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THE
READING OF SHAKESPEARE
THE READING OF
SHAKESPEARE
BY
JAMES MASON HOPPIN
PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF THE HISTORY
OF ART IN YALE UNIVERSITY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
fciterjrtbe pre#, Camfcribge
1906
COPYRIGHT 1906 BY JAMES MASON HOPP1N
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published April, iqob
CONTENTS
PAGE
LIFE AND LEARNING 4
STYLE . 18
NATURE AND ART 22
MORALITY 26
HISTORICAL PLAYS 39
COMEDIES 73
GREEK PLAYS 108
ROMAN TRAGEDIES 130
ITALIAN PLAYS . 157
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS 179
THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE
ALMOST every English-speaking man with liter-
ary tastes has had, at some time in his life, a bout
with Shakespeare, since this dramatist represents
the highest object of his literary curiosity, and it
may also be affirmed that one who possesses any
virility of mind is made stronger by the study of
Shakespeare ; our strenuous chief magistrate, it is
said, is fond of Shakespeare, and reads him for
refreshment while stretched before the fire in his
Montana log cabin. The subject itself of Shake-
speare aids us in our reading by its very magni-
tude.
Nature has produced three poets who stand like
mountain peaks higher than the rest Homer,
Dante, and Shakespeare. Homer delineated the
" throned gods" of Olympus, and gave expression
to the splendid Hellenic race ; Dante, leaving the
2 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
miserable strifes of Italian factions, tracked the
soul's flight into spiritual realms, following the
leadings of Celestial Love ; while Shakespeare
interpreted to us our common humanity, and was
the poet of universal humanity ; which of these
three poets is to be considered the greatest, de-
pends upon our nationality, trend of studies, and
sympathetic tastes.
The following brief talk on Shakespeare makes
no pretense to add anything new to such a vast
theme, and it originated in this wise : I spent the
summer of 1903 in the country a dreadfully rainy
summer and for recreation and instruction, I
took up the reading of Shakespeare's plays ; and
although I had been, all my life, more or less a
reader of Shakespeare in a cursory way, I con-
tinued this reading in a more regular manner,
though at intervals, until the present time, giving
myself to it, and enjoying the beauties of his work
from a purely literary point of view, not dwelling
too critically on them. In this year, 1903, and the
succeeding years I went through, more or less care-
fully, thirty-six plays, accompanying, it is true,
THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE. 3
the delightful task by reading Professor I^ouns-
bury's volumes on "Shakespeare as a Dramatic
Artist," and "Shakespeare and Voltaire;" but
leaving aside Dr. Furness's clean sweeping " Vari-
orum Shakespeare" and other critical and philo-
logic authors, truly rejoicing that I was born to
speak English and could read Shakespeare in his
own tongue. I did this, I may repeat, not only for
instruction but for enjoyment. In a true work of
art, be it literary or otherwise, there is always the
element of joy it gives delight because it aims for
perfection ; this is the meaning of aesthetics, which
is pleasure derived from the contemplation of
beauty in nature and art. A work of art may
have in it the element of the useful and practical,
but it also from its beauty awakes joy. Take any
of the arts Architecture, for example, on a Col-
lege campus : while there should be as much of the
ample space, air, and light of nature as possible,
and the grounds should be laid out with simple
taste, the buildings themselves should be of noble
form drawn from sound classic principles and of
essentially academic character, telling what they
4 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
are and the reason of them, so that the student who
daily passes to and fro is unconsciously touched by
their fitness and beauty and his mind is moved to
finer issues ; this is, imperceptibly, an education,
not only material but spiritual. These buildings
should not be merely for the inhabitation of a
flitting crowd of young men or for the reception of
books, needful as these are, but the edifices them-
selves should raise and cultivate the mind of many
generations by their true and artistic qualities.
Architecture, a manly art requiring accurate
thought, should be studied in connection with his-
tory, as one of the regular courses in a university
education.
LIFE AND LEARNING.
The first glimpse I ever caught of the living
Shakespeare, his actual personality, was of course
at Stratford-on-Avon, and there, above all, at the
old Edwardian Grammar School, where he learned
"small Latin and less Greek." I will speak of
the school more particularly soon.
UFE AND LEARNING.
5
Stratford-on-Avon was the place in the whole
world for Shakespeare to be born. It is situated
in a midland county in the heart of "merrie Eng-
land," where its quiet rural profile is reflected in
the stream of " the softly flowing Avon," in which
the tall osiers and brilliant wild flowers fringe its
banks ; though not so sad as poor Ophelia's crown
of rosemary and rue. The bright green meadows,
and the silly sheep browsing on them, the elegant
but small spire of Stratford church in which the
poet was buried, the gently swelling green hills
around, and the low, ancient, cross-timbered
houses make even now a picture of the olden
time, and in its almost unchanged character seem-
ing to promise, at least, that the memory of the
poet of nature would be sacredly kept till ' ' all the
breathers in the world were dead."
The antique grammar school, dating from 1482,
with rugged stone gables, stands at the turn of
"Scholar's Lane," and not far from the church.
Its courtyard in the rear of the building is the
same as when the young Shakespeare played in it
at marbles and leap-frog.
6 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
I procured a key from the teacher living not
many houses off, and entered the upper room,
where three boys sat at their desks apparently
intent on their lessons, having been kept in after
school for misdemeanors. They were curly pated,
sturdy little fellows, entirely equal to the occasion,
and I have no doubt that they regarded the inci-
dent as an opportune diversion from their enforced
task. I seated myself in the teacher's chair and
questioned them about their studies ; among other
things, one of the boys informed me gratuitously
that sometimes they were feruled it may be when,
in the language of Shakespeare's time, they had
' ' profited nothing in their books and failed in
their accidence." From some occult reason, I
know not exactly what, I seemed to find here the
real Shakespeare, full of life (albeit the boy, or
youth) more than at Henley street where he was
born, or in Shottery Cottage where he wooed
Anne Hathaway ; for here he started on that
intellectual career which left behind him a ray of
ever-expanding light.
The school-room is long and low, the ribbed
AND LEARNING. 7
beams above are massive and black with age, the
light coming through small window openings.
The desks are of oak, fearfully hacked, the boys
having wreaked their revenge on them for their
tasks and whippings. The oldest boy of the three
was a handsome little fellow, and he showed me
some writing-books of school exercises, and gave
me two or three of the condemned ones in the con-
flagration basket, and told me with a grin, when I
asked him if his name were " Will Shakespeare,"
that there was a boy in town whose name was
"Willie Shakespeare. 1 '
On my leaving, the boys said they would give
back the key to the master, and I let them have it ;
but going down stairs it occurred to me that I
ought not to deliver up the key of the fortress to
the prisoners, who might use it for their escape ;
and so, though I hated to do it, I went back and
took the key away from them, for they were smil-
ing and gentlemanly rogues, and (though this may
have been but a surmise) they nearly tricked me
in regard to the key would the boy Shakespeare
have been more successful ?
8 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
In regard to the controverted question of Shake-
speare's learning, his education, whatever it was,
was commenced at this school. Latin, or " Latin-
ity," as it was named, was the main part of the
education of this period, and how much of it and
of other learning Shakespeare there acquired (for
he must have remained at school until he was six-
teen or seventeen years old, and such a marvel -
ously keen youth could have learned a great deal
in that time) we can hardly know. His school
knowledge embraced the " humanities," as they
were called, that is, Latin and Greek, using the
crabbed compendiums then in vogue, like the Sen-
tentia pueriles, and he read portions of Virgil, Ovid,
Plutarch, and other classic authors, learning also
to speak Latin after a fashion ; then he left the
Stratford school and joined the Earl of Leicester's
company of ' ' Morality players, ' ' who performed
in Stratford, going with them to London. In
London, from small beginnings, he gradually rose,
and at that period of his life he is known to have
been an omnivorous reader of books, a meddler in
all knowledge, which he had to be, because when
UFE AND LEARNING. 9
he became a manager this implied also a purveyor
and provider, a writer of fresh plays, in order
to meet the demands of the English stage at a
time of mental ferment and growth, " the spa-
cious times of Great Elizabeth " a drama in
itself. It was a period of discovery, when a new
world was opening and new lands were found.
He read the voyages of Sir Walter Raleigh, Drake,
Hawkins, the Gilberts, and other sea-captains,
stimulating the wildest fancies. He also read his-
tories of European lands, from Scandinavia to
Italy ; stories of old Rome, before Niebuhr had
swept them away ; traditions of his own country
and its stirring civil wars and French wars ; in
fact everything came to his net. His knowledge
of affairs and familiarity with law terms came from
his helping his father and being himself frequently
in the courts; and above all, he had the art of
gaining friends among the educated classes, not
only among literary men, dramatists, and poets, but
accomplished noblemen of high culture. There
was in especial one friend, Florio, the emi-
nent Latin, Greek, Italian, and French scholar,
10 THK READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
translator of "Montaigne's Essays," and student
of Magdalen College, Oxford, a man of great
industry and learning ; and it is said, though this
has been disputed, that there exists a work of
Florio's with Shakespeare's autograph ; at least
there are allusions in his plays to this scholar,
which show his familiarity with Florio, so that he
did not have to go to Lord Bacon for his learning,
since he had those whom he could more easily con-
sult, who could direct his reading and fill his
readily assimilating mind with literary allusions
and lore, while his genius appropriated all accessi-
ble wisdom. There is no fear that Lord Bacon's
cryptogram will ever be found in Shakespeare's
tomb.
As to Shakespeare's more intimate knowledge of
nature and human life, leaving out of the question
his poetic genius, he had the advantage, when at
home in Stratford, of living amid natural scenes
and in the immediate neighborhood of Arden
Forest, in which his youthful poaching pranks led
him to an early acquaintance with the intricacies
of the forest and the law.
AND LEARNING. u
He was married and was a father before his
majority. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was seven
or eight years older than himself, and they were
early betrothed, which in those days constituted a
legal, but irregular marriage ; while his wife must
have had some power, good or otherwise, upon
him, yet a far finer and profounder feminine influ-
ence was that which his mother, Mary Arden,
exerted on him.
There is a tradition, not authenticated, that after
Shakespeare's death Anne Hathaway married a
second time. Mary Arden, though now fallen to
a yeomanry life, might be termed a gentlewoman
of old family, whose impress is seen in his poetry.
From his mother he inherited his love of flowers,
birds, animals, and trees, and of the solitudes
and beauties of nature, and he must have felt
that he had some rights in Arden Forest and its
deer, since it once belonged (as well as an exten-
sive territory in Warwickshire) to his mother's
family, giving their name to this whole region,
especially to the wood itself, where, wandering
and musing, he laid the forms and surroundings
of many plays.
12 THE; READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
He drew, too, his gentle spirit from his mother.
"Gentle and honest," Ben Jonson called him,
and his contemporaries speak of his gentle breed-
ing, upright character, and refined tastes, and he
gave proof of this in the select company he kept.
It has indeed been affirmed that Shakespeare was
an aristocrat, but if this were true, it might be
said that it was born in him and was no affecta-
tion. He had the English love of lords and kings,
and he walked among them like a king to the
manner born, and could also scathe them for their
pride and oppression with terrible words. He was
nature's nobleman, and was too big a man to be
an exclusive aristocrat. Ben Jonson once again
wrote of him, " I loved the man, and do honor to
his memory this side of idolatry. He was indeed
most honest, and of an open and free nature, had
an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle
expressions." Ben Jonson's relations to Shake-
speare throw strong light on the character of both.
They were nearly contemporaries, Shakespeare
being some eight or nine years older. They com-
menced their careers as writers for the stage at
UFE AND LEARNING. 13
about the same time. Shakespeare probably came
to London in 1585, going through the different
grades of stage service, while Jonson began his
work for the stage in London some six years
later, in his learned and famous dramas pursuing
the ancient Greek forms ; while Shakespeare still
remained a free lover of nature.
Jonson, though critical of his own methods,
looked upon Shakespeare as his superior. The
judgment pronounced by John Addington Symonds,
that Jonson bore no jealousy towards Shakespeare,
cannot be gainsaid. Jonson' s line,
"Shine forth, thou star of poets,"
sounded the keynote of his real feeling for Shake-
speare. This * ' sweetness and light, ' ' a phrase
which seems to have been invented to describe
Shakespeare, came, we cannot but think, from his
mother, Mary Arden ; and yet his father, John
Shakespeare, who by writers in the next centuries
of bitter controversy about Shakespeare's dramatic
art was called a "butcher" and other terms
meant to be lowering, was a man of no mean stock
14 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
or reputation. He married one of old family, by
name and race, at least, a lady, though living now
in yeomanry degree ; was himself high bailiff of
Stratford, and his ancestry dated back to Saxon
times. His forefathers doubtless fought at Bos-
worth Field near by Stratford, and in the Wars of
the Roses. The martial name of Shakespeare
was probably won in this way, so that his coat of
arms bearing a slanting spear was no misnomer ;
Shakespeare himself was tenacious of this coat of
arms, and took pains to have it certified in the
Herald's College.
When he returned from Ixmdon, to live some
twenty years in Stratford-on- Avon , owing to his
thrifty habits and honesty he not only helped his
father in money difficulties, but he had amassed
considerable wealth and built the " New House,"
so-called, where he entertained many of the lead-
ing dramatists and poets of the day, also men of
courtly rank. This constant reference to His hon-
esty is enough to quash any charge of forgery or
double dealing in respect to his plays, a charge
never mentioned or dreamed of in his lifetime or
UFE AND LEARNING. 15
the centuries immediately after. " Honest and
gentle ' ' indeed ! Shakespeare was what his friends
claimed, and what even his rivals and enemies did
not gainsay. But as to his being an aristocrat, it
should be remembered that he was no mere aristo-
crat. He rose above caste into a wider world of
humanity. He merited the name of democrat in
the nobler sense of that word. He loved the peo-
ple and his humble neighbors, and knew and
entered into their moods and merry-makings. He
was of the same independent spirit with them, and
in his youth even defied the lord of the manor.
Voltaire, in a green fit of poisoned envy, called
Shakespeare " a village buffoon who had not writ-
ten two decent lines," but Voltaire was forced
humbly to recede from these words, though he
hated Shakespeare because he upset his own
precious classic ideas of the drama.
The life of Shakespeare from 1564 to 1616, com-
prising fifty-two years, runs for some thirty years
parallel to the reign of Elizabeth, one of the most
memorable epochs of English history; and his death
removed from the quiet community of Warwick-
1 6 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
shire its greatest figure. He was buried in Strat-
ford church in the mid-place of honor of the chan-
cel, under a handsome monument, on which a brass
tablet is placed inscribed with the doggerel verse
of blessing and cursing which I for one do not
believe Shakespeare wrote, but that it was the
work of some simple-minded sexton or official, for
the reason that it was then the custom to remove
the remains of the dead from tombs in order to
make room for other bodies. Here was set up on
the wall a wooden and woodeny bust, which has
almost lost what value it had by being renovated
and repainted, and the original color of the hair
and eyes has disappeared.
Shakespeare's business, if it may be so called,
was simply that of a writer of plays for the Globe
and Blackfriars theaters, of which he was an actor
and partial owner ; and it was a life-work of the
vastness of which he was probably unconscious in
regard to its influence on the public mind, renew-
ing English historic patriotism, raising literature,
cleansing the stage of many of its worst faults,
reaching the government itself in its truer ideals
UFE AND LEARNING. 17
of thought and policy. From a low place he
mounted to a high one in the estimation of the
times, and was honored as a friend of the people
and of the loftiest in the land.
Shakespeare's life proved, if nothing else, his
own modesty, since so few facts of his life are left
us. He did not talk of himself, apparently, even
to his best friends, but he made the world and
humanity the confidant of his thoughts. If he
were an ambitious man he did not show it, for
he seemed careless of his literary works and of
future fame ; he did not think of filling the world
with his renown, but his pipe was cut from the
reeds of the gentle Avon. His friend and fellow
actor, Richard Burbage, spoke freely of his London
career ; and we know from incidental remarks that
there is as true a certification of his personality as
that of Ben Jonson. There was no mystery. He
walked and talked among the dramatists of his
day as the chief of them. He contested the prize
of wit with Ben Jonson at the " Mermaid Tavern ;"
with Edmund Spenser, he flattered Queen Eliza-
beth, yet Shakespeare did so with a less artificial
1 8 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
and more spontaneous grace ; both were men above
the herd of sycophantic writers, men who could
bestow immortality on monarchs.
STYLE.
No one better exemplified the truth of the old
French adage ' ' The style is the man ' ' than did
Shakespeare. His genius made his style what it
was. He was the poet (the maker) of his own
style.
I will not, at present, enlarge on the great
theme of Shakespeare's imagination, which peopled
earth and sky, and was so illuminating an ele-
ment of his style that it made it "of imagination
all compact," and gave him the power to see
things that did not visibly exist as if they were
real, enabling him to walk the Roman forum like
one who lived in ancient Rome, and to see the
bottom of the ocean as by a flash-light, revealing
its hidden treasures, sunken wrecks, and. ghastly
sights.
Freshly reading Shakespeare's plays, I have been
struck with what has been called his ' ' matchless
STYI<E. 1 9
use of words. ' ' In the development of the English
language from Chaucer's time to the present,
although the number of words has increased from
the increase of learning and the introduction
of foreign terms, it reached its highest point of
strength and richness in King James's version of
the Bible and in Shakespeare's dramas ; for noth-
ing before or since has overtopped this culmina-
tion of the English tongue, the strength of which
comes in a great degree from the use of the Saxon,
which, in Shakespeare, amounts to sixty per cent,
and forms the substratum of his style ; the English
Bible has about the same. Milton has less than
three per cent. Shakespeare's language is ribbed
with Saxon granite. No words, for an example,
can be briefer or weightier than the sentence from
"Macbeth:"
"Sagg with doubt, or shake with fear."
Shakespeare has, notwithstanding, a restricted
vocabulary, not exceeding fifteen thousand words.
"His affluence of language," according to Mr.
Marsh, "arises from the variety and combination
2O THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
rather than the numerical abundance of words.
He gave, more than any one, the English character
to our language, but could also employ words of
classical elevation to lend gravity, elegance, and
majesty to the style, whether in the form of pre-
cise expression, or that of the highest soar of the
imagination. There is a spiritual quality in his
English expression of the history and spirit of the
race, in which in all its earthliness the spiritual
has predominated, and which has been handed
down from northern conquerors, and that is the
secret of Shakespeare's power, clothing the mys-
terious sympathies of the soul in living words."
For myself, I believe that even so great a genius
as Shakespeare could not have written one of his
plays in French or Italian. It must be confessed
that Shakespeare's grammar, at times, differs from
Lindley Murray's, so that one can believe the
assertion of Richard Grant White that English
is a " grammarless tongue." The loose relation
of words in Shakespeare's sentences, the non-
agreement of singulars and plurals, the separa-
tion of object and subject, would be looked upon
STYLE. 21
now as faults, but his meaning is clearly con-
veyed except when, from its depths, we learn the
thought with difficulty ; so clear, indeed, is the
sense, that prose and poetry are harmonized, easily
tripping from the tongue, and minor grammatical
inconsistencies are not considered. The meaning
is of more importance than the style the life than
the form. It is, however, to be said that, to most
persons, the practical use of reading Shakespeare
is his English. A great many people have been
inclined to regard Addison as the standard of
style, but it would be far better to make Shake-
speare our master and teacher in the use of the
English language. A word more might be added
here ; while Shakespeare's relation to his native
tongue was all powerful, his influence on the lan-
guages of other races and nations was important.
He was the maker of English in its present form, as
Dante was of Italian and Luther of German ; he
used English with such freedom, force, and absolute
simplicity of nature that he went to the root of the
English language, the erd-form, as a German philos-
opher would call it, so that his works and poetry
22 THE HEADING OF SHAKESPEARE.
become a basis and nucleus, producing a constantly
increasing form of assimilation and unification in
all families of languages springing from the same
stock. The influence of literature itself is a
mighty one ; it is silent, invisible, and pervasive.
England's great writers and masters, especially of
the earlier stronger period, constitute an ever-
growing influence of character and brotherhood
between England and America that is stronger
than commerce or treaty.
NATURE AND ART.
In the deeper question of nature and art in
Shakespeare's style, it might be said by way of
prefatory remark that Shakespeare was the origi-
nator of the Romantic School. He was the creator
of this school in literature, not only in England
but in all Europe. Goethe is his child as well as
Victor Hugo. He was not trained in the classical
school of dramatic art, but he wrought directly
from nature without art ; yet it is absurd to say
that Shakespeare was not an artist, for he makes*
NATURE AND ART. 23
use of the terms "art" and "nature" with so keen a
discrimination, that while distinguishing them, he
saw their intimate relations and common source,
even as he says in a passage of " Winter's Tale,"
' ' This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather ; but
The art itself is nature."
Nature does not work without art, and the great
artist is he who perceives and interprets the secret
of nature and can ' ' mend ' ' nature. While we do
not detect Shakespeare's art, it is so real that, like
nature itself, it is ever fresh and new. His works
might have been written yesterday. They do not
grow obsolete, so that we are ever moved by their
power. In reading Shakespeare's works we won-
der at their modernness. The language is plastic in
his hand, and he moulds it at his will. He is its
master and it does not master him. It does not
grow archaic like the language of Ben Jonson, or
Beaumont, or Sir Philip Sidney, or Edmund Spen-
ser, since he employed not the language of book
but the language of everyday life ; and sometimes
it is even slang. In " King John" a person talks
24 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
of ' bounce ' just as it is now applied to a pushing
act or man ; in " Pericles " ' dad ' or ' old dad ' is
talked of as an irreverent boy nowadays might
apply it to his father ; and in " Troilus and Cres-
sida " the word ' rich ' is employed as we say jok-
ingly ' that is rich.' Shakespeare did not speak
of aesthetics, because this word was not then
invented, but for what is fit he makes use of the
Latin word ' incarnadine ' with magnificent effect
in " Macbeth." He keeps in touch with the peo-
ple and with nature, so that, as he walked in the
noisy Strand of London, he felt the quiet of Arden
Wood, and pictured in his mind its shadowy
depths. His business was, as has been said, writ-
ing plays for the London stage, and so to address
the people that they understood him and roared
with laughter at his jokes. His puns were execra-
ble, and we believe in the saying that a poor pun is
as good as a good one if it only makes people
laugh, and that was his object "to split the ears
of the groundlings;" but this senseless play on
words vanishes when he is seriously bent, and his
wit, which is the product of thought, shines, as it
NATURE AND ART. 25
does, for example, in the scene of Hamlet with the
actors, which is as pure subjective analysis as
anything in " Quintilian's Institutes."
Shakespeare's art, vilified during the two suc-
ceeding centuries in the battle of critics, is now
regarded as the highest. He broke the bonds
of classic art, but it is especially because he did
not observe the "unities," and for this cause he
was set down to be without art, and no true drama-
tist. -5schylus and Sophocles he did not regard,
but, great poets as they were, why should they
give rules to a greater poet ?
I have been impressed with Shakespeare's unity
of aim, a unity springing not from outward form
but from inner purpose. No matter what his-
torians have to say about "Richard III." it is
Shakespeare's " Richard III." for all time, and he
teaches what he means to teach. Everything
bends to his object, no matter what stands in the
way. In " Julius Caesar " the character of Caesar
is interpreted by the poet, who is evidently more
interested in Brutus than in Caesar, and the hero
of the play is Brutus and not Caesar. The lesson
26 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
is the adamantine patriotic conscience of Brutus,
and not the imperial will of Caesar. Compared
with such inner unity of purpose and design, the
outer unities of mere time, place, and circumstance,
so carefully observed by Racine and Voltaire, are
small things. In "Antony and Cleopatra," a
scene laid in Alexandria is followed in the next
act by a scene laid in Rome ; but what matter, if
Shakespeare has taught his lesson of a world's
empire lost through illicit love? He has put a
new stamp on the coin. He develops a conception
in the play which gives it an original value that
makes it differ from the work of any other drama-
tist, and this is art that outdoes nature.
MORAUTY.
The morality of Shakespeare cannot be reduced
to a philosophical system either of ethics or psy-
chology, for it was dynamic and spontaneous ; for,
to illustrate this in pure art, Pheidias did not work
on ethical lines or rules when he made the statue
of ' ' Olympian Zeus ' ' representing the supreme
ruler in Hellenic mythology, nor did Michael
MORALITY. 27
Angelo when he carved the " Moses" embodying
his conception of moral law, but these geniuses
wrought from a deeper insight and instinctive
sense of the true as Shakespeare did. His humor
also sprang warm from his heart, and because it
had to do with man it was moral. Of such genial
humor old Thomas Fuller said, ' ' it hath no teeth
or nails to tear or devour thy brother." It was a
quick sense of the ludicrous kept in bounds by a
loving heart that went out to all humanity, not
censorious or mean, but helpful to enable man to
bear the ills of life, an inestimable quality that car-
ries one over the hard places more easily, like a
wagon with good springs, and following the Greek
law of "moderation" moderation in judgment
and act ; and if a man has no touch of this humor
we might say of him, " Let me fall into the hand
of God and not into the hand of man."
In regard to Shakespeare's morality in the ordi-
nary sense of the term, he was not untrue to
the principle of right. He was too great not to
recognize this universal law of righteousness, and
in his plays he almost vehemently upholds virtue.
28 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
In Stratford, after his youthful days (if the story
of deer stalking has any truth), his character and
reputation were good. He undoubtedly felt the
moral influence of the beginnings of the Reforma-
tion in England, and contrary to the narrow judg-
ment of Carlyle in this instance, he was more of a
Protestant than a Catholic. The historical plays
of "King John" and "Richard III." are full of
the newly awakened spirit of resistance to Papal
authority, policy, and doctrine. "The Reforma-
tion," says the author of "English Past and
Present," "was commencing to throw off the ever-
lasting pupilage in which Rome would have held
the nations, an assertion that they had come of
age, and that not through the church but directly
through Christ, they would address themselves to
God." Shakespeare's allusions to Christ, which
are not few, are always tender and devout, and
his citations manifest his familiarity with the
Bible, in whose heights and depths his soul had
sympathy. Goethe says of him, "You would
think while reading his plays that you stood
before the enclosed awful books of fate, while the
MORALITY. 29
wind of most impassioned life was howling through
the leaves, tossing them freely to and fro."
Shakespeare, in his most furious moods, will be
found maintaining the moral law implanted in the
mind ; he makes wicked men wear the mask of
virtue and do homage to their own nature, being
created in God's image.
" There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts."
Shakespeare knew what sin and its consequences
were. Ulrici, the German critic, says, "It is a
wonder that a man who possessed such depths of
passion and knowledge of sin could have so
controlled his life that he seems to have been,
after his youthful period, respected and beloved."
Ulrici adds support to what has been said respect-
ing Shakespeare's idea of God and man, and that
he was decidedly Protestant.
In Shakespeare's development of character in a
play which brings on the stage all vile plots and
actions, the honesty of his mind appears, although
Shakespeare is without doubt open to the charge
30 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
of coarse language, such as now could not be
tolerated. He does not, however, deal in innuendo,
and he makes his lewd characters plainly what
they are in a way that befits them, bringing them
into derision and contempt. It was a coarse age.
Queen Elizabeth sometimes swore like a trooper ;
but this fact of its being a rough and gross age
does not excuse him, and yet no one but an essen-
tially clean-minded man could have drawn female
characters like Cordelia, Ophelia, Miranda, Desde-
mona, and the daughter of King Cymbeline, in
whom a singular purity shines, clothing them in
angelic garments ; while on the other hand, Cleo-
patra, serpent of the Nile in subtle grace, and
immeasurably the superior of the others in intel-
lect, shows a luxurious spirit that could wantonly
destroy Antony, "third pillar of Rome," while
waiting for other Caesars to ruin. Vice gains
nothing by Cleopatra's allurements, but her sen-
suality is stripped bare, and no one but Shake-
speare could have made her at once so lovely and
so vile.
Yet Shakespeare does not exhaust a character,
MORAUTY. 31
nor does he assume the part of omniscience. He
sometimes goes contrary to our natural expecta-
tion or to our views, as man judges fragmentarily
and short-sightedly. Shakespeare judges more as
the Bible does, which book he studied, and which
is the true transcript of human nature, because
man's spirit is a great deep, a blending of good
and evil, of wisdom and folly, strength and weak-
ness, swayed now by this motive and now by that ;
capable of vast effort, but perishing before the
moth ; a creature of heaven and earth, higher than
the angels and sometimes lower than the brutes, a
being of passions and affections as well as of
rational judgments, and as diversified and unac-
countable as the nature he lives in. In a word,
morality is at the foundation of Shakespeare's
greatness as a dramatic author. It is the quality
which discerns the true in things and is at the
same time genial and just, springing from the
heart ; as Goethe says in Faust,
"Gefiihlistalles."
There is one fact about Shakespeare's morality
32 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
which should not be forgotten, and that is, in the
period of dramatic art which followed Shakespeare,
or the age of the Charleses, of Dryden, Congreve,
and Wycherley, the drama allied itself to the profli-
gacy of the times, to the forces of temptation and
evil, while Shakespeare's plays did not do so. He
was not a seducer to vice, and his corruption, if it
might be so called, does not corrupt. It did not
stick and smutch, and we pass over the ribald
speeches of ' ' the fat knight ' ' and do not remem-
ber them, since they are the reflections of a gross
time rather than emanations of his mind. Often
he suddenly rises from earth and its baseness, and
in a moment we are lifted into the clear empyrean
of most delicate poetry, like Ariel's song, heard
above the cries of drunken seamen, and touched
by rainbow tints and the breath of flowers. Even
the bestial Caliban, when freedom comes to him,
grows poetic and sings of the deep secrets of nature
that he has learned from his witchdam Sycorax.
Shakespeare says :
" A golden mind
Stoops not to shows of dross."
MORALITY. 33
Shakespeare is now not so much played as he is
read, and this shows progress in the appreciation
of his literary genius, but he surely should be read
with a broad and generous mind, for he believed
in the greatness of man's spirit, and that every
human being is based on the moral law in the con-
stitution of his nature, so that ' ' the whole is mir-
rored in the individual."
The chief object of this little book is intended
to be my own impressions, especially of Shake-
speare's plays, one and several, and in these intro-
ductory remarks thus far, I will allude to but one
play, as it has a bearing on what has been already
said in regard to the moral aim of Shakespeare
OTHELLO, THE MOOE OF VENICE. This play
has a deep moral ; it is drawn from a story found
in an Italian novel of the same title, by one
Giraldi Cinthio, it being Shakespeare's lordly way
of seizing on the stories and plots of other authors
and making them new, no matter how often these
had been used by dramatists, as, for illustration,
there were three Parthenons on the Acropolis
before the Parthenon of Iktinos was reared out of
3
34 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
their ruins. Othello is not the central figure. He
is a Saracen soldier, and should be represented
with the finely-cut features, manly figure, tall,
powerful form of that Arab race, specimens of
which are now to be seen in Arabia and Egypt,
who with resistless force conquered Northern Africa
and the southern provinces of Spain, rising superior
to their Christian neighbors in the arts of civiliza-
tion, but enervated by centuries of peace were
driven out of Spain. Othello was a brave soldier,
laconic and proud, but capable of true affection.
He was absorbed in his love of Desdemona, and
talked to her freely of his stirring and perilous
life. It is not, however, Othello who forms the
central character of this play, since amid all the
splendid and changing scenes of this drama there
is one other figure on whom the mind of the reader
becomes fixed. He is not only everywhere, but
his personality is the occasion and cause of the
action of others. He grows terribly fascinating.
His presence, imperturbable, sometimes smiling,
polite in his address, looks out from every scene,
whether at Venice or Cyprus, in the council hall,
MORALITY. 35
the midnight revel, the chamber of love, and
the chamber of death. lago pulls the string
that moves each tongue and arm. He points
Roderigo's sword at his friend's breast ; he
prompts the intemperate fury of Cassio ; he brings
tears into the undimmed eyes of Desdemona; he
unsettles the steady mind of Othello, and "the
tragic loading of the bed" is his work. He is a
man without humanity, a polished intellect with-
out a ray of intellectual elevation. When Richard
III. cries out on Bosworth Field,
" A thousand hearts are great within my bosom,"
we almost forget the tyrant and murderer, and
wish him a soldier's grave; when the usurping
king of Denmark soliloquizes pathetically about
his crime and kneels to ask heaven's forgiveness,
we yield him a kind of pity and feel that though
a deep offender he has some feeling ; but lago has
no such "compunctious visitings," and he scoffs
at the present and the future. While he does not
profess to be an atheist, for the reason that that
would be a blunder to his exquisite sense of evil,
36 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
he undermines God's throne by making everything
honest, pure, lovely, and of good report, the object
of his wicked wit. He has been compared to the
Mephistopheles of Goethe, but the incomparable
superiority of Shakespeare is seen in his discard-
ing the supernatural ; for while Mephistopheles
amuses by his preternatural tricks, and we marvel
at his cleverness, we tremble at lago, and draw a
long breath when he is put out of the "world.
The seeming want of motive in lago has been
observed, which Coleridge has called his ' ' motive-
less malignity." A hint or so that lago himself
lets drop regarding disappointed ambition and an
undefined suspicion of his wife's honesty are the
only intangible causes to account for his conduct.
He did not set motive squarely over against action,
as is done in psychology or mechanics, but in this
way Shakespeare shows his profound knowledge of
human nature, which is too obscure to be analyzed
in a court of law or confined to a system of philoso-
phy. It was enough for a nature like lago's to
have a nobler nature like Othello's before him to
rouse " the cruel devil of his will."
MORALITY. 37
The two moral features of lago's character, as I
read them, are entire selfishness and constitutional
hypocrisy. In a conversation with Roderigo, to
whom in his contempt he was not afraid to expose
himself somewhat, he says :
" Were I the Moor I would not be lago :
In following him, I follow but myself."
While outwardly subservient to others, he serves
no one but himself. In his advice to Roderigo, he
remarks :
" I have looked upon the world for four times seven years;
and since I could distinguish betwixt a benefit and an injury,
I never found a man that knew how to love himself. ' '
His hypocrisy is the only thing he does naturally,
and he blurts out :
" I am not what I am."
He sneeringly says :
"Though I do hate him as I do hell pains,
Yet for necessity of present life,
I must show out a flag and sign of love,
Which is indeed but sign."
He is hail-fellow with the youthful drunkard Cas-
38 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
sio, and yet with entire grace he plays the saint,
and tells Othello :
"I lack iniquity sometimes to do me service."
Othello calls him to the last "honest lago " and
"my just friend."
The chief intellectual characteristic of lago is
his insight, or his analytic perception of character,
penetrating to the concealed causes of men's
actions. He discovers human weaknesses, and
takes advantage of this discovery by adapting
himself to the disposition of every person with
whom he has to deal and plying him with baits
that may prove successful to his overthrow.
He turns to account the smallest circumstances,
finding that men are ill-balanced, and moved not
by earthquakes, but shadows and sunshine ; by
never neglecting these small things, and in the cau-
tious way in which he uses them to plant sus-
picion in the mind of Othello the mysterious
tone, the abstracted repetition, the obscure mean-
ing, the indefinite hint he winds up the agonized
curiosity of the man to a pitch of excitement in
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 39
which calm judgment is confused ; in such methods
are seen his consummate knowledge of human life ;
and, indeed, lago's practical philosophy would, in
a good man, be worthy of imitation, but he has no
corresponding faith to save and to sanctify his
human will ; he entirely ignores the divine will
and love, and regards himself as maker of himself :
" T is in ourselves that we are thus and thus."
He brings every thought and passion under the
control of an iron determination, and, assaulting
the most divine of human qualities, he exclaims :
"It is merely ^ a lust of the blood, and a permission of
the will."
This, in fact r is the secret of lago's control over
other minds, to lead them at his pleasure, and
none can doubt that the character of this consum-
mate villain is a tremendous sermon of the fearful
capacities for evil in a human soul that throws off
a higher rule over its actions.
HISTORICAL PLAYS.
Goethe, though a great poet, showed neverthe-
less his personal and national limitations, as, for
40 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
example, in his Italian and classical dramas there
is a Teutonic subjectivity of thought which makes
his characters talk and act like Germans ; in a
similar manner Homer himself describes Greeks,
the Greek type of race, fierce, sensuous, eloquent,
loving beauty, art, and song. On the other hand,
Shakespeare's personages are not English solely,
but are beings who might have lived in any period
or land, and, in this respect, he passed beyond the
limitations of race and nation, reaching the deeper
elements of common humanity, depicting living
men as they are in childhood, youth, or old age,
the high and low, the good and bad. They are
real men and women, whose various costumes and
speech still cover a nature with common wants
and passions, happy or sorrowful, loving or hating,
base or pure ; yet while dealing thus with life
whereyer found, it is evident that Shakespeare
loves England. As most of what are called
Shakespeare's Historical Plays are laid in England
and belong originally to the more youthful period
of authorship, I will speak first of these, although
some of them may not be wholly Shakespeare's in
HISTORICAL, PI^AYS. 41
their plot. Of the first two plays, "KING JOHN"
and "RICHARD H," I will say but a few words ;
but what were the history of England without
Shakespeare's plays to give the color, form, and
pressure of those earlier times? Other modern
histories of England are more like academic essays
after the style of Thucydides and Sallust, with the
author's own philosophic generalizations. I would
except the great history of Gibbon, flowing like a
majestic river through a thousand years, bearing
on its tide all characters and events, great and
small ; but medieval England, with its gorgeous
pageants, the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," its
chivalry and fightings, its fierce ' ' Wars of the
Roses" that drenched England with blood, and
stubborn British valor on the fields of France this
England was illuminated by the vivid light of
Shakespeare's genius.
Great personages walked over the scene as if
alive. These plays were not political essays on the
government of the times, as the marvelous pen of
Lord Bacon might have written, though they give
penetrating glimpses into England's political his-
42 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
tory. The reader becomes one in time with these
scenes, and is an absorbed looker-on.
KING JOHN.
The first of the historical plays in point of time
is ' ' King John. ' ' This play with that of ' ' Richard
II." is of less importance than the rest. "King
John" was an earlier work, recast in 1591 and com-
pleted in 1595. This king himself, as is known,
was a weak and treacherous tyrant. He was no
hero, and there was no trace in him of the great-
ness of the Norman line, except, perhaps, his
physical beauty, at least if he is truly repre-
sented in the bronze monument in Gloucester
Cathedral.
The inimitable pathos of the conversation
between the "little Prince" Arthur and Hubert,
the dreadful display of red-hot irons to burn out
the eyes, the boyish pleadings from the heart, are
fitted to totally overcome Hubert's stern resolve.
What could be more winningly touching than the
words of Arthur ? The dialogue, so simple in lan-
guage and of almost childlike tenderness, yet so
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 43
wonderfully qualified to move the most iron will !
This scene is as fine as anything in the great poet's
own works :
Arthur "Good morrow, Hubert."
Hubert " Good morrow, little prince."
Arthur "As little prince, having so great a title to be
more prince, as may be. You are sad."
Hubert " Indeed, I have been merrier."
Arthur " Mercy on me !
Methinks nobody should be sad but I :
Yet, I remember, when I was in France,
Young gentlemen would be as sad as night,
Only from wantonness. By my Christendom,
So I were out of prison and kept sheep,
I should be as merry as the day is long ;
And so I would be here, but that I doubt
My uncle practises more harm to me :
He is afraid of me and I of him :
Is it my fault that I was Geffrey's son ?
No, indeed, is't not ; and I would to heaven
I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert."
Hubert [Aside} " If I talk to him, with his innocent prate
He will awake my mercy which lies dead :
Therefore I will be sudden and dispatch."
Arthur * ' Are you sick, Hubert ? you look pale to-day :
In sooth, I would you were a little sick,
44 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
That I might sit all night and watch with you :
I warrant I love you more than you do me."
Hubert [Aside] "His words do take possession of my
bosom.
Read here, young Arthur. [Showing a paper]
[Aside"] How now, foolish rheum !
Turning dispiteous torture out of door !
I must be brief, lest resolution drop
Out at mine eyes in tender womanish tears.
Can you not read it ? is it not fair writ ? "
Arthur "Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect :
Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes ? '*
Hubert " Young boy, I must."
Arthur ' ' And will you ? "
Hubert " And I will."
Arthur" Have you the heart ? When your head did
but ache,
I knit my handkerchief about your brows,
The best I had, a princess wrought it me,
And I did never ask it you again :
And with my hand at midnight held your head,
And, like the watchful minutes to the hour,
Still and anon cheer 'd up the heavy time,
Saying, ' What lack you ?' and ' Where lies your grief?'
Or, What good love may I perform for you ?'
Many a poor man's son would have lain still
And ne'er have spoke a loving word to you ;
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 45
But you at your sick service had a prince,
Nay, but you may think my love was crafty love,
And call it cunning : do, and if you will :
If heaven be pleased that you must use me ill,
Why then you must. Will you put out mine eyes ?
These eyes that never did nor never shall
So much as frown on you."
Hubert " I have sworn to do it ;
And with hot irons must I burn them out."
Arthur " Ah, none but in this iron age would do it 1
The iron of itself, though heat red-hot
Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears
And quench his fiery indignation
Even in the matter of mine innocence,
Nay, after that, consume away in rust,
But for containing fire to harm mine eye.
Are you more stubborn hard than hammer'd iron ?
An if an angel should have come to me
And told me Hubert should put out mine eyes,
I would not have believed him, no tongue but Hubert's."
Hubert " Come forth."
{Re-enter attendants with cord, irons, etc.}
" Do as I bid you do. ' '
Arthur" O, save me, Hubert, save me ! my eyes are out
Even with the fierce looks of these bloody men."
Hubert. "Give me the iron, I say, and bind him here."
[Stamps.
46 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
i
Arthur. 11 Alas, what need you be so boisterous rough?
I will not struggle, I will stand stone-still.
For heaven's sake, Hubert, let me not be bound !
Nay, hear me, Hubert, drive these men away,
And I will sit as quiet as a lamb ;
I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word,
Nor look upon the iron angerly ;
Thrust but these men away, and I'll forgive you,
Whatever torment you do put me to. M
Hubert " Go, stand within ; let me alone with him.'
ist Attend. "\ am best pleased to be from such a deed.*'
[Exeunt Attendants.]
Arthur " Alas, I then have chid away my friend !
He hath a stern look, but a gentle heart :
Let him come back, that his compassion may
Give life to yours."
Hubert " Come, boy, prepare yourself."
Arthur "Is there no remedy ? "
Hubert "None, but to lose your eyes."
Arthur "O heaven, that there were but a mote in
yours,
A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair,
Any annoyance in that precious sense!
Then, feeling what small things are boisterous there,
Your vile intent must needs seem horrible."
Hubert' 1 Is this your promise ? go to, hold your tongue. "
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 47
Arthur" Hubert, the utterance of a brace of tongues
Must needs want pleading for a pair of eyes :
Let me not hold my tongue, let me not, Hubert ;
Or, Hubert, if you will, cut out my tongue,
So may I keep mine eyes. O, spare mine eyes !
Though to no use but still to look on you !
Lo, by my troth, the instrument is cold
And would not harm me."
Hubert I can heat it, boy."
Arthur "No, in good sooth ; the fire is dead with grief,
Being create for comfort, to be used
In undeserved extremes : See else yourself ;
There is no malice in this burning coal ;
The breath of heaven hath blown his spirit out
And strew'd repentant ashes on his head."
Hubert " But with my breath I can revive it, boy."
Arthur " An if you do, you will but make it blush
And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert :
Nay, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes ;
And like a dog that is compel!' d to fight,
Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on.
All things that you should use to do me wrong
Deny their office : only you do lack
That mercy which fierce fire and iron extends,
Creatures of note for mercy-lacking uses."
Hubert" Well, see to live ; I will not touch thine eye
48 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
For all the treasure that thy uncle owes :
Yet am I sworn and I did purpose, boy,
With this same iron to burn them out."
Arthur "O.now you look like Hubert ! all this while
You were disguised."
Hubert " Peace ; no more. Adieu.
Your uncle must not know but you are dead ;
I'll fill these dogged spies with false reports :
And, pretty child, sleep doubtless and secure,
That Hubert, for the wealth of all the world,
Will not offend thee."
Arthur" O heaven ! I thank you, Hubert."
Hubert " Silence ; no more : go closely in with me :
Much danger do I undergo for thee."
[Exeunt.
ZING RICHARD II
This play has been held to be, as a general rule,
tame and dull, but for myself I find something
interesting in the dignity of King Richard II. at
his dethronement, when he is awaiting a cruel
death by the hands of assassins. Feudal England
was then more under the rule of the fierce nobles
than of the king or the people, as was also the
case in France at that period.
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 49
All the early editions of this play ascribe it to
Shakespeare's authorship of about the date of 1593,
receiving new additions later from his pen, perhaps
for political reasons, after the death of Elizabeth.
The king's meditations in the dungeon of Pomfret,
on thoughts and music and other things some-
times loftier, are interesting, such as
"Mount, mount, my soul ! thy seat is up on high ;
Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die,"
the blood of the Plantagenet showing itself in this
faineant king
44 As full of valour, as of royal blood."
At the fight between Bolingbroke and Norfolk,
which was to have come off but was stopped by
King Richard, the speeches are long-winded and
repetitiously boastful, like Homer's heroes before
their fights.
The proud Bolingbroke 's demeanor when he
returns from exile, in England, is to be contrasted
with his smooth-tongued, popular addresses to the
" common people." He saw a source of power in
the democracy, as he did more and more after-
wards when he became King Henry IV.
4
50 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
The arch conspirators, York, Northumberland,
and Harry Percy, the last "but tender, raw, and
young," here first appear in their ckaracteristic
speeches. Notice the common expressions even
now in use, such as the familiar phrase of sixes
and sevens :
" Everything is left at six and seven,"
and also of the contemptuous phrase of a " row of
pins." Phrases in Shakespeare's plays, I would
again remark, are often repeated, showing the
hand of the same master, as in the phrase,
" I have a thousand spirits in one breast."
The good Bishop Carlisle prophesies the bloody
' ' Wars of the Roses " which would spring up after
the death of Richard II.
Bolingbroke alludes to his son, afterwards Henry
V., while looking for him in London taverns, as
" a lawless youth."
The wonderful description of England by ' ' Old
John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster," cannot
be passed over :
" This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 51
This other Eden, demi-paradise ;
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war ;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive of a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands ;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son ;
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm :
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds :
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death !"
52 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
KING RICHARD IH
The play of "Richard III." follows Hollinshed
pretty closely. Richard III. clove his way to the
throne by his strong mind and iron mace, beating
down all before it. He was powerful, but piti-
lessly ambitious. Marlowe had also before this
written a play on Richard III. He was a drama-
tist of great vigor, but another had arisen to take his
sceptre, and after Shakespeare's play of " Richard
III." he grew discouraged and nearly came to an
end as a dramatic writer and poet.
An old chronicler says that Richard III. "was
no euill captain in war," but Shakespeare gives
him besides strong intellectual qualities and a
subtle wit, as is exhibited in the scene with the
Princess Anne.
He had a moral nature, but his devouring ambi-
tion swallowed it up.
The scene in the midnight tent before the battle
brings out the dread action of Conscience and the
fearful revenge of a vigorous but abused nature ;
but his warlike spirit was unconquered to the last.
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 53
Richard III. is one of those characters, trans-
formed by Shakespeare's genius from a mere
fighter to a thinking man, whose wicked ambitions
knew no bounds.
KING HENRY IV.
The first part of this play of " Henry IV." was
entered on the Stationers' Register under date of
1 597-8. Many quartos were issued between 1597-
1639. The title of the play in the folio is, " The
first part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and
Death of Henry, surnamed Hotspur." The second
part was first published in quarto in 1600, calling
it, " The second part of Henry the Fourth con-
tinuing to his death and coronation of Henry the
Fifth, with the humours of Sir John Falstaffe and
swaggering Pistol." Ben Jonson makes this allu-
sion in " Every Man out of his Humour" with the
words, " You may in time make lean Macilente as
fat as Sir John Falstaff."
The play of "Henry IV.," who earlier was
simply Bolingbroke, bears the same formally
dramatic relationship to "Richard II.," "King
54 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
John," and " Richard III.," as " The Merchant of
Venice " does to earlier comedies, such as " Love's
Labour's Lost," "Comedy of Errors," and some
other plays. The second part of "Henry IV."
was certainly written in 1598-99. The play was
derived from Hall's and Hollinshed's Chronicles,
and from an old play acted before 1588.
Shakespeare changed historical facts in the case
of Hotspur and the Prince, making them exact
contemporaries fighting on Shrewsbury field, which
could not have occurred. "Henry IV.," in two
parts, is by far the most important of these his-
torical plays. This monarch was one of England's
great kings. His life was a life of constant con-
flict with the formidable powers of York, Northum-
berland, and Scotland. Scotland had proved her-
self in warlike qualities superior to England, but
not so in the reign of Henry IV. , who was a fight-
ing king. He was brave, and sometimes cruel,
with murder stains on his hands while he was yet
Bolingbroke. He was wise but crafty, yet while
battling for the maintenance of his own throne, he
was at the same time not unmindful of the rights and
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 55
liberties of the English people. Shakespeare repre-
sents him as a broad-minded monarch and patriotic
in his political character ; he was even religious, as
piety went in those days.
In the very beginning of the play the king says :
1 ' Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross
We are impressed and engaged to fight,
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy ;
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers' womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail'd
For our advantage on the bitter cross."
He had an eye to England's welfare, not so
much expressed in the technical terms of political
administration as in potential speeches and acts.
Henry IV. died in 1413, and the tradition that he
died in the Jerusalem Chamber may have been used
by Shakespeare for dramatic effect, as well as the
temporary removal of the crown by the prince and
his father's solemn admonition.
The character of Hotspur, the English Achilles,
hard and implacable, forms a brilliant episode in
56 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
this play. Hotspur's life is in the flash-light of
swords. His contempt of bedizened aristocracy is
shown in his description of the frivolous nobleman
who meets him to deliver a message on the field of
battle, commencing with :
" But I remember, when the fight was done."
His other blunt, soldierly speeches are of a similar
kind:
"To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon."
"Tell truth, and shame the devil."
His wife whom he loved was second to the love of
arms. The oestrus of battle was in him.
Hotspur "How now, Kate! I must leave you within
these two hours."
Lady Percy" O my good lord, why are you thus alone ?"
" Tell me, sweet lord, what is 't that takes from thee "
" Thy golden sleep?"
" In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars ;
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed ;
Cry ' Courage ! to the field ! ' And thou hast talk'd
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
HISTORIC AL PLAYS. 57
Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat hath stood upon thy brow,
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream ;
And in thy face strange motions hath appear'd,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these ?
Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not."
Hotspur "What, ho!"
Lady Percy "In faith, I'll break thy little finger, Harry,
An if thou wilt not tell me all things true."
Hotspur" God's me, my horse ! "
It is a great leap in one play from Hotspur to
Falstaff. This light and shade give, however, an
opportunity for the practice of chiaroscuro, as in
Rembrandt's pictures, and also as it sometimes
occurs in nature and the mind, though it requires
a consummate artist to make use of this bold con-
trast in literature ; a large part of the historic play
of " Henry IV." is taken up with the "humours of
Falstaff." The name, Sir John Falstaff, was evi-
dently drawn from Sir John Falstoffe, who was a
58 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
real character, a Lollard, and a man of honorable
reputation, though a rebel and executed in the
wars of the times.
Shakespeare did not mean to defame or drag
down the name of " Oldcastle," another name of
this same character, to whom he alludes in the
Prologue ; but he probably took the name at ran-
dom, as a well-known one, yet it is unfortunate
that by this name he seemed to cast a slur upon a
worthy personage.
Shakespeare was the exact contemporary of Cer-
vantes, and the suspicion is aroused that as Cer-
vantes delineates with such exquisite humor the
demented but noble, melancholy-visaged Spanish
knight, Don Quixote, in order to satirize the deca-
dence of Spanish chivalry, so Shakespeare might
have drawn the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, to
throw contempt on some of the growing falsities
and vulgarities of English chivalry and knight-
hood ; in all probability this is not true, for both
authors were too original to take one character
from the other.
Falstaff is an immoral, lying old rascal, but has
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 59
no end of wit. The scene of his representation of
the king, with his cushion for a crown and his
dagger for a sceptre, who delivers a grave repri-
mand to the prince, instances his rapid seizure of
the situation. His comments on his wondrously
spectral squad of conscripts, such as " Mouldy,
Cobweb, Shadow, Wart, Feeble, and Bullcalf," are
philosophical :
Falstaff' ' Good enough to toss ; food for powder, food
for powder ; they'll fill a pit as well as better."
Falstaff"Go thy ways, old Jack ; die when thou wilt, if
manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the
earth, then am I a shotten herring. There lives not three
good men unhanged in England ; and one of them is fat,
and grows old : God help the while ! a bad world, I say.
I would I were a weaver ; I could sing psalms or anything.
A plague of all cowards, I say still.'
Falstaff" But to say I know more harm in him than in
myself, were to say more than I know. That he is old, the
more the pity, his white hairs do witness it ; but that he is,
saving your reverence, a whoremaster, that I utterly deny.
If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked ! if to be
old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know
is damned : if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean
kine are to be loved. No, my good lord ; banish Peto,
60 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
banish Bardolph, banish Poins : but for sweet Jack Falstaff,
kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff,
and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack
Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish not
him thy Harry's company : banish plump Jack, and banish
all the world."
How rapidly the men in buckram suits grew in
number :
Falstaff" Two rogues in buckram suits."
" Four rogues in buckram let drive at me."
Falstaff will last as long as Hamlet, and is immortal.
This foul-mouthed, wicked old rogue is the
exponent or expression of the material nature,
with the infusion of a keen intellectual element
turned to baseness. Its humor saves it from
obscenity that corrupts. Its good-natured coarse-
ness doubtless appealed to the gross English palate
of the age. In Falstaff the English mind saw its
own abominations, and the electric lightning of his
wit seemed to cleanse the foul marsh, and to make
it a subject for ridicule and contempt.
Speaking to the prince's very face, he says :
" It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage
is caught, as men take diseases, one of another ; therefore,
let men take heed of their company."
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 6l
The famous line descriptive of the death of Fal-
staff " a' babbled of green fields," does not seem
to me to exhibit a poetic thought, but rather a flit-
ting reminiscence of England's green meadows and
of a country inn, with unlimited " sack."
MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.
This roistering play was, according to an unau-
thenticated tradition, written in 1602 at the com-
mand of Queen Elizabeth, who required Shake-
speare to write a play of Sir John Falstaff in love.
It was finished in two weeks, and composed after
" Henry V.," but in point of successive time comes
between the plays of "Henry IV." and "Henry
V.," and one of the characters is supposed to be
identical with Sir Thomas Lucy of the deer-poach-
ing affair. The real Thomas Lucy died in 1600.
The scene is laid partly in Windsor Forest, but is
more like Arden Wood, which touches dear War-
wickshire scenery, and runs through so many of
Shakespeare's plays.
Herne's oak, around which the midnight revels
ran, existed until modern times.
62 THE; READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
Shallow says, reminding us of Sir Thomas I,ucy :
"You have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke
open my lodge."
Slender" If I be drunk, I'll be drunk with those that
have a fear of God, and not with drunken knaves."
Pistol" ' Convey, the wise call it. ' Steal !' foh ! a fico
for the phrase."
Pistol "Why, then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open."
Sweet Anne Page is a pretty and simple maiden,
and Shallow's lackadaisical nature is suddenly
immersed in a sort of scared love. The whole is
a rtide and boorish, but picturesque, old English
village scene.
"The Merry Wives" are merry wives indeed,
and they cunningly plot against the old knight to
lure him on to utter overthrow, with a mirth-
loving looseness of behavior. Falstaff himself
walks in this play in his most glorious pomp of
libertine excess. In his words with Pistol and his
talks with the disreputable woman who keeps the
inn, and in other scenes, he is the same scurrilous,
wicked old man, presuming somewhat on his
knighthood, but low to the depths in character.
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 63
The examination of the boy in his ' ' accidence ' '
has some allusion to Shakespeare's school-boy days
at Stratford. The ribald knight gets fairly pun-
ished at Herne's oak. The play must have been
an uproarious one, and set the queen, her grave
counsellors, the nobility, and the common peo-
ple into fits of laughter.
The scene may even now be imagined by one
walking at moonlight in the glades and amid the
oaks of Windsor Park. *
KINO HENRY V.
The play of "Henry V." was probably first
brought out in 1599, and written in that golden
period of the poet's life. It was contemporary
with the "Merry Wives of Windsor."
There is no positive historical confirmation of
the lawless character of the "mad-cap prince"
before his own coronation, but there may have
been a tradition of this in the old chronicles, some
of the wild pranks of youth, which Shakespeare
seized upon for the dramatic effect.
64 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Henry V. has come down to us in history as
a noble prince. Even before he came to the throne
he assisted his father in war and government, and
gave promise of being himself the great monarch
that he afterwards became. He represented the
best qualities of British chivalry and heroic valor.
He who has not read Shakespeare's play of
1 ' Henry V. ' ' has lost the most dazzling page of
England's medieval period ; when great personages
walked over the scene clad in gleaming steel ; when
her arms beat down into absolute submission the
French monarchy and annexed the fields of sunny
France.
Henry V. was a brave and sagacious king, but as
a Roman Catholic ruler he was sometimes cruel in
persecution. He finally quelled all revolutionary
efforts at home, even the fierce attacks of Scotland,
as Henry V. himself said :
" For you shall read that my great-grandfather,
Never went with his forces into France,
But that the Scot on his unfurnish'd kingdom
Came pouring, like the tide into a breach."
He sailed for France with banners flying over a
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 65
small but invincible host. Canterbury said of the
army :
"Full fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights,
Six thousand and two hundred good esquires."
The central point of the whole play is the battle
of Agincourt, which took place after hard toil and
fighting in France. Just before the battle took
place, the constable of France described the British
half-starved forces in these words :
41 Do but behold yon poor and starved band,
And your fair show shall suck away their souls,
Leaving them but the shales and husks of men.
There is not work enough for all our hands ;
Scarce blood enough in all their sickly veins
To give each naked curtle-axe a stain,
That our French gallants shall to-day draw out,
And sheathe for lack of sport."
The deepest portions in the play consist of
Henry V.'s utterances and soliloquies the night
before the battle, showing a burdened but indomi-
table spirit. He says to Gloucester :
" Gloucester, 'tis true that we are in great danger ;
The greater therefore should our courage be."
5
66 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
"God Almighty!
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out."
"'Tis good for men to love their present pains
Upon example ; so the spirit is eased :
And when the mind is quicken 'd, out of doubt,
The organs, though defunct and dead before,
Break up their drowsy grave and newly move,
With casted slough and fresh legerity."
He walked unrecognized through his camp and
talked with his soldiers in words that show his
humanity. One of the soldiers says to him while
he was unknown :
Bates " He hath not told his thought to the king ? "
King Henry " No ; nor it is not meet he should. For,
though I speak it to you, I think the king is but a man as I
am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me ; the element
shows to him as it doth to me ; all his senses have but human
conditions : his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he
appears but a man ; and though his affections are higher
mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with
the like wing."
He soliloquizes :
King " Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 67
Who with a body fill'd and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread.'*
' ' And, but for ceremony, such a wretch
Winding up day with toil, and nights with sleep,
Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king."
" O God of battles ! steel my soldiers' hearts ;
Possess them not with fear ; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not to-day, O Lord."
"More will I do;
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon."
41 This day is call'd the feast of Crispian :
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name ef Crispian."
" Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.' "
This is a speech of the heroic English epic,
and shows the poet's own manliness. The glitter-
ing ranks of France fell before the long ash-tree
bows of England. Crcy and Agincourt gave Brit-
ish valor the domination in France, down even to
the battle of Waterloo.
68 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
King Henry's gay and half French talk with
Katharine lights up the grim features of war, and
makes the play end in jocund peace, when all diffi-
culties are dispelled and all foes overcome, and
Henry returns with his French bride to the shores
of merrie England.
HE1TKY VI
The authorship of the play of " Henry VI." in
three parts, or the most of it, has been so fully and
even fiercely discussed that the part Shakespeare
played in it still remains greatly in doubt, but this
critical discussion is not my present aim. It has
been thoroughly done by other earlier and modern
writers, and still is a central pivot of stormy con-
troversy and is well worth our study ; whether he
composed the whole of it or composed no part of it,
but merely arranged it for the Globe Theatre, is a
difficult question. He doubtless had in some way
a hand in it, but the plot and composition look
more to Marlowe's or Greene's authorship. The
entire reversals of historic fact and the shocking
ill-treatment, for example, of the lofty and. mystic
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 69
character of Joan of Arc, would seem to be entirely
opposed to the spirit of the truthful and ' ' gentle
Will, ' ' but it is possible that in his youthful eager-
ness to push on the success of the Globe Theatre,
he yielded to the pressure of the royal and courtly
party and the stern censorship of the stage at that
period. It may be he could not well face the
clamorous position of the British public in the
matter of English courage in France ; at any rate,
the whole is beneath the standard of the other his-
torical plays.
It is without loftiness, and is painful and sad.
King Henry VI., only child of Henry V., was a
gentle and pure-minded man, but no hero. He
was never quite a king, and in his long regency he
was the prey of furious factions. His armies in
France gradually lost all that Henry V. had won,
and his own death gave immediate rise to the
sanguinary "Wars of the Roses." There would
seem to be a few touches of Shakespearean power
in this drama. The whole death scene of Cardinal
Beaufort is striking :
70 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Henry VI" How fares my lord ? speak, Beaufort, to
thy sovereign."
Cardinal -"If thou be'st death, I'll give thee Eng-
land's treasure,
Enough to purchase such another island,
So thou wilt let me live, and feel no pain.'*
Henry VI " Ah, what a sign it is of evil life,
Where death's approach is seen so terrible ! "
Cardinal ' ' Bring me unto my trial when you will.
Died he not in his bed ? where should he die ?
Can I make men live, whether they will or no ?
O, torture me no more ! I will confess.
Alive again ? then show me where he is :
I'll give a thousand pounds to look upon him.
He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them.
Comb down his hair ; look, look ! it stands upright,
Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul.
Give me some drink ; and bid the apothecary
Bring the strong poison that I bought of him."
" thou eternal mover of the heavens,
with a gentle eye upon this wretch !
O, beat away the busy meddling fiend
That lays strong siege unto this wretch's soul,
And from his bosom purge this black despair ! "
Warwick" See, how the pangs of death do make
him grin ! "
HISTORICAL PLAYS. 71
Salisbury "Disturb him not; let him pass peace-
ably."
King " Peace to his soul, if God's good pleasure be 1
Lord cardinal, if thou think'st on heaven's bliss,
Hold up thy hand, make signal of thy hope.
He dies, and makes no sign. O God, forgive him ! "
HENRY
This is a rich, spectacular drama, written near
the end of the poet's life, and portraying the
decline of British chivalry of the more showy and
less warlike period, the Field of the Cloth of Gold,
and also of the decline of the ' ' pride, pomp and
circumstance of glorious war. ' '
There are two theories in regard to the date of
this play ; one is, that it was composed in the time
of Queen Elizabeth to defend the character of her
mother, Anne Boleyn, and another, that it was
brought out in the reign of James I. and founded
on a previous drama.
The proud figure of Cardinal Wolsey and his
solemn words of repentance for his sin of serving
72 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
two masters God and the world, God and the
king still powerfully reverberate in men's deepest
consciousness.
These historical plays, written from a heart full
of the patriotism of a truly British soul, were evi-
dently thrown off originally in his youthful days
for the stage, and had their plot, it may be, in some
instances from previous plays, but in them all
there are traces of Shakespeare's revision and
inimitable genius. These touches or marks of
Shakespearean genius are plainly discernible wher-
ever they occur, and I have sometimes exemplified
this to myself by a homely illustration, which
would apply both to Shakespeare and Homer.
The explorer in the dark forest of mid- Africa
comes across a spring of pure water, which wild
beasts visit at night to quench their thirst. All
kinds, small and great, come ; on the sandy marge
of the spring or pond are innumerable tracks
of these nightly visitants, but across them all are
great prints, effacing the smaller ones, which are
the marks of the lion alone, unmistakable and awe-
inspiring.
COMEDIES. 73
COMEDIES.
CYMBELINE.
Comedy is usually a play where the ludicrous or,
better, the humorous element is prominently set
forth in opposition to tragedy, which stirs deeper
emotions ; but in the older classic and Italian use
of the word, as in Dante's " Divina Commedia," it
is applied to the Middle Style, admitting, indeed,
the elegant and poetic, but running usually in the
common form of dialogue, both high and low.
The play I now take up, " Cymbeline," is an
instance of this. It is neither comedy nor tragedy,
but may be classed under the form of comedy
according to the definition of this term which has
just been given.
It is laid on British soil in an ancient period,
whether real or fictitious, and like " King I^ear,"
" Macbeth," and all Shakespeare's dramas, wher-
ever their scene is laid, has, as I have said, a
smack of Warwickshire and Arden Forest ; yet in
spite of this, there is no merely local type of char-
acter exclusively evolved, either Greek or Roman,
74 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Italian, French, or English, but a pure humanity as
the basis of all. There is, however, in some of the
poet's dramas, as in one character, at least, in this
play of " Cymbeline," a certain prof ound subjectiv-
ity of thought.
This play, which has been sometimes supposed
to belong to a more youthful stage of Shakespeare's
works, is, by more thoughtful critics, assigned to the
period of his later dramas, such as ' ' Hamlet ' ' and
"Othello." Its style is too serious for my defini-
tion of comedy, and though it does not exhibit traces
of exalted poetry, it is clear and simple in its prose.
It reminds one both of barbarism and civiliza-
tion, and if its figures are dressed in British tunics
or Roman brazen armor, this is of little consequence.
None of Shakespeare's women, or those of any
other dramatist, equal Imogen's feminine perfec-
tion of womanly purity that springs from the cen-
tral principle of feminine nature. It is genuine
and unconscious one lustrous immaculate pearl.
It is the essence of love, natural, gentle, patient,
enduring, thinking no evil.
Imogen forgives her most treacherous enemies,
COMEDIES. 75
and seems to harbor no revenge, is ready to obey
her husband's letter that she be killed, is true to
his love, is unchanging in her patience, unswerv-
ing in her affection. This is the deep lesson of the
drama.
Imogen's character needs no ornament ; it is
born of perfect love innate, spiritual, and divine.
No female personage of Shakespeare's plays sinks
more quietly, more indelibly into the mind of the
reader.
It is strange that few plays contain more Homeric
and classical allusions fitly applied than ' ' Cymbe-
line."
Shakespeare must have read the Iliad, it may
be of Chapman's translation, aided by what of the
Greek language he knew. Shakespeare was an
educated man. He had the culture that was com-
prehended in his age. If modern science had then
existed he would have delighted in its wonderful
progress, as his marvelous guesses in respect to the
circulation of the blood, the electric currents in the
atmosphere, and the law of evolution in " The Tem-
pest " show. Sir Thomas Brown's observations on
76 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
the dew-claws of dogs and the left-footedness of
parrots betoken original scientific observation, but
Shakespeare, as one who reached the inner spirit
beneath the fact, thus linking nature with the
human soul, and saw the divine beauty of the
starry firmament the prophet poet was the
greater genius ; but I believe his calm reason look-
ing before and after would have led him in the
advancement of science to something like conser-
vatism.
Another striking figure in " Cymbeline," that
forms a strong contrast to Imogen, is the Queen,
who is a British Medea of masculine barbarity as
well as intelligence. She supplements her weaker
husband. Her description of England, though not
exactly scientific, is wonderfully true :
Queen " Remember, sir, my liege,
The kings your ancestors, together with
The natural bravery of your isle, which stands
As Neptune's park, ribbed and paled in
With rocks unscaleable and roaring waters,
With sands that will not bear your enemies' boats,
But suck them up to the topmast. A kind of conquest
Caesar made here ; but made not here his brag
COMEDIES. 77
Of ' came, and saw, and overcame : ' with shame
The first that ever touch' d him he was carried
From our coast, twice beaten ; and his shipping
Poor ignorant baubles ! on our terrible seas,
Like egg-shells moved upon their surges, crack'd
As easily 'gainst our rocks."
It is strange that in such an oppressive drama,
dragging the mind downward by its expectant ill,
there could have sprung up the most beautiful
golden lyric that exists ; most musical, singing
itself, thus beginning :
" Hark, hark ! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chalked flowers that lies."
This lovely expression of " chaliced flowers " is
one of the many illustrations that showed Shake-
speare' s genuine love of flowers. He observes their
peculiarities of form and color, symbolic meaning,
and poetic expression. I would not, for one, have
the Shakespearean garden changed into a botanic
hortus siccus, invaluable as it is to the advance-
ment of scientific knowledge. For in turning over
78 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
those withered leaves, I would not forget that this
dried flower, for example, may have nodded in
its beautiful blue color from the icy summit of an
Alpine cliff, or that this one grew in a savage
western wilderness and formed its only ornament,
or that this dead lily rested in life on the broad
waters of the Amazon, or that this, the desert ere-
mite, too small even for fragrance, has cheered the
heart of the weary traveller over the burning sands
of Arabia, saying to him, "up heart, there is still
hope for thee ! " So nature seemed to open its
secrets to the poet. Nature is beautiful in its
own forms, and organic nature runs in curvilinear,
not straight, lines ; ever aspiring, like the vine, to
climb in spirals higher and higher into the free air.
This seemed to be Shakespeare's view of it in the
life of flowers.
The two speakers who open the first act of the
play talk naturally, explaining the circumstances
of the drama. There is rarely a coarse phrase.
The I,atin pun on muliernesir the end is, to say
the least, amusingly elaborate.
COMEDIES. 79
AS YOU LIKE IT
This is a rich comedy in the best sense of the
word, full of genial humor, sparkling wit, and
pleasing nature. The scene of this glorious open-
air play is, to be sure, placed in Bordeaux and the
Forest of Ardennes in France, but is really laid
in English Warwickshire, and in close touch with
Sherwood Forest and the ballad poetry.
In this very play it is said :
"They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a
many merry men with him ; and there they live like the old
Robin Hood of England : they say many young men flock
to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did
in the golden world."
Shakespeare loved his native land, and built up
his visionary on the real. We are, in the play, in
a great shadowy forest, with oaks here and there,
sunny green spots, and a group of foresters in
Lincoln green, with long yew bows, spears, and
bugles, such as the outlaws of English legend bore.
Orlando, banished, had gone to them, who
though exiled, was a brave man, capable of love.
He shows his courage in slaying the lioness that
80 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
"with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch,
When that the sleeping man should stir ; for 'tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead."
Orlando sends his bloody handkerchief to Rosa-
lind. The plot is a story illustrating three degrees
of love, a charming comedy, perhaps more popu-
larly read than any other, in which Shakespeare
recalls his romantic youth of careless pleasure
mingled with some serious thoughts of misspent
time that awake upbraidings of conscience. He
speaks in the words of the whilom courtier, " the
melancholy Jaques."
Jaques is not a bitter satirist of life, and his
reflections are softened by the solitude of nature
and the pensive reflections of an amiable humor.
There is a laugh at the bottom of his contempt and
a charity for human faults. The wounded stag
gives him his allegory, in which pathos is mixed
with scorn, pity for the poor animal, and contempt
for the shams of life. The philosophic mind in the
poet is awakened, and the thoughts of an earnest
COMEDIES. 8 1
spirit well up from deeper springs. The world
shut out, conscience speaks in the calmer eventime.
Jaques is called a ''fool," as well as Touch-
stone ; the folly consists in carrying the contem-
plative spirit beyond its bounds, and becoming
critic instead of actor, throwing up the fight ; but
Jaques is at heart good and kindly, whom life has
somewhat saddened and disgusted. It has been
said truly that the only blot in this delightful
comedy is in betrothing Celia to Oliver instead of
to Jaques.
Rosalind is the sparkling gem, the heroine,
though the question is not settled which of the two
maids is the taller. Rosalind has a witty mind,
and remains arch and tricksome to the last, even
in the epilogue. She is a bit mannish, like a lively
boy playing both sexes, delightful to the end as
a beauteous woodlawn sprite.
It is life under the greenwood tree. Shake-
speare enters the region of romance, takes down
the bars, and lets us into the broad fields of the
imagination, where we rejoice to wander released
from all care and restlessness.
6
82 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
The style is easy and that of the common life,
not of the inflated romance taken from Spain and
France of that day. Shakespeare, as mentioned,
was the contemporary of Cervantes, and both of
them as reformers returned to their country's
idiomatic speech.
Homely words, as in these examples :
"Let the world slide."
" He drew a dial from his poke,"
the old Norman French for pocket.
The pun where "goats" and "Goths" are
interchanged is likewise an illustration of this ordi-
nary speech. The man who said he liked Shake-
speare because he was so full of quotations might
find much in "As You Like It" to confirm his
opinion, as in the words :
" All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players."
" Whoever loves that loved not at first sight."
14 Sweet are the uses of adversity."
' ' Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything."
COMEDIES. 83
Gay, bright, and changing, it is Shakespeare's
thoughts out of the fullness of youth, and of his
growing philosophy. The times are mirrored in
his play, when the poet talks of " South Sea bub-
ble," and the common contrast of forces, organic
and inorganic, when he speaks of ' ' breaking his
shins against it."
A noble contrast is drawn between Fortune and
Nature, the former giving only "the world's
gifts," the other showing us the eternal lineaments
of the permanent and divine.
Swearing by his honor who had no Fortune,
reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments
of Nature.
No more healthful and happy counsel for a tem-
perate life, packed in a few words, could have been
devised than the speech of old Adam :
" Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty ;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,
Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo
The means of weakness and debility ;
Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty, but kindly."
84 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.
This play appeared in the first folio edition of
Shakespeare's works, and was written probably
about 1574. It was undoubtedly adapted from
Marlowe, but what was Shakespeare's bears his
own stamp.
A beautiful young woman with a vixenish tem-
per, whose
" tongue will tell the anger of [her] heart,
Or else [her] heart concealing it will break,"
and a lover and husband determined to have his
way, no matter how rough-shod, and we have the
plot. A big man with a hunter's whip snapping,
and louder language, is not the modern means of
settling love disputes, or of bringing about har-
mony in marital relations, though it may have
better suited Shakespeare's times.
"The Inception," so called, was possibly taken
from the story in "Arabian Nights" of "Abu-
Hassan, the wag, in the Caliph's palace," and
the play is one within a play, a device used more
than once by the dramatist.
COMEDIES. 85
The comedy begins when Katharine enters
on the scene. She makes matters lively ; she
treats her gentle sister like a slave, but the
"shrew" meets a rock. The masculine will
conquers even by brutal impertinence and affected
cruelty, while the better element is radical and
really prevails.
The scriptural precept that the wife should obey
her husband is acknowledged and confirmed in
Kate's speech at the end :
" A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty ;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign ; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe ;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience."
It is to be supposed that some unconscious sense
of love is awakened in both. But praise for thy
sweet humility, brave Kate !
86 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
The lofty spiritual height of St. Paul's doctrine
concerning the marriage state and its unity, its
likeness to heavenly things, was not reached.
The true equality of the sexes and the freedom
of woman are not realized in this conception ; but
the rough lesson taught is not a bad one, even in
this present time of so many mercenary marriages
and shameful divorces.
Petruchio and Katharine are strong Shakespear-
ean characters that will live. They are Shake-
speare at play, the lion free in his gamboling.
Petruchio is a masculine figure, strong and rude,
but loves his wife while abusing her. He meets
fire with fire ; " kills her in her own humour. ' ' He
woos her in his love speeches shown in his outra-
geous behavior. He denies her reason. He makes
her to say the sun is the moon and the moon
the sun, as he lists. This is abominable, but it
effects his purpose ; drastic, but Kate was made
over as Lucretia Borgia was made over, by a good
marriage.
Something in the rugged strength of Petruchio
is said to have aroused the playwright Greene's
COMEDIES. 87
jealous spite, as if Shakespeare had robbed him or
overtopped his own play, and gave rise to his
pamphlet, and scornful saying that "he thought
himself the only Shakescene in the country."
The play is pure comedy, and the scene is laid
in Padua, Italy. Many things might lead us to
believe the tradition that Shakespeare once visited
the land of
" fruitful Lombardy
The pleasant garden of great Italy ; "
and
"fair Padua, nursery of arts."
Perhaps he stood inside the many-domed church
of San Giustiniani, and looked at Giotto's frescoes
in the Arena Chapel. He describes Italian cos-
tume, especially women's dresses, with minuteness,
and makes use of Latin words and Italian expres-
sions such as the people used, so that it would seem
as if these came by personal observation.
It is curious to see brought out a custom in the
legal profession that continues, if I mistake not, to
this day :
" And do as adversaries do in law,
Strive mightly, but eat and drink as friends."
88 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE.
This play, though called a comedy, leaves out
the comic element and is of sterner ethical fibre,
entering more deeply into humanity.
Its central figure is Angelo, whom the Duke of
Vienna, in his absence for a considerable period,
makes his deputy, endowing him with absolute
authority, having apparently the most unbounded
confidence in the man :
Duke of Vienna " Angelo,
There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to th' observer doth thy history
Fully unfold. Thyself and thy belongings
Are not thine own so proper, as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for ourselves ; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere airalike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd
But to fine issues ; nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use."
COMEDIES. 89
Angelo is a "public creature." He is a born
ruler ; he has a talent for the administration of
public affairs ; he is "a man of law. ' ' His ' ' solid
will" is the great governing wheel that turns the
machinery of state. He* is a man of precedents, of
outward form but not of inward spirit, and the
conception of justice as one form of love the
love of others, when applied to the regulation of
men in groups and companies for their common
good and happiness, and the spiritual law of right-
eousness to guide one's own conduct, were outside
his thinking. He is a cold and unrelenting ruler ;
he applies the law mercilessly to all but himself ;
he condemns in others, sins of which he is guilty.
He is hypocritical and base as well as cruel ; on
the outside awe-inspiring, he is like a tall pine of
the Apennines, buttressed by the slow forces of time
and opposing winds, but rotten at the core and
ready to fall with a crash.
Isabella, who is a lofty type of the Shakespearean
woman, sees through Angelo, and is bold enough
to charge him with crime :
90 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Isabella "'Tis not impossible
But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute
As Angelo ; even so may Angelo,
In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms,
Be an arch-villain ; believe it, royal prince :
If he be less, he's nothing ; but he's more."
Yet it is this Isabella who at the last asks for
his life, and with a touch of angelic mercy says to
the Duke :
' Most bounteous sir,
Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd,
As if my brother lived : I partly think
A due sincerity govern'd his deeds,
Till he did look on me : since it is so,
Let him not die."
Angelo is reprieved with the rest. He, the
chief offender, escapes, but he shows no repent-
ance ; to the last is unmoved. He is remarried
to Mariana, his long betrothed and wronged wife.
This has been thought to be the one blot upon
a strong play ; but Shakespeare cannot be lightly
amended. He makes his lesson of charity's victory
complete. The sinner is in the hand of God to
COMEDIES. 91
repent or suffer. God will rule over him in the
infinite spaces of eternity.
The Duke of Vienna plays an important part in
his disguise as an observer of character, and in his
easy nature it is not unlikely that Shakespeare
may have shadowed forth the character of that
Solomon, James I., and the happy-go-lucky, disor-
derly condition of public affairs in the government
of England.
Claudio, the condemned man, though amiable,
is not so strong as his sister Isabella. He fears
death :
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice ;
To be imprison 'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling : 'tis too horrible !
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
92 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."
There is a slight reminder in these words both of
Homer and of Dante, though Shakespeare needed
not to go to either for inspiration.
Those who are accnstomed in their daily talk
to use the devil's name needlessly, whatever this
spirit of evil may be, have no support in Shake-
speare, and find themselves rebuked in the Duke's
words :
11 Respect to your great place ! and let the devil
Be sometime honour'd for his burning throne ! "
COMEDY OF EBRORS.
The present comedy is upon a somewhat lower
plane, and turns upon the simple fact of a strong
physical resemblance between two actors in the
comedy, leading to confused and amusing scenes,
some of them quite serious, as brawls, rages, accu-
sations of dishonesty, estranging of husband and
wife, and imprisonments.
It is entertaining, and if acted skillfully might
be greatly so.
COMEDIES. 93
The art shown is to keep the actors apart, so
that their identity may remain doubtful, and this
of course limits the time and makes the play com-
paratively short. There is no poetic elevation, but
the humor of Shakespeare shines out at times
unmistakably.
Of all places, that- Ephesus should be chosen for
such juggling and pranks ! Poor Antipholus of
Ephesus is the hardest used, he comes near to
losing his reputation and liberty. Perhaps the
play would not be considered very ludicrous now,
but doubtless was so in its day. Parts of the play
run easily from prose into rhyme. America and
the Indies are treated as being about identical.
Shrewd phrases, now familiar, are spoken :
1 ' Marry, he must have a long spoon that must eat
with the devil."
So close is the resemblance that at the denouement
the Duke says :
" Stay, stand apart ; I know not which is which."
" One of these men is Genius to the other."
11 Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother : "
94 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
incredible, but supposedly plausible. The play is
genuine comedy, and stage action is brought about
smoothly without overdrawn demonstration.
The plot is taken from Plautus ("Mercator "),
the Shakespeare of Latin comedy.
One would have thought that twins separated by
accident and brought up in cities so distant from
each other would lose, when men, their physical
resemblance to each other, and more and more
lessen the confusion of personal identity ; but the
plot was good enough for the poet to use in a
jocose and offhand way.
TWELFTH MIGHT.
Here is a play fitted to be acted during Twelfth
Night's season of festivities. With "All's Well
that Ends Well," it is printed in the folio edition
of 1623. They are about the last of Shakespeare's
comedies. In ' ' Twelfth Night ' ' are some allusions
that may serve to mark the date, as, for instance,
there is one sentence which is clearly written in
defence of Sir Walter Raleigh.
"The Romance literature of Europe was a com-
COMEDIES. 95
mon property, from which Elizabethan writers of
every grade drew material for their own perform-
ances, using them with all possible variety of adap-
tation.
' ' Italy was the fountain head of these fictions ;
although they might have traveled thither from the
East, and gradually assumed European shapes and
character."
The scheme of this play comes from this source,
or from one of those medieval fictions from which
English playwrights freely drew. The real comedy
and poetry, however, were Shakespeare's, and his
thought and style refine the original play.
The scene was laid in Illyria and the sea coast
near it. Orsino, duke of the country, whose deep-
phrased love is fixed upon Olivia, thus speaks :
"If music be the food of love, play on ;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again ! it had a dying fall :
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour ! Enough ; no more :
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
96 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh thou art I
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute ! so full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high fantastical."
Viola, a king's daughter, shipwrecked on the
coast of Illyria, mourns the probable destruction of
her brother, but is assured by the captain that he
saw him lashed to a spar and safely riding the
waves. Viola, brought up as a simple shepherdess,
becomes a servant of Orsino, Duke of Illyria, and
serves him as a page disguised in masculine attire ;
she falls ardently in love with him, but is sent as a
messenger to Olivia, whom the Duke loves, and
who lives in solitariness for her brother's death.
Sir Toby, uncle to Olivia, here introduced,
seems more like a rough English squire than an
eastern European. He cries :
"And so be these boots too : and they be not,
let them hang themselves in their own straps."
"He is drunk nightly " with Sir Andrew Ague-
cheek, who also resembles an occidental character,
COMEDIES. 97
who capers about, and is " a great eater of beef"
that "does harm to his wits" doubtless very
comic to the audience of that period.
The Clown, too, makes good sport and sings
' ' mellifluous songs. ' '
Sir Toby's use of "sack" seems to link the
play with " Merry Wives of Windsor."
Malvolio, a vain fool, with his "yellow cross-gar-
tered leggins, ' ' is one of Shakespeare's characters
that lives. He says of Viola, disguised as a man :
' ' Not yet old enough for a man. nor young enough for a
boy ; as a squash is before tis a peascod, or a codling when
'tis almost an apple : 'tis with him in standing water, between
boy and man. He is very well-favoured and he speaks very
shrewishly ; one would think his mother's milk were scarce
out of him.'
Malvolio is a prosaic, orderly coxcomb, a kind of
steward of Olivia's household, who aspires egre-
giously even to Olivia.
Maria, the maid, hits off thus Malvolio's char-
acter :
Sometimes he is a sort of puritan, ' ' or anything constantly
but a time-pleaser ; an affectioned ass, that cons state with-
out book and utters it by great swarths : the best persuaded
7
98 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that
it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him ;
and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause
to work."
"I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love;
wherein, by the colour of his beard, the shape of his leg, the
manner of his gait, the expressure of his eye, forehead, and
complexion, he shall find himself most feelingly personated.
I can write very like my lady your niece : on a forgotten
matter we can hardly make distinction of our hands."
All this she skillfully does, and Malvolio becomes
a more self-bespangled ass than ever. His self-
complacency, thinking no one sees or hears, is
hugely comic, and he minces along most ludicrously.
In the letter, which Maria feigns as coming
from Lady Olivia, occur the familiar words :
"But be not afraid of greatness: some are born great,
some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust
upon 'em.'
Malvolio comes in smirkingly,
'his face into more lines than is in the new map with
the augmentation of the Indies,"
a contemporaneous fact that had just occurred.
COMEDIES. 99
Maria speaks of this latter as if it were in the
author's thought to further its success.
Viola, with woman's wit and subtle ingenuity,
displaces the image of Olivia from the Duke's
mind and fastens his love at last upon herself. In
her arguments she uses the well-known words :
14 She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud
Feed on her damask cheek : she pined in thought ;
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed ? '
In this amusing comedy, the plot of the whole is
this : Malvolio is badly punished for his vanity,
but his penance is short, being not at heart a bad
fellow. Viola, by her wit and genuine love for the
Duke, takes the place of Olivia in his affections,
Olivia becoming the wife of Sebastian, the brother of
Viola, saved from perishing in the sea ; so all ends
well.
The comedy is a bright one, worth reading on
rainy days and fair days, though the Clown sings
at last :
" For the rain it raineth every day. '
100 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.
Shakespeare ' ' held the many-coloured mirror up
to nature," and this comedy is another phase of
Love, but it is begun in affectation. The very
scene of it is in an artificial court and French park,
not in a free wild wood :
"Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art."
This was one of the nineteen plays published
during Shakespeare's life, and although it has
been charged by critics, and not unjustly, as bear-
ing the marks of juvenility, itis_siotably amusing,
admirable reading for dull weather, and it con-
tains some passages worthy of the poet.
The freakish young King of Navarre conceives
the plan to bind himself and three of his courtiers
by a solemn oath to confine themselves for a space
of three years to the pursuits of philosophy and
other high studies, during which period they should
abjure all society of men and women, eat but one
meal a day, fast entirely one day in the week, and
sleep but three hours at night.
''The mind shall banquet, though the body pine."
COMEDIES. 10 1
These hard conditions are broken in upon by
the unlooked-for coming of the King of France's
daughter and three of her ladies on a political
embassy, who, by their beauty and wit, scatter to
the winds the King of Navarre's fine scheme of
study, and nature resumes her sway.
In the discussions of Navarre with his com-
panions, and those of the French ladies, the chief
speaker, himself inly hostile to the King's plan, is
the young Biron, who has a mocking spirit, though
he sometimes rises into higher thoughts with a
touch of "painted rhetoric," as thus when he
pleads the cause of Love :
" Love," "lives not alone immured in the brain ;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye ;
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind ;
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,"
' For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides ?
Subtle as Sphinx ; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair ; "
102 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
" Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
It is religion to be thus forsworn,
For charity itself fulfils the law."
Biron says vehemently :
" Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,
That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks."
He gives a sling at study :
" Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books."
The introduction into the play of a fantastic
Spanish knight, named Don Adriano de Armado,
exhibits Shakespeare's command, when he chose to
exercise it, of the language of pedantry, ' ' taf-
feta phrases," as the custom was in Queen Eliza-
beth's age, and even in the writings of Sir Philip
Sidney, to toss these ' ' silken terms " as a bull
tosses red rags. Shakespeare could play at that
with boys' delight. This phraseology served as a
foil to his plain speech. Hyperbolic phrases of
pseudo-learning, long rustling words which travel
on many feet and are tricked off with false colors
of rhetoric, were an object of his lively wit. Lan-
COMEDIES. 103
guage to him was simply an instrument to thought
and of secondary value. His influence on English
literature will be ever most powerful.
To read Shakespeare would seem to be the duty
of our public men. When the teacher of right
goes out to instruct and guide men, let him lock
up his study and his books in it, deny and sacrifice
his ambition to be regarded as a deep thinker,
a great scholar, and speak in the plain language
of ordinary men, without coarseness, but from a
simple, true heart. The lawyer should throw off
his professional robes and drive for the right,
content to lose causes, if may be, though in the
end he will grow in power and popularity, and
would build up the foundations of law and good
government ; statesmen, political orators, preach-
ers, lecturers, essayists, journalists, authors, even
poets, should speak only what they know and feel
from the bases of fact and nature, with Shake-
speare's real knowledge ; and though they might
not become Shakespeares, they would come nearer
to him in the plain path he led and nearer to truth
and sources of power.
104 THS READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
This play, which is elegant, like the finer ambi-
tious language of a young man, is nevertheless
not without a sprinkling of the commonest words
and phrases, such as "loggerhead," "work-a-day
world, ' ' and there is one passage from which Gold-
smith might have caught the idea of the familiar
phrase, ' ' Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be
wise," which in Shakespeare is thus expressed :
" Were my lord so, his ignorance were wise,
Where now his knowledge must prove ignorance."
In the contest of the sexes, the women won a
complete victory, and the king and his courtiers
are assigned for a year before the renewal of agree-
able relations, to perform useful tasks of life.
Biron in especial, who is not bad at heart, to
chasten his mocking spirit, is required to superin-
tend a hospital for the sick.
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.
The title of the play has been much commented
upon and it has been supposed that its early title
was " Love's Labour's Won," and that it was the
counterpart of " Love's Labour's Lost," for which
COMEDIES.
105
there is the shadow of a reason ; yet the title
" All's Well that Ends Well " fits it equally, and
in the last words spoken this title is almost given
word for word. In the play itself the labor of
love is truly great and difficult, but the end hap-
pily attained.
The heroine of the play is a rare type of woman
in Shakespeare's multifarious characterizations ;
she unites in herself some contrary elements, the
greatest of which are love and ambition. Helena
is the true heroine with
"youth, beauty, wisdom, courage."
Her will is bold it might indeed be thought at
times, hard, calculating, and unfeminine ; she is
the daughter of a great physician and wise man,
but has set her heart on one higher in rank,
Bertram, Count of Rousillon ; here the selfish is
planted in the unselfish, and the explanation is left
to the thoughtful mind of the reader. Helena's
life is a constant struggle between honest affection
and strong ambition, and the wonderful force of the
character is shown in really attaining the object of
106 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
both these desires and reconciling them. Some of
her words at times in this mental contest are diffi-
cult to understand from their depth, while others
are more simple and pathetic. She says :
' Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven : the fated sky
Gives us free scope ; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
What power is it which mounts my love so high ;
That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye ?
The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join like likes."
She is thoughtfully philosophic, reasons subjec-
tively of things, and maintains the inward conflict
on a calm and level line of reason by an intense
will; sometimes she is more simple and natural.
She says :
" My friends were poor but honest ; so's my love :
Be not offended ; for it hurts not him
That he is loved of me : I follow him not
By any token of presumptuous suit ;
Nor would I have him till I do deserve him."
*' There's something in 't
More than my father's skill, which was the great'sl
COMEDIES. 107
Of his profession, that his good receipt
Shall for my legacy be sanctified
By the luckiest stars in heaven."
She confesses her secret to the Countess, Bertram's
mother, and wins her love, and she also obtains
the firm favor of the King of France by curing
him with her father's prescriptions ; at length by
parental and royal command she is married to Ber-
tram. He, feeling that he has been forced into
this marriage and that she is of lower rank, departs
that same day for Italy, where he is afterwards
followed by Helena under disguise as a pilgrim ;
and in the wars of the Duke of Florence he gains
military renown.
The three older characters, Lafeu, Parolles, " a
very tainted fellow and full of wickedness," and
the Clown, who like nearly all of Shakespeare's
clowns conceals under his fool's-cap much practical
wisdom and likewise makes nonsense of words, such
as :
'* To say nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing and to
have nothing, is to be a great part of your title ; which is
within a very little of nothing,"
108 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
these make up the few ludicrous features of a
strong comedy. Bajazet is true history.
The play is like the First Lord's words :
'The web of our life is of a mingled yam, good and ill
together : our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped
them not ; and our crimes would despair, if they were not
cherished by our virtues."
I leave the end of this vigorous drama to the
reader. It is approached by ' ' the inaudible and
noiseless foot of time," but it is drawn out, some
might possibly say, to an almost painful expec-
tancy, yet it is hard to amend Shakespeare.
Helena and Bertram are reunited in happy mar-
riage bonds.
King " All yet seems well ; and if the end so meet,
The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet."
GREEK PLAYS.
This title of Greek plays, as well as the titles
that follow of Roman Tragedies and Italian plays,
have no real significance, but are here used by me
only for convenience in classification, since the
plays are not strictly classical.
GREEK PLAYS. 109
TROILTTS AND CRESSIDA.
This drama pursues closely the story of the Iliad
and it constitutes a fable for critics. It is a com-
plex work and is of lower tone and style than
Shakespeare's other plays. I do not think that
Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, set him-
self to rival Homer on the same field but from
Chapman's Homer or Florio's translations or his
own knowledge of Greek, he was acquainted with
Homer's Iliad and in this play of "Troilus and
Cressida," if he indeed had a hand in it, he freely
introduces the Homeric characters of Hector,
Paris, Helen, ^neas, as well as on the Greek
side Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles, Menelaus,
Patroclus, Diomedes, and Thersites.
Thersites is made to say of himself,
" I am a rascal ;"
he is witty but hardly with the wit and point of
Shakespeare's other characters of the same stamp.
Achilles, instead of eating out his soul in
Homeric anger, is humorous, lying in his tent in
inactivity, jerking out his blunt invectives against
Agamemnon and the war.
110 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Ulysses is the "foxy Ulysses." Ajax is made
a dancing bear. Agamemnon has an imperious
strut, but now and then says a strong thing, as :
" He that is proud eats up himself; pride is his own glass,
his own trumpet, his own chronicle ; and whatever praises
itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise."
On the Trojan side Hector almost alone sustains
his Homeric dignity and nobility. Homer puts
into the mouth of Hector the noble reply to
Polydamas in the battle with the Greeks :
" The best of omens is our country's cause."
(eis (Ho>vo9 opioTos, d pv via a Trepl Tras pi;?.)
Shakespeare makes Hector say to Cassandra who
urges him not to go into the fight :
" The end crowns all,
And that old common arbitrator, Time,
Will one day end it."
"Life every man holds dear ; but the dear man
Holds honour far more precious-dear than life.'*
Shakespeare's Helen does not talk like the high-
born dame, and Cassandra, instead of being the
awful and fiery prophetess, is but a " demented
superstitious girl."
GREEK PLAYS. Ill
The play is given in the folio edition of 1609
with other Shakespearean plays, but was doubtless
made up for the stage from an earlier composition.
If Shakespeare wrote it or fitted it for stage per-
formance, it was the work of youth and, though
following in a measure the story of the Iliad, seems
to me almost like a piece of boyish fun, making
sport of the personages of that epic.
The love of Troilus and Cressida, the hero and
heroine, if they may so be called, is on a low level,
especially Cressida' s, who ends as a wanton in the
Greek camp, but who, nevertheless, is made to
speak words of love. The biggest and wickedest
rascal of all is the oily-tongued wicked old uncle
of Cressida, Pandarus, his ribald song of "Ha,
Ha, Ha!" is not equal to Shakespeare's other
songs. Yet in this whole uncanny farrago of evil
lawlessness there is now and then what may be
well regarded as flashes of Shakespeare's power,
as in the sweet familiar line :
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
This play comes actually in the authorized order
of Shakespeare's plays after "Pericles" and
112 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
"Timon of Athens;" it is neither comedy nor
tragedy, but a historic refauch of an immortal
story, yet Shakespeare in this play was in a cycle
of comedy. It never rises to the usual easy
flowing inspiration of the poet, but is labored and
dry. Even fierce Achilles, when at last aroused to
arms, gives mean orders to his myrmidons and
slays Hector when he is sitting unarmed.
TIMON OF ATHENS.
This drama, as well as that of " Pericles, Prince
of Tyre," has Greece and the Orient for back-
ground, and, as has been already said, they are
classic in name only.
The story of " Timon " is found in Plutarch.
Timon is the millionaire of Athens; as another
actor in the play says of him :
" If I want gold, steal but a beggar's dog
And give it Timon, why, the dog coins gold."
Timon was naturally a loving, generous man, who
trusted his friends with unbounded confidence ; he
entrusts the disposition of his enormous wealth to
his treasurer Flavius ; he says to him :
GREEK PLAYS. 113
" To think I shall lack friends ? Secure thy heart ;
If I would broach the vessels of my love,
And try the argument of hearts by borrowing,
Men and men's fortunes could I frankly use."
" And in some sort these wants of mine are crown'd,
That I account them blessings ; for by these
Shall I try friends ; you shall perceive how you
Mistake my fortunes ; I am wealthy in my friends. ' '
So he lavishes his gold upon his friends and all
who servilely court him. He feasts his clients in a
princely manner, buys their pictures or poems,
whether good or bad, he makes them large loans,
he pours his wealth into their extended hands ;
but he is no Carnegie, to do real good to men with
his riches ; he seeks only his and their vain gratifi-
cation.
He finds them false to their promises, dishonest
sycophants, and his kindness changes to hate. He
seeks a solitary place by the seashore. He had
done with man. He utters truths pressed out of
his burning heart against human selfishness and
dishonesty. It is odd to see Shakespeare in the
r61e of pessimist, and it somehow does not seem to
8
114 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
sit well on him ; yet as the interpreter of humanity
he regards the bad as well as the good.
The lesson of " Timon of Athens" is money.
Money, like life, beauty, and power, is a gift ; it is
not a toy to be thrown about as Timon did for his
own pleasure or that of his friends. It is the
"love of money," not money itself, which Scrip-
ture calls the root of all evil and which is noxious
and destructive ; this wholesome admonition was
never more needed than at the present ; the gospel
of money is preached from one end of the land to
the other ; it enters into all. Godliness is gain.
Public institutions are run on the narrow gauge
of trade. Political systems and economists base
their final arguments on financial prosperity. Life
itself is reckoned to a nicety solely in its money
relations. There are some fathers who send their
sons to the university, not to discipline and broaden
their minds in studies which require mental con-
centration, but to make them sharper for a busi-
ness life so as to be foremost in the race for gain.
It would be easy for the student, thus intel-
lectually equipped, when he leaves college and
GREEK PLAYS. 115
enters the professional school or business life, to
master the practical, to conquer the difficulties,
and learn the methods of business, citizenship, and
politics ; college is the place for thorough study,
to lay deep the foundation principles of truth. In
literary studies it is better to obtain a genuine
knowledge of one great subject or author, such as
Plato or Aristotle, than all the minor classics or
the Greek logomachies of the Byzantine period,
with the exception, perhaps, of Chrysostom and
Origen. It is better to sit under the shadow of
the great oak of Dante than to wander aimlessly
through the decayed luxuriant garden of Italian
letters. It is better to know Shakespeare than a
hundred English authors and poets. This may be
combined in the university course with the pur-
suit of the noble advancement of modern scientific
thought. But a long leap has been made from
money to education, and above all from poor disil-
lusioned Timon of Athens, in whose eyes the yel-
low glare of gold has become sickening and deadly.
Money is the moral of the play. Some doubtless
have felt the force of Charles Lamb's rather
strongly expressed words :
Il6 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
"O money, money, how blindly thou hast been
worshipped, and how stupidly abused ! Thou art
health and liberty and strength ; and he that has
thee may rustle his pockets at the foul fiend."
Money is good if gotten in clean ways. This
brighter side of money ought by no means to be
lost sight of ; magnificent examples are found, and
none more than in our own country, of some rich
t
men who use their wealth or portions of it for the
promotion of civilization, so that these democratic
wealthy men cast kings and nobles behind their
backs, in making themselves benefactors of their
race.
Timon did not understand this, he retired from
the society of men.
Alcibiades was his friend, who when a youth
was a disciple of Socrates, but afterwards turned
out to be a libertine and traitor to his country.
Alcibiades, with his train of courtesans, comes also
to Timon to solicit gold, and Timon flings his gold
with curses at their heads. He retreats to the sea-
shore, lives in a cave, and digs his grave by the
sea, so that its waves would roll over his bones and
GREEK PLAYS. 117
dispose of them at last in its hidden depths, as if
he would carry his hatred of man into^ the eternal
abyss.
Timon "Come not to me again : but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood ;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover."
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.
This delightful comedy is likewise laid in Greece,
but is of an airy, playful tone. The bars are let
down and the mind enters the enchanted fields of
the imagination, where love undergoes strange
changes, mingling human with fairy folk that sport
in the moonbeams, and whose light footprints
leave little green circles in the grass :
" To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,"
and vanish at the coming of the dawn. If much
of the play be made of moonbeams, they
"are of imagination all compact."
It is a court drama played before Queen Eliza-
beth in all her pomp, and probably at the marriage
Il8 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
of some high personages, so that it seems to be com-
posed with peculiar care and elegance, with a flat-
tery at once delicate and loftily poetic, as in the
words of Oberon to Puck :
" That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd : a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts :
But I might see Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell :
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower ; the herb I shew'd thee once :
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make a man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb ; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league."
The play blends mature thought with youthful
GREEK PLAYS. 119
fire as in "Love's Labour's Lost," written in the
last years of the sixteenth century, and abounds in
classic allusions.
The scene is in Athens in the legendary time of
Theseus, and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons,
whose figures and costumes are like those carved
on the friezes of the temple of Theseus and the
Parthenon, so that there is a touch of the Greek
heroic, as when Theseus says to his queen Hip-
polyta :
11 1 woo'd thee with my sword."
Love plays its part on the stage, a triple or four-
fold actor ; and the scene is Shakespeare's favorite
one of a vista in a forest.
The author, as we have seen, made much use
of Plutarch's histories. The language of this play,
however, is pure English, and both its poetry and
prose flow like music.
The fairy folk are a Shakespearean creation and
like no other in English or German. They are
superior fairies. They are made of air and moon-
beams, yet endowed with a bright intelligence.
They love and hate, they have control over certain
120 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
natural forces, they ply between nature and human-
ity.
Obcron' But we are spirits of another sort :
I with the morning's love have oft made sport ;
And, like a forester, the groves may tread,
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery-red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams."
Oberon, king of the fairies, can endure something
of the daylight and rejoices in nature's beauties.
He is a pure emanation from nature, yet with a
superior touch, gifted with a playful and sometimes
mischievous humor, though on the whole not
unfriendly to man.
The fairies are the ' ' scene-shifters ' ' in dreams
and ply between nature and humanity. Puck, the
business sprite, who boasts of putting " a girdle
round the earth in forty minutes," much prefers
to sport with the birds and butterflies or to nestle
in a bed of violets ; yet he causes immense trouble
to human pairs who are wandering bewildered in
the vast forest.
The fairies change the affections of the lovers to
GREEK PI<AYS. 121
their opposites, so that the sweet-hearted Hermia
compares sudden transformations to the direst
things.
Ly sander prophesies beforehand sorrow and woe,
and says :
" War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream ;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say ' Behold ' !
The jaws of darkness do devour it up."
44 Ay me ! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth."
But all comes out happily and the tricksy fairies
sing the marriage song.
During the nuptial festivities of Theseus and Hip-
polyta and the other pairs of lovers, there is intro-
duced a comic by-play gotten up by peasants, of
" Pyramus and Thisbe," which, if it accomplishes
nothing more, brings to notice "bully Bottom"
with his supreme confidence in himself, as the
asinine-headed sweetheart of Titania, ordering about
122 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
the little fays, Peas-blossom, Cobweb, Mustard-
seed, and is also ready to act Lion, Wall, or Mor-
tar ; he speaks his opinion to Theseus in the
Ercles vein, a rude clod, but, touched by Shake-
speare's genius, as individual and immortal as the
most important characters. Shakespeare's close
observation of nature and life is seen in such pas-
sages, where in Titania's language he describes
with realistic minuteness " the dreadful English
winter " that the poet himself had witnessed :
" Contagious fogs ; which, falling in the land,
Have every pelting river made so proud,
That they have overborne their continents :
The OT hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat ; and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard :
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock ;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud ;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable ;
The human mortals want their winter here ;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest :
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
GREEK PLAYS. 123
That rheumatic diseases do abound :
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter : hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose ;
And on old Hiems' chin, and icy crown
An ordorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set."
Shakespeare's facts, as before said, give him a
base for his poetry, and the ideal builds itself on
the actual. In the play of "The Tempest," for
example, how bare and grim the realism of the
passage,
" They hurried us aboard a bark,"
A rotten carcass of a butt, not rigg'd
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast ; the very rats
Instinctively have quit it."
Little escapes the poet's eye. He writes just
what he sees and feels. He makes Theseus in this
play good-naturedly excuse the slips of memory
in the boorish minds of the actors, by referring to
the stage-fright of ' ' great clerks ' ' or learned men
who addressed him, suggested, perhaps, to the poet
by his recollections of Burleigh, or even, it may be,
of the wonderfully wise Lord Bacon :
124 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
1 ' Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practised accent in their fears,
And, in conclusion, dumbly have broke off."
We may possibly be reminded of a fine line in
Keble's hymns, when we read poor distracted
Helena's words :
"It is not night when I do see your face."
As noticed in other plays, "A Midsummer
Night's Dream" is pervaded by the scent of wild
flowers, as in Oberon's speech to Puck :
" I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows ;
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,"
"There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,'
Lull'd in these flowers."
To hear this sportive play on the German stage,
accompanied by Mendelssohn's fairy-music, is some-
thing not to be forgotten.
THE WIKTEE'S TALE.
This seems to be one of the latest of Shake-
speare's dramas, dating about the year 1611. It
GREEK PLAYS. 125
consists apparently of two plays. It is pure romance,
audaciously breaking all bounds of time, place, and
circumstance ; it is full of errors of fad, as in
the well-known illustration of identifying Bohemia,
which has no coast line, with Sicily, which has one ;
it mixes up ancient and modern things, introduc-
ing then as living the Italian Renaissance painter,
Giulio Romano, and has a burial conducted after a
Christian form. It mixes up classical demi-gods,
such as Hercules and Theseus, with Christian
saints.
Its style is finished, but somewhat studied and
involved, yet it has a great charm. Its morality is
pure and lofty, and its end is joyous and serene ; as
I have quoted already from this play in relation to
Shakespeare's conception of Nature and Art, I will
not dwell upon this theme.
It was written to be acted before the Court of
Elizabeth.
There could be no more enjoyable reading, about
the fireside of a stormy winter's night, when tem-
pestuous blasts of wind and snow dash against the
windows, than this tale, which is purely of the
126 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
imagination and belongs to the Shakespearean
beginning of the English romantic school of litera-
ture. *
The play was published in the first folio of
Shakespeare's works and it has been called the last
of his comedies, but was written in the fullness of
his strength. The story seems to have sprung
from a mass of fables and ' ' extant stories ' ' in the
Elizabethan times, with which the people amused
their leisure hours ; but what Shakespeare touched
carried with it something real and vital. It is also
of the "Middle Style" or a mingling of higher
drama with common life and the language of the
people.
" The Winter's Tale" is in one sense comedy,
dealing with human woes and joys. It is pure
fiction, but in regard to the Bohemian sea-coast,
Greene, a geographer contemporary with Shake-
speare, affirms the same fact on his map. This
may show how little the country of Bohemia was
known of in England at that time, though it
appears incredible from the fact that but a century
and a half before, John Huss, the Bohemian re-
GREEK PLAYS. 127
former, was burned, and Shakespeare may have
alluded to this in the line :
It is an heretic that makes the fire."
But is not another explanation admissible, that,
in the freedom of poetic license, Shakespeare, to
add romance to his tale, takes the name of Bohemia,
as good as any other strange land, to be that of a
distant and almost unknown country ?
What mattered it to the poet what name of
country he employed ?
Imogen in " Cymbeline " was the typical daugh-
ter, so Hermione was the typical wife. Hermione
is the central character of " The Winter's Tale,"
her constancy, patience, unfailing love, and stead-
fast faith, burning unquenchably bright in the
most trying conditions.
King I^eontes was a jealous tyrant, who wrongs
his wife, but in his youth he loved her. The
words of Polixenes, King of Bohemia, which he
applied to Leontes, might be the origin of the
words which has been bestowed on Shelley of an
"eternal child:"
128 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Polixenes ' ' We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind,
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal."
The Chorus, Time, sweeps away the lapse of
years and with his scythe cuts the drama into two
parts, and in the second introduces Perdita, who
from a babe in the wilderness, exposed to death,
grows up
" A Shepherd's daughter "
in her blooming womanhood in Bohemia, and her
maidenly words are characteristically simple, pure,
and wise.
The play is brought back again to comedy by
the rogue Autolycus, who changes his clothes,
but not his vagabondish character ; he sings :
*' Jog on jog on the foot-path way,
And merrily hent the stile-a :
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a."
There is no more beautiful scene than Hermione's
awakening, when the sculptor's marble melts into
life, and the power of art is seen to be triumphant.
GREEK PLAYS.
I2 9
PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE.
The play of "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," may be
symbolized as a white lily, growing in the black
mud of a swamp.
The pure spirit of the heroine, who is perhaps its
principal character, saves the drama from corrup-
tion and exhales the sweetness of innocence.
The drama is undoubtedly Shakespeare's in point
and passages, but not probably in its whole web
and woof. The time of its authorship is judged to
be 1609.
It also contravenes all classical rules ; the reader
is whisked from Antioch to Tyre, then to Ephesus,
Tarsus, and Mitylene, as by magic bounds. The
s.tyle is an even steady pace, though it passes
through deep valleys of shame and humiliation.
Yet its end is happy and its moral tone, on the
whole, rises about its foul corruption.
It is Greek in one respect, it has a Chorus ; oddly
enough it is English in the fact that the Chorus is
none other than " ancient Gower."
" To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come."
9
130 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
ROMAN TRAGEDIES.
ANDRONICUS.
This is the poorest of what I have denominated
the Roman tragedies, but I will mention it first.
In this play we reach the most disputable of
Shakespeare's dramas.
If Shakespeare indeed composed it, his part was
like a graft on a crabbed tree, or it may be he
wrote it originally in his youthful days to make
his audience sup full on horrors, as was the fashion
of the times. His own genius was so strong that
he comprehended all the elements and human con-
ditions of passions.
He who could stand in sunshine on the clear
mountain summit commercing with the skies could
descend into the poisonous valley where loathsome
things grow and move.
In this play the scene is laid in Rome, with the
forum in the background, yet there is nothing of
antique Roman nobleness, but a most degenerate
baseness of the decline of the empire. The charac-
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 131
ters are not even historic, nor are they grand.
The emperor, Saturninus, is weak; the empress,
Tamora, is a foul fiend.
Titus Andronicus boasts of his warlike achieve-
ments, but shows no vigor in an emergency.
The younger men are lewd fellows ; poor Lavinia
with her bleeding stumps of arms somehow is not
pathetic. The dusky Aaron is a devil incarnate ;
only Lucius Andronicus shows manliness, and
proves that Shakespeare was a democrat in the
true sense of that word, recognizing the rights and
freedom of the people.
The play is barbarous, bloody, and disgusting.
Were it not for some delicate similes of flowers,
birds, and nature, in which the poet is seen, it
would be a wide waste of terrible crime.
The author speaks of ' ' popish tricks ' ' and
"God and St. Stephen " in these old Roman days,
yet his knowledge discriminating between the
Greek and Roman gods and his frequent allusions
to Ovid's metamorphoses, and quotations from
Virgil and Horace, show a familiarity with these
Latin authors.
132 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
The recurrence of Shakespearean phrases is to
be observed, as in the words :
" She is a woman, therefore may be wooed,
She is a woman, therefore may be won,"
which brings to mind the wooing scene in Richard
III.
I have come myself to believe in the Shake-
spearean authorship of this play, as bearing inter-
nal and external proof of this.
It has as good a claim as any in this respect.
It appeared in the quarto of 1600 under the title
1 ' The Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus
Andronicus. ' ' In London it was printed for Edward
White in company with other undoubted Shake-
spearean dramas, but it was evidently written in no
high mood of thought.
CORIOLAOTS.
We come in this play to the genuine Roman of
the olden time, hard and grand, where Shake-
speare's genius seems to find a more sympathetic
and firm ground ; but Shakespeare, as has been
more than once said, was at home in humanity,
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 133
and created new and lasting types. His clown is
always a ' ' clown/ ' his hero, ' ' a hero ; " the fighter
is set before us in Roman form both legendary
and historic. Coriolanus was a precursor of that
inflexible valor which led* Rome to the conquest of
the world.
The little town, Roma, seated on her seven hills,
often assailed and sometimes captured, was never
annihilated, and itself finally overcame the fierce
Volsci and Etruscans represented in the play, and
became the ruling power of Italy and of the world.
It was of the period when a Roman demos had
begun to make its appearance, and the majestic
shadow also of the Roman mother is seen.
Coriolanus may never have done the marvelous
warlike deeds, except in imagination, but the
lesson of the tragedy is Pride, a passion working
in a brave and haughty nature, invading and over-
throwing its noble qualities, creating that unfor-
giving spirit which brought about a tragic end.
The play probably belongs to the beginning of
the 1 7th century, and the later period of Shake-
speare's life. It would seem to have been thrown
134 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
off rapidly, inspired by the story in "Plutarch's
Histories," but putting new life into prosaic details.
Coriolanus is a Roman Achilles, a great figure,
but without the beauty of the Greek. The only
soft spot in his hard nature is his love for his
mother, Volumnia, by whose entreaties and those
of his wife, Virgilia, he magnanimously, in the first
instance, spares Rome ; yet he is no politician
stooping to little things, but strives to ingratiate
himself with the people, to unify them under his
leadership. He, like Achilles, seems to do the
fighting, and to make the whole host of his ene-
mies flee before him. He defends his patrician
views with rough and haughty force, but in the
political field he fails to attain popularity, as is
readily seen in his address to the people :
Coriolanus "The people are abused ; set on.
This paltering
Becomes not Rome ; nor has Coriolanus
Deserved this so dishonour'd rub, laid falsely
I' the plain way of his merit."
"Tell me of corn !
This was my speech, and I will speak 't again "
" Now, as I live, I will. My nobler friends,
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 135
I crave their pardons :
For the mutable, rank-scented many, let them
Regard me as I do not flatter, and
Therein behold themselves : I say again,
In soothing them, we flourish 'gainst our senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition, [ter'd,
Which we ourselves have plough'd for, sow'd and seat-
By mingling them with us, the honour'd number ;
Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that
Which they have given to beggars.
"How! no more!
As for my country I have shed my blood,"
" By Jove, 'twould be my mind ! "
" Be not as common fools : "
1 They chose their magistrate ;
And such a one as he, who puts his ' shall,'
His popular ' shall,' against a graver bench
Than ever frown'd in Greece. By Jove himself,
It makes the consuls base ! "
The pathetic point of the drama is where Corio-
lanus stands a suppliant in the market place before
the altar of the Volsci, at Corioli, not in the brag-
gadocio style, when he proclaims himself :
11 My name is Caius Marcius,"
'My surname, Coriolanus ; "
136 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
grim words to his hearers, but not boastful. Yet
he breaks out once in a flame, when the Volscian
General, Aufidius, who hates him for his superior-
ity in warlike fame, called him a boy :
" Cut me to pieces, Volsces ; men and lads,
Stain all your edges on me. ' Boy ! ' false hound !
If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,
That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli ;
Alone I did it ' Boy ! * "
Old Aufidius, his chief foe, again says of him :
"Thy country's strength and weakness."
Weakness, indeed, because selfish.
Coriolanus fell under many blows. The sacred
Alban Mount and the sunny hilltops still are
there under the clear blue sky of Italy, where
Corioli and the ancient Latin cities stood ; but the
worshipers and fighters who regarded Rome as
their mightiest foe are now but silent shadows.
JULIUS CJESAB.
We have at last reached historic ground, but as
has been already suggested, Shakespeare, for his
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 137
own purposes, sometimes swerves from history,
though sti^l true to life, and in this noble tragedy
Brutus is evidently his hero. In such a stern,
pure character and lover of his country as Brutus
was, his killing of Caesar was an act of savage
grandeur and untaught paganism he drew from
deep instincts of native self-sacrifice wholly un-
trained by the higher law of Christianity. It is
strange after so long a time of the teaching of
Christianity, when almost the whole world has
been reached by its mild divine truths, that even
in Christian nations the pagan belief of Brutus
should be re-erected into a kind of religion ; what
is violent cannot last. It seems sometimes as if
permanent peace made progress by occasional re-
trogression ; in zigzags, not in straight lines, that
history repeats itself, and that even in Christian
lands pagan ideas should be revived as if there had
been no advance in civilization. Caesar's greatness
is recognized in this and other plays his vast
organizing ability and warlike, conquering energy
but in a spiritual sense he is not the adorable,
nor is he Shakespeare's own highest conception of
138 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
greatness. He has been held to be the greatest
man the world has ever seen in force of mind and
will, perhaps so yet in the highest traits of moral
character, like Napoleon, who comes nearest to
him, he fails. He is the embodiment of power,
which men worship. It is true, if he had lived
longer he might have done even more as a con-
structor of a broad system of government, a law-
giver, a patron of letters, a political builder of
empire, which would have become world-wide, as
the world then was. To the last he was an ambi-
tious man, working for self and power, the origina-
tor of Caesarism, whose portentous shadow has
since then overspread the world and entered every
system political, moral, and even religious. It
was a kingdom of force opposed to that of right-
eousness. Caesar was a subject worthy of Shake-
speare's genius ; he took hold of it in a simple,
natural way. He is not taken off his feet by the
greatness of his subject, nor does he create a demi-
god.
Caesar crushed the factions of Sulla, Caius
Marius, and the worthier contention of Pompey,
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 139
and gathered the reins of power into his own hand.
He looked to the rulership of all hence, the
Roman empire he drove over freedom and the
popular rights. There was a call for the con-
spiracy of Brutus in the fact of Caesar's ambition.
Brutus saw in it that which menaced liberty,
crushing the republic. Doubtless Caesar's views
were broad, and his system of government won-
derfully calculated for the conquest and unification
of the nations ; himself, in one sense, was the begin-
ning of Roman civilization in law, political science,
art, and letters.
The excuse for absolutism in the conception of
a more orderly form of government was proved in
the line of most of his successors to be unjust and
detestable Caesarism means war, righteousness
means peace. Shakespeare seemed to have had a
deep conception of this. In his poetic eye he saw
a day in old Rome, the capitol, the senate, the
forum, the splendid Julian Basilica, filled with
officers and clients, the narrow streets tramped by
many feet, and the market places also filled with
crowds discussing political affairs, and the great
140 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
turn in the tide of them. He saw, too, the scene
of Brutus and Mark Antony's speeches over the
dead body of Caesar, now so familiarly declaimed
by schoolboys, but is this an argument against
them ? What other speeches of ancient or modern
times are like these for boys to declaim? They
are models of forcible address, surpassing the
speeches of Cicero, and the ages have caught
them up.
Shakespeare does not entirely follow Plutarch's
life of Csesar ; he had his own interpretation of the
characters of Caesar and Brutus ; he came into the
wide field of true dramatic motive. These persons
become men instead of the forms and opinions of
historians and essayists. Evidently the life of
Caesar made a deep impression on Shakespeare, as
is instanced in other plays, calling him, for ex-
ample in "Hamlet," "Mighty Csesar," yet he
makes Brutus, who truly loved Caesar, say :
" Caesar was ambitious."
Brutus was afraid of Caesar's ambition. He knew
Caesar's power and feared for freedom. The scene
of the conspirators' plot in Brutus' s house, with
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 141
closed doors, and shadows, and the critical discus-
sion of the characters of those to be chosen or
omitted, is deeply impressive. The speeches of
Brutus, Mark Antony, and Cassius, after the mur-
der in the forum, marvelously differentiated, are
characteristic. We might imagine Brutus ascend-
ing the rostrum in simple dignity, wrapped in his
toga, and without a gesture. He is laconic, frank,
and stately, but with loftier ideas than the rest
the highest pagan, though not Christian, ideas.
Brutus " If there be any in this assembly, any dear
friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar
was no less than his. If then that friend demand why
Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer : not that I
loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you
rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar
were dead, to live all freemen ? As Caesar loved me, I weep
for him ; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it ; as he was
valiant, I honour him ; but as he was ambitious, I slew him.
There is tears for his love ; joy for his fortune ; honour for
his valour ; and death for his ambition. Who is here so
base that would be a bondman ? If any, speak ; for him
have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a
Roman ? If any, speak ; for him have I offended. Who is
142 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
here so vile that will not love his country ? If any, speak ;
for him have I offended ? I pause for a reply."
Cassius' speech is plausible and political, seeking
to lower the estimation of "the great Caesar," but
Mark Antony's reveals the highest art of elo-
quence. He leads his audience along on one way,
winningly pathetic and masterful. Then he turns
with the fury of hot passion, carrying all like a
lava stream before him. From thinly concealed
sarcasm he suddenly shows his deeper design to
stir the people to rise in rebellion :
Antony "But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world : now lies he the r e,
And none so poor to do him reverence.
masters, if I were disposed to stir
Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,
1 should do Brutus wrong and Cassius wrong,
Who, you all know, are honourable men :
I will not do them wrong ; I rather choose
To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you,
Than I will wrong such honourable men."
" I am no orator, as Brutus is ;
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend ; and that they know full well
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 143
That gave me public leave to speak of him :
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men's blood : I only speak right on ;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know ; [mouths,
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb
And bid them speak for me : for were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar's, that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny."
The weird death of Brutus at Philippi ends the
tragedy :
" For Brutus only overcame himself."
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
"Antony and Cleopatra" is great because the
characters are great. It is a magnificent drama,
and the consistency of the character of Antony
throughout these, the last Roman plays ' ' Julius
Caesar" and " Antony and Cleopatra, " is marvel-
ous in the qualities of Antony, the most brilliant
of the triumvirate of Rome. The same moving
orator, the victorious general at Philippi, the hus-
144 TH E READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
band of Octavia, threw away all for his love of
Cleopatra, but with the exception of his infatuated
words of passion, he still is noble and magnani-
mous.
Antony cast aside duty and power for pleasure,
and did it deliberately ; but he fell on his sword,
Roman-like, at the last. He walks the scene
right royally ; he was strong, but not so strong in
wicked will as Cleopatra. She was a flower of
wondrous beauty sprung from the slime of the
Nile, entrancing and mysterious. Antony's love
for her was the rift in the towering cliff that finally
brought it to ruins. Antony was the same man
who made the fiery speech over Caesar's dead
body, rousing the Roman people, turning the
tide against the revolutionists, and really setting
forth the first conception of the Roman empire.
Antony knows himself with utmost perspicacity,
and confesses his moral weakness. He also has
imagination that sees beneath the surface of things
to the true motives of actions.
The style of the play is simple and vigorous ; it
seems to have mingled the Saxon naturalness and
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 145
the I^atin terseness of expression. In all this,
Shakespeare's poetic genius vitalizes the common-
place. Such sentences as these are illustrative of
the style of this martial play, as far as it has to do
with the Roman soldier and politician.
Antony speaks of Octavius :
" He shall to Parthia. Be it art or hap,
He hath spoken true ; the very dice obey him,
And in our sports my better cunning faints
Under his chance ; if we draw lots, he speeds ;
His cocks do win the battle still of mine
When it is all to naught, and his quails ever
Beat mine, in hoofed at odds, I will to Egypt :
And though I make this marriage for my peace,
I' the east my pleasure lies."
Antony, a keen observer, mixes scientific fact
with poetry :
^4&wy "Thus do they, sir: they take the flow o'
the Nile
By certain scales i' the pyramid ; they know,
By the height, the lowness, or the mean, if dearth
Or foison follow : the higher Nilus swells,
The more it promises : as it ebbs, the seedsman
Upon the slime and ooze scatters the grain,
And shortly comes to harvest."
10
146 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Antony's character is set forth by Agrippa when
in Rome, and by a rude Roman soldier :
Agrippa " Tis a noble Lepidus,"
Enobarbvs " A very fine one : O, how he loves Caesar ! "
Agr. " Nay, but how dearly he adores Mark Antony ! "
Eno. " Caesar? why, he's the Jupiter of men."
Agr." What's Antony ? the god of Jupiter."
Eno. " Spake you of Caesar ? How ! the nonpareil ! "
Agr. O, Antony ! O thou Arabian bird ! "
Eno. "Would you praise Caesar, say 'Caesar;' go no
further."
Agr." Indeed, he plied them both with excellent
praises."
Agrippa "Nay, but how dearly he adores Mark
Antony :"
Enobarbus "But he loves Caesar best; yet he loves
Antony :
Ho ! hearts, tongues, figures, scribes, bards, poets, cannot
Think, speak, cast, write, sing, number ho !
His love to Antony. But as for Caesar,
Kneel down, kneel down, and wonder."
Antony refers, lover-like, to Cleopatra :
" The April's in her eyes : it is love's spring,
And these the showers to bring it on. Be cheerful."
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 147
Agrippa brings his testimony as to Antony's
emotional nature :
Agr. (aside to Eno.) "Why, Enobarbus,
When Antony found Julius Caesar dead,
He cried almost to roaring ; and he wept
When at Philippi he found Brutus slain."
Caesar himself says to Antony :
' ' Adieu ; be happy !
Lepidus Let all the number of the stars give light
To thy fair way ! "
Ccesar " You praise yourself
By laying defects of judgment to me ; but
You patched up your excuses."
But how simple, graceful, and fitting are these
words :
Agr. " To hold you in perpetual amity,
To make you brothers and to knit your hearts
With an unslipping knot, take Antony
Octavia to his wife ; whose beauty claims
No worse a husband than the best of men ;
Whose virtues and whose general graces speak
That which none else can utter. By this marriage
All little jealousies which now seem great,
And all great fears which now impart their dangers,
Would then be nothing : truths would be tales,
148 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Where now half tales be truths : her love to both
Would each to other and all loves to both
Draw after her."
The author breaks through the course of this
martial play in a picture of inimitable beauty and
effulgence, in which the galley bearing Cleopatra
burns on the mirroring bosom of the Orontes :
Eno." I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burn'd on the water ; the poop was beaten gold ;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that [silver,
The winds were lovesick with them ; the oars were
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description : she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature : on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did."
The description of this beautiful sorceress min-
gles the intellectual element with the material.
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 149
In the following passages there is a simple but
perfectly expressed, though subtle, thought :
Menas " I think the policy of that purpose made
more in the marriage than the love of the parties."
Eno. "I see men's judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them,
To suffer all alike."
But the poet represents Antony as a hero ;
invincible by land, yet not so strong at sea ; this
failure Caesar took advantage of. Enobarbus says
to Antony :
Eno." Most worthy, sir, you therein throw away
The absolute soldiership you have by land,
Distract your army, which doth most consist
Of war-marked footmen, leave unexecuted
Your own renowned knowledge, quite forego
The way which promises assurance, and
Give up yourself merely to chance and hazard,
From firm security."
Antony" How now, worthy soldier ? "
Soldier" O noble emperor, do not fight by sea :
Trust not to rotten planks. Do you misdoubt
This sword and these my wounds ? Let the Egyptians
And the Phoenicians go a-ducking : we
150 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
Have used to conquer, standing on the earth
And fighting foot to foot."
Eno. " Antony only, that would make his will
Lord of his reason. What though you fled
From that great face of war, whose several ranges
Frighted each other, why should he follow ?
The itch of his affection should not then
Have nick'd his captainship : at such a point,
When half to half the world opposed, he being
The mered question ; 'twas a shame no less
Than was his loss, to course your flying flags
And leave his navy gazing."
As before indicated, the unity of Antony's char-
acter is surprisingly kept throughout from begin-
ning to end Shakespeare has the same conception
of it. He makes its subjective features immortal,
torus et teres.
Plutarch's rough sketch of Antony has been
filled out and transformed by the dramatist, mak-
ing a complex character, kept down by an enslave-
ment to his lower nature that forbids its rising to a
lofty height except at intervals.
There is the warrior in gleaming arms, driving
back, single handed, the advancing enemy, and
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 151
there is the weak Antony, captured by a woman's
wiles. Nevertheless, Shakespeare has lifted him
above ordinary men, as a leader, one of the bril-
liant heroes of the world, but powerless through
unworthy passion.
Cleopatra is set before us as a queenly spirit ;
she does love Antony as much as such a hard, sel-
fish nature could love anything out of itself. Some
of her haughty words are :
Cleopatra "These hands do lack nobility, that
they strike
A meaner than myself ; since I myself
Have given myself the cause."
11 Most kind messenger,
Say to great Caesar this : in deputation
I kiss his conquering hand ; tell him, I'm prompt
To lay my crown at's feet, and there to kneel :
Tell him, from his all-obeying breath I hear
The doom of Egypt."
1 ' Noblest of men, woo't die ?
Hast thou no care of me ? shall I abide
In this dull world, which in thy absence is
No better than a sty ? O, see, my women,
The crown of the earth doth melt. My Lord !
152 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
O, wither'd is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fall'n : young boys and girls
Are level now with men ; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon."
" No more, but e'en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chares. It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods,
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
All's but naught ;"
" Patience is sottish, and impatience does
Become a dog that's mad : then is it sin
To rush into the secret house of death,
Ere death dare come to us ? How do you, women ?
What, what ! good cheer ! Why, how now, Charmain !
My noble girls ! Ah, women, women, look,
Our lamp is spent, it's out ! Good sirs, take heart ;
We'll bury him ; and then, what's brave, what's noble,
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make death proud to take us. Come, away :
This case of that huge spirit now is cold :
Ah, women, women ! Come : we have no friend
But resolution and the briefest end."
"Where art thou, death?
Come hither, come ! come, come, and take a queen
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 153
With many babes and beggars ! "
" Sir, I will eat no meat, I'll not drink, sir ;
If idle talk will once be necessary,
I'll not sleep neither : this mortal house I'll nun,
Do Caesar what he can. Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court,
Nor once be chastised with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up,
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome ? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me ! rather on Nile's mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring ! rather make
My country's high pyramids my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains."
" But when he meant to quail and shake the orb ;
He was as rattling thunder."
" Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits
Through the ashes of my chance : wert thou a man,
Thou wouldst have mercy on me."
Then comes Antony, convulsed by the false
report of Cleopatra's death which she had sent.
He says to Eros :
Antony "Since Cleopatra died
I have lived in such dishonour that the gods
154 THB READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Detest my baseness. I, that with my sword
Quarter'd the world, and o'er green Neptune's back
With ships made cities, condemn myself to lack
The courage of a woman ; less noble minded
Than she which by her death our Caesar tells
I am conqueror of myself. ' Thou are sworn, Eros,'
That, when the exigent should come which now
Is come indeed when I should see behind me
The inevitable prosecution of
Disgrace and horror, that, on my command,
Thou then would'st kill me : do't ; the time is come.
Thou strik'st not me, 'tis Caesar thou defeat'st
Put colour in thy cheek."
Eros " My dear master,
My captain, and my emperor, let me say,
Before I strike this bloody stroke, farewell ! "
' Why, there then ; thus I do escape the sorrow
Of Antony's death."
(kills himself)
(Antony falls on his sword)
Antony " Peace !
Not Caesar's valour hath o'erthrown Antony,
But Antony's hath triumph 'd on itself."
" The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at ; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes,
ROMAN TRAGEDIES. 155
Wherein I lived, the greatest prince of the world,
The noblest, and do now not basely die,
Nor cowardly put off my helmet to
My countrymen, a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going ;
I can no more."
Then Caesar, entering the room, says :
Ccssar " O, Antony !
I have follow'd thee to this. But we do lance
Diseases in our bodies : I must perforce
Have shown to thee such a declining day,
Or look'd on thine ; we could not stall together
In the whole world : but yet let me lament,
With tears as sovereign as the blood of hearts,
That thou, my brother, my competitor
In top of all design, my mate in empire,
Friend and companion in the front of war,
The arm of mine own body and the heart
Where mine his thoughts did kindle, that our stars
Unreconcilable should divide
Our equalness to this. Hear me, good friends."
Cleopatra is a wonder of wonders she is Greek,
not Egyptian. Her portrait on the walls of the
Temple of Denderah show an Egyptian artist's
156 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
attempt to depict Greek beauty under an Egyptian
type, but not very successfully. Shakespeare, it
is likely, never had seen a woman just like her in
all points, and no one else has before or since, but
he made up her varied traits into a whole from
imagination. There are words in this play which
I could quote, but which, I would almost say, I
dare not, for it is Shakespeare alone who could use
them. His powerful genius is like a winged Mer-
cury that flies lightly over the abyss. Cleopatra's
beauty, strength of will, and surpassingly bright
intelligence make her the romantic and even his-
toric symbol to the world of a temptress to evil.
Shakespeare has mainly created this. She destroys
whatever stands in her ruthless and ruinous path.
She exults in her wicked conquest of a noble char-
acter.
Her own imaginary sepulchre on the banks of
the Nile, to herself and Antony, grand and gor-
geous, casts its shadow with the pyramids and the
Sphinx on the river where the white sails appear
and disappear like spectres.
"Antony, Antony, Antony,"
ITALIAN PLAYS. 157
was not a cry of affection which lasts after death,
but the loss of an earthly lover.
She was Egypt's proud queen still, and killed
herself, not from love to share death with Antony,
but because she would not suffer herself to be
made a Roman spectacle in Caesar's triumph.
ITALIAN PLAYS.
TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.
The scene of the "Two Gentlemen of Verona "
is laid for the most part in Verona with its ancient
amphitheatre, its bridges, and the stately palace of
Can Grande Scala, above all its memories of Dante
and those illustrious exiles who sought here a
home.
It is an Italian love story, and Valentine talks
with the free vigor of a young man, gay measure
and the caprices of the master passion, in which
woman plays a gentle and refined part. The old
Elizabethan drama, like the plays of ^Sschylus
and Sophocles, needs the stage to set it off, and
living persons to carry out its action. The Eliza-
158 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
bethan drama is at the present day displaced by
the novel, but whether the novel teaches us man-
ners and morals, and influences these as strongly
as the drama, is a question. Certainly the descrip-
tion of nature in the novel is often artificial, con-
ventional, and empty, compared with the lively
dialogue of real persons, the nimble wit, and the
rounded action awakening poetic emotion. This
is hardly made up by the critical analysis of char-
acter in the novel. Assuredly nothing in succeed-
ing fictitious literature has left such a vivid
impression of personality as Rosalind, Portia, Fal-
staff, and Hamlet in the Shakespearean drama.
They live and will ever live ; on the stage or in the
closet they are equally vivid.
In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" the dia-
logue is graceful, easy and natural, with wonder-
ful rhythm and poetic smoothness. Valentine
says :
" Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits."
Julia, beloved of Proteus, enters into an encounter
with her smart- witted waiting woman, Lucetta,
and says :
ITALIAN PLAYS. 159
Julia ' ' Your reason ? ' '
Lucetta " I have no other but a woman's reason ;
I think him so, because I think him so."
Proteus is the more romantic and ardent of the
two, and Valentine the more worldly, though a
little more inclined to coarseness ; but there is a
good deal in the play that makes it a drama of
friendship. Shakespeare's own youth and friend-
ship may be interwoven in it, though in modern
fiction the author might draw his facts from the
stock exchange.
Romance retires with shy step ; the past has van-
ished ; the actor is the newspaper chronicler, not
the poet. But time changes, the age has grown
scientific and prosaic, actual fact and the primitive
emotions in poetry have vanished, and even Tenny-
son cannot bring them back.
The two gentlemen of Verona talk to each other
in an easy, natural way. Valentine tries to per-
suade his friend to travel and see the world.
They were true friends ; they confided their deep-
est secrets to one another ; they aided each other's
schemes in peace or war. They overlooked petty
160 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
differences of opinion ; but Proteus was the more
ardent lover and had the most difficult road to
travel to escape on account of the temper and rank
of the Duke of Milan, Silvia's father.
Proteus felt more keenly the changes and disap-
pointments of love's contest. He says, fiery and
poetic:
" O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away."
In contrast to this flight, Speed, Valentine's
man, says :
"Though the chameleon Love can feed on the air, I am
one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain have
it."
Launce, a shy dog, makes pure comedy :
"I think Crab my dog be the sourest-natured dog that
lives : my mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister
crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and
all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel -
hearted cur shed one tear : he is a stone, a very pebble
stone, and has no more oitv in him than a doe."
ITALIAN PLAYS. l6l
Speed, the true wag, describing his master Val-
entine's signs of love, says :
Valentine " Why, how know you that I am in love ? "
Speed "Marry, by these special marks : first, you have
learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms, like a mal-
content ; to relish a love-song, like a robin-redbreast ; to
walk alone, like one that had the pestilence ; to sigh, like
a school-boy that had lost his A B C ; to weep, like a young
wench that had buried her grandam ; to fast, like one that
takes diet ; to watch, like one that fears robbing ; to speak
puling, like a beggar at Hallowmass. You were wont, when
you laughed, to crow like a cock ; when you walked, to
walk like one of the lions ; when you fasted, it was pres-
ently after dinner ; when you looked sadly, it was for want
of money : and now you are metamorphosed with a mistress,
that, when I look on you, I can hardly think you my
master. "
But after all, the love of Valentine was more
true than that of Proteus, and he perhaps the
nobler gentleman. Carried away by the new
passion for Silvia, Proteus, like his name, changes
his love, while Julia remains loyal to him and
speaks a soul full of poetic calm :
Julia " The current that with gentle murmur glides,
Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage ;
ii
1 62 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
But when his fair course is not hindered,
He makes sweet music with th' enamell'd stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtakcth in his pilgrimage ;
And so by many winding nooks he strays.
With willing sport, to the wide ocean."
Silvia, whom Valentine loves, is the Duke of
Milan's daughter. Valentine is banished and
goes through many troubles and perils, in which
outlaws mingle on the border-land forest of Man-
tua an Italian plot of masks, disguises, escapes,
and intrigues in a forest reminding one of Arden
Wood, in which a comparison is made with Robin
Hood's outlaws ; and Friar Lauena, who meets
Silvia, is like the priest who in Arden Forest,
tradition says, married or betrothed Shakespeare
to Anne Hathaway.
At length the denouement takes place when
Proteus comes near and appears to Silvia, who is
attended by Valentine. Julia is present in boys'
clothes as page to Proteus. The disgrace of Pro-
teus and his repentance are rather too artificial to
seem genuine, but Valentine takes him to his
ITALIAN PLAYS. 163
friendship again, pronouncing these solemn words :
" Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth ; for these are pleas'd,
By penitence th' Eternal's wrath's appeas'd."
The one who neglects to read " The Two Gen-
tlemen of Verona ' ' passes by a play which is full
of music and harmony, with melodious flow, simple
and natural in style, and with but a few coarse
blots. It is a song from beginning to end, like the
brief poem,
"Silvia, and where is Silvia?"
MERCHANT OF VENICE.
This play is really two plays in one. Its plan
probably follows that of the original story which
suggested it. It wants unity, but Shakespeare's
hand is everywhere in it. It would seem as if he
himself must have been one of the "strangers in
Venice " who stood in the motley mart and mused
on the Rialto. There were two quarto editions
published in 1600 ; it is said by critics that the
earliest positive allusion to the play was in 1596, a
prolific period of Shakespeare's literary life. The
1 64 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
play or plot is doubtless from some original story.
The shining point of the play is the figure of
Portia. She seems a creation that would unite the
seriousness and dignity of the English with the
bright intelligence and high spirit of the American
maiden. Her famous sentence regarding the pound
of flesh, which saves the life of Antonio, would
not be regarded as legal authority or strong
enough to "hold water " in modern jurisprudence,
but rather as an ingenious device to satisfy the
conditions of the play.
Shy lock the Jew, whose moving forces of action
are avarice and revenge, is still a man, and his
speech in court in defence of his humanity has a
dynamic force and will always have its influence
to mitigate the injustice of the world towards this
long-enduring race. It is pleasant to think that
our own country, America, is the only one of pro-
fessed Christian nations that has not legally
oppressed the Jew, and that they have in this
land with other American citizens perfect freedom
to think, speak, and act, to display their law-
abiding character, rare talent for trade, often their
ITALIAN PIAYS. 165
haute finance, and their love of the musical art.
Their civic and religious freedom is here perfectly
secured, and they may, possibly hereafter, form,
without going back to Palestine flying "on the
shoulders of the Philistines," a conservative and
orderly element in our western political life.
The elopement of Shylock's daughter Jessica,
carrying with her her father's ducats and jewels,
throws an almost gay and amusing light on the
fierce and lurid personality of Shylock. I,ove is
truly the subtle thief that melts the flinty heart
and conquers all.
Books might be and have been written on this
drama. It belongs to Shakespeare's great plays,
though not the greatest. The characters of Portia
and Shylock, one a type of justice mingled with
mercy and the other of race mingled with revenge ,
will live as long as the English language.
Antonio, the merchant prince, ready to share his
wealth with his friends, patient under adversity
and brave to face the most deadly peril, but proud
and contemptuous to the Jew, standing as he does
in Shylock's way by aiding those who had been
1 66 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
crushed by Shylock's methods, paying their for-
feitures and bonds which had been imposed upon
them, is a pleasing personage, a modest figure in
whom all our sympathies combine.
The mart of Venice and the Rialto did not form
the only scene of action in this complex play, but
the great house at Belmont, of which Portia was
mistress, also witnessed the beginning and ending
of the drama.
Bassanio " In Belmont is a lady richly left ;
And she is fair, and, fairer than that word,
Of wondrous virtues : sometimes from her eyes
I did receive fair speechless messages :
Her name is Portia ; nothing undervalued
To Cato's daughter, Brutus' Portia :
Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth ;
For the four winds blow in from every coast
Renowned suitors : and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece ;
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strand,
And many Jasons come in quest of her."
The young nobleman lover says this to his
wealthy friend. His rivals are rich and powerful.
Portia and her maid Nerissa discuss these suitors
ITALIAN PLAYS. 167
at Belmont, but it is early seen where Portia's
preference lies, notwithstanding her dead father's
stern requisition regarding the three caskets. Bas-
sanio, "the soldier and the scholar," has caught
both her fancy and reason. In this love story the
caskets play a part, and manifest the poet's view of
the momentous character of Choice. What infinite
events truly hang on this word, which means the
will, the heart, the deepest spirit of man taking
its final action.
The beginning or weaving of this love story into
the darker tragedy of the Bond, so wide apart,
shows the power of only the greatest dramatist.
Yet they at length glide together like the head
waters of the divided Rhine.
Before the final trial another lesser love story is
wrought out that of Lorenzo and Jessica. Jessica
is a beautiful Jewess, loyally loving, but still racial
in her fondness for gold, yet her love leads her to
be a true woman and give up all.
Lorenzo is full of romantic passion rising into
the loftiest poetry. He says to Jessica :
168 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank !
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears : soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold :
There's not the smallest orb which thou behoid'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins ;
Such harmony is in immortal souls ;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it"
This takes all of earthliness out of passion, and
makes it ethereal and heavenly, higher than nature.
The plot of this drama may have arisen from
the ballad in "Percy's Reliques," or far more
likely from a story in the Italian " The Gesta
Romanorum" but in Shy lock it is refined by
Shakespeare's genius above the common concep-
tion of the Jew, when he was treated like a dog
and held to be as having no rights. Shakespeare
may have known of the place of the Jew in medie-
val history, but his just and gentle nature revolted
at this although he knew the race stamp was so
ITALIAN PLAYS. 169
deep as to be almost ineffaceable. Still the Jew
represented the idea of religion. He is chosen to
maintain the fundamental truth of monotheism.
The invention of the " pound of flesh" is found
mainly in the old stories, and has no place in
legalized justice, but as has already been said, it
is pure fiction that served the author's purpose in
his drama.
The scenery of Venice, its canals, the Rialto and
the Ducal Palace stand before us in their strong
and mystical colors. The very costumes of Shake-
speare's day in Venice, the gold and silver robes
of the Doges, the embroidered dresses of the
knights and officials wrapped in the spoils of the
luxurious East, the marine coloring, and the very
atmosphere of Venice seem to have been caught.
The medieval scorn and contempt of the Jew
continued to be held in Shakespeare's day, so
that Shylock's speech is a proof of the poet's liber-
alism and humanity. Shylock for the moment
rose above even his avarice and revenge, asserting
the essential brotherhood of the human race. The
trial scene is solemn and powerful ; life and death
1 70 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
are in its issues. The address of Shylock pours
like a lava stream from his burning soul, fierce
and terse, in which the woes and revenges of a
thousand years are condensed. Sir Henry Irving,
great artistic genius as he was, was not quite able
to express the full force of the language. The
whetting of the knife is not all. Irving' s ren-
dering, according to my recollection, was studied,
but failed in intellectual vital energy.
Shylock "To bait fish withal : if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hin-
dered me half a million ; laughed at my losses, mocked at
my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled
my friends, heated mine enemies ; and what 's his reason ?
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes ? hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the
same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is ?
If you prick us, do we not bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not
laugh ? if you poison us, do we not die ? and if you wrong us,
shall we not revenge ? if we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is
his humility ? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what
ITALIAN PLAYS. 171
should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why,
revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute ; and it
shall go hard but I will better the instruction."
His raucous voice is heard through the silent court
room :
"I'll have my bond."
Then Portia's exquisite apostrophe to mercy, run-
ning like a silver strain of music through the
angry tempest of the play, incomparable, rises into
the loftiest spheres of the heavenly and divine :
Portia "The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath : it is twice blest ;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes :
'Tis- mightiest in the mightiest : it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown ;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings ;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway ;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself ;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
172 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation : we do pray for mercy ;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoken thus much
to mitigate the justice of thy plea ;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there."
ROMEO AND JULIET
In Verona once more lies the scene of one of
Shakespeare's greatest plays. John Ruskin said
he could not make Venice to be Italy, that it was
Italy and Venice, but this could never be said of
Verona, "fair Verona," with its view of the Alps
and encircling hills and its Roman Amphitheatre.
Its local atmosphere is pure Italian.
The independent rulers of the great Italian
cities, such as Florence, Milan, Pisa, Genoa, and
Verona, founded those aristocratic governments
that, as earlier in Athens, prepared the Italian race
for a future, more popular rule. Classes, castes,
armed retainers, mobs, fierce quarrels, and the all
overcoming love, which did away with these Hues
of separation, existed, making it not impossible
ITALIAN PLAYS. 173
that two such great houses as those of Montague
and Capulet should find their ardent affiliations, as
well as fierce antagonisms.
This play of " Romeo and Juliet" is the very
efflorescence, the bright flower of Shakespeare's
dramas of romantic love, which absorbs all else ;
breaking bonds and limits, changing life, sudden,
brief and sweet, but with a tragic ending. It is a
flood of accidents and surprises. The play has the
intrigue, the masked figures of Italian romance,
the fire, the brief joy, and often death of young
love. We search in vain for the tomb of Romeo
and Juliet, but what matters if Achilles and Helen
never lived, or Troy was never besieged, the poet
has made them real.
Romeo, the young Montague, is the hero of the
play and no weakling. He is of manly presence,
strong in love, fiery in action, his imagination
kindled into poetic glow by the master passion ;
"good," too, as acknowledged by Capulet, head
of the hostile faction ; and yet Romeo is not the
only individuality, but there is Mercutio, one of
Shakespeare's inimitable creations, and who though
174 TH * READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
occupying but a brief space on the stage, seems to
me more as Shakespeare was himself when unbent
and free, full of finest humor and subtle wit.
He could be gay and he could be stern, as when
Mercutio describes Queen Mab as the ruler of
dreams :
" O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with yon.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep :
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinner's legs ;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers ;
Her traces, of the smallest spider's web ;
Her collars, of the moonshine's watery beams ;
Her whip, of cricket's bone ; the lash, of film ;
Her waggoner, a small grey-coated gnat,"
" Her chariot is an empty hazel nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love ;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight ;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees ;
ITALIAN PLAYS. 175
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are ;
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit ;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice ;
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep ; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two,
And sleeps again."
" King Cophetua loved a beggar maid."
At the masked ball, Capulet says to another old
noble :
" For you and I are past our dancing days."
Verona brags of Romeo to be a virtuous and well-
governed youth. At the ball in Capulet's house
Romeo first sees Juliet. In Capulet's orchard
Romeo says :
" I fear, too early : for my mind misgives
Some consequences, yet hanging in the stars,
1 76 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's revels, and expire the term
Of a despised life closed in my breast,
By some vile forfeit of untimely death."
In Juliet's garden Romeo speaks :
44 But soft ! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun !
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,"
44 It is my lady ; O, it is my love ! "
This is poetry which blinds the sense of right
and overleaps all bounds. Juliet's wayward prat-
tlings, she not knowing she is overheard, are natu-
ral and almost childlike :
* 4 O, Romeo, Romeo ! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name ;
O, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet."
41 Tis but thy name that is my enemy."
Mercutio dies to shield his friend Romeo, and
Romeo avenges his death on Tybalt. The tragedy
deepens and draws towards its end. In their
interview in the good Friar Laurence's cell, Romeo
and Juliet are wed with the friar's solemn parting
words.
ITALIAN PLAYS. 177
Romeo is exiled, and on his sudden return to
Verona comes the parting dialogue between the
lovers :
Juliet "Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day :
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear ;
Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate-tree :
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale."
Romeo "It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale : look, love, what envious streaks
t
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east :
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops :
I must be gone and live, or stay and die."
Juliet "Yond light is not day-light, I know it, I :
It is some meteor that the sun exhales,
To be to thee this night a torch-bearer,
And light thee on thy way to Mantua :
Therefore stay yet ; thou need'st not to be gone."
Romeo" Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death ;
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.
I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye,
'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow ;
Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven so high above our heads :
12
178 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
I have more care to stay than will to go :
Come, death, and welcome ! Juliet wills it so.
How is't, my soul? let's talk : it is not day."
Juliet" It is, it is ; hie hence, be gone, away !
It is the lark that sings so out of tune,
Straining harsh discords and unpl easing sharps.
Some say the lark makes sweet division ;
This doth not so, for she divideth us :
Some say the lark and loathed toad change eyes ;
O, now I would they had changed voices too !
Since arm from arm that voice doth us affray,
Hunting thee hence with hunts-up to the day.
O, now be gone : more light and light it grows."
Romeo" More light and light : more dark and dark
our woes."
The return of Romeo, the fatal mistake, the find-
ing of Juliet, supposed by him to be dead, but
lying in a trance at the Capulet tomb in the
churchyard ; Romeo's piercing and mad words
addressed to Death, and his death and that of
Juliet end this pathetic tragedy.
Romeo " O, my love ! my wife !
Death, that hath sucked the honey of the breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty ;
Thou art not conquer'd ; beauty's ensign yet
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 179
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there."
" Here's to my love ! O true apothecary !
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die."
It is now needful for me regretfully to say that,
as is the case sometimes with age, and in my case
of an age extending far beyond the allotted period
of three score and ten, that my eyesight has so
failed that it is impossible for me to read a word,
and this perhaps may go to excuse errors. I had
naturally reserved for the last a more critical and
extended treatment of a few of Shakespeare's
greatest plays, and of Shakespeare himself as a
dramatic author ; but I am now obliged to give up
the plan and only speak briefly of some great
plays that remain.
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS.
THE TEMPEST.
Prospero's Island still firmly stands, while the
lost Atlantis has vanished. The majestic figur.e
of Prospero differs entirely from the other persons
1 80 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
of the play, and there may be a shadow of a reason
held by some, that in his soliloquy it is Shake-
speare himself who speaks, as prophetic of his end.
This I think is groundless ; the words belong con-
sistently to the character of the magician Prospero,
who says :
" Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves ;
And ye that on the sands with print less foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back ; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites ; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew ; by whose aid
Weak masters though ye be I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war ; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt ; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar ; graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure ; and, when I have required
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. l8l
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book."
The island with its valleys and promontories is
of the imagination built on clouds, tempest, and
sunshine ; here Romance rides upon the wings of
the poetic fancy. The exquisite song of Ariel is
made of sun and air, and the sprite swings lightly
as he sings from the petal of a delicate flower a
song of obedience to a higher power ; but at the
same time with a breath and aspiration after free-
dom :
11 Where the bee sucks, there suck I :
In a cowslip's bell I lie ;
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."
The beastly monster, Caliban, has in him a
touch of humanity that also seeks for freedom
1 82 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
while he snarls and creeps on the earth under
"his burden of wood." His knowledge of some
of the subtle laws of nature makes him at times a
philosopher, even a poet. His poetry is "of the
earth earthy," and never soars above material
nature. Prospero lighted in him an intellectual
spark.
Caliban " This island's mine, by Sycoraz my mother,
Which thou takest from me. When thou earnest first,
Thou strokcdst me, and madest much of me: wouldstgiveme
Water with berries in't ; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night : and then I loved thee,
And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile :
Cursed be I that did so ! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you !
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king : and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' th' island."
" You taught me language ; and my profit on"c
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language ! "
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 183
"No, pray thee.
(Aside) I must obey : his art is of such power
It would control my dam's god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him. ' '
When the drunken sailors, Stephano and Trin-
culo, reeled on the scene, Caliban says to Trin-
culo :
11 Hast thou not dropp'd from heaven ? "
" I'll show thee every fertile inch o' th' island ;
And I will kiss thy foot : I prithee, be my god."
1 I'll kiss thy foot ; I'll swear myself the subject."
"I'll show thee the best springs : I'll pluck thee berries ;
I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve."
" Be not af eared ; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears ; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again : and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me ; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again."
Caliban, though a creature of the imagination,
1 84 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
is worth study by the scientist as Shakespeare's
conception of the connecting link between beast
and man ; in this case at their worst.
At last compelled to recognize Prospero's power
and virtue, Caliban says :
" Ay, that I will : and Til be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool."
The only real humanities in the play are
Miranda and Ferdinand. They love each other
with a sweet and natural affection, although dis-
ciplined by the heavy burdens put upon them.
Miranda is a lovely child of nature, and one of
Shakespeare's purely feminine creations. When
Miranda asks Ferdinand who he is, Ferdinand,
thinking his father had perished in the shipwreck,
says with aristocratic spirit :
41 1 am Naples."
The play ends in joy and happiness, the tempestu-
ous clouds clear away, and the island that never
existed, but will immortally live, comes forth once
SOME LAST GREAT PI<AYS. 185
more in its beauty under a serenely blue Italian
sky.
MACBETH.
Macbeth' s character is not to be judged rashly,
for it is a mixed character. He was not a thorough-
going ruffian or tyrant ; his moral nature was not
constitutionally bad, nay, in some things human
and good. He was met by a most violent tempta-
tion presented to his ambitious nature, to be great,
to be a king. He shrank at first from this temp-
tation, but was overcome chiefly by the will of his
wife, who towered above him in her own wicked
ambition.
The date of the play of " Macbeth " was ascribed
by Malone to 1606, but the proof of this is unsatis-
factory. It undoubtedly belonged to the last ten
years of Shakespeare's life, between the dates of
1 ' Julius Caesar ' ' and ' ' Hamlet. ' ' There is strong
proof that it was written after the conjunction of
England and Scotland, under the reign of James I.
The scene is laid in that picturesque and rugged
land of mountains and vales, deep lakes, and
unconquerable men, made familiar in the pages of
1 86 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Walter Scott, who drew his inspiration from the
grander genius of Shakespeare.
The story of " Macbeth " is found in the older
chronicles, whose truth or fiction it is now hard to
discover, but there may have been some ground
for the tradition in the ancient history of Scotland ;
at all events, it suits those stormy skies and wilder
times. The opening scene of the witches on the
" blasted heath, "
" Hovering through the fog and filthy air,"
seems to signify the first false promises of unhal-
lowed ambition to the soul of Macbeth, paltering
with the spirits of evil. Their three words, weird,
bold, and broken :
" Hail to thee, thane of Glamis ? "
" Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor ! "
" All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter ! "
These words seem to rise like the barren scenery
around, cliff above cliff into the sky, and are lost.
They are indeed portentous dreams :
"The earth hath bubbles as the water has,
And these are of them."
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 187
Yet these " instruments of darkness" speak some
truths in the perilous story. We go on :
"Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."
Macbeth attains the first two titles, but the last
involves his own choice and criminal destruc-
tion :
"Then when lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin :
and sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death."
Cawdor's death is marked in memorable words
by Malcolm, who says to the King, his father :
Malcolm "But I have spoke
With one that saw him die : who did report
That very frankly he confess'd his treasons,
Implored your highness' pardon and set forth
A deep repentance : nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it ; he died
As one that had been studied in his death,
To throw away the dearest thing he owed,
As 'twere a careless trifle."
Macbeth speaks loyally when he meets the king,
and it is difficult to see that he is not for the
moment sincere.
1 88 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Lady Macbeth receives her husband's letter tell-
ing of the witches' prophecy of Macbeth being made
king. Reading that letter, she* exclaims :
"Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shall be
What thou art promised : yet do I fear thy nature :
It is too fall o* the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way : thou wouldst be great ;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it ; what thou wouldst highly
That wouldst thou holily : wouldst not play false
And yet wouldst wrongly win ; thou'dst have, great
Glamis,
That which cries, ' Thus thou must do, if thou have it
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishes! should be undone.' Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd withal."
This curious use of the word ' ' metaphysical ' ' as
applied here to the spiritual foes that impede Mac-
beth' s grasp of the "golden round," looks as if
Lady Macbeth were genuinely Scotch in her phil-
osophy.
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 189
The approach of Duncan to the castle of Inver-
ness is of exquisite realness, Nature above and
around shining in the crystal morning light. Dun-
can speaks :
"This castle hath a pleasant seat ; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses."
Banquo ' ' This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his loved mansionry that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here : no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle :
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed
The air is delicate."
The sparkling brightness of the morning air,
the medieval castle with its arched, carved door-
way and lofty towers, the peace of all things indi-
cate little of the somber terrors that wait within
the walls. Lady Macbeth 's smooth and courtly
welcome all bespeaks peace, and Macbeth, coming
home to Inverness, says to his wife, who urges
him to the deed, in low tones, and half to him-
self:
190 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly : if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success ; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'ld jump the life to come."
" This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison 'd chalice
To our own lips."
"Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off."
Lady Macbeth still plies him, appealing to his
courage as a man.
Macbeth "We will proceed no further in this
He hath honour'd me of late ; " [business :
Lady Macbeth " Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire ? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting ' I dare not ' wait upon ' I would ? ' "
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 191
Macbeth ' ' Prithee, peace :
I dare do all that may become a man ;
Who dares do more is none."
Lady Macbeth ' ' What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me ?
When you durst do it, then you were a man ;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both :
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me :
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from its boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this."
In another scene Macbeth, alone, apostrophizes
the airy dagger :
" Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand ? Come, let me clutch
thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight ? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
192 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain ?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going ;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses
Or else worth all the rest : I see thee still ;
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's ho such thing :
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one half -world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep."
The motives of the horrid deed to be done work
fast, like poison, and reason is thrown to the
winds. The crafty preparation for the murder,
the drugged grooms, the watch slain, the deep
gloom lighted only by a feeble lamp ; the silence
so great that the softest footstep can be heard in
the long corridor, the screech of the midnight
owl after the deed was done, the whispered talk
between Macbeth and his wife in which he already
shrinks from his dreadful deed, and the voice that
cried :
SOME; LAST GREAT PLAYS. 193
" Sleep no more !
Macbeth does murder sleep,"
The innocent sleep,
" Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,"
smearing of the sleepy grooms with blood ; these
only can be told by Shakespeare.
Macbeth' s description of the murdered king,
half true, half false, follows :
Macbeth ' ' Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood,
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance."
A cunning, devilish policy lays the crime on
Duncan's sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, who have
fled. The plot thickens, and murderous peril
threatens Banquo and Fleance. Then comes the
gloomy banquet scene in the hall, where Macbeth
sees the procession of ghostly visions, that raise
him to his feet staring, which only can be dis-
13
194 TH E READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
pelled by Lady Macbeth' s overmastering will.
The ghost of Banquo coming, Macbeth exclaims :
" Thou canst not say I did it : never shake
Thy gory locks at me."
The supper ends in terror and confusion.
Hecate, in a thunder storm on the heath, inter-
feres with the witches' plan, and speaks :
" Upon the corner of the moon
There hangs a vaporous drop profound ;
I'll catch it ere it come to ground :
And that distill'd by magic sleights
Shall raise such artificial sprites
As by the strength of their illusion
Shall draw him on to his confusion."
Again the witches meet around the boiling
cauldron and sing their weird song :
" Double, double toil and trouble ;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble."
The supernatural breaks into the steady whirl of
nature's laws of retribution. Macbeth, coming
into their circle in a storm, demands :
11 Though you untie the winds and let them fight
Against the churches : though the yesty waves
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 195
Confound and swallow navigation up :
Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down ;
Though castles topple on their warders' heads :
Though palaces and pyramids do slope
Their heads to their foundations : though the treasure
Of nature's germens tumble all together,
Even till destruction sicken : answer me
To what I ask you."
Tremendous storms like this one rage about
Scotland and England's rocky coast. I have seen,
without the aid of the supernatural, such a storm
rage around the southern end of England. The
scene of the apparitions ends with the last false
prophecy :
Sec. App." Macbeth ! Macbeth ! Macbeth ! "
Third ^//."Macbeth shall never vanquished be
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill [until
Shall come against him,"
and the witches themselves
"Come like shadows, so depart."
The terrible exhibition of his feigned inward self
by Malcolm, the heir, to Macduff, is a powerful
Shakespearean touch :
196 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
Malcolm "But I have none: the king-becoming
graces,
As justice, verity, temperance, stableness,
Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness,
Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude,
I have no relish of them, but abound
In the division of each several crime,
Acting it many ways. Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth."
Macduff"0 Scotland, Scotland ! "
Malcolm " If such a one be fit to govern, speak :
I am as I have spoken."
In showing the poet's deeper insight of the human
soul, by a truer impulse Malcolm takes back these
false self-accusations and is himself again.
Then comes the scene in Dunsinane Castle, when
Lady Macbeth's imperious will breaks down at last
under the terrors of conscience.
Lady Macbeth in her sleep walking, witnessed by the Doc-
tor and her nurse :
Doctor "Look, how she rubs her hands."
Gentlewoman "It is an accustomed action with her, to
seem thus washing her hands : I have known her continue
in this a quarter of an hour."
SOME I<AST GREAT PI.AYS. 197
Lady M." Yet here's a spot."
Doctor " Hark ! she speaks : I will set down what comes
from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly."
Lady M. "Out, damned spot! out, I say! One: two:
why, then 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky. Fie, my lord,
fie ! a soldier, and af card ? What need we fear who knows
it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who
would have thought the old man to have had so much blood
in him?"
Doctor" Do you mark that ? ' '
Lady M. "The thane of Fife had a wife : where is she
now? What, will these hands ne'er be clean ? No more o'
that, my lord, no more o' that : you mar all with this start-
ing."
Doctor " Go to, go to : you have known what you should
not."
Gentlewoman "She has spoken what she should not, I
am sure of that : heaven knows what she has known."
Lady ^."Here's the smell of the blood still : all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh,
oh, oh ! "
Doctor " What a sigh is there! the heart is sorely
charged."
Gentlewoman" I would not have such a heart in my
bosom for the dignity of the whole body."
Doctor "This disease is beyond my practice : yet I have
198 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
known those which have walked in their sleep who have
died holily in their beds."
Lady M. "Wash your hands, put on your nightgown;
look not so pale : I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried ; he
cannot come out on's grave."
Doctor" Even sx>."
Lady M. "To bed, to bed ; there's knocking at the gate ;
come, come, come, come, give me your hand : what's done
cannot be undone : to bed, to bed, to bed.*'
Doctor" Will she go now to bed ? "
Gentlewoman" Directly."
Doctor" Foul whisperings are abroad : unnatural
deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles : infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets :
More needs she the divine than the physician.
God, God forgive us all ! Look after her :
Remove from her the means of all annoyance,
And still keep eyes upon her. So, good night :
My mind she has mated and amazed my sight :
I think, but dare not speak."
Gentlewoman "Good, night, good doctor."
To delay now no longer the end, Macbeth, the
warlike king, issues from his castle ; his fears have
vanished, his soldier's courage has returned to
SOME LAST GREAT PI.AYS. 199
him ; he rushes fearlessly into the fight with Mac-
duff and is slain. Justice triumphs.
The drama deals with deep things of the soul :
Temptation, Sin, and Death. Its lesson is the
yielding of the spirit to the temptation to be great,
to an unhallowed ambition that passes the bounds
of that natural ambition implanted in the mind to
stimulate it to do and be good.
The play is better suited, I think, for the silent
room of the reader than for the stage. The reader
closes his book with the words :
Macbeth^" Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time."
One then appreciates with solemn awe what an
old and true critic calls
" The pleasing terrors of Tragedy/ 1
KING LEAR.
This play is pure paganism. It deals with ele-
mental powers and reminds the reader of those
gigantic forms that loom up in the pages o
lus, pagan throughout.
200 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
The grand old king, made mad by the unloving
and treacherous conduct of his daughters, goes
forth into the fierce storm. He and the human
forms accompanying him seem strange and antique,
and even in the scene of the last words and hours
of King Lear, the faithful and lovely Cordelia
shows a touch of hardness in her nature, like a
beautiful Greek sculpture. But the scene is laid
on British soil, and the path traversed during the
howling tempest by Lear and his group of follow-
ers was familiar to Shakespeare, as it is now to
those of us who have walked over chalky Dover
cliff, and looked off towards France on the waters
of the English Channel. Gloucester says in his
talk with Edgar :
" There is a cliff whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully in the confined deep :
Bring me but to the very brim of it,
And I'll repair the misery thou does bear
With something rich about me : from that place
I shall no leading need."
Edgar "Come on, sir; here's the place :
stand still. How fearful
SOME LAST GRKAT PLAYS. 2OI
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eye so low !
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles : half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade !
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head :
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice ; and yond tall anchoring bark
Diminish 'd to her cock ; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight : the murmuring surge
That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.''
Shakespeare in this great play seems to free
himself from all the forms that had gone before in
literature and from all traditions of Christian
drama, and to fling himself freely into the wild
play of nature's forces and passions.
.There followed after Lear the singular company
of the sturdy English Kent, who said :
" Be Kent unmannerly, when Lear is mad ; "
the blind Earl of Gloucester, the loving, faith-
ful Edgar, the smooth-faced bastard Edmund, the
Fool shivering in his rags, a motley group of good
202 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
and bad, high and low, fortuitously brought
together to breast the storm.
There is a sense of wild power when the poet
"revelled in his strength," the more so, perhaps,
of any of his dramas.
Lear asks his daughter :
"Which of you shall we aay doth love us most ? "
The speeches of Goneril and Regan, the two
elder sisters, are crammed with protestations of
false affection, so full indeed that Cordelia says,
aside:
" What shall Cordelia do ? Love, and be silent"
"Then poor Cordelia !
And yet not so, since I am sure my love's
More ponderous than my tongue."
Lear turns to Cordelia, who has yet said noth-
ing. He asks :
Lear" Nothing ! "
Again,
Lear" Nothing will come of nothing : speak again."
Cordelia answers :
SOME LAST GREAT PI.AYS. 203
' ' Good, my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me : I
Return these duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all ? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty :
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all."
He casts himself with the treacherous sisters.
The old fiery-hearted king, who lived now solely
in and for the affection of his children, was not
satisfied with this reticent truthfulness of Cordelia.
It might indeed awake a subtle discussion in the
euphemistic style of noble Sir Philip Sidney,
whether love should be expressed or hidden. The
love itself is infinitely better than its expression ;
the love of parent and child, husband and wife,
friend and neighbor which last term embraces
the whole brotherhood of man, whether good or
bad, worthy or unworthy, Christian or heathen, if
expressed only in general phrases, without real
kindness, or an energetic disposition to do good,
204 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
would be sheer hypocrisy. If the expression of
love were relegated entirely to the future life and
to the intercourse of spiritual beings, this world
would be left desolate and become a cold and bar-
ren place, and the scientific prophecy of the com-
ing reign of the earth's final refrigeration would
have already commenced.
In ' King Lear ' ' there is an expression of Shake-
speare' s mightiest strength, and the play is a block
cut out of rock, hard and jagged, without any
softening feature of art or Christianity. The
author casts away all classic rules and precedence,
and speaks as though inspired by his own bold
original genius.
HAMLET.
Going from the rugged Lear, in his concentrated
storm of passion, to the polished Hamlet, repre-
senting the sphere of universal ideas, it is indeed a
tame word to say that the Prince of Denmark is a
gentleman ; but this term I would use in its true
sense.
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 205
Hamlet is a cultivated man. He is inclined to
meditative thought ; he loves to look into his own
mind, and to analyze the springs and motives of
character in other minds ; he would wish to pene-
trate human life in all its bearings ; he belongs, in
a ruder age, to the modern school of thought and
universal philosophy. He is quiet, and grows
stout, and has a streak of indolence, but this is
combined with other qualities unknown to him-
self; with a kind heart, with genial wit, with a
power of friendship and love, with energies for
practical activity when aroused ; these are manifest
in his talk with his student friend Horatio, and his
keen address to the players, showing his thought-
ful knowledge of the principles of art.
In his witty speech to the old courtier Polonius,
leading him whithersoever he wills, and in his
kindly words, though with a touch of cynicism,
addressed to the skull of Yorick :
Hamlet "O heavens ! die two months ago, and not for-
gotten yet ? Then there's hope a great man's memory may
outlive his life half a year : but, by'r lady, he must build
206 THE READING OF SHAKBSPEAKE.
churches then ; or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with
the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, 'For, O, for O, the
hobby-horse is forgot.' "
These more energetic qualities unconsciously, per-
haps, are surprisingly developed when awaked to
vigorous action by the appearance of his father's
ghost, and the enormous burden of responsibility
suddenly laid upon him to revenge his father's
murder and set to rights the rotten state of Den-
mark. He starts up, unites in himself all other
characters, interests, and events, and walks the
scene in the terrible step and form of avenger.
His madness is assumed as a shield for his deeper,
craftier plan. In his interview with Ophelia, one
reads between the lines his love, and Ophelia's last
moments lend infinite pathos to the drama.
Her mind breaks down, but its sweetness is not
lost. Her gift of flowers, so thoughtful and fitted
to every one to whom she gives them, touches the
most stoic heart.
The snatches of her strange, loose song show the
strain of the disordered fancies in a pure and inno-
cent nature ; her interview and clinging love for
SOME LAST GREAT PLAYS. 207
Hamlet, and her maidenly tribute to him when
her true heart speaks out, are exquisitely fitting :
Ophelia "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown !
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword :
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down !
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh ;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstacy : O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see ! "
Hamlet's burning words to his mother, coming
straight from a hot heart that had been cheated in
its natural and deepest affections, show the most
painful moment of the tremendous trial through
which he is now passing.
The craftily arranged play within a play, the
slaying of the king, the death of his mother, the
exchange of the poisoned rapier in his duel with
Laertes, in the explosion of that world of wicked-
ness and deceit in which his own life was lost, are
a fitting end to this immortal tragedy.
208 THE READING OP SHAKESPEARE.
I have heard the greatest actor of Germany,
Emil Devrient, personate this character, but I am
still of the opinion that Hamlet is better suited for
the silent room of the reader than for the stage.
It is above all the scholar's play. The oftener it
is read the more it will awake earnest thought on
human life, both present and the future.
Shakespeare, as I have just said, speaks in this
play of Hamlet to the mind of the student and
thoughtful educated man.
Shakespeare's many portraits, whether authentic
or unauthentic, form an argument by themselves of
his greatness.
I cannot give the copy of a photograph picked
up in Stratford-on-Avon, nor do I know who was
the artist of the original picture. It is evidently
modern and too smooth and idealized, lacking even
the life-like robustness of the Stratford bust, but it
belongs like other portraits to the highest historic
type of humanity an imperial face, serenely
strong, betokening a harmony of nature which
SOME; I,AST GREAT PI<AYS. 209
combines gentleness and power. It impressed me
as a face that comprehends the traits of other por-
traits, showing in its imagined results the thought-
ful and true conception of a courtly man of the
highest education and culture.
Shakespeare was by no means a perfect man.
He had his faults, arising partly, doubtless, from
the rude British coarseness of the period, and from
his own exuberant vitality. While his head was
in the clouds, his feet walked on the solid earth,
and were sometimes, it may be, in the mud and
mire. When he returned to Stratford in the later
years of his life, he showed a shrewd Anglo-Saxon
instinct towards the amassing of property, which
would not now be regarded as an unreasonable
trait. But it should not be forgotten by the ear-
nest reader of Shakespeare, that when his plays are
considered, there is to be observed a decided pro-
gress in his maturer nature; an elevation of
thought, growing more purely intellectual and
philosophic, not less genial, but more refined in his
210 THE READING OF SHAKESPEARE.
loving and sweet-hearted humor, loftier in his
spirit and imagination, more free from the merely
earthly and sensuous, more broad in his love of
universal humanity and of man's brotherhood,
more powerful in his expression of the deep things
of life, death, and eternity, more firm in his belief
in the principles of right, justice, and truth, and
of that higher divine order which enters into,
shapes, and directs all.
OVERDUE-
MART" 1944
II '
id 114,
M188565
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY