterwards Lord Brooke, sat in Parliament 
 as Knight of the shire for Warwickshire, together with Sir Thomas Lucy, and 
 like him in the Protestant interest, and was a member of the Virginian Council 
 from 1607. He had, in his earlier days, been the friend of Spenser and the 
 comrade of Sidney. Though he was a politician who thought for himself, he 
 held office both under Elizabeth and under her successor, and was in 1614 
 appointed to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer which he held till 1621. If 
 he was a Liberal, his Liberalism was of no very advanced kind. His two 
 tragedies, of which Mustapha is the better known, are described by Charles Lamb 
 as ' political treatises rather than plays' ; aad his style is ' frozen with intellect', 
 like the literary drama of most ages. As for Robert Rich the youuger, his 
 biography, admirably summarized by Professor Firth, covers a long and 
 momentous period of both home and colonial history. The family feud 
 originating, there can be no doubt, in the adulteries of his beautiful mother, 
 Essex's sister Penelope, of whom reminiscences have, I conceive without good 
 evidence, been sought in more than one production of Shakespeare's, broke out 
 in a quarrel between Warwick and Lord Cavendish (afterwards Earl of Devon- 
 shire) supported by his friend and leader Sir Edwin Sandys, and must have 
 contributed to bring about the appointment of the Commission on whose report 
 the Virginia Company's Charter was annulled. Warwick was a member of the 
 new (royal) Council for the Government of the Colony, in whose affairs and 
 
24 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 well as Essex magnate of that day, Robert Rich, the second Earl of 
 Warwick, was one of the most conspicuous figures in the history 
 of the Company. 
 
 The real leader of the party in the Company to which, except on 
 occasion, Warwick was adverse, and the foremost representative of its 
 interests in the House of Commons where, for many years he held 
 a leading position as the determined foe of arbitrary government, was 
 Sir Edwin Sandys. His eminent name has inevitably been more than 
 once mentioned by me already, while I have necessarily (to use a word 
 much affected by his tutor Hooker) ' pre-supposed ' a familiarity with 
 the general character of his public career. The pedigree of his family 
 is curiously complicated, but we need only note here that he was the 
 second son and namesake of an Archbishop of York, who, in the 
 troubled earlier half of Queen Elizabeth's reign managed, on the whole 
 successfully, to combine strong Protestant sympathies with admini- 
 strative vigour ; the younger brother of Sir Samuel Sandys, ancestor 
 of the Lords Sandys of Ombersley, a staunch friend of religious 
 toleration ; and the elder of George, the translator of Ovid's Meta- 
 morphoses, whose career, especially if viewed in connexion with that of 
 his more famous brother, is one of varied distinction , 1 
 
 those of the Somers Islands and other colonial companies he had taken a most 
 active interest since he had succeeded to his father's dishonoured earldom, 
 three years after the death of Shakespeare. (See as to his earlier activities 
 A. P. Newton, The Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans (1914), pp. 34 ff.) 
 Puritan in his leanings, he was out of sympathy with the Court, though he insti- 
 gated its action against Sandys ; and he leaves on us the general impression of 
 one of those great personages in the world of commerce and nuance who, aware 
 of the claims of their epoch, in the main play for their own hand. 
 
 1 He was long interested in the affairs of the Virginian Company, hut finally 
 (on being refused the post of Secretary to it) severed the connexion. In the 
 colony itself, where he seems to have acquired a plantation, he appears to have 
 made more enemies than friends ; at home, the work by which he is chiefly 
 remembered, is his Translation, which he in part completed ' amongst the 
 roaring of the seas ' and which can hardly have commended itself to the sym- 
 pathies of the Puritan element in the popular party. He became a devoted 
 adherent of King Charles I ; but when, so late as 1638, he accepted the office 
 of London agent of the Virginian Legislative Assembly, and sought to bring 
 about a revival of the old self-governing Virginian Company in London, he was 
 disavowed both by the Assembly and by the King (1642). George Sandys, who 
 in his day was equally celebrated as a scholar and as a traveller, appears to 
 have possessed something of the indefatigable energy, without the concentrated 
 force, of his more famous brother. A singularly interesting feature in his 
 biography is his intimacy with Falkland, the most attractive to many moderns, 
 as he was to Clarendon, of the chief personalities of the Civil War (see J. A. R. 
 Marriott's Life and Times of Falkland, second edition, 1908, pp. 84 if.). For 
 a pedigree of the whole Sandys family see Sir B. Burke's Dictionary of the 
 Landed Gentry (1858), pp. 1060-1. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 25 
 
 Sir Edwin Sandys, the central figure of a most memorable chapter 
 of British constitutional history, is compendiously described by our 
 standard authority on that period 1 as having ' without any pretensions 
 to Bacon's genius, possessed a large fund of common-sense.' He 
 likewise possessed, what in a politician is of at least equal value, 
 very genuine moral courage ; so that his political career as a whole 
 did lasting honour both to his reputation and that of the party 
 which acted with him, and to the teaching which was, beyond doubt, 
 the chief formative force in at least his earlier intellectual and moral 
 growth the teaching of Richard Hooker. The principle of that 
 teaching was formulated by Edward Burke in the words : ' The 
 distinguishing part of our constitution is its liberty. . . . But the 
 only liberty I mean is a liberty connected with order : that not only 
 exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all 
 without them ', 2 a definition which, most assuredly, would not have 
 been spurned by Shakespeare. As is well known, the relations between 
 Edwin Sandys and his friend George Cranmer (the son of a more 
 celebrated but less fortunate Archbishop, who himself, after a short 
 official career prematurely lost his life in Ireland) and their tutor 
 at Corpus, Oxford, were of the closest intimacy, and have indissolubly 
 linked their names with his. George Cranmer's literary association 
 with Hooker's great work, and the relations between their ecclesiasti- 
 cal opinions, lie beyond our present scope. As for Sandys, whether 
 or not he was, through his father, instrumental in obtaining for 
 Hooker the Mastership of the Temple, his own public life began 
 with his entry into Parliament in the year (1586) following on that 
 of his tutor's appointment, and also marked by the commencement 
 of the Ecclesiastical Polity. Sandys, it may be well to point out, 
 in view of his later public action, was no Puritan ; as is clear from 
 the book which he completed in 1599, after a three years' continental 
 journey with his friend Cranmer, and which he originally dedicated 
 to Whitgift. This work, which was originally called A Relation of 
 the State of Religion, and was afterwards reprinted under the more 
 taking title of Europae Speculum, though strongly anti-Papalist 
 (it was subsequently translated by no less a controversialist than 
 Sarpi, who had doubtless been no stranger to its composition), is not 
 incorrectly described by Professor A. F. Pollard 3 as written in a tone 
 remarkably tolerant for the time. What most interests us at the 
 
 1 Gardiner, Vol. I, p. 185. 
 
 2 Speech at his arrival at Bristol (1774), Works, 1852, Vol. Ill, p. 230. 
 
 ' In his excellent article on Sandys in the Dictionary of National Biography, 
 Vol. I. 
 
26 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 present day in Sandys's essay (though it possesses, also, general 
 historic value) are the references in it to what, then as now, seemed 
 hardly more than a speculative issue the Reunion of 'at least the 
 Reformed Churches \ The tolerance of Sandys's earlier religious views 
 is not out of keeping with his later (1621) exposition, in the House 
 of Commons, of the dangers with which the Protestant faith was 
 threatened by the course of events on the continent, or even with 
 his rather earlier support of the efforts of the British separatists 
 (Brownists) at Leyden. These efforts, which Warwick also favoured, 
 ended in the event which next year will be commemorated on both 
 sides of the sea the sailing of the Mayflower in September 1620, 
 with a royal promise of freedom of religious worship to the intending 
 settlers J , the principle represented by whose advent was, after a long 
 historical evolution, at last established in New England. 
 
 In the sixteenth and seventeenth, more perhaps than in any other 
 century of our history, the motive of religious and of political history 
 cannot be distinguished without difficulty. But with Sandys, as with 
 the popular party headed by him during nearly the whole of the 
 reign of James I, it may be said to have been political principle 
 proper in which they found the directive force of their action. The 
 object they had in view and at heart was constitutional government 
 in other words a system of political life based upon the consent 
 of the governed. The data put together by Professor Gay ley would, 
 I think, suffice to prove this proposition, and to justify his further 
 inquiry as to the measure in which this political conception was 
 derived from, or at least in full consonance with, the teaching of 
 Hooker. These data might, moreover, without difficulty be sup- 
 plemented ; and perhaps the most striking of them are crowded 
 together in the brief notes of the debate on Inquisitions, held on 
 May 21, 1614 (the arguments are not added) cited by Gardiner: 2 
 
 'No successive King [i.e. no King by mere right of succession], 
 but first elected. Election double, of person, and care ; but both 
 come in by consent of people, and with reciprocal conditions 
 between King and people. That a King by conquest [i.e. who 
 founds his title on such a claim as conquest, instead of on that 
 of reciprocal agreement, actual or understood] may also (when 
 power [i.e. when feasible]) be expelled.' 
 
 Ten years before this (in 1604), Sandys had drawn up the Report 
 
 1 See Gardiner's stirring chapter, f The Voyage of the Mayflower ' in his fourth 
 volume. It was largely owing to Sandys that a patent from the Virginia 
 Company had been granted to the exiles. 
 
 2 Vol. II, p. 240. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 27 
 
 of the House of Commons Committee for the abolition of the King's 
 feudal tenures; and, in 1610, he was member of a Committee for 
 considering the 'Great Contract', whereby these rights were to be 
 commuted for an annual grant to the Crown. An attempt to bring 
 him over to the Court party having failed, he, as already noted, 
 reached the height of his parliamentary position in the days of the 
 Addled Parliament (1614), and after being at the dissolution of that 
 Assembly summoned before the Council, and bound over to remain 
 in London, he gave himself up, during the seven years in which 
 Parliament remained unconvoked, to colonial affairs, and to those 
 of Virginia in particular. He had, as we saw, taken a leading part 
 in promoting the Company's Charters of 1609 and 1612, he had 
 favoured the adoption, in 1616, of the system of land-tenure by 
 which Dale had begun to base public prosperity upon private 
 interest ; and, after, in 1617, he had been appointed Assistant- 
 Treasurer of the Company he was, in the following year, by a politic 
 combination of parties, elected to the Treasurer-ship. A thorough 
 reform of the colonial administration followed. Though when in 
 1620, he was again proposed for the Treasurership, he, as we have 
 seen, thought it more prudent to secure the election of his alter ego, 
 Southampton, in his place, and though both of them, with their 
 chief adherents, had to undergo some petty persecutions so late 
 as 1621, their principles had prevailed in Virginia itself, and a great 
 era of colonial history had thus set in. Sandys, whom we must leave 
 at the height of his career, was not only a clear and free political , 
 thinker, but a practical administrator of great ability and vigour, 
 intent upon keeping away from the colony the undesirable element 
 of population which has so often been an ignominious drawback 
 to the beginnings of colonial undertakings, and upon multiplying 
 the industries on which the growth of its prosperity was largely 
 to depend. But it is as a convinced constitutionalist that he has 
 to be more especially remembered. Together with those who 
 followed in his footsteps, he proved Gondomar to have shown some 
 insight when warning King James that the Virginian Court in London . 
 would, in the end, be found a seminary for a ' seditious ' parliament. 
 In 1623, the new split in the Company already noted led to Sandys 
 being once more placed under arrest (in his own house), and to the 
 annulment of the Charter in the following year. But the colony 
 retained the representative institutions which the action of Sandys 
 now near the close of his labours had secured for it, and what 
 was to prove the greatest part of his life's work was never undone. 
 That the political principles which he conspicuously applied to the 
 
28 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 reorganization of the political life of Virginia were, in his case, to 
 
 a notable extent directly derived from the teaching of Hooker, must, 
 
 in view of the intimacy of the two men, and personal piety of the 
 
 pupil towards the teacher, be a priori regarded as highly probable. 
 
 Professor Gayley has, however, further undertaken to show, that the 
 
 i internal evidence as to the influence of Hooker's writings upon 
 
 Sandys as a politician helps to establish the same conclusion ; and 
 
 ) I have no hesitation in expressing my opinion that, in this part 
 
 of his argument, he has been indisputably successful. 
 
 The work on which Hooker's fame enduringly rests, the great 
 treatise on The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, was begun at the 
 Temple, where, as already noted, he had, in 1585, been appointed 
 to the Mastership. Most of the Benchers had desired to see the 
 Reader, Walter Travers, chosen in his stead; and, in accordance 
 with the spirit one might almost say with the demands of their age, 
 a lively controversy ensued between them. 1 
 
 But though, in this contest, Travers, like Hooker himself, had shown 
 no personal rancour, the atmosphere of the Temple was for its Master 
 inevitably one of continuous controversy, and, as it ha,s been well put 
 by Bishop Paget 2 , it was this experience which led Hooker to write 
 his famous treatise. In preparing it he was desirous of finding out 
 why his opponents including a single-minded divine such as Travers 
 'judged what he himself believed, revered and loved, to be corrupt 
 and wrong.' The earliest books of the Polity were probably written 
 at the Temple, before, in consequence of his wish for removal from 
 this area of combat, he was presented by Archbishop Whitgift to the 
 rectory of Boscombe near Salisbury, where he finished the first four 
 Books, published in 1594. It is with the First Book, together 
 with a few sections of the Second, that we are here principally 
 concerned. 3 
 
 1 Travers had been commended by the late Master, ' Father Alvy ', on his 
 deathbed, and had been favoured by Burghley ; while Whitgift, who would not 
 hear of Travers and afterwards inhibited him, had at first suggested one of the 
 Queen's Chaplains, Nicholas Bond (subsequently the subject of much abuse by 
 Martin Marprelate) for the vacancy. The inhibition of Travers led to the proffer 
 by him of a long Supplication, which it seemed incumbent on the new Master 
 to answer ; and Travers remained in the background till, in 1594, he became, for 
 a short time, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 
 2 In his Introduction to the Fifth Book of the Ecclesiastical Polity (second edition, 
 Oxford, 1907), pp. 36 if. 
 
 3 We have no present occasion for discussing the Preface to the work, prefixed 
 to the first five Books when posthumously published in 1604, or the standpoint 
 
 ; that of resistance to the changes demanded by the Puritan Book of Discipline 
 which Hooker there assumes and elaborately defends, undertaking in reply to show 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 29 
 
 The First Book, then, addresses itself straightway to the great 
 theme of Hooker's literary labours, towards which everything written 
 by him, either within or outside the framework of his Ecclesiastical 
 Polity converges the fundamental idea of Law, with the consequences 
 springing from this idea, and the argument that Law does not 
 consist of the prescripts of arbitrary will, but is either identical with 
 reason or a result of the application of it. 1 
 
 The particular application of these conclusions, which came home 
 directly to men engaged in political life at home or in laying its 
 foundations in other lands than that of which they were natives, 
 are expressed, with perfect clearness, in a section of the First Book 2 
 which explains 
 
 ' how reason doth lead men unto the making of human laws 
 whereby politic societies are governed, and to agreement about 
 laws whereby the fellowship or communion of independent societies 
 standeth. . . . Two foundations, we read, there are which bear up 
 public societies ; the one, a natural inclination, whereby all men 
 desire sociable life and fellowship; the other, an order expressly 
 or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their union in 
 living together. The latter is that which we call the law of a 
 commonweal, the very soul of a politic body, the parts whereof are 
 by law held together, and set on work in such actions as the public 
 good requireth.' 
 
 What have we here, in germ, but the idea of the Social Compact, 
 the very foundation of the political philosophy of which Sandys and 
 his party were the first parliamentary exponents, and on which was 
 built up the constitutional life of Virginia and New England ? 
 
 Of still more direct bearing upon the principles of government 
 on which, in Virginia is the first instance, was based the political 
 edifice that outlasted even the annulment of the Company's Charter 
 by King James I, is another passage in the same section of the same 
 Book. 3 Here the ^assent of the governed is treated as indispensable 
 to any system of government notwithstanding the Aristotelean 
 maxim of ' a kind of natural right in the noble, wise, and virtuous 
 to govern them which are of servile disposition '. The patriarchal 
 
 that there is probable ground for the existing law of ecclesiastical government, 
 and no necessary reason against it. 
 
 1 Thus (as Dean Church states the case in his masterly Introduction to 
 Book I) ' every law of God is a law of reason, and every law of reason is a law 
 of God. Laws, which are of God, cover the whole field of venture . . . [and are] 
 antecedent to Scripture, the supernatural law . . . There is no authority without 
 reason : no just authority which cannot give its reason ; no authority which is 
 not at last based on reason which can be tested and verified '. 
 
 2 Sec. x. 1. s Sec. x. 4. 
 
30 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 principle or method having proved not to admit of application to 
 so large a complex of families as that of which ' every politic 
 society 1 in the world consists, no mode of exercise of complete lawful 
 power was found possible except 'by consent of men, or by immediate 
 appointment of God '. Over the latter alternative Hooker, consider- 
 ing the age at which he lived and wrote, passes with singular ease, 
 noting how men recognized that ( to live by one man's will became 
 the cause of all men's misery', and summing up, with the half- 
 ironical conclusion : 
 
 'for any prince or potentate of what kind soever upon earth to 
 exercise the same [power] of himself, and not either by express 
 commission, immediately and personally received from God, or 
 else by authority derived at the first from their consent upon 
 whose persons they impose laws, it is no better than mere tyranny.' 
 
 The limitation conceded l that these laws shall be devised by ' none 
 but wise men ' is undeniably founded upon a very reasonable con- 
 sideration, and, as we shall see, commended itself, for instance, to 
 those who took so practical a view of politics as Shakespeare's. But 
 it cannot be said to have found a definite place in any political 
 constitution, however frequently it may have been attempted to 
 establish ' aristodemocracy ' an excellent word meant, I take it, 
 to imply something very different from an oligarchy of rank, age, or 
 wealth, or from the establishment of a balance of power between 
 the few and the many a solution recommended by Erasmus 2 and 
 aimed at in not a few constitutions of the past. Hooker upholds 
 popular government in no faltering terms ; 3 though it must be 
 conceded that certain of the reasons suggested by him for adapting 
 laws to the jealousies of the 'many-headed' have may we venture 
 to call it ? a Machiavellistic tinge. And even in the Eighth and 
 last Book of his great work, written not long before his death in 
 1600, but not likely to have been left unread at least by his faithful 
 friend and pupil Sandys (George Cranmer died in the same year), 
 he adheres to his constitutional position. In this Book, the argument 
 of which is designed to refute the Puritan contention that legal 
 ecclesiastical dominion should not be allowed to any civil Prince 
 or Governor, he describes the English monarchy as the pattern of 
 a monarchy by law. 4 
 
 1 Sec. x. 8. 
 
 2 Jn his Institutio Principis Christiani. 
 
 3 Sec. x. 9. 
 
 4 e The axioms of our regal government are these : Lex facit regent ; the king's 
 grant of any favour made contrary to the law is void : Rex nihil potest nisi quod 
 iure potest.' Sec. ii. 13. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 31 
 
 But the right of legislation, which implies the right of representa- 
 tion for legislative purposes, also implies that of resistance with its 
 not always avoidable or avoided consequence, the right of revolution. 
 The right of Resistance, which Sandys and his party put into practice 
 at home, and which was carried to its extreme consequences, both 
 by the generation that followed on theirs at home and by the 
 descendants of the colonists whom they had planted beyond the 
 Atlantic, cannot, of course, be said to have been taught explicitly 
 by Hooker ; and to insist upon it would, it must be granted, have 
 ill accorded with the essential spirit of his great treatise. Yet he 
 certainly goes beyond the general maxim enunciated in his First 
 Book, 1 that 'to constrain men into anything inconvenient doth 
 seem unreasonable ', when, towards the close of the same Book, 2 after 
 appealing to Scripture in support of the principle that 
 
 'the public power of all societies is above every soul contained 
 in them ', he adds : ' And the principal use of that power is to 
 give laws unto all that are under it ; which laws in such case we 
 must obey, unless there be reason shewed which may necessarily 
 enforce that the law of reason or of God doth enjoin the contrary.' 
 
 Neither Hampden nor Washington could have asked for more 
 than this : and, in theory, though the truths may not all be of 
 equal strength, the chain is without a break from Hooker to Locke, 
 and from Locke to that true-born and bred Virginian, President 
 Jefferson. 
 
 We may, then, I think, accept without much hesitation the con- 
 clusions reached by Professor Gayley as to the influence of Hooker's 
 political teaching upon the principles and action of the Makers of 
 Virginia and of Sandys in particular. But what is to be our judge- 
 ment of the further attempt to discover a direct connexion between 
 that teaching and the political thought to call it philosophy would 
 almost be like begging the question of Shakespeare ? I may say, 
 at once, that to the external evidence, or semblance of external 
 evidence, on the subject accumulated by Professor Gayley I attach 
 only a quite secondary importance. Shakespeare's intimacy with 
 Southampton is, of course, a fact beyond dispute ; but it came to 
 an end very soon after the publication (in 1593 or 1594) of the Ecclesi- 
 astical Polity. Of Shakespeare's relations to Essex and his rebellion 
 the central incident of Southampton's earlier life we have already 
 spoken : no serious attempt has ever been made to construe them 
 into, an indication of political sympathies. With Sandys and other 
 members of his party in Parliament and in the Virginia Company 
 
 1 Sec. x. 8. 2 Sec. xvi. 6. 
 
32 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE. 1919 
 
 Shakespeare may have been in occasional contact but further than 
 this the external evidence in but a very few instances extends. It 
 is perhaps strongest in the case of Pembroke and his brother Mont- 
 gomery, whose private patronage Shakespeare certainly enjoyed. No 
 directly personal relations of any kind seem traceable between Shake- 
 speare and other earlier members of the Virginia Council or subscribers 
 to the Company, though he may have met Lord Delaware at the 
 Mermaid a resort said to have been likewise frequented by 
 Christopher Brooke, who was employed as draughtsman by the 
 Company, in 1612 pleaded for the shareholders of the Blackfriars 
 Theatre, and was a genuine admirer of the dramatist. I am at 
 a loss to see between what other members of the Virginia Council 
 or of the constitutional party in Parliament and Shakespeare more 
 than a possible indirect connexion can be established. Mr. Gayley's 
 account of the meetings at the Mitre is interesting enough, but the 
 attempt to treat them as having afforded to Shakespeare ' a nucleus 
 of associations, personal or literary 1 , must be relegated into the 
 realm of ingenious conjecture. Finally, it would be hazardous to 
 draw any inferences as to the influence upon Shakespeare of the 
 political principles which his Warwickshire acquaintances interested 
 in Virginian colonisation may have imbibed from Hooker's teaching. 
 There may have been some general affinity of thought or feeling 
 on public matters between him in his later years and others besides 
 Fulke Greville but is it possible to say more ? 
 
 On the whole, therefore, attractive as is the use to which 
 Mr. Gayley has turned his many-sided researches, of which it has 
 necessarily been impossible to furnish a complete account here, I 
 cannot pretend to think that they carry us very far in the direction 
 of the result to which he believes them to tend. I by no means 
 imply that, taken together, they should be classed with those 
 * discoveries ' as to Shakespeare's ' environment ' as to which, without 
 any prejudice to Mrs. Stopes's thorough and valuable studies, one 
 might, as Sir Sidney Lee observes, ' as well say that Shakespeare had 
 Huguenot views because he lodged in the house of a Huguenot 
 refugee (an acquaintance which he may have owed to his fellow- 
 townsman Richard Field, whose wife was a Huguenot).' And even 
 were it satisfactorily demonstrated that Shakespeare was well 
 acquainted with all the noblemen and gentlemen connected with the 
 Virginia Company between whom and him some kind of personal 
 link can be discovered, it would not, of course, follow either that 
 his way of thinking on political questions and issues was impregnated 
 with theirs or that of their leaders, or, supposing this to have been 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 33 
 
 the case, that what he had thus derived was assimilated by him into 
 a system of political thought or philosophy. Before adverting, in 
 conclusion, to this latter hypothesis, will you bear with me while 
 I rapidly attempt to inquire whether the former can be in any 
 measure substantiated from Shakespeare's plays ? l 
 
 May I, without plunging you into the maze of the chronology of 
 Shakespeare's plays, venture to divide them, with the help of the in- 
 structive table recently printed by my friend Mr. William Poel, 2 into 
 three groups ? They correspond roughly to the periods of his life in 
 which he was, successively, acquiring, together with a knowledge of 
 his twofold profession, a growing experience of the world around 
 him ; at the height of his creative power and activity ; and more at 
 leisure to look back on a prosperous career and round upon human 
 life and its varied problems. And may I reckon these divisions, as 
 marked off by the dates at which his several plays were first produced, 
 at the playhouses or at Court, as covering in turn the periods from 
 1591 to 1596, June 1595 to 1599 or 1600, and thence to the close ? 
 
 In the earliest of these groups of plays, it will be remembered 
 that Shakespeare is largely adapter rather than author, though his 
 wit and wisdom naturally found their opportunities in his additions. 
 The philosophy of Jack Cade in Part II of Henry VI, who prefers 
 fighting to famishing (Act IV, sc. 10), is as purely dramatic as is that 
 of the writer of Sonnet LXIV, who, in view of the topsy-turveydom 
 of the world, 'cries for restful death'. Neither in The Comedy of 
 Errors nor in Love's Labour ">$ Lost assuredly the two earliest Shake- 
 spearean comedies shall we seek for a revelation of political or 
 social thought, albeit in the latter play Armado addresses the 
 'Anointed' with no very reverent humility (Act V, sc. 2), and 
 Costard, who has been derisively announced as a ' member of the 
 Commonwealth 1 already plays with the term 'degree', which, as we 
 shall see, became a favourite with Shakespeare in the wider sense of 
 'ordered system' an idea never more forcibly expressed than by 
 Hooker. 3 Nor would a similar search be more successful in The Two 
 
 1 In what follows I have mainly depended on my .own reading, while not 
 abstaining from making use of Professor Gayley's investigations. 
 
 2 Table III in Prominent Points in the Life and Writings of Shakespeare, 
 reprinted from The Bulletin of the John By lands Library (Manchester University 
 Press, 1919). 
 
 3 In Book I of his Ecclesiastical Polity he uses the word in the sense of ' kind ' 
 or ' sort ' (sec. v. 2) and in the ordinary sense of ' steps ' (sec. viii. 8). In the post- 
 humous Preface he mentions university degrees. As to the locus classicus (sec. iii. 2) 
 in which he dwells on the Law or Order of Nature, which Shakespeare in the 
 
34 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 Gentlemen of Verona, although in this charming work are to be 
 found the germs of so much later fruit; or in that feast of frolic 
 and fun, A Midsummer Night's Dream. In The Merchant of Venice, 
 a graver note is struck, and there is no need for recalling Portia's 
 vindication of mercy as a more than royal prerogative. Curiously 
 enough, the same play contains, in the speech of the Prince of 
 Aragon (Act II, sc. 9), a reference to that regard for established 
 political and social order which Hooker enjoins and which Shake- 
 speare is never weary of enforcing, and to the necessity of making 
 the tenure of 'estates, degrees, and offices' depend on merit only. 
 The same opinion or sentiment recurs in the Gardener's speech in 
 Richard II (Act III, sc. 4), a play probably produced at no very 
 distant date from that of The Merchant. 
 
 Both Richard //, however, and the perhaps slightly earlier King 
 John show how, after Shakespeare had once begun to fix his 
 attention upon well-known characters and episodes of English history, 
 he had become conscious of their bearing upon the political life 
 of the nation in later periods, and in that of the actual production 
 of his historical dramas in particular. National unity, and its cor- 
 relative, the nation's power of determining its own destinies, are 
 consistently recognized as the ideals which England, of all countries, 
 is called upon to realize. In King John, spiritual and temporal 
 authority confront each other in barren conflict, and the action ends 
 on the note of self-sufficing patriotism, typically sounded by the 
 Bastard Faulcon bridge, whom it is hardly going too far to identify 
 with the people of England since national unity and sovereignty is 
 the one thing he has, or they have, at heart. 1 
 
 This, however, it should be observed, does not amount to a system 
 of political thought ; and it seems to me useless to seek for hidden 
 or secondary meanings where they are not to be found. Thus, the 
 self-deception of the ill-fated Richard's assurance (Act III, sc. 2) that 
 
 Not all the water in the rough rude sea 
 
 Can wash the balm off* from an anointed king, 
 
 and his not less lofty denunciation of those who, like Northumberland, 
 have been guilty of deposing him (Act IV, sc. 1) cannot, I feel sure, 
 be regarded as reflecting ironically upon the doctrine of divine right. 
 Nor can the Bishop of Carlisle's condemnation of subjects who dare 
 
 widest sense calls ' degree ', see below ; but I am not aware that Hooker himself 
 ever uses the word with so special a significance. Of any metaphysical use of the 
 term by either there can of course be no question. 
 
 1 Mr. Morton Luce, a fine Shakespearean critic, has pointed this out. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 35 
 
 to give sentence on their sovereign (?.) be rightly described as an 
 obvious attempt to buttress a falling cause by an obsolete theory. 
 Such passages as these, of course, merely exemplify Shakespeare's 
 unequalled dramatic power of making his personages speak in 
 accordance with his conception of them. At the same time, we 
 recognize here a striking advance upon the treatment of political 
 history in the earlier Richard III, where Shakespeare takes over his 
 chief character ready-made from popular (originally, of course, 
 partisan) legend, and supplies no background to the action beyond 
 what he has derived from the same lurid page. Yet this play, too 
 truly tragic, notwithstanding the dramatist's crude use of his historic 
 material rises to a lofty view of political morality to which Hooker 
 would not have hesitated to subscribe, in a passage in which with 
 the King's command is contrasted that of the King of Kings in the 
 letter of His law. 1 
 
 So we may pass on to a group of plays belonging to the first years 
 of Shakespeare's maturity as a dramatist and including some of the 
 choicest gems of his poetic genius. Of political thought or com- 
 mentary we shall find no trace either in Romeo and Juliet, though it 
 brings home, with incomparable force, the dire avayKT) of faction ; 
 nor, with a single exception, 2 is Airs Well that Ends Well, a play 
 which aesthetic criticism has in vain striven to redeem from neglect 
 due to insuperable ethical repugnance. Far different is the case with 
 Hamlet the profoundest of all Shakespeare's dramatic creations 
 because the single personality and mental and moral experiences of 
 the hero reflect those of humanity at large, and therefore those of 
 the poet who created the character. 3 Among these elements could 
 not be missing the sense of man's responsibility to the community in 
 which he has been placed by the accidents of birth and state 
 a responsibility of which he cannot free himself except by flying to 
 
 1 Act I, sc. 4. This is the supernatural law which, according to EccL Polity 
 (Bk. I, sec. xi), God has made known by Scripture. How futile, in the face of 
 such a principle, is Richard's boast (Act V, sc. 3) : 
 
 the King's name is a tower of strength, 
 Which they upon the adverse faction want ! 
 
 2 This is the passage (Act I, sc. 2) illustrating by the simile of the beehive, 
 the maxim that the prosperity of a community depends on the performance of 
 his duties by every member of it. Cf. below, as to Henry V. 
 
 3 It is impossible here to attempt to distinguish between the recasts of the 
 original old play. Perhaps I am assuming too late a date for the first 
 Shakespearean revision, which Mr. J. Dover Wilson's recent discussion of 
 the bibliographical side of the subject shows good reason for dating about 
 June 15, 1593. 
 
36 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 the unknown (Act III, sc. I). 1 For the rest, our human nature was 
 not planned by the Creator so carefully, ' with such large discourse,' 
 (a word much affected, in this sense, by Hooker), in order that we 
 should abstain from exerting the reason implanted in us (Act IV, 
 sc. 4). From this source must be drawn our principles of duty 
 towards the State and its highest authority. To flatter royalty to 
 the top of its bent may befit the servility of a Rosencrantz (Act III, 
 sc. 3); while the belief in 'the divinity that doth hedge a King' 
 may be fairly taken as a proof of the self-confidence, rather than of 
 the theoretic principles, of the regicide Claudius (Act IV, sc. 3). The 
 remarks which, towards the close of the play, Hamlet drops in 
 a cynical mood, as to the inconvenient levelling spirit of the age 
 (Act V, sc. 1), arid as to the hazards of the hindmost (Act V, sc. 2), 
 cannot be held to illustrate Shakespeare's anti-democratic tendencies, 
 since they are merely utterances natural to a personage born and 
 bred among the exclusives. 
 
 To a time not very remote from the production of Hamlet, as first 
 revised by Shakespeare, also belongs that of both parts of Henry IV 
 and (though at what point in the sequence of the other Falstaff plays, 
 if in that sequence at all, the present is not an occasion for discuss- 
 ing ' 2 ) of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The last-named hurriedly 
 composed farce, said with some internal probability to have been 
 written in a fortnight so as to comply with a foolish wish of Queen 
 Elizabeth's, offered no opportunity for the expression of serious 
 thought, although the genius of Shakespeare found one for the 
 depiction of a most serious passion (jealousy). But with Part I 
 of Henry IV Shakespeare resumed the series of his national Histories, 
 putting into dramatic form the narrative of the epoch of national 
 life preceding the Tudor age, in which his own lot was cast, and to 
 which the first two Lancaster reigns had bequeathed some of their 
 most vital .national traditions. Where, if not in the Henry IV plays, 
 and in their sequel Henry V 9 could the dramatist, had such been his 
 purpose, have found apt occasion for laying down the principles on 
 which may be securely established a monarchy at once popular and 
 strong, and fit to prove victorious both over factions at home and 
 over foreign foes ? And, in truth, none of Shakespeare's plays are so 
 
 1 I confess myself unable to follow Professor Gayley in tracing an analogy 
 between Hamlet's statement of the great dilemma, and refusal to accept it, and 
 a very notable passage in Ecclesiastical Polity (Book I, sec. x, 9) already cited 
 and offering a shrewd counsel to framers of constitutions. 
 
 2 Cf. Mr. J. M. Robertson's ingenious essay The Problem of the Merry Wives of 
 Windsor, published by the Shakespeare Association, 1917. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 37 
 
 truly national and so truly popular as these, whether in their serious 
 or in their comic scenes and characters ; nor can any be said so 
 constantly, as it were, to invite the dramatist to impart, in however 
 concrete a form, his ideas concerning the forms and methods of 
 government best suited to England and to Englishmen. It may be 
 worth while to note, with a certain measure of detail, after what 
 fashion he responds to the invitation. 
 
 The First Part of Heni-y IV exhibits the conflict of faction at its 
 height, engulfing in its fury not only doughty champions of the one 
 or other side, but 'ancient lords and reverend bishops'. Few can 
 pause, like Sir Walter Blunt (Act IV, sc. 3), to apply the infallible 
 principle that they cannot be right who stand against anointed 
 majesty. Before the final struggle, Worcester and King Henry enter 
 as it were into statement against statement faction putting its case 
 against faction (Act V, sc. 1) ; and it is noticeable that, with all his 
 denunciation of rebellion, the King assents to the trial by combat 
 offered by the Prince to Hotspur, although, on gaining the victory, 
 he once more commands the suppression of rebellion everywhere 
 (sc. 5). In the Second Part, we have a singularly animated picture 
 of political disturbance and its remedies. In the opening scene, 
 Northumberland's despair takes the form of resignation to anarchy, 
 which is the direct contradiction of that Order which is Heaven's 
 first law ('let order die!' and cf. Eccl. Polity, Bk. I, ii. 3, and the 
 famous passage in iii. 2 referred to below). The Archbishop of York 
 essays to convert rebellion into ' religion ' (Act I, sc. 2), while expect- 
 ing that the 'fond many', the 'common dog' which 'disgorged' King 
 Richard, will now be ready to desert its favourite, Bolingbroke 
 (sc. 3). King Henry treats his present trouble as a necessity, as it was 
 a necessity that compelled him to become great (Act III, sc. 1) ; the 
 Archbishop pursues his private quarrel with the grievance against 
 the King under cover of the commonwealth's complaints against him 
 (Act IV, sc. 1). In the end, the leaders of the rebellion having been 
 tricked to their doom (Act IV, sc. 2), the King's task is achieved. 
 He bequeaths to his son, with his hard- won crown, the policy he has 
 intended to pursue of distracting attention from home quarrels by 
 foreign expeditions (Act IV, sc. 5) ; and it is with an injunction of 
 loyal adherence to established institutions and national self-confidence 
 whether for war or for peace, that the new reign sets in (Act V, 
 sc. 2). 
 
 In Henry V it is impossible to mistake the dramatist's satisfied and 
 almost joyous consciousness that the age of faction, which corroded 
 the vital strength of the people, has been superseded by that of 
 
38 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 internal unity, intent only on some great national achievement. One 
 more attempt at rebellion is cast off, as it were, in passing and with- 
 out either hesitation or difficulty, as with a firm step, King Harry 
 continues on his course : ' Now, lords, for France ! ' (Act II. sc. 2). 
 The State is so well protected that 
 
 While that the armed hand doth fight abroad, 
 The advised head defends itself at home 
 
 (Act I, sc. 2) ; on which there follows another of those noteworthy 
 passages in which Shakespeare dwells on the benefits of ordered 
 government, where all parts 'high and low and lower 1 , 'keep in one 
 consent'. The Archbishop of Canterbury carries on the thought by 
 comparing the ' order of a perfect kingdom ' to that of a beehive, in 
 a passage which Mr. Gay ley is no doubt right in thinking to have 
 been adapted from Lyly's Euphues and his England (p. 252 in 
 Arber's Reprints, 1868), but which may not the less be taken as 
 indicating the poet's own way of thinking. (Cf. for the same simile 
 ante, as to All^s Well that Ends Well.) Borne along, as it were, on 
 the crest of such high thoughts, the immediate action of the play 
 rises to the height of its ulterior purpose; and, as 'model to her 
 inward greatness', England 'like little body with a mighty heart', 
 after shaking off* from herself all unkindly elements, enters on her 
 great enterprise (cf. Chorus to Act II). But the unity on which this 
 England's strength depends is not a unity of bondsmen under a despot ; 
 the King's subjects stand by him as by one who, in the hour of 
 supreme effort, calls those who join in it with him 'brothers' (Act IV, 
 sc. 3) ; each does his duty, and does it glady. This seems, after all, 
 the simple moral of the famous nocturnal exchange of theories of 
 allegiance between King Harry and privates Bates and Williams 
 (Act IV, sc. 1). The King deduces from the views of the soldier the 
 overwhelming conclusion that, with no recompense but that of 
 4 ceremony ', the King has to bear the whole responsibility, moral and 
 material, of the deeds done in his name. Private Williams's doubts 
 remain unsatisfied the answer to them being, of course, that in 
 a well-ordered political community every subject (or every 'national', 
 in the jargon of our own day) has his share of responsibility for public 
 acts to bear, as the King has his, without ' the soul ' of either remain- 
 ing any the less his own. The phrase, thus understood, is, indeed, 
 a bond of brotherhood, which holds firm in battle, prayer preceding, 
 and thanksgiving following, and the glory of victory being ascribed 
 to God alone (Act IV, sc. 8). The wonderful poetic grace (if it "may 
 be so called) with which patriotism is here merged in piety (a dis- 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 39 
 
 tinctive future in the historic Henry V) must not be enlarged 
 upon here. 
 
 Curious, however, as it may seem, it is not in these great dramas, 
 in closest contact though they are with English history, but in a 
 tragi-comedy wholly detached in subject from the national life, that 
 occur Shakespeare's most notable utterances on topics falling within 
 the range of political science or philosophy. Whether or not 
 Trollus and Cressida, as it has come down to us, represents a later 
 version of an earlier play, and whether it was into this version that 
 a satirical design was first infused, must remain a matter of conjecture, 
 on which the date, or dates, of its composition must depend ; but we 
 may here treat it as a play produced much about the same time 
 as the Histories of which we have been speaking, however different 
 from them in general conception and design. In one of those 
 camp-scenes, in which the English dramatist contrived to add 
 interest to his Homeric model (Act I, sc. 3), Ulysses discusses the 
 reason why little or no progress has been made, during seven years, 
 with the siege of Troy. It is to be found, he says, in the neglect, 
 among the Greek force, of the 'specialty of rule', and in the play 
 allowed there to ' hollow factions '. When the general J is not like 
 the hive to which all return from their expeditions, w r hat honey 
 can be expected ? From this simile, also, as we have seen, employed 
 in Airs Well that Ends Well and in Henry V, Ulysses passes on to 
 a most remarkable exposition of the doctrines of degree or order, 
 as conditioning the organic life of communities, whether political 
 or other. 2 There is an unmistakable parallelism between this passage 
 and one in the Ecclesiastical Polity (Book I, iii. 2), which had 
 certainly been written, and was probably published, before the 
 production of Troilus and Cressida. This parallelism is no discovery ; 
 it had already, as Mr. Gayley notes, been pointed out by Verplanck. 
 At the same time, Shakespeare's lines are anything but a copy of 
 Hooker's prose, which in this instance reaches an unsurpassed 
 magnificence. The speech of Ulysses in the play, as Mr. Gayley 
 demonstrates in a special Appendix, is equally indebted to Chapman's 
 Translation of the Iliad, of which the Second Book had appeared 
 in 1598, and to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. From a passage 
 in Ulysses's speech in Chapman's First Book Shakespeare may have 
 transferred the repeated pregnant employment, in this instance, of 
 
 1 It is tempting to explain this to mean ' the army ' ; but in the same speech 
 the word occurs in the sense of the ' commander '. 
 
 2 Shakespeare never tired of the word, or of the idea which he connected with 
 . See The Winter* Tale (Act II, sc. 1). 
 
40 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 the term 'degree'. In another passage, near the end of the Third 
 Book of the same poem, to which Shakespeare must have had resort, 
 Chaucer reproduces a passage from his own translation of Boethius 
 de Consolatione, in which he treats Love, not Law, as the great organ 
 of cosmic cohesion. 
 
 At this point, however, I must frankly express my regret at not 
 being able to follow Mr. Gayley further in his deductions from this 
 investigation. It seems by no means unlikely that Shakespeare's 
 strong sense of the value of political order and enduring social 
 organization was strengthened by his having become acquainted 
 with such passages as those cited above. That in Chaucer he 
 cannot but have read ; that in Hooker might very well have come 
 before his eyes. But we are unable to find herein any indication 
 that, so far as either Troilus and Cressida or Coriolanus (as to which 
 immediately) is concerned, Shakespeare was writing in anything like 
 conscious agreement with the ideas which Sandys and others were 
 seeking to constitute the bases of self-government in Virginia. 
 Mr. Gayley cautiously admits that Shakespeare was not referring 
 to America ; and it may be as well to pretermit all suppositions as to 
 his direct cognizance of, or sympathy with, 'the movement for 
 liberty in the New World as at home \ l 
 
 It would lie beyond the bounds of my immediate purpose to enter 
 here into a further inquiry, to which Mr. Gayley invites us in a 
 special Appendix, into the question (if it be such) of Shakespeare's 
 indebtedness to the ethics and psychology, as distinct from the 
 political and social philosophy, of Hooker. The particular play 
 of Troilus and Cressida^ as well as certain other plays notably 
 Hamlet and Measure for Measure no doubt contain passages to 
 which analoga may be pointed out in divers sections of the Ecclesias- 
 tical Polity. But, to use Mr. Gayley's own very appropriate query, 
 must counterparts be found 'for reflections which might be common 
 to the thought of the age ? ' 
 
 1 By the way, in this very play of Troilus and Cressida (Act III, sc 3) Ulysses 
 declares, quite in the fashion of diplomacy after the school of Metternich, that 
 
 There is a mystery, with whom relation 
 Durst never meddle, in the soul of state ; 
 Which hath an operation more divine 
 Than breath or pen can give expressure to. 
 
 It is amusing to find, in an interesting essay On the Conception and Method of the 
 History of States by the eminent historian Fournier, the conclusion drawn that 
 there are certain limits to all insight into the nature of states beyond which 
 demonstration must give way to hypothesis, and that this is the ultra posse to 
 which Shakespeare refers in the above passage. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 41 
 
 The last group of Shakespearean plays, belonging, in date of 
 production, to the period from 1600 (or thereabouts) onwards might, 
 a priori, be expected to have presented more abundant results of 
 observation and imagination, as applied to political and social 
 phenomena. But, as we call them to mind in something like their 
 probable chronological order, we find such elements of the kind 
 as they contain even more variously and ' antithetically mixed '. The 
 irresistible humour and deep incidental pathos of Much Ado about 
 Nothing, at the first performance of which assuredly 'there was a star 
 danced ', cover nothing political ; for to interpret Hero's comparison 
 of 'favourites made proud by princes' (Act III, sc. 1) as referring 
 to Essex, suits the date better than what we know of the personal 
 relations of the author. 1 Still less productive would be the search 
 for such an element in the most purely poetical of all Shakespearean 
 dramas, the enchanting As You Like It, all 'made of passion and 
 all made of wishes ', and, we might add, ' all purity ' or in Twelfth 
 Night, which combines with many beauties a curious study in 
 psychology. 2 
 
 With Julius Caesar we, from our present point of view, reach 
 more interesting ground. While it would be difficult to trace in this 
 stirring tragedy instances of comparative or, still more so, of con- 
 structive, political thought, Sir Sidney Lee is justified in pronouncing 
 the entire drama a penetrating study of political life. Circumstances 
 and personal character, no doubt, here determine the adoption and 
 maintenance of particular political opinions ; but these are held 
 and expressed with perfect distinctness, and together illustrate the 
 chief party divisions both of the period of action, and of wider 
 divisions of history. In his first great dialogue with Brutus (Act I, 
 sc. 2), Cassius harps upon the argument that in a republic one great 
 man must not be suffered to predominate an argument suited to the 
 atmosphere of a mixed policy which allows a share in its government 
 to a ' breed of noble bloods ' rather than to that of a democracy pure 
 and simple. Again, it is the recognition of Caesar as King from 
 which Brutus shrinks as from an invitation to his great friend to 
 
 1 The late Mr. R. Simpson, accordingly, thought it referred to the Cecils. 
 
 2 The interest attaching from this point of view, and also from that of his 
 Puritan features, to Malvolio has been frequently noted. It must he added 
 that there is an unmistakably shall we say undemocratic tone in this, as 
 in some other Shakespearean plays. The unhappy Malvolio is only a steward, 
 after all; Viola-Sebastian is f a gentleman. I'll be sworn thou art' (Act \, 
 sc. 5). Even the hero of Timon of Athens (Act. IV, sc. 3) draws a distinction 
 between his own misanthropy and that of a ' slave ' who has not known the 
 ' sweet degrees that this brief world affords' to the privileged 
 
42 ANNUAL SHAKESPEAKE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 endanger the safety of the State (Act II, sc. 1). Caesar himself is 
 all amiability to the conspirators when they wait on him to salute 
 him (ib., sc. 2); but hardly has he set foot in the Senate house when 
 he justifies their design by a tyrannical 'Know, Caesar doth not 
 wrong', and expounds at length his theory of personal monarchy 
 (Act III, sc. 1). In the speeches of Brutus after the deed is done, 
 its motive cause, Caesar's ambition to be King, is dwelt upon as 
 persistently, as the mention of it is avoided by Antony. It was 
 'for justice sake' i.e. for the sake of pure political principle that, 
 as Brutus declares 'great Caesar bled' (Act IV, sc. 3); and, on the 
 liberator's death, his adversary Antony acknowledges that, of all the 
 conspirators, Brutus alone was actuated by 
 
 a general honest thought 
 And common good to all (Act V, sc. 5). 
 
 To re-read this wonderful play is to perceive that it is not a 
 people freeing itself from oppression whom we are here taught f o 
 honour, but a knot of ' men that gave their country liberty' (Act III, 
 sc. 1), and among them 'the noblest Roman' and the most con- 
 sistent Liberal doctrinaire ' of them all '. 
 
 In Measure for Measure we have a drama, next in date of produc- 
 tion to Julius Caesar, which, in a very different way, indicates its 
 author's attentiveness to political problems, though unaccompanied 
 by any endeavour to solve them with convincing completeness. The 
 opening lines 
 
 Of government the properties to unfold 
 
 Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse 1 
 
 apprise us that the opportunity of political demonstration offering 
 itself will not be taken. 2 For the rest there is, as has been pointed 
 out by Sir Sidney Lee, little in the play, which seems to have been 
 one of the dramatist's first personal offerings to the Court, that 
 suggests a wish to commend it there by its political or social senti- 
 ments. To be sure, the Duke's abhorrence of mobs, despite his love 
 for his people (Act I, sc. 1), and Angelo's expression of the same 
 dislike of seeing royalty crowded (Act II, sc. 4) may have appealed 
 
 1 A favourite word, as already noted, in the sense of e reasoning ', with 
 Shakespeare as with Hooker. 
 
 2 The Duke's commission to Angelo, by the way, is sufficiently broad and 
 elastic. He is, like the Duke himself, 
 
 So to enforce or qualify the laws 
 
 As to your soul seems good (Act I, sc. 1). 
 
 What benevolent despot could claim a more complete authority ? 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 43 
 
 to King James I, who hated that sort of company almost as much 
 as did King Louis II of Bavaria. The most beautiful passage in 
 Isabella's appeal to Angelo, and in the whole play, is based, not 
 on political, or even on mere ethical, principle, but on the pro- 
 foundest teaching of Christianity. 
 
 Othello, which might almost be called the unequalled early 
 exemplar of domestic tragedy, neglects its chance of referring, or 
 alluding, to the Venetian system of government, a subject of constant 
 interest to many Englishmen (Nicholas Ferrar among them) in the 
 age of its commencing decline. Macbeth, psychologically the most 
 directly powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies, had the secondary 
 purpose in gratifying the pride of Malcolm's reigning descendant ; 
 but, apart from this, it is surely 'stretching a point too far' to find 
 in the play we presume in MacdufTs indignant protest after the 
 prince's fictitious self- accusation (Act IV, sc. 3) a repudiation of 
 the doctrine of the right divine of kings. Even the direct reprehen- 
 sion of those who flatter kings in Pericles (Act I, sc. 2) will hardly 
 bear such a construction. Contrariwise, the thought of the sovereign 
 as father of all his people suggests itself with extraordinary force 
 in King Lear. The greatest of all tragedies of pity contains no 
 more touching passage than that in which the royal outcast bethinks 
 himself of the ' poor naked wretches ' of whose condition he has taken 
 4 too little care ' (Act III, sc. 4). With the storm without and the 
 storm within, this is a divergence from personal grief into sociological 
 thought to which Philoctetes could have hardly risen. 
 
 There remain the plays of the final period. In Antony and 
 Cleopatra, as in Julius Caesar, the chief personage of the tragedy 
 is still of heroic type a head and shoulders, as the phrase is, over 
 common men, though not ' a colossus ', like his chief of old. But 
 Antony, as it is borne in upon us from the first, is a falling, and 
 soon will be a fallen, star, unable to master a world like Julius 
 Caesar, or even to keep a hold over his third part of it. Thus, 
 though hardly any other Shakespearean play is more full of shrewd 
 political as well as of psychological observation, 1 no handle is sought 
 or found for the introduction of political thought or principle. 
 Shakespeare's contempt for the voices of the multitude reappears 
 
 1 See, e. g., the remark of the politic general Ventidius the prototype of 
 many a celebrated general who has followed the same rule of conduct that 
 principals do not like to be surpassed, by those holding a command under them 
 (Act III, sc. 1). Or see the scene in which Sextus Pompeius declines to do the 
 deed, though he will gather in the fruits (Act II, sc. 7). It is unnecessary to 
 do more than refer to the psychological insight of the Cleopatra scenes. 
 
44 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 more emphatically than ever, and finds summary expression by the 
 great politician who, in the end, masters all the factions Caesar 
 Augustus himself. 'It hath', he says, 'been taught us from the 
 primal state,' that ' in the common body ' there is naught but 
 instability and fickleness (Act I, sc. 4). Why,, we seem half- tempted 
 to ask, be at the pains of winning such a world ? 
 
 Whether or not later in date of production than Antony and 
 Cleopatra, Coriolanus exhibits the same maturity of dramatic con- 
 ception and execution, and more compactness of construction ; while, 
 with regard to our present subject of inquiry, it displays more 
 clearly than any other of Shakespeare's plays his ways of thought 
 on political life. This tragedy has been asserted to have been 
 intended to demonstrate how the best form of government is equally 
 free from the control of aristocratic arrogance and from subjection 
 to the turbulence of the populace. But this view overlooks the 
 circumstance that, while Coriolanus himself is by nature imperious 
 and overweeningly self-confident, so that he 
 
 fails in the disposing of those chances 
 Which he was lord of (Act IV, sc. 7), 
 
 the other Patricians, and Menenius, the very embodiment of 
 sagacity, in particular, share his political opinions, and only differ 
 from him under the pressure of circumstance ; whereas the motives 
 of the Tribunes are as mean as their ways are crooked, and the 
 minds of the many-headed are feeble and swayed to and fro by every 
 successive gust. Although the dramatic conflict is thus, in its 
 essence, ethical, no attempt is made to conceal the political bias 
 of its presentment. Indeed, the pride of Coriolanus who ' speaks 
 of the people ', as if he were, not merely a superior mortal, but 
 'a god' (Act III, sc. 1), is designedly coloured so highly that it 
 contrasts with a reasonable opposition to democratic principles. In 
 return, Coriolanus himself raises an interesting question of political 
 history when (in the same scene) he compares the Roman with the 
 Greek (Athenian) constitution, to the disadvantage of the former, 
 from the anti-democratic point of view. The guilt of Coriolanus 
 was a moral guilt his pride ; that he aimed at tyranny was a mere 
 pretence of his enemies the Tribunes (Act III, sc. 3), whose own 
 patriotism was one that ' rack'd for Rome, to make coals cheap ' 
 (Act V, sc. 1) ; but the far greater wrong which he commits by 
 drawing his sword against his country, though he seeks to undo what 
 he has begun, is inexpiable, and takes his case quite out of the range 
 of mere politics. 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 45 
 
 In the super-romantic drama of Cymbeline the accumulation of 
 incident probable and improbable, even to monstrosity yet leaves 
 room both for striking narrative passages and for others of interest 
 to ' statists ' (cf. Act II, sc. 4) or for conveying fine thoughts and 
 sentiments, alike extremely undemocratic. 1 The Winter's Tale, 
 which internal evidence places very late in the list of Shakespeare's 
 plays, is not without a certain lengthiness which would help to defeat 
 any effort to find in it instances of the assertion of definite political 
 principles. The loyal Camillo refuses to obey his sovereign's com- 
 mand to murder his royal guest, even if he could find example of 
 thousands who had found themselves none the worse for an act 
 of regicide (Act I, sc. 2); and King Leontes, while he nakedly 
 advances the claims of absolute monarchy, opines that after all, the 
 main thing is to possess the power. 2 Yet here and there, in the 
 lovely pastoral scenes, glimpses are to be found of that lesson of 
 equality which beneficent. Nature herself teaches : 
 
 The self-same sun that shines upon his court 
 
 Hides not his visage from our cottage (Act IV, sc. 4). 3 
 
 And so, whether or not we may regard it as an established fact 
 that The Tempest in its final form dates from 1613, we come once 
 more to what no lover of Shakespeare will care to regard as other 
 than his last play. We have seen that the opening of The Tempest, 
 original in every other sense of the word, was beyond all doubt taken 
 from a Virginian letter, and that Caliban knew something of the 
 troubles of the early English settlers in the colony. But, as a whole, 
 this wonderful play, from which, if from any of Shakespeare's dramas, 
 we might feel inclined to draw general conclusions as to his world 
 of thought in the maturity of his genius, contains no reference to 
 politics or for that matter, to religion, with which in this age, more 
 than in any other, politics were so unintermittently blended. At 
 Milan, Naples, and no doubt in other 'residential' capitals, Duke 
 
 1 e. g. Clay and clay differ in dignity 
 
 Where dust is both alike (Act IV, sc. 2), 
 
 with the reflections of Belarius on the ' invisible instincts' which ( framed' his 
 two princely wards to ' royally unlearn'd ' ; and the tribute to ' reverence the 
 angel of the world ', which ' doth make distinction of place between high and 
 low '. ' Consider ' writes Hooker, in a famous passage (Eccl. Pol., Bk. I, 
 sec. iv, 2), the Angels of God associated and their law is that which disposeth 
 them as an army , one in order and degree above another.' 
 
 2 See Act II, sc. 1, as to his ( prerogative ', and ib., sc. 3, as to his being called 
 a tyrant. 
 
 8 As well as of the social satire which always commends itself to the lowly : 
 * Not swear it,' says the Clown, ' now I am a gentleman? ' (Act V, sc. 2). 
 
46 ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE, 1919 
 
 succeeds Duke and King follows upon King, as Amurath to Amurath 
 succeeds, and the people are of little or no account. The enchanted 
 island, indeed, is unpeopled ; though on shipboard, even in the storm, 
 occasions arise for differences between passengers and crew. Thus, 
 questions of constitution, land-tenure, employment, .and the like, 
 in the island are mere Utopian visions, without any reference to 
 Milan, or Great Britain, or (as Mr. Gayley is half-disposed to suggest) 
 to 'the Virginian fiasco' the fiasco, i.e., which Virginia escaped 
 through the reforms of Dale and Gates. 
 
 The present paper has extended to so great and (probably) to so 
 wearisome a length, that a very brief deduction from its concluding 
 survey is all that I can ask leave to add. Concerning the politics 
 of Shakespeare I have long held a view that has been confirmed 
 by more than one recently published study of his life and art free 
 from what I will venture to call the pedantry of certain earlier 
 schools of Shakespeare criticism, which deserve that censure precisely 
 where they claimed to set up criteria best suited to the requirements 
 of superior minds. First and foremost, we should always remember 
 that Shakespeare is the greatest of dramatic artists, and that whatever 
 principle, maxim, or experience finds utterance in his plays should 
 be read in the light of the dramatis personae from whom it proceeds 
 be this Hamlet or Polonius, or any less complex character than 
 either of these. It is they who speak and think in the first 
 instance, and not the author of their being. In the second place, 
 Shakespeare was an incomparable observer, not only of the ways 
 of men and women, but of their thoughts and feelings, and of those 
 that had found utterance in the speech or writings of his own and 
 former generations of Englishmen, in which politics past and present 
 always had a large share; and both for the cutting and for the 
 setting of these ' gems ' (as our later ancestors and ancestresses loved 
 to call them in their collections) his was a master-hand beyond that 
 of any other English Avriter. Finally, however, let us allow that 
 the very nature of his art as a dramatist, doubled as it was with that 
 of actor, offered him constant opportunities of giving play to his 
 personal beliefs and convictions, preferences and prejudices in this, 
 as well as in other fields of comment or exemplification ; and that, 
 though we know him to have possessed the quality of reserve which 
 is characteristic of all great minds, and which, moreover, the circum- 
 stances of his personal career imposed upon him, he was at the same 
 time conspicuous for the freedom of discourse which (we shall agree) 
 is, likewise, at all events a frequent sign of greatness. Thus he was 
 always patriotic, and always not only when he wore scarlet as 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE MAKERS OF VIRGINIA 47 
 
 a member of King Jameses household loyal ; while the conditions 
 of his profession made him dependent upon great nobles, whose ways 
 and manners it was but natural for him to prefer to those of popular 
 throngs. He was could he help it ? an aristocrat by nature ; but 
 he was no follower of party, faction, or sect. The idea of an antithesis 
 between moral duties and political principles had not occurred to 
 him ; and in his judgement of the course of public affairs, as in the 
 conduct of his own manhood, he stood, one and whole, in Church 
 and State, steadfastly on the side of degree or Order, the dispensation 
 of God to man, and therefore on the side of Ordered Freedom, 
 as against that of the inevitable sequence of faction, tyranny, and 
 mob-rule. Whether and in whatever proportions he and the Makers 
 of Virginia had learnt these convictions from the same great teacher, 
 they, like him, had derived them from the same ever-flowing Source. 
 
 In this inquiry I may seem to have left aside one aspect of the 
 relations between the Makers of Virginia, on the one hand, and 
 Hooker and Shakespeare, on the other, But the question whether 
 the plays of Shakespeare in any way reflect the interaction between 
 the Puritan movement, in its successive phases, and English life and 
 thought in the period of his chief productivity, I must leave over 
 for discussion on a subsequent opportunity, and by a more competent 
 lecturer. 
 
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