An Image of Shakespeare
 
 CGDEN 
 
 An Image of Shakespeare 
 
 by Frank Mathew 
 
 Jonathan Cape 
 
 Eleven Gower Street, London
 
 First published ig22 
 All Rights reserved 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Fron\c and London
 
 
 
 SA.NiA BAilBAIJA 
 
 PREFACE 
 
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 WE shall never understand Shakespeare unless we can 
 learn the history of his Poems and Plays. Lisideius 
 in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy says that " he conceived 
 a Play ought to be a just and lively image of human nature, 
 representing its passions and humours, and the changes of 
 fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction 
 of mankind." This was Hamlet's view when he said that 
 the purpose of Playing was " to hold, as it were, the Mirror 
 up to Nature ; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her 
 own image." We must see the mirror correctly if we want 
 to discern a just and lively image of Shakespeare. 
 
 We have been misled by our deference to the opinion of 
 foreigners. The German students, for instance, who have 
 tried to explain him to his countrymen were forced to rely 
 on such hints as could be found by research, because they 
 knew little of the nature of Englishmen. Without under- 
 rating the debt we owe to the industry of some of the German 
 students, such as Gervinus, we should remember that no 
 rational Englishman would try to interpret Moliere to the 
 French. If our notion of Shakespeare is foreign it is sure 
 to be wrong. 
 
 The fact that a Play was printed or mentioned or per- 
 formed on the Stage in a particular year cannot prove that 
 it had not been written before, and the metrical tests may 
 be only signs of revision. The only important clue is the 
 fact that there is a difference between juvenile and elderly 
 work. If we knew nothing about Giovanni Boccaccio we 
 could be sure that he wrote his Fiammetta before most of 
 his Rime, and his Questione d^Amore before his Decameron. 
 Three of Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and some of his 
 Plays survive as he wrote them when he was young, and we
 
 PREFACE 
 
 can be sure that his other juvenile work resembled them in 
 manner and mood. We ought to be able to recognize the 
 change in his manner better than students reading Plays in 
 a language which is foreign to them, and we ought to see the 
 change in his mood better than any foreigner can. 
 
 Our acquaintance with his private affairs is dangerous 
 unless it is coupled with an intimate knowledge of his different 
 times, and this is also required because he mirrored the days 
 in which he was living. Mr. Bradley, for instance, writes 
 in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry : " When we study the history 
 of the times in which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, 
 when we examine the portraits of famous men, or read such 
 a book as the Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury^ we 
 realize that the violent actions and passions which the drama- 
 tist depicted were like the things he saw." This intimate 
 knowledge is out of the reach of the most industrious for- 
 eigner — even Gervinus, though he wrote " So wie die Zeit, 
 so war der Dichter selbst," exhibited a natural ignorance. 
 No rational Englishman would try to explain Luther's times 
 to the Germans. 
 
 While the history of the Plays is confused Shakespeare's 
 image in them must be distorted, and if we have a wrong 
 notion of him they also would be misunderstood. It ought 
 to be possible to discover the right Order of his Poems and 
 Plays. The Order commonly accepted to-day, with some 
 variations, is founded on chance hints and metrical tests, 
 and many students have recognized that it cannot be right. 
 Mr. Saintsbury, for instance, writes in his History of English 
 Prosody: " I ought to say, that it seems to me pretty certain 
 that some (and perhaps many) of the Plays represent very 
 different stages and were, in all probability, begun, suspended 
 and finished with more or less rewriting, sometimes at long 
 intervals." And he writes in the Cambridge History of 
 Literature about The Merchant of Veriice : " To the present 
 writer it has been for many years a moral certainty that these 
 different parts are of different dates, and that a similar differ- 
 ence prevails much more largely in Shakespeare's work than 
 is commonly thought " ; and about Measure for Measure, 
 " it was certainly, or almost certainly, performed in 1604, 
 and it has been customary to accept that year as the approxi- 
 
 6
 
 PREFACE 
 
 mate date of its composition. To the present writer this 
 appears very improbable, and he would select Measure 
 for Measure as the strongest instance of the suggested earli- 
 ness, in a more or less complete form, of many more Plays 
 than are contained in Meres' Hst." All modern students 
 have recognized that several Plays, for instance Romeo and 
 Juliet and Troilus and Cressida, show signs of revision. And 
 Sir Walter Raleigh writes in his Shakespeare : " There is 
 good reason to think that many of his Comedies are recasts 
 of his own earlier versions now lost to us. . . . When the 
 Theatre came to its maturity, complete five-act Plays, with 
 two plots and everything handsome about them, were required 
 to fill the afternoon. The earher and shghter Plays and 
 Interludes were then enlarged and adapted to the new 
 demands." 
 
 The right Order should show when Plays were first written 
 and when they were revised. This method would solve 
 many problems about the dates of the Plays : for instance, 
 Cymbeline might be ranked with the earliest, as Coleridge 
 suggested in his Classification Attempted of 1819, and also 
 with the last in accordance with the metrical tests and Simon 
 Forman's mention of it and the place given to it by Heminge 
 and Condell in the Folio of 1623. 
 
 It may be that the First Folio Order would help us to 
 discover the right one. Even Mr. Saintsbury writes of " the 
 notoriously haphazard Order," and even Sir Walter Raleigh 
 writes : " In the Folio Shakespeare's work is divided into 
 three kinds — Comedy, History and Tragedy. The Classi- 
 fication of the Plays under these headings is artificial and 
 misleading. Cymbeline appears among the Tragedies ; while 
 Measure for Measure, a play much more tragic in temper, 
 is numbered with the Comedies. Richard the Second is a 
 History : Julius Ccesar is a Tragedy." But these instances 
 were chosen unluckily, for Cymbeline was planned as a Tragedy 
 (as is shown by its title, the Tragedy of Cymbeline), and it 
 is not a Comedy now but a Tragi-comedy ending in impossible 
 happiness, and Measure for Measure was a Comedy first, 
 though it became Tragi-comical when its meaning was darkened 
 in an older revision, and Richard the Second is ranked with 
 the Histories because, like all the other Plays in that class.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 it is an English Chronicle History or a Scene in the Pageant 
 of the Annals of England. 
 
 If Heminge and Condell had printed a fourth class, 
 Tragi-comedies, it could have included Cymbeline and 
 Measure for Measure and many other Plays. They may have 
 remembered how Philip Sidney condemned " the mongrel 
 Tragi-comedy " in his Afology for Poesy, or they may have 
 perceived how difficult it would be to discriminate, since 
 many Comedies became Tragi-comical when they were 
 revised and some of the Tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear 
 and Othello, for instance, had a Comical vein. And they 
 may have disliked the recent Italianate Tragi-comical fashion. 
 Their three classes echoed the Licence granted to them in 
 1603 " freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing 
 Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Interludes, Morals, Pas- 
 torals, Stage-Plays, and such other like as they have already 
 studied," and these were the three classes named first by 
 Polonius when he spoke of " the best actors in the World, 
 either for Tragedy, Comedy, History." Since they did not 
 use the fourth class their division was a natural one. They 
 must have known all the facts and they may have preferred 
 to set the Plays rightly when there was nothing to be gained 
 by inventing an irrational Order. 
 
 Heminge and Condell printed the Comedies thus — The 
 Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives 
 of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, 
 Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labour^s Lost, A Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream, The Mercha?it of Venice, As Tou Like It, 
 The Taming of the Shrew, All's Well that Ends Well, Twelfth 
 Night, and The Winter's Tale. Next they printed the 
 English Chronicle Histories according to the dates of the 
 Reigns. Last they printed the Tragedies, Troilus and Cres- 
 sida, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Timon 
 of Athens, Julius Ccesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, 
 Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline. 
 
 Francis Meres wrote in Palladis Tamia, printed in 1598: 
 " As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy 
 and Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the 
 English is the most excellent in both kinds for the Stage, 
 for Comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his 
 
 8
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Lovers Labour* s Lost, his Lovers Labour* s Won, his Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream and his Merchant of Venice : for Tragedy his 
 Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, 
 King 'John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and 'Juliet.''"' 
 Meres only professed to cite some Plays as examples, and he 
 set them all in the First Folio Order except Love''s Labour* s 
 Won, which may have been the first form of AlVs Well that 
 Ends Well, and King John, which may have been the last 
 of the four Histories selected by him and classed with the 
 two Tragedies Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. This 
 would be a curious coincidence if the Folio Order was a 
 haphazard one. In that case it would also be a curious 
 coincidence that Heminge and Condell printed the Tragedies, 
 except the two first and Timon of Athens, in an Order close 
 to the one commonly accepted to-day. Since Troilus and 
 Cressida appears to be founded on two juvenile Plays and 
 Timon of Athens is an unfinished revision of an earlier one, 
 the main ground for rejecting this part of their Order is the 
 fact that Coriolanus is piinted early in it, and this would be 
 explained if they knew that Shakespeare had written a form 
 of Coriolanus when he was young. Since they printed the 
 Chronicle Histories in the historical order (which was the 
 natural thing to do because they were Scenes in an Historical 
 Pageant), the modern Order mainly differs from theirs about 
 the dates of the Comedies. And Coleridge came near the 
 Folio Order when after putting Lovers Labour* s Lost in the 
 earliest epoch in his Classification Attempted of 1 8 19, he said: 
 " In this same epoch I should place the Comedy of Errors. 
 ... I add AWs Well that Ends Well, originally intended 
 as the counterpart of Love*s Labour* s Lost, Taming of the 
 Shrew, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing.** 
 It may be that Heminge and Condell had a definite rule. 
 Perhaps when they thought that a Play had been little changed 
 in revision except in its manner, which may have seemed 
 of small importance to them because they were Players and 
 concerned with the story, they put it according to its original 
 date and when one had been altered in its structure they 
 ranked it according to the date of the change. For instance, 
 they may have printed The Tempest first because it was 
 founded on a juvenile Comedy and appeared the same Play to 
 
 9
 
 PREFACE 
 
 them (since the story survived in spite of an elderly revision 
 which changed it to a wise Tragi-comedy), while they printed 
 T^he fVinter^s Tale and Cymbeline later because the young 
 stories had been altered in them. 
 
 Of course, the right Order ought to differ from theirs in 
 combining the three divisions which were intended to put 
 Plays of the same nature together ; but perhaps it ought to 
 recognize theirs as a proof that some form of each Play was 
 written first or revised at the time denoted by it and ought 
 to reconcile theirs and Meres' corroboration of it with the 
 Order suggested by the stray hints and by the metrical 
 tests. 
 
 The right Order of Shakespeare's Poems and Plays would 
 show us an image of him as he was altered by a natural growth 
 and it would help us to value the stories about his private 
 affairs, if they interest us at all, for if we listen to gossip about 
 some one we know, we test it according to our knowledge 
 of him. 
 
 This Order may yet be ascertained by some English or 
 American student. And this is the right time for that task. 
 Though more details may be found, the long labours of 
 Mr. Halliwell-Phillips and of Sir Sidney Lee, for instance, 
 have gathered many things which were hidden from Gervinus 
 and Coleridge, and the England which Shakespeare knew is 
 passing away. Those of us who are elderly can remember 
 a time when there were many remote villages where people 
 were living in a wholesome placidity, only concerned with 
 their immediate affairs, reading little or nothing or unable 
 to read, spending every night of their lives in the same little 
 houses centuries old, never desiring to go anywhere else, 
 ripening like their apples and falling when their time was 
 complete. In that ancient tranquillity we were able to find 
 Chaucer's England or Shakespeare's ; but our children will 
 look for those quiet places in vain. And many other things 
 which survive from England's old days are vanishing with 
 the calm of those villages. I propose to begin this task by 
 making suggestions which students more learned may correct 
 or reject. 
 
 (1915-1920.) 
 
 10
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Plays of Youth, I 13 
 
 The Plays of Youth, II 51 
 
 The Poems of Love 81 
 
 Midsummer Dreams 117 
 
 The Chronicle Pageant 151 
 
 The Tragedies, I 199 
 
 The Tragedies, II 247 
 
 The Last Tragi-Comedies 287 
 
 Ben Jonson's Opinion 317 
 
 An Image of Shakespeare 353 
 
 Index 409 
 
 II
 
 THE PLAYS OF YOUTH 
 
 I 
 
 SHAKESPEARE wrote the buoyant Prose of his time 
 with a rhythm of his own easily recognized in such sentences 
 as " the tears Hve in an onion that should water this sorrow," 
 or " I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes 
 this night to Messina," or " Why, thou wert better in thy 
 grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity 
 of the skies." His Prose was gay when he was young and 
 stately when he began to be old. We can discern from it 
 not only the order of his Writings, but also blunders still 
 popular in all the Editions as, for instance, when we read in 
 Twelfth Night that Sir Toby squeaked out his catches " without 
 any mitigation or remorse of voice," the rhythm proves that 
 Shakespeare wrote " without any remorse or mitigation of 
 voice." 
 
 A great deal of the Prose of his time was controlled by the 
 fashion which is commonly called Euphuism though it was 
 admired at the Court before Lyly wrote Ewphues. Queen 
 Elizabeth was always an Euphuist. When she was eleven she 
 wrote in Italian to Katharine Parr a letter beginning " Inimical 
 Fortune, envious of all good, and ever-revolving human 
 affairs have deprived me for a whole year of your illustrious 
 presence." This was a Spanish fashion set at Queen Katharine 
 of Aragon's Court and after her time when, for instance, the 
 second Lord Berners translated Antonio de Guevara's Dial 
 of Princes {Reloj de Princi-pes) in 1534 as the Golden Book of 
 Marcus Aurelius. 
 
 John Lyly wrote Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, " hatched 
 in the hard winter in 1578," when he was aged about 
 twenty-five. He seems to have meant it to be a picture of 
 some one, perhaps Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl 
 of Oxford, to whom he dedicated Euphues and His England 
 in 1580. Lord Oxford, who was then about twenty-eight 
 and had returned from his travels in Italy in 1576, was 
 a poet and a patron of writers. Euphues meant well- 
 formed and hence well-intentioned and eloquent and witty, 
 
 13
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and the Anatomy of Wit began thus, " There dwelt in 
 Athens a young gentleman of great patrimony, and of so 
 comely a personage, that it was doubted whether he were 
 more bound to Nature for the lineaments of his person, or 
 to Fortune for the increase of his possessions. . . . This 
 young Gallant of more wit than wealth, and yet of more 
 wealth than wisdom, seeing himself inferior to none in pleasant 
 conceits, though himself superior to all his honest conditions, 
 insomuch that he thought himself so apt to all things that 
 he gave himself almost to nothing but practising of those 
 things which are incident to these sharp wits, fine phrases, 
 smooth quips, merry taunts, jesting without mean and abusing 
 mirth without measure." This young Gallant's letters are in 
 the mode of the day, as can be seen, for instance, if we compare 
 them with the correspondence between Edmund Spenser 
 and his " singular friend," Gabriel Harvey, who wrote, " Young 
 Euphues but hatched the eggs that his elder friends laid." 
 
 Lyly imitated Guevara, particularly in the chapter called 
 Euphues and Atheos ; but he echoed the Court fashion in 
 these two little books instead of inventing it. Hazlitt wrote of 
 him in his Characters of Shakespeare^s Plays, " It is singular 
 that the style of this author, which is extremely sweet and 
 flowing, should have been the butt of ridicule to his con- 
 temporaries, particularly Drayton." The vices and virtues 
 of Euphuism are much more distinct in Sidney's Arcadia, 
 which was finished in 1581, and since Drayton, for instance, 
 admired Sidney's style we can guess that Lyly's was ridiculed 
 by personal enemies. 
 
 This fashion of beautiful speech was based on the theory 
 that words should be used harmoniously in Prose as in Verse 
 and set out of their natural order if the melody of a sentence 
 required it. The national English Prose is sane and straight- 
 forward, neither spangled with adjectives nor twisted to 
 fascinate. But this temperate Prose only became national 
 when the English were sobered. There was a young mood 
 in Queen Elizabeth's time, and this foreign fashion suited the 
 fantastic and buoyant life of those days. The men who 
 followed it could have cited King Duartc of Portugal's rules 
 in O Leal Conselheiro, " que se screvam cousas de boa sustancia, 
 claramente pera se bem poder entender, e fremoso, o mais
 
 BLANK VERSE 
 
 que elle poder, e curtamente quanto for necessario." Though 
 some of them overlooked his advice that Prose should be clear 
 and brief as well as charming, this fashion enriched our language 
 with many beautiful pages which will be studied if anyone 
 should seek to revive the lost art of musical English. And 
 though Shakespeare lived to renounce his early extravagance 
 he was always an Euphuist. 
 
 Shakespeare followed another fashion in writing Plays in 
 Blank Verse. Rhyme had been employed for the Stage because 
 it had assisted the Players to remember the words and because 
 the Drama had sprung from the old chants or recitations of 
 Minstrels. Blank Verse was adopted instead and, like the old 
 rhymes, it was mainly employed as Metrical Prose. Shake- 
 speare did not imagine that when Holinshed's words, " after 
 the death of Pharamond," were changed into — 
 
 After defunction of King Pharamond 
 
 this alteration had turned Prose into Poetry, but he saw that 
 the use of this metre allowed him to write Poetry without 
 the jar caused by an alteration of form. Besides, Blank Verse 
 added dignity to the long recitations which were retained 
 from the Traditional Stage. This dignity led to the use of 
 ordinary Prose in some Plays which were not meant to be 
 dignified : Gascoigne, for instance, wrote a Tragedy in Verse 
 and a Comedy in usual Prose. And Shakespeare often kept 
 this distinction, writing recitations or dignified passages in 
 Blank Verse and turning to the usual Prose to mark a change 
 in his tone. 
 
 It has been stated that Henry Howard, who was called 
 Earl of Surrey by courtesy, was the first to write English 
 Blank Verse ; but this is improbable. The first Italian Carnival 
 Comedies seem to have been written in Prose ; but about 
 1 5 19 Ariosto invented or used his Verso Sdrucciolo as a 
 compromise between Prose and Verse, probably based on the 
 Latin trimeter iambic, and the later Italian Comedies were 
 either in Prose or in Versi Sciolti, Blank Verse. It may be 
 that Blank Verse was employed by the Traditional Stage of 
 England soon after it was the fashion in Italy or earlier, for 
 it was merely Chaucer's favourite metre delivered from the 
 shackles of rhyme. 
 
 15
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare seems to have learnt the first music of his 
 verses from Chaucer, though he imitated Spenser and Marlowe 
 and others besides when he was beginning to write. His 
 first two Narrative Poems are imitations of Chaucer, as well 
 as of Ovid, and his third, A Lover's Complaint, resembles, 
 for instance, Chaucer's Cofnplaifit of the Black Knight, but 
 this may have been due to an imitation of Spenser's Ruins of 
 Tijfie. A day came when he could surpass all his masters, 
 except Christopher Marlowe, writing his Blank Verse with a 
 music which was his individual voice. But that day was slow 
 in coming. The difference between his mature and immature 
 Verse and between his mature and immature Prose is patent 
 to any reader who happens to have an ear for such things. 
 This difference (which is not a mere matter of metrical tests, 
 such as whether he used a redundant syllable as Ariosto had 
 done in his Verso Sdrucciolo, but a radical alteration) remains 
 the best clue to the order in which he wrote parts of most of 
 his Plays. 
 
 If he had not rewritten his Plays even a foreigner could 
 hardly help seeing that many of them had been written in 
 Youth ; but he rewrote or retouched nearly all of them, 
 turning to some of them again and again, and the result is 
 that in many of them his immature work remains blended 
 with the work of maturity. 
 
 Some students have argued that when immature work is 
 visible in one of the Plays, as, for instance, in Macbeth or in 
 Timon of Athens, we should ascribe it all to somebody else. 
 Even Mr. Masefield has written of Timon of Athens in his 
 William Shakespeare : " Timon of Athens is a Play of mixed 
 authorship. Shakespeare's share in it is large and unmistak- 
 able ; but much of it was written by an unknown Poet of 
 whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a 
 skilled writer for the Stage, and of a marked personality. It 
 cannot now be known how the collaboration was arranged. 
 Either the unknown collaborated with Shakespeare, or the 
 unknown wrote the Play and Shakespeare revised it." It 
 does not seem probable that Shakespeare would have stooped 
 to collaborate with anyone else in the days when he wrote 
 the masterly part of Timon of Athens. We have cither to 
 think that he collaborated with somebody else in a great 
 
 i6
 
 A GROAT'SWORTH OF WIT 
 
 many Plays, or that he wrote the immature work when he 
 was young. 
 
 It seems to me that one man wrote the immature work in 
 all Shakespeare's Comedies, except The Taming of the Shrew 
 and perhaps Pericles, and in all his Tragedies. The Plays in 
 the Enghsh Chronicle Pageant printed as Histories by Heminge 
 and Condcll are apart from the rest, and there are many 
 voices in them. He used stories and Plays written by others 
 when he was writing his Comedies and Tragedies also, but 
 he did this in a different way, transmuting them and making 
 them his. 
 
 We know that Venus and Adonis was printed in i '593 and 
 the Ravishment or Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus in 
 the following year. It is probable that the two Narrative 
 Poems and the Melodramatic one had all been revised before 
 they were printed, and we do not know when they were 
 first written. In the year before Venus and Adonis was 
 printed Robert Greene wrote in A Groafsworth of Wit : 
 " There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that 
 with his Tiger^s heart wra-pt in a Player'^ s hide supposes he is 
 as well able to bombast out a Blank Verse as the best of you ; 
 and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit 
 the only Shake-scene in a country." This seems to prove 
 that Shakespeare had begun as a Player and that when he was 
 aged about twenty-six he had earned success and dislike by 
 writing Plays of different kinds. 
 
 Sir Sidney Lee writes in his Life of William Shakespeare : 
 " There is no external evidence to prove that any piece in 
 which Shakespeare had a hand was produced before 1592. . . . 
 But his first essays have been, with confidence, allotted to 
 1 591." Instead of supposing that A Groat'' sworth of Wit 
 complained of such a recent beginning, I take it to be evidence 
 that Shakespeare had written Plays for several years, for it 
 would have been extraordinary if he had earned such success 
 in one year while he also worked as a Player. Besides, the 
 few Plays which Sir Sidney Lee doubtfully assigns to the 
 year 1591 could not have made anyone claim to be the only 
 Shake-scene in England. And, instead of concluding that 
 Shakespeare during most of his life recurred to the work of 
 some unknown and immature Dramatist, I suggest that he 
 
 17 B
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 used or rewrote many of his own early Plays or Interludes 
 written before 1592. 
 
 In those times the Players were still ranked with the 
 Jugglers. For instance, Sir Walter Cope wrote to Lord 
 Cranborne in January, 1604-1605, " Sir, I have sent and 
 been all this morning hunting for Players, Jugglers and such 
 kind creatures, but find them hard to find ; wherefore leaving 
 notes for them to seek me, Burbagc is come." The Jugglers 
 seem to have been Mountebanks and Reciters and Singers 
 like the Spanish Juglares whose name may have come from 
 Joculator, perhaps through the French versions Jogleor and 
 Jongleur. They seem to have been masters of some tricks of 
 illusion in Chaucer's time, for he wrote in The Squire'^s Tale^ 
 
 It is rather like 
 An apparence made by some Magic, 
 As jugglours playen at the festes great ; 
 
 and in The Franklin's Tale, 
 
 For I am sure that there be Sciences, 
 By which men make diverse apparenccs. 
 Like to the subtile Juggelours when they play. 
 For oft at Festes have I heard it say 
 That juggelours within an halle large. 
 Have made incomen water and a barge 
 And in the halle rowen up and down : 
 Sometime hath seemed come a grim leoun, 
 Sometime a castle all of lime and stone. 
 And when they would it vanished anon : 
 Thus seemed it to every man's sight. 
 
 Chaucer's account would be sufficient to prove that there was 
 an old Stage-craft apart from the Church Pageants and 
 Miracle and Morality Plays if there was any reason to doubt 
 that the Common Players provided an immemorial amusement. 
 The Strolling Players, who went from house to house to 
 perform at revels and banquets, would not have been 
 welcomed if all their Plays had been pious. King Richard the 
 Second and King Edward the Second, who both employed 
 Players, would not have been pleased if all the Plays had been 
 
 18
 
 ORIGIN OF THE SECULAR DRAMA 
 
 sermons. The Religious Drama of England must have been 
 separate from the Secular one which was only meant to 
 amuse. 
 
 The Secular Drama of England sprang from the songs 
 and recitations of Minstrels who were succeeded hy Strolling 
 Players performing short Chronicle Plays which led to the 
 longer Chronicle Histories. Mr. Tucker Brooke says in his 
 Tudor Drama : " Coeval with the beginnings and earliest 
 development of the regular Stage under Religious auspices, 
 there had existed an entirely popular species of quasi-dramatic 
 entertainment, much less definite in form and less rich in 
 evolutionary possibilities, but even more firmly ingrained in 
 the life of the Nation and deep-rooted in hoariest antiquity. 
 . . . Most commonly it dealt with the celebration of heroic 
 qualities and lauded individual prowess." These Heroic 
 Plays seem to have been the chief stock-in-trade of the Players. 
 For instance, Thomas Nashe wrote of the Plays in Pierce 
 Penniless, printed in 1592, " First, for the subject of them 
 for the most part it is borrowed out of our English Chronicles." 
 These Plays were England's national Chronicles, preserving 
 the memory of former events, not as they were recorded in 
 the seclusion of Cloisters but as they had been understood 
 by the men who bore the brunt of the fighting. In them, as 
 the Prince said in Ki7ig Richard the Third, the History of 
 England survived as it was — 
 
 reported 
 Successively from Age to Age. 
 
 And in them such mythical Heroes as Sir Bevis of Hampton 
 or Guy of Warwick were shown with the legendary pictures 
 of Kings. These Chronicle Histories dealt with current 
 affairs as well as with the deeds of the Past ; for instance, it 
 is recorded that King Henry the Eighth, disguised as a 
 gentleman, watched some Common Players acting a Comedy 
 in which he was shown killing the Monks, and also that after 
 his death and before he was buried a Play depicting the Comical 
 Tragedy of his Reign was performed by Lord Oxford's 
 Players at Southwark. 
 
 The Religious Drama of England sprang from the Ritual 
 of the Catholic Church. The Church Pageants and Miracles 
 
 19
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 were Catholic sermons, and because they were Catholic they 
 were abolished in the Protestant days. (I use the terms 
 Catholic and Protestant here and elsewhere in the sense in 
 which they were commonly understood in those times.) 
 For instance, the York Cycle was forbidden to show the 
 Coronation of the Virgin in 1548, and was changed further 
 in 1568 and 1572 and suppressed with the Coventry Cycle 
 in 1580, though twenty years later there was a last attempt 
 to revive the Chester Plays — which had been called the 
 Popish Plays of Chester in 1575. The Catholic Church was 
 hostile to the Secular Drama, as it is still, for no Priest is 
 allowed to see a Play in a Theatre. Cardinal Manning, for 
 instance, while condemning the Stage, wrote : " The mind 
 of the Church is sufficiently shown in the fact that histriones 
 were held to be in statu reprobatorum and deprived of Christian 
 burial." And though some of the Strolling Players performed 
 humorous Morals as Interludes because they were popular, 
 they repaid that hostility, particularly in King Henry the 
 Eighth's time and Queen Mary's. The Secular Stage rose 
 into favour when the Religious Stage was suppressed. 
 
 This separation set the English Drama apart from the 
 Drama of Spain which sprang from the Spanish Mystery 
 Plays, such as El Misterio de los Reyes Majos, and resembled 
 them at first in its Autos. And its national growth sundered 
 it from the Drama of Italy which began when Ariosto revived 
 the old Roman Comedies in the mood of the Carnival. It 
 might have resembled the Drama of France if this had sprung 
 from the Pieces Farcies acted by Les Clercs de la Basoche or 
 Les Enfants sans Souci in rivalry with the Miracle Plays shown, 
 for instance, by Les Confreres de la Passion ; but the French 
 dramatists copied Italian and Spanish and Portuguese and 
 Classical models instead of retaining the character of their 
 Secular Stage. 
 
 In Queen Elizabeth's time the Players were still ranked 
 with the Minstrels, and even their longer Plays were still 
 linked with music and dancing. Her Statutes of 1 571 and 
 1596 required all Fencers, Bear- Wardens, Common Players 
 of Interludes and Minstrels wandering abroad to procure 
 patrons if they wished to avoid being prosecuted as Vagabonds. 
 Paul Hcntzner, or Hcntznerius, wrote in his Travels in England, 
 
 20
 
 THE FIRST ENGLISH THEATRES 
 
 written in German in 1598, " Without the city are some 
 theatres where EngHsh Actors represent almost every day 
 Comedies and Tragedies to very numerous audiences. These 
 are concluded with music and a variety of dances." And 
 even in 1632 Donald Lupton wrote in London and the Country 
 Carbonadoed, " Most commonly when the Play is done, you 
 shall have a jig or dance of all treads ; they mean to put their 
 legs to it as well as their tongues." 
 
 We do not know when the Players built their first theatres. 
 In 1578 Thomas White, preaching at Paul's Cross, said : " Look 
 but upon the common Plays in London and see the multitude 
 that flocketh to them and foUoweth them. Behold the 
 sumptuous theatre-houses, a continual monument of London's 
 prodigality and folly." In the same year John Stockwood 
 said at Paul's Cross : " If you resort to the Theatre, the Curtain 
 and other places of Plays in the City, you shall see the Lord's 
 Day have those places, with many others that I cannot reckon, 
 so full as possible as they can throng," and he spoke of " eight 
 ordinary places " in the City of London. These eight ordinary 
 places may have been the courtyards of Inns or they may 
 have been booths. The sumptuous theatre-houses denounced 
 by White may have been the Theatre and Curtain, the wooden 
 booths built at Shoreditch outside the Walls of London in 
 1576 ; but these two sermons prove that the Players had many 
 other resorts. 
 
 London was then a huddled old town, defended stiU by 
 its ancient Walls except on the river-side. About a hundred 
 and fifty thousand people lived there, and the length of the 
 original Walls was little more than two miles ; the narrow 
 streets were so packed that few rode in them and nobody 
 drove, and the Thames was still the highway of traffic. This 
 gave the Players a reason for building booths in the fields 
 when they became popular enough to attract the citizens 
 there. Besides, they wished to avoid the Corporation's 
 hostility, which was explained, for instance, in 1597 when the 
 Lord Mayor and the Aldermen of London demanded the 
 final suppression of Stage-Plays, " as well at the Theatre, 
 Curtain and Bankside as in other places about the City," 
 because " they corrupted the young by their exhibition of 
 vices and lascivious devices," and because they were frequented 
 
 21
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 by " the base or refuse sort of people, or such young gentiemen 
 as have small regard of credit or of conscience," and were 
 " the ordinary places for vagrant persons, masterless men, 
 thieves, contrivers of Treason and other idle and dangerous 
 persons to meet together." 
 
 The Suburbs outside the Walls or across the River were 
 then known as the haunts of cut-throats and thieves, as they 
 were when Ben Jonson in Poetaster (which was first acted in 
 1601) made Historicus say, " All the sinners in the Suburbs 
 come to applaud our actions daily," and the Players had 
 resorted to them long before this. For instance, we know that 
 Lord Oxford's Company was acting in Southwark in 1547. 
 The lawless Suburbs were congenial to them because they 
 were " vagrant persons," and only exempted from the Laws 
 against Rogues and Vagabonds when they were controlled 
 by a responsible patron. Robert Willis wrote in Moimt Tabor, 
 printed in 1639 : " In the City of Gloucester the manner is 
 (as I think it is in other like Corporations) that when Players 
 of Interludes come to the town they first attend the Mayor 
 to inform him what nobleman's servants they are, and so to 
 get licence for their public playing." In Shakespeare's time 
 they were still Strolling Players during part of the year, going 
 from house to house or town to town in the country, and 
 even when they were acting in their booths in the Suburbs 
 they still kept the old customs of the open-air Stage. 
 
 Even the Globe, which was built on the Bankside at 
 Southwark in the fields near the Bear Garden in 1599, was 
 roofless though the back of the stage was protected by a pent- 
 house of thatch. The stage there was a wide platform jutting 
 into the Pit in front of a house or shed with a balcony. The 
 Plays there began at three o'clock, and though some students 
 have thought that a curtain was used to darken the theatre 
 when darkness was needed, we have no record of this. Since 
 the spectators could understand that a scene had been changed 
 from a seashore to a forest or city they could not have needed 
 darkness when they witnessed events which were supposed 
 to happen at night. We have no record that there was any 
 attempt to copy old or foreign costumes. Thomas Platter 
 of Basle, whose narrative of his visit to London in 1599 '^^^ 
 printed in 1899, wrote in German: " The Players wear the 
 
 22
 
 THE COMMON PLAYS 
 
 most costly and beautiful dresses, for it is the custom in 
 England that when noblemen or knights die, they leave their 
 finest clothes to their servants, w^ho, since it would not be 
 fitting for them to wear such splendid garments, sell them soon 
 afterwards to the Players for a small sum." 
 
 Paul Hentzner wrote in his Travels in England : " At these 
 spectacles and everywhere else the English are constantly 
 smoking the Nicotian weed which in America is called 
 tobacco. ... At their theatres, fruits, such as apples, 
 pears and nuts, according to the season, are carried out to be 
 sold as well as ale and wine." The men and boys in the Pit 
 were apt to be turbulent, as is recorded in Julius CcBsar, 
 " If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him, according 
 as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the Players 
 in the theatres, I am no true man " ; and in King Henry 
 the Eighth, " These are the youths that thunder at the Play- 
 house and fight for bitten apples." 
 
 We have no reason to think that the Common Players 
 altered the nature of their old entertainment when they built 
 their new booths in 1576. The Classical or Italianate Plays, 
 written, for instance, by Gascoigne or by Lyly, were not 
 intended for them but were acted by students or the boys of 
 the Choirs, such as the Children of Paul's, for courtiers or 
 others who had some education. These Plays were literary 
 and meant to be printed, but most of those acted at Shore- 
 ditch or Southwark provided amusement for people who were 
 mainly illiterate, and few of them were intended to be studied 
 in books. Even in 1604 John Marston complained in the 
 Preface to Malcontent that " Scenes invented merely to be 
 spoken should be enforcibly published to be read." 
 
 Most of the Players came from the lowest ranks. Even 
 James Burbage, who built the Theatre and was the chief of 
 Leicester's Players, began life as a carpenter, and Lord 
 Strange's Company was formed first in 1589 from men who 
 had served him as tumblers or acrobats when they were boys. 
 When Shakespeare was young no woman was allowed to 
 adopt the disreputable life of the Stage. Thomas Coryat 
 in his Crudities, printed in 161 1, wrote that in Venice he saw 
 women act, " a thing that I never saw before, though I have 
 heard that it hath sometimes been used in London " ; but it 
 
 23
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 may be that all Shakespeare's feminine Characters were 
 entrusted to men or boys in his time. And if we can trust 
 the Corporation of London no respectable women went to 
 the theatres. 
 
 Though between 1580 and 1590 dramatists of some 
 education, such as George Pecle, Robert Greene, Thomas 
 K,yd, Anthony Munday and Christopher Marlowe, began 
 to write for the Players, some of them imitating foreign 
 examples or the Plays written for the courtiers and students, 
 the Theatre and Curtain exhibited fencing and wrestling 
 and dancing combined with Interludes still. William 
 Lambarde wrote in his Perambulation of Kent, printed in 
 1576 and 1596, of men who went " to Paris Garden, the Bell- 
 Savage or Theatre to behold Bear-baiting, Enterludes or 
 Fence-play." Interludes seem to have been Plays written 
 to be acted between other entertainments or after a feast or 
 during a revel. Short Plays were required for all such 
 occasions as when Theseus said in A Midsummer Nighfs 
 Dream, 
 
 Say, what abridgment have you for the evening ? 
 What Masque ? what Music ? How shall we beguile 
 The lazy time if not with some delight ? 
 
 For instance, it is recorded that Henry Medwall's lost Interlude, 
 The Finding of Truth, which was acted before King Henry the 
 Eighth at Richmond in 15 14, was condemned for its length, 
 " it was so long it was not liked : The Fool's part was the 
 best, but the King departed before the end to his chamber." 
 Abridgments seem to have been Plays which were shortened 
 to be acted as Interludes. 
 
 The Players were often described as Players of Interludes, 
 as for instance, in Queen Elizabeth's two Licensing Statutes, 
 and they acted them still after her time, as was shown when 
 King James granted his Licence to Shakespeare's associates 
 in 1603. Ben Jonson wrote when he dedicated Volpone to 
 the two Universities (perhaps about 1616, though that Play 
 was first acted in 1605), " the increase of which lust in liberty, 
 together with the present trade of the Stage, in all their 
 misc'line Enterludes, what learned or liberal soul doth not 
 already abhor ? . . . But my special aim being to put a 
 
 24
 
 INTERLUDES 
 
 snaffle in their mouths that cry out, ' We never punish Vice 
 in our Enterludes.' " 
 
 The Licence of 1603 shows that the Interludes were 
 distinguished from Morals and Stage-Plays. Mr. Pollard in 
 his Fifteenth-Century Prose and Verse cites a lawsuit which in 
 1530 showed that the Interludes were acted in Winter and the 
 Stage-Plays in Summer. This may mean that the Stage- 
 Plays were longer and acted out of doors on a stage while the 
 Interludes were acted without one indoors in any town-hall 
 or room. We know that some of the later Morals and Morality 
 Plays were acted as Interludes and were called by that name. 
 But, as Mr. Tucker Brooke says in his Tudor Drama, the term 
 Interlude came more and more to be employed in the Tudor 
 period " as the gradual disappearance of the Religious element 
 rendered the expression ' Moral Play ' increasingly a mis- 
 nomer." They seem to have been of similar length but 
 distinguished by the fact that the Morals were intended to 
 edify. The Players of Interludes mentioned in the Licensing 
 Statutes with Bear- Wardens and other Vagabonds could not 
 have restricted themselves to edifying performances, and we 
 can infer that the men described by Sir Robert Dudley, after- 
 wards Earl of Leicester, as " his servants. Players of Inter- 
 ludes," in 1559, did not attempt to entertain him with piety. 
 
 In Queen Elizabeth's time the Interludes may have been 
 mainly Comedies, as would have been natural when they were 
 associated with revels. For instance, the Treasurer's Accounts 
 show that Shakespeare and Burbage and Kemp were paid for 
 " two several Interludes or Comedies " acted at Greenwich 
 Palace in 1594. But we have no reason to think that the 
 Strolling Players of Interludes only performed Comical Plays, 
 for many Heroic Plays and Chronicle Histories must have 
 been Tragical. And we know that " an Interlude concerning 
 King John " was acted for Cranmer in 1538. 
 
 The Secular Drama seems to have grown from songs or 
 chants, recitations, dialogues, short Plays of the nature of 
 Interludes, and Chronicle Pageants or Histories. And the 
 Religious Drama seems to have grown under the influence of 
 the dramatic Ritual of the Catholic Church from sermons, 
 dialogues, Miracle or Morality Plays to its last form the 
 Pageants or Cycles shown first by the Church and later by 
 
 25
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Guilds which were Rehgious in origin and mainly concerned, 
 hke the Guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford-on-Avon, with 
 good works, including the provision of Masses for the living 
 and dead. The Morality Plays seem to have been the Inter- 
 ludes of the Catholic Church. 
 
 The Mummers' Plays were Interludes founded on the 
 Religious and the Secular ones and distinguished from these 
 because they travestied them and were performed by the 
 Rustics in their holiday sports. The Masques were the 
 Mummers' Plays of the Court. For instance, Edward Hall 
 in his Chrofiide wrote of one acted in 1509," the torchbearers 
 were apparrelled in Crymosin Satin and green like Morescoes, 
 their faces black, and the King brought in a Mummery," and 
 George Cavendish wrote in his Life of Cardinal Wolsey, " The 
 banquets were set forth with Masques and Mummeries, in so 
 gorgeous a sort and costly a manner that it was a heaven to 
 behold." 
 
 When the change called the Reformation delivered the 
 Secular Drama from its rival and enemy the Drama of Sermons, 
 Plays of all kinds were added to the Chronicle Histories. The 
 Players of Interludes must have employed some foreign 
 stories before (such as, perhaps, the story of Pericles), in the 
 same way as the French Players founded their Robin et Marion 
 on the English Robin Hood Plays, and they probably used 
 some familiar Classical themes, such as Caesar's Fall, and 
 repeated some of the private murders of the day in their 
 Chronicles. 
 
 There may have been from the first some remembrance of 
 the Drama of Rome in the Secular Drama as there was in the 
 Morality Plays written by men who knew Latin, the language 
 of the International Church. Four hundred years of Roman 
 civiUzation in England during which Plays were performed 
 publicly must have left echoes in the minds of the English. 
 Besides, Terence had been greatly admired through all the 
 Middle Ages and Plautus had rivalled him since 1427 and 
 their Plays were still seen as when, according to Holinshed, 
 " there was a goodly Comedy of Plautus played before the 
 King and Queen and the hostages " at Greenwich Palace in 
 1520. This may help to account for the resemblance between 
 the English and the Roman buffoonery. Still, the influence 
 
 26
 
 FOREIGN INFLUENCE 
 
 of the Drama of Rome, if indeed it survived, must have been 
 very much weaker than it was when the Plays were written hy- 
 men who were acquainted with Latin. 
 
 Most of the new dramatists who began to write for the 
 Common Players about 1580 could read Latin and Italian 
 and Spanish, and these often turned to foreign books for their 
 plots because there were so few English stories in print. These 
 foreign books put them in touch with the World's common 
 stock of stories. Mr. Edward Hutton says in his Giovanni 
 Boccaccio, " Certainly to the Contes and Fabliaux of Northern 
 France a third part of the Decameron can be traced, much too 
 to Indian and Persian sources and a little to the Gesta 
 Romanorum.^^ El Conde Lucanor, written by Don Juan 
 Manuel and printed at Seville in 1575, was founded on stories 
 brought to Spain by the Moors and as old as the Arabian 
 Nights'' Entertainments, which were traced by Masondi in his 
 Golden Meadow (Nouradj-al-Zehel), written in 944, to Persian 
 and Greek and Indian tales gathered by Caliph Mansour who 
 began his reign about thirty years before Caliph Haroun 
 Al-Raschid. And other Writers, such as Giraldi Cinthio, 
 borrowed tales from The Arabian Nights'' Entertainments. 
 Some of Boccaccio's stories could be read then in English, for 
 sixteen of those in the Decameron were translated in William 
 Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, printed in 1566 and 1567, and 
 two others in the Forest of Fancy, printed in 1579, and there 
 were many other foreign ones in the Hundred Merry Tales 
 which were printed in 1565 and 1588. But most of the stories 
 in the Decameron and in El Conde Lucanor and Cinthio's 
 Hecatommithi, licensed in 1565 and printed in the following 
 year, had not been translated, and this gave them the charm 
 of novelty when they were seen on the Stage. 
 
 The Plays founded on such stories as these were only 
 foreign in setting and could have been made English by 
 altering the names and the scenes in the same way as Ben 
 Jonson changed the second edition of Every Man hi His 
 Humour. Indeed, it would have been hard to make a play 
 foreign when there was no scenery except a thatched shed, 
 and when sign-posts were used instead of programmes to show 
 that the platform should be taken to be a Forest near Rome 
 or the imaginary Coast of Bohemia, and the Players wore 
 
 27
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 second-hand finery in the fashions of England. So the 
 EngKsh Drama remained essentially English in spite of the 
 fact that some foreign plots were added to the old stock-in- 
 trade of the Traditional Stage. 
 
 Mr. Moulton says in his Ancie?it Classical Drama : " The 
 English reader will bring his mind into the right focus for 
 appreciating Old Attic Comedy if he imagines a modern 
 Pantomime into which is infused a strong element of the 
 highest literary power." This might be said too of England's 
 national Drama : it resembled the Pantomimes imported to 
 Rome about 21 b.c. by Pylades and Bathyllus or the fabulae 
 togatae, of which the younger Seneca wrote in his Eighth 
 Epistle, " Habent enim hae quoque aliquid severitatis et sunt 
 inter comoedias et tragoedias mediae." Most of its Tragedies 
 remained Pantomimic or Tragi-comical because they were 
 blended with inappropriate Clownage, as even T amhurlaine 
 was when it was first shown on the Stage and as even the 
 Church Pageants (for instance, the Wakefield or Towneley 
 Cycles) had been. And the English Stage remained Panto- 
 mimic till it ceased to be national when Ben Jonson and his 
 followers killed its natural growth. 
 
 Shakespeare wrote the Plays of his time as well as its Prose 
 and Verse when he began. Mr. George Baker writes in 
 Representative English Comedies: "By 1590 the boisterous 
 Romantic Drama, the often inchoate Chronicle History, 
 both frequently accompanied by scenes of would-be comic 
 horseplay, engrossed public attention. The great period of 
 experimentation with both old and crude forms was 
 beginning." I think that Shakespeare began to write for the 
 Stage while he was still a Player on it, some years before 1590 
 when Interludes were still in demand. And I think that he 
 began with short Plays of the nature or length of Interludes. 
 I infer this from the fact that the separate parts visible in most 
 of his Plays seem to have been of an appropriate length. 
 Besides, it would have been a natural thing for a beginner to 
 do and particularly for one whose chief work was still the 
 trade of a Player. He may have begun with Tragical efforts, 
 as so many other writers have done, in the same way as many 
 actors begin with visions of succeeding as Hamlet though they 
 
 28
 
 TITUS ANDRONICUS 
 
 may be destined to be known as buffoons. If he began by 
 copying Kyd and then turned to imitate Lyly this would help 
 to explain why only one of his Tragedies survives as he wrote 
 it in his ignorant days, though some of his first Comedies were 
 left little changed. 
 
 This Tragedy, Titus Andronicus , was printed in 1594 and 
 may have been revised in the manner of his Narrative Poems. 
 It may have been first written in Quatrains like Robert 
 Wilmot's Taricred and Gesimund, which was written in 
 Quatrains about 1568 and was published in Blank Verse con- 
 taining some Quatrains in 1591. This is suggested, for 
 instance, when Andronicus says in the second Scene of the 
 second Act, 
 
 The hunt is up, the morn is bright and grey. 
 The fields are fragrant, and the woods are green : 
 Uncouple here, and let us make a bay. 
 And wake the Emperor and his lovely bride, 
 
 for the last line may have ended with Queen and this may 
 have been changed because Shakespeare remembered that 
 the Emperor's wife should be an Empress. Elsewhere in this 
 Play Tamora is often called Empress, but sometimes Queen, 
 as when Andronicus says in the fifth Act — 
 
 In the Emperor's Court 
 There is a Queen attended by a Moor. 
 
 In any case the manner and mood of the present form seem to 
 show that it was written before the final revision of Venus and 
 Adonis. 
 
 This charming Play remains lyrical, a Melodramatic 
 Poem. We are reminded that its terrible doings are as 
 innocent as the shadows that chequer the bright Forest of 
 Arden when Tamora says. 
 
 The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind. 
 And make a chequered shadow on the ground. 
 Under their sweet shade, Aaron, let us sit. 
 
 The wicked Moor, Aaron, whose love-making and cruelty may 
 have suggested Othello's, is as pleasantly false as Andronicus 
 
 29
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 who raves like King Lear and pretends to be more mad than 
 he is, like Hamlet. 
 
 Some of the horrors are openly imitated from Ovid's. 
 When Andronicus asks, 
 
 Lucius, what book is that she tosscth so ? 
 
 the boy answers, 
 
 Grandsire, 'tis Ovid's Metamorphoses. 
 
 Like Ovid's they are meant to afford the pleasure sought by 
 Andronicus when he turned from his afflictions to read — 
 
 Sad stories chanced in the times of old 
 
 as by King Richard the Second when he said. 
 
 Come, let us sit upon the ground. 
 
 And tell sad stories of the deaths of Kings. 
 
 In this young story of impossible crimes Shakespeare 
 supped full of horrors, as a schoolboy might do, and if anyone 
 condemns him for this there is the answer — 
 
 Grandsire, 'tis Ovid's Metamorphoses. 
 
 He pointed to one source of his horrors when he made 
 Andronicus say, 
 
 This is the tragic tale of Philomel, 
 
 And treats of Tereus* treason and his rape. 
 
 And rape, I fear, was root of thine annoy. 
 
 This links it with The Rafe of Lucrece and both are connected 
 with Cymbeline when lachimo says in the second Scene of the 
 second Act of that Play, 
 
 Our Tarquin thus 
 Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened 
 The chastity he wounded. . . . 
 
 She hath been reading late 
 The Tale of Tcreus, here the leaf's turned down 
 Where Philomel gave up. 
 
 Shakespeare could have said of this Play as Horatio did in 
 Hamlet, 
 
 30
 
 TITUS ANDRONICUS 
 
 So shall you hear 
 Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, 
 Of accidental judgments, casual slau-ghters, 
 
 or with Othello, 
 
 On horror's head horrors accumulate. 
 
 He tried to increase Ovid's horrors, as when he made Deme- 
 trius and Chiron cut off Lavinia's hands and made Andronicus 
 say to them. 
 
 For worse than Philomel you used my daughter, 
 And worse than Progne I will be revenged, 
 
 and prepare their heads for Tamora's meal (instead of using 
 a child's flesh as was done in Ovid's version and Gower's in 
 the Fifth Book of Confessio A mantis), so that he was able to say 
 when they were sought, 
 
 Why, there they are both baked in that pie, 
 Whereof their mother daintily hath fed. 
 
 This last change made his version ridiculous : since the pie 
 could not have been vast enough to hold two men he made 
 Tamora eat two heads without detecting her fare. 
 
 It may be that he combined his version of Philomela's 
 calamity and Procne's revenge, using Gower's names for the 
 story, with a plot suggested to him by a similar play, Lusfs 
 Dominion or The Lascivious Queen. Though Titus Andronicus 
 is meant to be Roman and its scenes are in Rome or in a neigh- 
 bouring forest, the story seems Spanish and may have been 
 based on some old Spanish legend of the days of the Visigoths. 
 It may be that he could have said, as in Lusfs Dominion, 
 
 Now Tragedy, thou minion of the night, 
 Rhamnusia's pewfellow, to thee I sing. 
 Upon an harp made of dead Spanish bones. 
 
 This may have referred to the fact that the Revenge 
 Tragedies were supposed to be modelled on those ascribed to 
 Lucius Annseus Seneca, who was a native of Cordova. Ben 
 Jonson, for instance, called Seneca " him of Cordova dead " 
 
 31
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 in the Verses prefixed to the Folio of 1623, and Guilpin wrote 
 in Skialetheia, printed in 1598, 
 
 Or if my dispose 
 Persuade me to a Play, I'll to the Rose 
 Or Curtain, one of Plautus' Comedies 
 Or the pathetic Spaniard's Tragedies. 
 
 The most prominent Writer of these Plays, Thomas Kyd, 
 may have been one of the shifting companions who, according 
 to Thomas Nashe's Preface to Greene's Menaphon, printed in 
 1589, borrowed from Seneca read by candlelight (that is, with 
 the help of translations). But Kyd owed more to Spain than 
 to Rome. Spain was the Country of Romance in his eyes, 
 as he showed when he used the Danish story of Hamblet in 
 The Spanish Tragedy, and his Plays have the Spanish cruelty 
 which seems to have come from the heartless tales of the Moors. 
 When Shakespeare revelled in horrors in Titus Andronicus, and 
 perhaps in the first versions of most of his Tragedies, his mind 
 had the young cruelty shown in the immemorial tales of the 
 East and in the Mythology which Ovid preserved. 
 
 Heminge and Condell printed two Plays, Troilus and 
 Cressida and Coriolanus, as Tragedies before Titus Andronicus ; 
 but both of these seem to have been rewritten by Shakespeare 
 towards the end of his life. They began to print Troilus and 
 Cressida between Romeo and Juliet and Julius Ccesar and then 
 gave that place to Timon of Athens. They did not name it 
 in the Table of Contents. If, after they began printing it, 
 they came to believe that it should have been put with the 
 Comedies they saw this too late, for they had printed the 
 Comedies and Histories first. They could not have meant 
 it to be ranked with the Histories since these are all Scenes 
 from the Pageant of the Annals of England. It may be that 
 they decided to put it according to the date of the first form 
 of one of its parts, the finished Story of Hector. 
 
 Mr. Saintsbury writes in his History of English Prosody : 
 *' It is impossible that Troilus arid Cressida, in part at least, 
 should not be early, and it must be remembered that the fact 
 of Meres not mentioning a play is not final." Sir Sidney Lee 
 
 32
 
 POSSIBLE JUVENILE TRAGEDIES 
 
 writes : " In matter and manner Troiltis and Cressida combines 
 characteristic features of its author's early and late perfor- 
 mances. His imagery is sometimes as fantastic as in Romeo 
 and Juliet^ elsewhere his intuition is as penetrating as in King 
 Lear. The problem resembles that which is presented by 
 AWs Well that Ends Well and may be solved by the assumption 
 that the Play was begun by Shakespeare in his early days and 
 was completed in the season of maturity." And many 
 students have recognized three parts in this Play, the stories 
 of Troilus and Hector and Ajax. It may be that Shakespeare 
 wrote one of these parts when he was beginning to write and 
 another, the Story of Troilus, about the time when he wrote 
 Lovers Labour^s Lost and combined these and added the 
 Episode of Thersites and Ajax about 1601 during the War of 
 the Poets (which would explain why Heminge and Condell 
 began printing this Play before Julius Ccesar) and revised them 
 about 1609. 
 
 Coriolanus is a man's work and echoes the gravity and 
 hardness of Rome. We would be tempted to say that the 
 mind in it is not Shakespeare's, though the manner is his, if 
 we did not find the same mood in Troilus and Cressida and 
 Timon of Athens. It may be that all these were first written 
 when he was young and revised darkly near the end of his days. 
 This would help to explain the contrast between Coriolanus 
 and his other mature tragedies except Julius Ccesar. They 
 are aching with sympathy, but this is external and rhetorical 
 work. This Play, like King Richard the Third and Timon of 
 Athens, is planned in Marlowe's proud way : there is a dominat- 
 ing figure in it and the rest of the Characters have little 
 importance. It may be that instead of reverting to imitate 
 Marlowe after he had surpassed him he copied him here with 
 a beginner's humility. 
 
 Coriolanus imitates North's version of Plutarch : it is a 
 close dramatic copy repeating or expanding the speeches. 
 Such a method would have been natural when he was begin- 
 ning, and if he had written a first form in this manner Heminge 
 and Condell might have thought that this Play should be 
 ranked as an early one. If he had written it first when he was 
 mature, he would have transfigured North's version as he did 
 when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra.
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Coriolanus is closely linked with Timon of Athens. Both 
 are tales of Ingratitude, and Timon of Athens was another 
 Coriolanus who raged in solitude and befriended his country's 
 enemies instead of commanding them. Timon of Athens is 
 obviously based on a Play written in Youth, and if he took the 
 story from North's version of Plutarch, which was first printed 
 in 1579, he may also have founded a first form of Coriolanus 
 on Plutarch when he was beginning to write. But the 
 structure of Coriolanus suggests that he did not write it when 
 he was young enough to write the crude form of Timon of 
 Athens, and the place given to it by Heminge and Condell may 
 only mean that he wrote a version of it before he revised Titus 
 Andronicus, It may be that he revised Timo?i of Athens about 
 1600 (when the second Earl of Essex was seen in Timon's 
 place) and began to rewrite it afterwards as the last of his 
 Tragedies. Dryden thought it the last and Mr. Dowden 
 has said that it was their climax. If so, this would explain 
 why Heminge and Condell printed it before Julius Ccesar, 
 since the last form of it was only begun. 
 
 Julius Cc^sar seems composed of two parts, a Play of 
 Ingratitude dealing with Caesar's fall and a Senecan one 
 showing the revenge of his ghost. It may be that the first of 
 these was first written in a Classical group with the Story of 
 Hector and Timon of Athens, and the other among the Plays 
 of Revenge, and these groups may have been linked by Titus 
 Andronicus . 
 
 We cannot be certain that Shakespeare was the poet 
 described in Kemp's Nine Days'' Wonder, printed in 1600, 
 " whose first making was the miserable stolen story of Macdoel 
 or Macdobeth or Mac-somewhat." Still, Macbeth, as we 
 have it, seems a noble revision of a juvenile Tragedy. It may 
 be that its first form belonged to a group which included the 
 first forms of Othello, King Lear, King Richard the Third, 
 Hamlet and The Merchant of V enice. Four of these Plays, 
 Macbeth, Hamlet, King Richard the Third and the story of 
 Brutus in Julius Cccsar exhibit Senecan ghosts seeking revenge. 
 Even if this was an imitation of Seneca instead of Kyd it was 
 Spanish, and all these first forms may have shared the Spanish 
 mood of Titus Andronicus. 
 
 Shakespeare founded Macbeth on Raphael Holinshed's 
 
 34
 
 POSSIBLE JUVENILE TRAGEDIES 
 
 Chronicles of England and Scotland, printed in 1578 and 
 reprinted with John Elooker's additions in 1586, and he may 
 have used an obsolete Play if it was " a miserable stolen 
 story." The first form may have suggested a similar Play 
 dealing with King Richard the Third which was borrowed 
 from the Traditional Stage. The wicked Moor, Aaron, with 
 the Jewish name, may have suggested the Moor of Venice, 
 who may in his turn have suggested the Jew of Venice, and 
 Andronicus may have suggested King Lear's frenzy and 
 Hamlet's simulation of madness. 
 
 All this group of first forms may have resembled Titus 
 Andronicus in imitating Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, which may 
 have been written about 1586 and was printed in 1594 like 
 Titus Andronicus. Sir Israel Gollancz writes, " Hamlet 
 and The Spanish Tragedy may well be described as twin 
 dramas," and he adds, " To this same class of drama belongs 
 Titus Andronicus, and it is interesting to note that early in 
 his career Shakespeare put his hand to an Hamletian Tragedy." 
 It may be that Shakespeare put his hand to his first version 
 of Hamlet when he was young, and this may have been one 
 of the Plays in Nashe's mind when he wrote in his Preface 
 to Greene's Menaphon : " Yet English Seneca, read by 
 candlelight, yields many good sentences as ' Blood is a beggar ' 
 and so forth, and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, 
 he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say Handfuls of 
 Tragical speeches." But this may only refer to the fact that 
 Kyd had used the story of Hamlet which he may have found 
 in the Historia Danica by Saxo Grammaticus, printed in 1514, 
 or in Belief orest's Histoires Tragiques, printed in 1570. His 
 story differed from the story of Hamlet in making a father 
 revenge a murdered son. Shakespeare may have copied 
 from it the ghost demanding revenge and the use of a Play 
 set in a Tragedy. Sir Sidney Lee writes of Hamlet : " Kyd's 
 Spanish Tragedy anticipates with some skill the leading 
 motive and an important part of the machinery of Shake- 
 speare's Play." It does not seem probable that Kyd would 
 have copied his own Spanish Tragedy by writing a Danish 
 one ; but anyone setting out to imitate him might have 
 done this. Neither does it seem probable that Shakespeare 
 would have written a twin drama to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy 
 
 35
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 in 1 60 1 or later when he had outgrown his young mood and 
 the Spanish fashion was dead. 
 
 Mr. Tucker Brooke writes in his Tudor Drama : " The 
 Sfanish Tragedy virtually created a great deal of Elizabethan 
 stage business." The long success of this Play (which was 
 afterwards called The Second Part of Jeronimo) proves that 
 madness or distraction of mind was recognized as a Tragical 
 theme or a Tragi-comical one. Hieronimo's distraction 
 of mind seems a source of all Shakespeare's pictures of men 
 crazed or distraught and tottering on the brink of Insanity. 
 Pedro says of Hicronimo, 
 
 O Jaqucs, know thou that our master's mind 
 Is much distract since his Horatio died : 
 And now his aged years should sleep in rest, 
 His heart in quiet, like a desperate man. 
 Grows lunatic and childish for his son : 
 Sometimes, as he doth at his table sit, 
 He speaks as if Horatio stood by him, 
 
 and Hieronimo says to the Painter, 
 
 Art thou not sometime mad ? 
 Is there no tricks that come before thine eyes ? 
 
 " Well, sir, then bring me forth, bring me through alley and 
 alley, still with a distracted countenance going along, and 
 let my hair heave up my nightcap. Let the clouds scowl, 
 make the moon dark, the stars extinct, the wind blowing, 
 the bells tolling, the owls shrieking. . . . There you may 
 show a passion. Draw me like old Priam of Troy, crying 
 ' the house is afire, the house is afire ' and the torch over 
 my head ; make me curse, make me rave, make me cry, 
 make me mad, make me well again, make me curse Hell, 
 invocate, and in the end leave me in a trance and so forth." 
 It seems plain that if Kyd wrote these passages Shakespeare 
 echoed him in Titus Andronicus and in Hamlet and Macbeth 
 and Kiug Lear. And it may be that the echoes were much 
 more distinct in the first forms of these Plays. King Lear, 
 even as we have it, seems based on The Spanish Tragedy and 
 Titus Andronicus. 
 
 Kin^ Lear combined separate stories, as is shown by the 
 
 36
 
 POSSIBLE JUVENILE TRAGEDIES 
 
 title page of the Quarto of i6o8, " Mr. William Shakespeare, 
 his true Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King 
 Lear and his three daughters. With the unfortunate life 
 of Edgar, son and heir to the Earl of Gloucester." The 
 first may have been founded on Holinshed's Chronicles and 
 the second derived from Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which 
 may have been current in manuscript before it was printed. 
 Both were tales of Ingratitude; but the horrors in them give 
 them a place in the group linked with Titus Andronicus. 
 
 Coleridge rejected 'Titus Atidronicus because he disliked 
 it, in the same way as he called The Two Gentlemen of Verona 
 a sketch in his Classification of 1802 and omitted it in his 
 Classifications of 18 10 and 18 19. He said in his Notes on 
 some other Plays : " To the objection that Shakespeare wounds 
 the moral sense by the unsubdued, undisguised description 
 of the most hateful atrocity . . . I, omitting Titus Androni- 
 cus as not genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster's 
 blinding in Lear, answer boldly in the name of Shakespeare, 
 not guilty." But the scene of the blinding proves that 
 Shakespeare could have written the horrors of Titus Androni- 
 cus. And its survival in King Lear seems a sign that this 
 Tragedy is based on two others which were written in Youth. 
 
 The Merchant of Venice is another Play which seems 
 linked with Titus Andronicus. It seems compounded from 
 two different Plays, a Tragical one of Shylock's Revenge and 
 an Italianate Comedy, The Choice of the Caskets. It may 
 be that in the first of these Shylock was taken from the Tra- 
 ditional Stage to rival the Moor of Venice and was as horrible 
 as Aaron the Moor and resembled Barabas as he was drawn 
 in the Jew of Malta in the immature Scenes which were 
 added to Marlowe's noble beginning. 
 
 It may be that after writing these first Tragical Plays 
 Shakespeare turned to two longer Tragedies or fantastic 
 Romances, Cymbeline and The Winter''s Tale. Cymbeline 
 and King Lear are connected by a part of their themes, the 
 tragedy of a father's injustice, and by their place in pre- 
 historical England and their tangled construction. And 
 Cymbeline is linked with Othello by its tale of a loving hus- 
 band's deception and jealousy and with Titus Andronicus 
 
 37
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of the wickedness of a Queen and her son and the atmosphere 
 by a boyish romance. The W inter'' s Tale is connected with 
 Cymheline and Othello by a story of jealousy and by the 
 calamities of an innocent lady which also unite it with King 
 Lear and with Titus Andronicus. 
 
 There are three parts in Cymheline, as we have it, Holin- 
 shed's tale of Cymbcline and his sons, and the Wager-story 
 told by Boccaccio, and Imogen's fantastic adventure in the 
 Mountains of Wales. The third part may have been added 
 after he had combined the two others in a Romance which 
 had a Tragical ending as its title The Tragedy of Cymheline 
 shows. In this version, I think, Imogen died when Posthumus 
 struck her down at the end ; but in the Play, as we have it, 
 she is restored from the grave as Thaisa, yEmilia and Her- 
 mione were. These long-suffering ladies all belonged to 
 the type which Chaucer admired when he drew Constance 
 " full of benignity " in The Man of halo's Tale and wrote, 
 
 The talc of Melibee 
 And of Prudence and her benignity 
 
 and drew the patient Griselda in The Cleric's T ale. The fierce 
 women like Tamora and the Queen in this Play were also 
 in Chaucer's Tales as when he wrote in The Man of Law's 
 Tale, 
 
 Oh Sultaness, root of iniquity. 
 Virago thou ! 
 
 and of Donegild " the King's mother, full of tyranny." 
 
 The restoration from the tomb makes this Play Tragi- 
 comical as King Lear would have been if Cordelia and the 
 King had survived. If it was a change made by Shakespeare 
 at the end of his work this would explain why Heminge and 
 Condell put Cymheline as the last of the Tragedies. They 
 may have classed it as a Tragedy still because he had not 
 altered the name and because there is no Comedy in it — 
 the drift of the Play remains Tragical and the end is untrue 
 because there has been no preparation for it. 
 
 Samuel Johnson wrote in his General Ohservations : "This 
 Play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogues and 
 some pleasing Scenes, but they are obtained at the expense 
 
 38
 
 CYMBELINE 
 
 of much incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, 
 the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the manners 
 and names of different times and the impossibility of the 
 events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon 
 unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection 
 and too gross for aggravation." Johnson had no eyes for 
 the Poetry and glamour of Cymbelme, and he did not perceive, 
 as Coleridge did, that these faults are signs of juvenile work. 
 The merits too are equally young, and the Play is planned 
 with a boy's lavishness and random invention. 
 
 When Coleridge in his Classification of 1819 put Cymbeline 
 and The Winter''s Tale with the earliest Plays he added : 
 " The example of Titus Andronicus which as well as Jeronimo 
 was most popular in Shakespeare's first Epoch, had led the 
 young dramatist to the lawless mixture of dates and man- 
 ners." And the fact that Cymbeline and King Lear are the 
 two Plays which are most akin to Titus Andronicus seems a 
 proof that they were first written in Youth. 
 
 Cymbeline has the mood of the Mediaeval Romances, 
 and this was why Imogen's adventure in Wales, the scene of 
 many of them, resembles a Fairy-tale, as Sir Israel Gollancz 
 has observed when he compared it with the Fairy-tale of 
 Little Snow- White. It is probable that most of the Fairy- 
 tales were early Romances which had dwindled for the amuse- 
 ment of children in the same way as the primitive gods 
 dwindled to Fairies. This Fairy-tale dominates the rest 
 of the Play : if it was omitted Cymbeline would closely 
 resemble Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece. 
 
 The Wager-story was told by Boccaccio with indifferent 
 gaiety. His story " Bernabo da Genova da Ambruoguiolo 
 ingannato perde il suo " begins gaily. Three rich Italian 
 merchants have been feasting in Paris, " avendo una sera 
 fra laltre tutti lietamente cenato, cominciarono di diverse 
 cose ad ragionare " ; they talk of their wives and Bernabo 
 praises his and Ambruoguiolo " comincio ad fare le maggior 
 riso del mondo." The same laughter rings in the Italian 
 Novelle which imitated Boccaccio's and in the Queen of 
 Navarre's Contes et Nouvelles. Shakespeare remembered it 
 when he was writing his Argument to The Rape of Lucrece : 
 " During which siege the principal men of the Army meeting 
 
 39
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 one evening at the tent of Sextus Tarquinius, the King's 
 son, in their discourses after supper every one commended 
 the virtues of his own wife ; among whom Collatinus extolled 
 the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia. In that 
 pleasant humour they all posted to Rome, and intending, 
 by their secret and sudden arrival, to make trial of that which 
 every one before had avouched." Still, this pleasant humour 
 has no part in that Poem or in this Play : he had not come 
 to the mood of his Italianate Comedies and the wager which 
 would have been light-hearted in them, and therefore left 
 credible, is unnatural here because it is made by Posthumus 
 as lachimo says, 
 
 Sitting sadly. 
 Hearing us praise our loves of Italy. 
 
 This fault would have left this Play as crudely Impossible 
 as Titus Andro7iicus if it had not been redeemed by the 
 glamour of the adventure in Wales. Cloten in this Play 
 might have sinned in Titus Andronicus and so might lachimo, 
 another lago, but their wickedness is unreal and harmless 
 because the soft light of the Fairy-tale subdues their atrocity. 
 I think that this Fairy-tale was added when Shakespeare 
 borrowed a lighter method from Pericles. 
 
 There are two Plays in The fVinter^s Tale as we have it. 
 One is a version of the Tragical part of Cymbeline with Her- 
 mione in Imogen's place and Leontes outdoing Posthumus, 
 and the other, the fourth Act, is a separate Comedy. 
 
 The first part is based on Greene's story, Paiidosto or The 
 Triumph of Time, which was printed in 1588 and afterwards 
 called Dorastus and Faunia. Greene may have shaped a 
 Play from his story, for his slack mind and wandering manner 
 seem visible in the build of this part. This would help to 
 account for his assertion that Shake-scene was arrayed in 
 his plumes. 
 
 As this part was first written Leontes was a caricature 
 of jealousy. When it was revised he remained a boy's picture 
 of a man's jealous rage in the first Acts, but in the fifth 
 he was worthy to be loved by Hermione. The dignity of 
 this Act was worth the audience of Kings and Princes, as 
 the First Gentleman says in it with a different meaning. 
 
 40
 
 THE WINTER'S TALE 
 
 The fourth Act is a Pastoral Comedy of the Rustics and 
 knaves of an EngHsh countryside fair. It has the sweetness 
 and ripeness of a Midsummer Dream and it shines in this 
 PlayHke the episode of Marina in Pericles and the Interlude 
 of Imogen's wanderings in the story of Cymbeline. Auto- 
 lycus could have wandered with Jaques, singing in the Forest 
 of Arden : he was too wise for the days when Shakespeare 
 was beginning to write and too merry for his mood at the end. 
 
 The first three Acts have the mood of a Mediaeval Romance 
 and I see in their rawness a proof that they were written 
 first in the days when he was young enough to conceive the 
 first fantastic version of Cymheline. Mr. Saintsbury writes : 
 " There might be some reason for thinking The Winter^s 
 Tale Shakespeare's first experiment in very free redundance 
 and overlapping combined ; perhaps one made very much 
 earlier than is usually thought, and held back. Nor would 
 this lack support in some non-prosodic aspects of the Play." 
 
 This Tragi-comedy had, I think, a Tragical ending in 
 its earliest form. The first three Acts are still appropriate 
 to a Tragical ending, but they are made Tragi-comical by 
 the unforeseen radiance of a Midsummer Dream. A first 
 end, which was imitated from Greene's Pandosto, seems still 
 shown when Mamilius begins his story and says, " A sad tale 
 is best for Winter." King Richard the Second thought 
 the same when he said. 
 
 In Winter's tedious nights sit by the fire 
 
 With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales 
 
 Of woeful ages long ago betid. 
 
 Mr. Seccombe and Mr. Allen write of this Play and 
 Cymbeline in their Age of Shakespeare : " Both these Plays 
 combine an almost childish romance of plot, an utter disregard 
 of plausibility, with most minute and finished realism in 
 the presentation of individual figures or situations." It 
 seems to me that these contrasts can only be explained by 
 concluding that these Plays were written first when Shake- 
 speare was young and revised when he was mature. 
 
 Coleridge in his Notes on some other Plays of Shakespeare, 
 written in 1818, said that " Cymheline is a congener with 
 
 41
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Pericles,^^ and in his Classification Attempted of 1819 put 
 Pericles after Love'' s Lahour''s Lost^ which he took to be the 
 earhest Play, and added, " in the same epoch I place fVinter^s 
 Tale and Cymbeliney differing from the Pericles hy the entire 
 rifaciamento of it." In 1802 he had put Pericles in Shake- 
 speare's first Epoch among " the transition-works, Ueber- 
 gavgszuerke^ not his, yet of him," and in his Lectures on Shake- 
 speare and Milton of 1813 he had spoken of " the Play of 
 PericleSy written a century before, which Shakespeare altered." 
 In these opinions he disregarded the fact that Heminge and 
 Condell had omitted this Play. 
 
 The Quarto edition of Pericles printed in 1609 (or 
 bearing that date), described it as " the late and much admired 
 Play called Pericles, Prince of Tyre ... as it hath been 
 divers and sundry times acted by His Majesty's Servants 
 at the Globe on the Bankside. By William Shakespeare." 
 Since it was a popular Play acted by His Majesty's Servants 
 and was printed as Shakespeare's in four or five Quarto 
 editions before 1623 Heminge and Condell must have been 
 guided by some particular reason when they rejected it. 
 It seems to me that they must have known either that Shake- 
 speare had not written this Play or that he had wished to 
 disclaim it. I think that there are at least three versions 
 to be seen in this Play, an antiquated one and another founded 
 on it and a hasty revision. If only this last version was 
 Shakespeare's they may have rejected Pericles for that reason 
 alone, or in that case he may have preferred that it should 
 rest in oblivion because he had founded several other Plays 
 on its Scenes. 
 
 Old Gower says in the beginning. 
 
 To sing a song that old was sung. 
 
 From ashes ancient Gower is come, 
 
 Assuming man's infirmities, 
 
 To glad your ears and please your eyes. 
 
 It hath been sung at festivals 
 
 On Ember eves and holy ales, 
 
 Soon he breaks into irregular Verse, 
 
 42
 
 PERICLES 
 
 This Antioch then Antiochus the Great 
 Built up, this city, for his chiefest seat, 
 The fairest in all Syria : 
 I tell you what mine authors say : 
 This King unto him took a fere. 
 
 In the second Act he declaims. 
 
 The good in conversation, 
 To whom I give my benison, * 
 Is still at Tarsus, where each man 
 Thinks all is writ he speken can ; 
 And, to remember what he does. 
 Builds his statue to make him glorious. 
 
 He says after the dumbshow in this Act, 
 
 And he, good prince, having all lost. 
 By waves from coast to coast is tost ; 
 All perishen of men, of pelf, 
 Ne aught escapen but himself. 
 
 And in the third Act he says. 
 
 By many a dern and painful perch 
 Of Pericles the careful search, 
 By the four opposing coigns 
 Which the world together joins, 
 Is made with all due diligence 
 That horse and sail and high expense 
 Can stead the quest. 
 
 I do not think that these old-fashioned verses were written 
 in Queen Elizabeth's time. They are like many verses in 
 Confessio Amantis, for instance, 
 
 Whereas with great devotion 
 
 Of holy contemplation 
 
 Within his heart he made his shrift . . . 
 
 The Vice of Supplantacion, 
 
 With many a false collacion. 
 
 Which he conspireth all unknow, 
 
 Full ofte time hath overthrow 
 
 The worship of another man. 
 
 43
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 If anyone writing in Queen Elizabeth's time could have 
 imitated Gower so closely he would have done it throughout 
 the speeches given to him. I think that these old-fashioned 
 verses survive from a Traditional Play. They probably led 
 Coleridge to think that Pericles had been written a century 
 before, and Ben Jonson seems to have considered them old 
 when he wrote in the Prologue to Folpojie, 
 
 Nor hales he in a gull, old ends reciting, 
 To stop gaps in his loose writing, 
 
 for this seems to refer to Gower's words 
 
 I do beseech you 
 
 To learn of me, who stand in the gaps to teach you 
 
 The stages of our story. 
 
 John Gower may have written his Confessio Amantis ten 
 years before he changed his first dedication in 1393. When 
 he began his tale of AppoUinus, Prince of Tyre in the Eighth 
 Book he wrote, 
 
 Of a Chronique in days gone, 
 The which is cleped Panteon, 
 In love's cause I rede thus. 
 
 This Chronicle, Godfrey of Viterbo's Pantheon, written 
 in the Twelfth Century, borrowed the talc from the Greek 
 Romance, Apollonius of Tyre, which may have been written 
 in the First Century and now survives in a Latin version 
 made in the Sixth. Chaucer in The Man of Lazv's Tale called 
 the story — 
 
 As horrible a tale as man may read, 
 
 but the horrible beginning was only an episode in a tangled 
 Romance. Apollonius of Tyre belonged to the group of 
 Greek Romances which dealt with flights, captures, rescues, 
 storms at sea, pirates and partings, and ended with mar- 
 riages, as Nicetas Eugenianus wrote of Charicles a?id Drusilla. 
 Mr. Gaselee writes of them in his Appendix on the Greek 
 Novel, printed in the Loeb edition of Longus and Parthenius, 
 " The most significant feature of the Greek novels is their 
 un-Greek character. We can always point to Oriental 
 
 44
 
 PERICLES 
 
 elements in their substance, and almost always to Oriental 
 blood in the writers. Sometimes it would almost seem that 
 the accident that they were written in Greek has preserved 
 them to us in their present form rather than in some such 
 shape as that of The Thousand and One Nights.^'* And it 
 may be that Pericles shared an Oriental descent with Titus 
 Aiidronicus. 
 
 The story of Pericles is all to be found in Gower's Con- 
 fessio Amantis, though the Prince is called Appollinus there 
 and Thaise is the name of his child. Gower, for instance, 
 tells of the tempest. 
 
 The storm arose, the winds loud 
 They blewen many a dreadful blast. 
 The welkin was all overcast, 
 The dark night the sun hath under. 
 There was a great tempest of thunder, 
 
 and of the sale to the brothel. 
 
 The master-shipman made him boun 
 And goeth him out into the town. 
 And proifereth Thaise for to sell. 
 One Leonin it heard tell 
 Which master of the bordel was. 
 
 Some Strolling Player, thinking only of pleasing an illiterate 
 crowd, may have discovered the admirable contrasts of 
 Pericles when he heard Gower's story, perceiving how the 
 excitement of shipwreck and the humour of brothels and 
 the triumph of Virtue could be fitly combined. Mr. Saints- 
 bury writes of Pericles in his History of English Prosody : 
 " It was evidently a derelict in some way. Not merely 
 the extremely decousu character of the plot, and the absence 
 of any distinct character-drawing, but the importance and 
 peculiarity of the Chorus show earliness, and so does the 
 Blank Verse, though this is not exactly of the earliest." It 
 may be that Pericles was already a derelict when Shakespeare 
 began. 
 
 In 1608 George Wilkins published a story called " The 
 Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Being the 
 true history of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately presented 
 
 45
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 by the worthy and ancient Poet, John Gower." He invited 
 the Reader " to receive this History in the same manner 
 as it was under the habit of ancient Gower, the famous 
 Enghsh Poet, by the King's Majesty's Players excellently 
 presented " and he claimed that the Play was " a poor infant 
 of his brain." We know nothing else about Wilkins except 
 that he helped John Day and William Rowley to write The 
 Travaile of Three English Brothers which was printed in 
 1607, and wrote a Play called The Miseries of an Enforced 
 Marriage which was printed in the same year. If he wrote 
 Pericles he deserved to be ranked with Shakespeare and 
 Marlowe ; but nothing else written by him justifies this. 
 It is possible that he revised an old Play or that he helped to 
 write a version of it twenty years before 1608 (since we do 
 not know when he was born) ; but his other work seems a 
 sufficient proof that the beauty of Pericles was out of his 
 reach. 
 
 The title of his story suggests that he based it on Laurence 
 Twine's " Pattern of Painful Adventures containing the most 
 excellent, pleasant and variable History of the Strange 
 Accidents that befell unto Prince Apollonius, the Lady 
 Lucina his wife and Tharsia his daughter." And that book 
 was first printed thirty-two years before 1608. If the 
 Prologue to Ben Jonson's Volpone was spoken when that 
 Play was acted in 1605, its mention of a gull reciting old 
 ends may be a proof that Pericles had been seen on the Stage. 
 But we cannot conclude that Pericles was old from the fact 
 that Ben Jonson called it " mouldy " when he wrote of 
 
 Some mouldy tale 
 Like Pericles 
 
 in the Verses beginning " Come, Leave the loathed Stage," 
 for he used that word to mean " bawdy," and Owen Fcltham 
 agreed with him when he said that some of Ben Jonson's 
 Scenes in The New Inn 
 
 Throw a stain 
 Through all the unlikely plot, and do displease 
 As deep as Pericles. 
 
 This Play is essentially young, and it is either the source 
 
 46
 
 PERICLES 
 
 of many of Shakespeare's Scenes or a repetition of them. If 
 he was acquainted with a version of it when he was young, 
 this would explain, for instance, why in The Comedy of Errors 
 the first Scene of the fifth Act, when ^geon recognizes the 
 Abbess as his lost wife and says. 
 
 If I dream not, thou art ^Emilia ; 
 
 If thou art she, tell me, where is that son 
 
 That floated with thee on the fatal raft ? 
 
 closely resembles the third Scene of the fifth Act of Pericles 
 when the Prince sees the High Priestess of Diana at Ephesus, 
 and why the brothel-scenes are so much alike in Pericles and 
 in Measure for Measure, which is openly founded on a juvenile 
 version. Other things which resemble Pericles, such as the 
 restoration of wives in Love'^s Labour'' s Lost and Cymbeline and 
 The Winter's Tale, could have been derived from the story, 
 which must have been commonly known like other Greek 
 novels, for instance, the yEthiopica of Heliodorus of Emesa, 
 which was taken to Sea by Pantagruel (according to Rabelais) 
 and was remembered by the Duke in Twelfth Night when he 
 said, 
 
 Why should I not, had I the heart to do it. 
 Like to the Egyptian thief, at point of death 
 Kill what I love ? 
 
 These tales, which may have sprung from the East, had 
 been destined to be Wonderful Things Beyond Thule, like the 
 adventures celebrated under that name by Antonius Diogenes. 
 While these other apparent echoes of Pericles could have 
 answered the story, they could also have repeated the Play, 
 and this seems more probable. 
 
 Many students (for instance. Sir Israel Gollancz) have 
 regarded Pericles as closely connected with Cymbeline and 
 The Winter''s Tale and The Tempest, Cymbeline is linked with 
 it by the mood of Imogen's adventure in Wales, and The 
 Winter's Tale is connected with it by the mood of the fourth 
 Act and so is The Tempest by the use of the storm and by the 
 grace and the sweetness of those separate Episodes. Also 
 these three Plays, like many others, retain the nature of the 
 immemorial Romances. 
 
 47
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 One obvious link between Pericles, Cymbeline and The 
 Winter^s Tale is the use of the conventional lists of flowers 
 chosen for their colours or names. In the first Scene of the 
 fourth Act of Pericles Marina says, 
 
 No, I will rob Tellus of her weed, 
 To strew thy green with flowers : the yellows, blues. 
 The purple violets, and marigolds. 
 Shall, as a carpet, hang upon thy grave, 
 While summer-days do last. 
 
 In the fourth Scene of the fourth Act of The Winter's Tale, 
 Perdita says, 
 
 I would I had some flowers of the Spring that might 
 Become your time of day . . . 
 
 daffodils, 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim. 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
 Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses. 
 That die unmarried, ere they can behold 
 Bright Phoebus in his strength. 
 
 And in the second Scene of the fourth Act of Cymbeline 
 Arviragus says, 
 
 With fairest flowers. 
 While Summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, 
 I'll sweeten thy sad grave : thou shalt not lack 
 The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor 
 The azured harebell, like thy veins ; no, nor 
 The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander, 
 Outsweetencd not thy breath. 
 
 A model for all these had been set, for instance, in Marlowe's 
 Dido, Quee?i of Carthage when Venus said. 
 
 Amongst green brakes I'll lay Ascanius, 
 And strew him with sweet-smelling violets. 
 Blushing roses, purple hyacinths : 
 These milk-white doves shall be his centronels. 
 
 The second of these three lists is plainly an imitation of 
 
 48
 
 PERICLES 
 
 Marlowe. The third is a revision or a form of the first and 
 it is the only one in Shakespeare's last manner. The repetition 
 in it would be explained if when it was written or revised, as 
 we have it, Shakespeare had not intended to take the credit 
 of Pericles. 
 
 Dryden recognized the young mood in Pericles when 
 (referring to the belief that the Glastonbury Thorn blossomed 
 at Christmas) he wrote in his Prologue to Davenant's Circe, 
 printed in 1675, 
 
 Shakespeare's own Muse her Pericles first bore. 
 The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moor : 
 'Tis Miracle to see a first good Play ; 
 All Hawthorns do not bloom on Christmas Day. 
 
 It seems certain that Shakespeare could not have written 
 Pericles after Hamlet or King Lear or Othello. Still, he might 
 have revised a Play as young as Titus Andronicus, founded by 
 him on a much earlier Traditional one and written in imitation 
 of Marlowe, and this would have been the natural conclusion 
 if Heminge and Condell had not rejected this Play. Of course, 
 the fact that it was called his in the Quarto editions proves 
 nothing, for several Plays which were not his (for instance, 
 the First Part of Sir John Oldcastle, which was written by 
 Munday and Drayton and others, and apparently printed in 
 1619, though it bears the date 1600) were ascribed to him 
 with intent to deceive. The later belief that it was his may 
 have been due to the Quartos or to a tradition that he had 
 prepared a form of it for His Majesty's Servants. The Play, 
 as we have it, bears signs of a revision by him after 1603. 
 But I think that Heminge and Condell's rejection can only 
 be explained by concluding that the Play was not his. Though 
 they do not appear to have been equally scrupulous when they 
 printed King John and Kifig Henry the Eighth, this may have 
 been due to the fact that those Plays were in the Chronicle 
 Pageant which was founded on common property. No one 
 ascribed Doctor Faustus to Dekker, or Jeronimo to Jonson, 
 though they added some Scenes, and if Heminge and Condell 
 had happened to know that Pericles was as old as those Plays 
 and that Shakespeare had only retouched it (perhaps after a 
 revision by Wilkins) they would not have ascribed it to him. 
 
 49 ^
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Sir Israel Gollancz writes : " It is possible to differentiate 
 no less than three styles in Pericles." The most charming of 
 these is either Christopher Marlowe's or an exceedingly 
 skilful imitation of him. Marlowe's music is repeated, for 
 instance, in such verses as 
 
 Thou comest as a physician, Helicanus 
 
 or 
 
 A terrible child-bed hast thou had, my dear. 
 
 It may be that Marlowe, working with others, perhaps 
 Pecle and Kyd, shaped a version of Pericles from an old 
 Traditional Play about the time when Shakespeare had written 
 the first forms of Cymbeliiie and The Winter''s Tale. This 
 would account for a change in Shakespeare's manner of 
 writing. And in that case the many things in other Plays 
 which resemble Pericles were repeated from it, and this 
 Tragi-comic Romance taught him how to write most of his 
 Tragi-comical and Comical Plays in the same way as The 
 Spanish Tragedy guided him when he began to write Tragedies. 
 This Play may have shown him how to avoid the monotony of 
 Titus Andronicus and to enliven his others, even his Tragedies, 
 by contrasts and changes. 
 
 SO
 
 THE PLAYS OF YOUTH 
 II 
 
 SOME students who think that The Tempest is an elderly 
 Play support this belief by contending that it is founded 
 on Pericles, which they take to have been written by Wilkins 
 in 1607. Mr. Dowden, for instance, thinks that Shakespeare 
 retouched Pericles in 1608, and calls Marina's Romance a 
 sketch of The Tempest. And the common belief that Cymbeline 
 and The Winter''s Tale are elderly work is partly derived from 
 the theory that they should be taken as allied with The Tempest, 
 which should be read as a farewell to the Plays. 
 
 The German students who held this theory had the 
 excuse that the Tragical part of The Winter'' s Tale and the 
 structure of Cymbeline appealed to their taste. Besides, they 
 interpreted Shakespeare as if he was a German : Schiller 
 might have dreamt of such work, and Goethe could have 
 ended his task with a complacent farewell. The kindly German 
 hearts of the days when Schlegcl and his followers laboured with 
 such zeal to explain Shakespeare to his countrymen found a 
 pleasure in thinking that he had ended his work jolly and 
 kind. So they linked these three Plays, which seemed master- 
 pieces to them, as a proof that there was a sunny close to his 
 life and that he emerged from the gloomy meditations of 
 Hamlet to adopt as his motto " All's Well that Ends Well." 
 They thought that the false happiness at the end of these 
 Plays showed that he had lived to repent the truth of his 
 Tragedies, and they discovered in them a last mood of 
 reconciliation and pardon. But in doing this they overlooked 
 the fact that this mood was not a new one to him, since it is 
 as plain in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, 
 As Tou Like It, and The Merchant of Venice, and they studied 
 those Plays as if they were as German as their notion of 
 Hamlet. 
 
 Sir Sidney Lee writes, " The composition of Cymbeline 
 and The Winter'' s Tale may be best assigned to the Spring 
 and Autumn respectively of 1610, and The Tempest to the 
 
 51
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 early months of the following year." He bases this date for 
 The Tempest on the metrical tests and the mood and, for 
 instance, on his trust in the Book of Revels which mentions a 
 performance at Court in November, 1611, and on his belief 
 that Gonzalo quotes Florio's version of Montaigne and that 
 Prospero's Island represented Bermuda. None of these things 
 could show that The Tern-pest was not a revision of a juvenile 
 form. 
 
 He writes of Prospero's Island : " Suggestions for these 
 episodes reached Shakespeare from a quarter nearer home than 
 Spain or Germany. In the Summer of 1609 a fleet bound for 
 the new plantation of Jamestown in Virginia, under the 
 command of Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a storm 
 off the West Indies, and the Admiral's ship, the Sea Venture, 
 was driven on the coast of the hitherto unknown Bermuda 
 Isles." And Mr. Hamilton Mabie, in his William Shakespeare, 
 writes: " In the Autumn of 1610 a great sensation was made 
 in London by the arrival of a company of sailors who had been 
 wrecked off the Bermudas, until that moment undiscovered." 
 
 Bermuda was known long before this. In Hakluyfs 
 Voyages, printed in 1589 and reprinted with many additions 
 between 1598 and 1600, we have Job Hortop's mention of 
 passing it in 1570, and the accounts of the storm which the 
 Edward Bo?iaventure met there in 1593, and of the wreck 
 of a French ship on its rocks in the same year, and of Dudley's 
 meeting " foul weather enough to disperse many fleets " 
 there in 1595. And it has a place in the two Ruttiers preserved 
 by Hakluyt : one of them says, " In the winter time go on 
 the south side of Bermuda, and must go with great care 
 because many have been lost here about this Island." Shake- 
 speare may have known of this Island and of shipwrecks there 
 when he was a child, and his use of the name Bermoothes, 
 which is nearer to the discoverer's name, Juan Bcrmudez, 
 docs not suggest that he depended on the Discovery printed 
 in 1 610. " Discovery," of course, meant exploration, as it 
 did when Ralegh published the Discovery of Guia?ia, a country 
 which had been seen by Columbus, and when Ben Jonson 
 called his Discoveries ^^ Explorata,^^ and told Drummond of 
 Hawthornden that he intended to write an account of his 
 Pilgrimage from London to Scotland and call it a Discovery. 
 
 52
 
 THE TEMPEST 
 
 The fact that Ariel was sent to fetch dew from the still- 
 vexed Bermoothes is a proof that Bermuda was not Prosperous 
 Island. Besides, Prospero told Miranda that their enemies 
 
 Hurried us aboard a bark, 
 Bore us some leagues to Sea, where they prepared 
 A rotten carcase of a butt, not rigged. 
 Nor tackle, sail nor mast, 
 when he was banished from Milan, and he said that Sycorax 
 had been exiled to it from Algiers, and Ferdinand said that 
 he was returning from Tunis to Naples, when he was driven 
 on it, and Ariel said, 
 
 For the rest of the fleet 
 Which I dispersed, they have all met again 
 And are upon the Mediterranean flote. 
 Bound sadly home for Naples. 
 
 All this seems to prove that when Prospero was banished 
 from Milan he made his home on a dream-island in the 
 Mediterranean. Even if we accepted the theory that his Island 
 resembled the one described in the pamphlets published in 
 i6io, this could be explained by supposing that Shakespeare had 
 introduced that resemblance in a later revision. Fortunate 
 Islands and haunted ones had been famous in the legends and 
 Poetry of the sea-going Nations from time immemorial. 
 
 There may be one link between Prospero's Island and 
 the dreaded Bermudas. Job Hortop, in his account of his 
 voyage with Diego Flores de Valdez in 1570, which was 
 published by Hakluyt and may have been current before, 
 wrote, " When we came in the height of Bermuda we dis- 
 covered a monster in the Sea, who showed himself three times 
 unto us from the middle upwards, in which parts he was 
 proportioned like a man of the complexion of a Mulatto or 
 tawny Indian. The General did command one of his clerks 
 to put it in writing and he certified the King and his Nobles 
 thereof." This monster may have suggested Caliban (whom 
 Trinculo called " half a fish and half a monster ") when 
 Shakespeare remembered the old stories about a Magician 
 and his innocent daughter and wished to provide them with 
 company on their Fortunate Island. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare drew Caliban, the land-fish 
 
 53
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 who resembled a tortoise and had a very ancient and fishlike 
 smell, from an Esquimaux brought to England by Frobisher 
 in 1576 and then called an Indian. He may have heard him 
 described or seen him exhibited in Stratford or London, alive 
 or dead. Trinculo says, " When they would not give a doit 
 to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead 
 Indian. Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but 
 this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give 
 a piece of silver : then would this monster make a man." 
 
 It may be that this picture of Caliban and the mention 
 of Setebos, the Patagonian Devil, are signs of the early date 
 of ^he T em-pest. Several of the names in this Play are to be 
 found in Eden's History of Travels which described Patagonia 
 and was published in 1577. In 1610 Eden's book and the 
 Esquimaux were things of the Past. Caliban's name is not to 
 be found in it and Sir Israel Gollancz writes that " it is most 
 probably a contemporary variant of Canibal, which is itself 
 merely another form of Caribal, i.e. Caribbean." If this 
 could be proved it would support the impression that The 
 Tempest as we have it derides Montaigne's Essay Des Canni- 
 bales. Even in that case the name might have been given in 
 a later revision. This derivation cannot be proved, and the 
 name may have been found in a Spanish form of the story, 
 for similar names (such as Oliban) are still used in Spain. 
 
 Prospero's farewell to his Magic has been interpreted as 
 Shakespeare's to his. I do not believe that Shakespeare said 
 good-bye to his dreams as if he was closing a shop. This 
 farewell seems based on Medea's assertion in Ovid's Meta- 
 morphosesy 
 
 Et silvas movco, jubeoque tremescere montes 
 Et mugire solum, manesque cxire sepulchris. 
 
 Since these verses must have been familiar to Shakespeare in 
 the days of his Youth, this echo of them may be a sign that 
 this Comedy was first written then. And the renunciation of 
 Magic was involved in the story. Perhaps he developed his 
 Magician's farewell, making it his, when he said good-bye 
 to his trade and to his fanciful dreams, turning to Tragedies, 
 and saw himself as Prospero parting from the tricky sprite 
 Ariel. 
 
 54
 
 THE TEMPEST 
 
 Ariel did not belong to Fairyland but to Magic as is 
 shown by his name. Sir Israel Gollancz says that it is " of 
 Hebraistic origin, and was, no doubt, derived from some such 
 treatise as Hey wood's Hier archie of the Blessed Angels. 
 
 The earth's great Lord 
 Ariel, the Hebrew's Rabbins thus accord." 
 
 Ben Jonson wrote in the Alchemist, acted in 1610 : 
 
 And in the east side of your shop aloft 
 Write Mathlai, Tarmiel and Baraborat, 
 Upon the north part Rael, Velel, Thiel, 
 They are the names of those Mercurial Spirits. 
 
 And when he wrote his Masque The Fortunate Isles, which 
 was " designed for the Court on the Twelfth Night, 1626," 
 he began it with Johphiel : " His Majesty being set, entereth 
 in running, Johphiel, an aery spirit, and according to the Magi 
 the Intelligencer of Jupiter's Sphere, attired in light silks of 
 several colours, with wings of the same, a bright yellow hair, 
 a chaplet of flowers, blue silk stockings and pumps and gloves, 
 with a silver fan in his hand." He must have remembered 
 that other Fortunate Island on which Prospero lived, and 
 though he may have been glad to correct Shakespeare's 
 inaccuracy by giving the proper Magical name to his Messenger, 
 he may have attired him as he had been shown on the Stage. 
 A Midsummer Nighfs Dream as we have it is akin to The 
 Tempest. Oberon is in Prospero's place, and Ariel is Puck 
 compounded with the Fairy who sings to him. When gentle 
 Puck is sent to fetch Love in Idleness he replies, 
 
 I'll put a girdle round about the earth 
 In forty minutes, 
 
 showing Ariel's activity, and he misleads Lysander and 
 Demetrius unseen. And Prospero wrought his miracles 
 through Oberon's Fairies. But Oberon's Court is happier 
 than Prospero's Island : as Drayton said of it in his Nymphidia, 
 
 This Palace standeth in the air. 
 By Necromancy placed there. 
 That it no Tempest need to fear ; 
 
 55
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and The Tempest, as we have it, is darkened, for disillusion 
 has supplanted illusion. Puck is a prose spirit ; but Ariel is a 
 Poem with wings. Still, Puck lives in The Tempest though he 
 has been changed from Robin Goodfellow, — 
 
 Nothing of him that doth fade, 
 But doth suffer a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange. 
 
 Though Puck was able to take the disguise of a roasted 
 apple at will he did not change his form in the Play; but 
 Ariel, though he must have been acted by a boy, was intended 
 to have no definite size. He could sing. 
 
 Where the bee sucks, there suck I : 
 In a cowslip's bell I lie, 
 
 and could summon the elves to play with him on the sands. 
 This vagueness of stature is one of the proper signs of a dream 
 and may have been added when Shakespeare changed a boyish 
 Romance partly founded on Pericles and on old stories of 
 Magic which were current in Spain and Italy and probably 
 sprang from Oriental tales, for Ariel resembles the Jinn who 
 were released and employed in the Arabian Nights^ Entertain- 
 ments. 
 
 Mr. de Perott in The Probable Source of the Plot of Shake- 
 speare's Tempest, printed in 1905, and Mr. Henry Thomas in 
 Spanish a?id Portuguese Romances of Chivalry, printed in 1920, 
 have shown the resemblance between this Play and the First 
 Book of Espejo de Principes y Cavalleros, written by Diego 
 Ortunez de Calahorra and printed in Spanish in 1562 and 
 in English as The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood 
 about 1580. Shakespeare knew the book, for in the First 
 Part of King Henry the Fourth he made Falstaft' say, " We 
 that take purses go by the moon and seven stars, and not 
 by Phoebus, he ' that wandering knight so fair.' " In it there 
 are Magicians, for instance, Artidor brotlier of Polidarca 
 King of Phoenicia, and Polisteo elder son of the King of 
 Phrygia, and there is an Island in which Polisteo lives with 
 his two children while he practises Magic. And, as Mr. 
 Henry Thomas says, " There is also the Island of Artimaga, 
 named after its mistress, the most wicked and abominable 
 
 56
 
 THE TEMPEST 
 
 among women, who worhipped only the Devil, and had by 
 him a son called Fauno, at whose birth she died. The Island 
 passed to the son, and was known as Maniac Island, frequented 
 by storms and legions of Devils." 
 
 If this island suggested Prospero's Island we cannot 
 deduce the date of The Tempest from the fact that A Discovery 
 of the Bermudas was printed in 1610. It does not seem 
 probable that Shakespeare would have turned to the First 
 Part of the Mirror of K7iighthood in his elderly days, thirty 
 years after it had been printed. This was a popular book 
 when he was beginning to write, and though he made Falstaff 
 deride it afterwards, it may have attracted him while he was 
 still young. 
 
 The Tempest retains the atmosphere of the old story 
 borrowed by Chaucer in his Ma7i of Lazv^s Tale, and by 
 Gower in the Second Book of his Confessio Amantis from 
 Vincent of Beauvais' speculum Historiale. In the Man of 
 halo's Tale, Constance marries the Sultan of Syria, as Claribel 
 (whose name can be found in the Mirror of Knighthood) 
 marries the King of Tunis, and she is twice set adrift as 
 Prospero and Miranda and Sycorax were. According to 
 Chaucer, 
 
 Years and days floated this creature. 
 Throughout the Sea of Greece, unto the Strait 
 Of Marok, as it was her aventure, 
 
 and afterwards 
 
 Floateth in the Sea in pain and woe 
 
 Five year and more, as pleased Christ's hand, 
 
 Ere that her ship approached unto land. 
 
 The Tempesfs Geography is as hazy as Chaucer's, for Tunis is 
 so distant from Naples that Claribel can have no news of her 
 home 
 
 Till newborn chins 
 Be rough and razorable. 
 
 This statement (which the return of the wedding-party 
 disproves) seems one of the signs that The Tempest echoed 
 the mood of Constance's impossible journeys and that its 
 Characters dwelt " ten leagues beyond man's Life." 
 
 57
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The apparent growth of Ariel from Puck and the employ- 
 ment of Fairyland may show that The Tempest, as we have it, 
 was partly based on J Midsummer Night's Dream. Coleridge 
 in his Classification of 1802 ranked The Tempest, The W inter'' s 
 Tale and Cymbeline last, but he put The Tempest between 
 As Tou Like It and Twelfth Night in 18 10 and before As 
 Tou Like It in 18 19. These changes must have been due 
 to his recognition of The Tempest's resemblance to As Tou 
 Like It in mood, and that resemblance would be explained 
 if The Tempest ended a series of riper plays which began with 
 the other vision of Fairyland. It may be that the first form of 
 The Tempest was a story of Magic and that it was partly 
 changed to a Fairy-tale, in which Ariel became a poetic 
 version of Puck, after A Midsummer Nighfs Dream was 
 reshaped as we have it. 
 
 The first Magical form seems suggested, for instance, by 
 the story and by Ariel's name and by Prospero's farewell to 
 his Magic and his final repentance, which is not told in the 
 Comedy, as we have it, but in an Epilogue which clashes 
 with it. 
 
 Tragedies of Magic were popular when Shakespeare was 
 young. We cannot be certain when Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 
 and Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay were written. 
 Sir Adolphus Ward says in his Old English Drama : " There is 
 no reason against the assumption that Friar Bacon was written 
 before February 1589 — very possibly in 1588 or even already 
 in 1587; after, and if so, doubtless very soon after. Doctor 
 Faustus had been produced on the Stage." And Mr. Charles 
 Gayleyin Representative English Comedies says: " The period 
 between July and the end of 1589 will probably cover the 
 production of Friar Bacon, but the latter limit might include 
 the Spring of 1590." Faustus and Friar Bacon repented. 
 Faustus ended saying. 
 
 My God, my God, look not so fierce on me ! 
 I'll burn my books. 
 
 and Friar Bacon said, 
 
 Bungay, I'll spend the remnant of my life 
 In pure devotion, praying to my God 
 That he would save what Bacon vainly lost. 
 
 58
 
 THE TEMPEST 
 
 Remorse of this kind would be out of place in T^he Tempest, 
 as we have it, and Prospero bids farewell to his Magic with a 
 gentle regret. But the Epilogue has a different tone : in it 
 he says, 
 
 Now I want 
 Spirits to enforce, art to enchant. 
 And my ending is despair 
 Unless I be relieved by prayer. 
 
 This Epilogue seems suggested by Gower's words in the 
 fifth Act of Pericles, 
 
 Now our sands are almost run ; 
 More a little and then dumb. 
 This my last boon give me. 
 For such kindness must relieve me. 
 
 It would be explained if The Tempest began as a fantastic 
 Romance or Tragicomedy, a story of Magic written in 
 imitation of Pericles about the same time as the first form of 
 Love''s Lahour'^s Lost in the days when Doctor Faustus and 
 Friar Bacon were first admired on the Stage. 
 
 It may be that Ben Jonson referred to a form of this Play 
 in Every Man Out of His Humour, where Mitis asks " What's 
 his scene ? " and Cordatus replies " Marry, Insula Fortunata, 
 Sir," and Mitis rejoins " Oh, the Fortunate Island ! Mass, 
 he has bound himself to a strict law there." If so this form 
 may have been written in 1598, for Meres did not mention 
 this Vlsij 2ind Every Man Out of His Humour Yf2iS acted in 1599. 
 This date would explain the close resemblance between The 
 Tempest and As Tou Like It, in which there is another 
 banished Duke and an equally repentant Usurper. 
 
 An innocent fantastic Romance with the sweetness of 
 Pericles seems to survive in the satire and weariness of a 
 final revision. It may be that this was written in Youth and 
 rewritten with the wisdom and ripeness of a Midsummer 
 Dream and again under the shadow of a Tragical mood. 
 The alacrity of Lovers Labour^s Lost seems combined with the 
 mellow mood of Twelfth Night : the Fortunate Island is as 
 sequestered as the Forest of Arden, and Jaques sees the folly 
 
 59
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of Youth as soberly as Prospcro does and turns away to hear 
 solemn music, saying, 
 
 I am for other than for dancing measures, 
 
 seeking with Prospero 
 
 A solemn air, and the best comforter 
 To an unsettled fancy. 
 
 It may be that The Tempesfs vague connexion with Italy 
 and the success of the Comical Scenes in it and a ripening 
 mood in which he began to learn the value of laughter led 
 Shakespeare to Comedies. Heminge and Condell printed 
 The Two Gentlemen of Verona after The Tem/pest, and then 
 The Merry Wives of Windsor^ Measure for Measure, The 
 Comedy of Errors, Much ado About Nothing and Love''s Labour's 
 Lost before J Midsummer Nighfs Dream. I follow Coleridge's 
 classification of 1819 in adding to these the first forms of 
 The Taming of the Shrew and AlVs Well that Ends Well. 
 And I think that the first forms of the Story of Troilus in 
 Troilus and Cressida, and of Romeo and Juliet and of the 
 Choice of the Caskets in The Merchant of Venice, and of A 
 Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and of Imogen's adventure in 
 Wales in Cymbeline are united with them. 
 
 All these except the Story of Troilus and the Choice of 
 the Caskets, were Comedies of Errors depending on mistakes 
 and disguises. When Ariosto wrote his Suppositi as a Carnival 
 play in 1 509 (copying, as he said, Terence and Plautus and 
 Menander), he set an example imitated in Italy first and in 
 England when George Gascoigne wrote his Supposes in 1566. 
 Italian vivacity and sharpness of wit and love of masquerading 
 became fashionable in London instead of the horseplay and 
 the simple buffoonery of the Traditional Stage. Shakespeare's 
 Italianate Comedies were masquerades written in the mood 
 of a Carnival. His turning to them seems a sign of an ambition 
 to please the idle students of Law and other young men who 
 sat in the boxes or galleries or on the stage, exhibiting them- 
 selves with the show, as well as the rougher men in the Pit. 
 The Itahanate youths in them resembled the " sharp wits " 
 
 60
 
 JUVENILE COMEDIES 
 
 described by Lyly in Euphues His Anatomy of Wit who 
 indulged in " fine phrases, smooth quips, merry taunts, 
 jesting without mean and abusing mirth without measure." 
 These Plays were as fit for the Court or the Inns of Court as 
 Lyly's had been, but when they were performed by the Players 
 they must have seemed travesties or caricatures of the 
 behaviour of gentlemen, and this must have helped the men 
 and boys of the Pit to find amusement in them. 
 
 It may be that his first juvenile Comedy was the Story of 
 Troilus. Sir Walter Raleigh writes of this in his Shakespeare : 
 " The love-story is written, for the most part, in the style of 
 Romeo and Juliet and the early Comedies with many similar 
 phrases and jests." And he surmises that Shakespeare wrote 
 it first as a Tragedy in imitation of Chaucer and then, finding 
 the story unsuitable, " wrote Romeo and Juliet instead, and 
 retained the go-between in the character of the Nurse, who 
 is twin-sister to Pandarus even in tricks of speech." But it 
 seems to me that Shakespeare neglected Chaucer's version 
 and took his story from Lydgate's Troy Book or Caxton's 
 Recuyell of the Histories of Troy. The version to be found in 
 these books may have led him to write it as a Comedy first. 
 This form may have been suggested to him by the Story of 
 Hector and it may have linked his early Classical Tragedies 
 with his Juvenile Comedies. It may have suggested the 
 stories of betrayal in them and in the Sonnets. And it may 
 have been echoed in a first form of Romeo and Juliet with a 
 fortunate end. 
 
 The Two Gentlemen of Verona does not seem to have been 
 printed before 1623, but Meres cited it in Palladis Tamia 
 in 1598 as the first of the Comedies. It may have been 
 partly suggested by a couple of Plays, Felix and Philiomena, 
 which (according to the Revels Accounts for 15 84-1 5 85) 
 was " acted before Her Highness by Her Majesty's Servants 
 on the Sunday next after New Year's Day at night," and 
 Fidele and Fortunio, the Receipts in Love discoursed in a Comedy 
 of Two Italian Gentlemen, which was probably written by 
 Anthony Munday and was printed in 1585. Felix and 
 Philiomena seems to have been founded on a Castilian Pastoral 
 
 61
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 story, Diana Enamorada, written by Jorge de Montemayor 
 or Montemor, which may have been translated in 1583; and 
 Fidele and Fortunio copied Luigi PasquaHgo's Fidele, printed 
 in 1576. 
 
 These Plays may have led Shakespeare to blend a Woodland 
 Romance with an Italianate Comedy. These two strains 
 were old, for the Diana Enamorada revived the mood of a 
 Greek Romance, the Lesbian Pastorals of Daphnis and Chios 
 written by Longus in the Second Century, or at the beginning 
 of the Third, and the Italian Comedies sprang from Ariosto's 
 imitation of Greek and Roman Comical methods. The Italian 
 strain in this Romantic Comedy may have been partly derived 
 from Barnabe Riche's story of Afolonius and Silla, printed in 
 his Farewell to the Military Profession in 1581 and copied 
 from one of the tales in Cinthio's Hecatommithi. The Scenes 
 in the Forest near Mantua may have come from the Tale 
 of Gamelyn which (though it does not seem to have been 
 printed as Chaucer's till 1721) must have been current, for 
 Thomas Lodge used it in Rosalynde. Or if Shakespeare wrote 
 this Play or revised it about 1590 he could have found them 
 in Rosalynde, or have borrowed the Woodland strain from 
 Sidney's Arcadia. 
 
 These Scenes link As Tou Like It with this story of Italy. 
 Valentine is like Jaques when he says, 
 
 How use doth breed a habit in a man ! 
 This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods ; 
 I better brook than flourishing peopled towns. 
 
 And these Scenes may have suggested the first form of that 
 version of Rosalynde. 
 
 This young Play is as lyrical as Titus Andronicus, but 
 it imitates Lyly instead of Marlowe and Kyd. In it Shake- 
 speare's young Poetry is combined with the mirth as when 
 Valentine says : 
 
 Oh, thou that dost inhabit in my breast, 
 Leave not the mansion so long tenantless, 
 Lest, growing ruinous, the building fall. 
 
 Mr. Masefield says that " it comes from the mood in which 
 the Sonnets were written," and that " one of the noblest 
 
 62
 
 THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA 
 
 things in this Play is the forgiveness at the end." This 
 forgiveness is shown, too, in the Sonnets, and it is implied or 
 expressed in every one of the Comedies. There was no room 
 for it in the Tragedies, for it would have been fatal to a 
 picture of Justice : the deceivers were pardoned in tales 
 which were not meant to be true. 
 
 It may be that The Tempest would hsLve justified Heminge 
 and Condell's place for it by being the Prologue to the rest 
 of the Comedies if it had not been revised with a wisdom 
 which has left it an Epilogue. This Play is the Prologue now. 
 Proteus was properly named, for he was destined to appear 
 on the Stage in many disguises. When Julia said to her maid. 
 
 Gentle Lucetta, fit me with such weeds 
 As may beseem some well-reputed page, 
 
 she set the example which Portia, Jessica, Viola and Rosalind 
 followed. There is another favourite trick when Julia says, 
 
 Madam, he sends your Ladyship the ring, 
 
 and Silvia answers. 
 
 The more shame for him that he sends it me. 
 For I have heard him say a thousand times 
 His Julia gave it him at his departure, 
 
 and when Launce fooled with his dog (which may have been 
 a performing one borrowed from a neighbouring show) and 
 argued with Speed he prepared the way for Launcelot Gobbo 
 and the Court-Jesters. 
 
 It may be that after this happy experiment in different 
 strains Shakespeare wrote the first forms of Js Tou Like It 
 and Romeo and Juliet and of the Choice of the Caskets. Then, 
 perhaps because Launcelot's fooling had been greatly admired, 
 he may have turned to write Comedies which were intended 
 to win similar laughter. 
 
 A Midsummer Night's Dream, as we have it, seems com- 
 posed of three parts, — a Fairy-tale and a travesty of Rustical 
 Players and a more mature setting of both for a performance 
 at Court. The Interlude of the Rustical Players may have 
 been the first of four Farces in which he echoed the boisterous 
 
 63
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 humour of the Traditional Stage. These Farces, the Interlude 
 of the Rustical Players and the Merry Wives of Windsor and 
 The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors, are linked 
 closely in mood, and this seems to suggest that they were 
 written together. 
 
 Heminge and Condell printed The Merry Wives of Windsor 
 the third on their list of Comedies. There are two Interludes 
 or adventures in it. The Story of the Basket is one that 
 might have been told by Rabelais or the Queen of Navarre 
 and there are similar tales in Notti Piacevoli and // Pecorone. 
 The adventure in the Forest is English and it is a version of 
 the Fairy-tale part of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The 
 Character now called Falstaff in it is as much of a laughing- 
 stock as Bottom the Weaver, but his adventures are Prose. 
 
 The usual belief that this Comedy was written to please 
 Queen Elizabeth who had expressed a desire to see Falstaff 
 in love is based on a suggestion first made by John Dennis in 
 1702. As a matter of fact, Falstaff is not shown in love, he 
 is merely indulging in a vicious adventure with a couple of 
 strangers : neither is he the Falstaff' of King Henry the 
 Fourth ; he has nothing in common with that lovable Knight 
 except his size and his name. William Hazlitt wrote in his 
 Characters of Shakespeare'' s Plays, " Falstaff in The Merry 
 Wives of Witidsor is not the man he was in the two parts of 
 Henry the Fourth. His wit and eloquence have left him. 
 Instead of making a butt of others, he is made a butt of by 
 them. Neither is there a single particle of love in him to 
 excuse his follies : he is merely a designing, barefaced knave 
 and an unsuccessful one." 
 
 It does not seem possible that Shakespeare could have 
 drawn this dull laughing-stock as a picture of Falstaff after 
 Sir John had come to glorious life in his dreams. Mistress 
 Quickly is Dr. Caius' servant in this Play and is a stranger 
 to Falstaff till they meet in it and only resembles her name- 
 sake by some blunders in speech, and Justice Shallow is no 
 more than a name. These three are at best crude sketches 
 of the three who are living in King Henry the Fourth, And 
 no writer ever drew his rough sketches after his pictures. 
 All this seems enough to refute Dennis's guess, even if the 
 
 64
 
 THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR 
 
 whole structure of the Play did not prove that it was earlier 
 work. 
 
 The fact that the name Falstaff was used in King Henry 
 the Fourth (after Shakespeare had ceased to call his Knight " Old- 
 castle ") has been cited as proving that this Play was written 
 after that time. But Heminge and Condell called Fastolfe 
 " Falstaff " in King Henry the Sixth. It may have been the 
 laughing-stock's name in a form of this Play written before 
 King Henry the Fourth or it may not have been his original 
 name. 
 
 This Falstaff may have begun as a Fleming and this would 
 explain why Mrs. Page says of him, " What an unweighed 
 behaviour hath this Flemish drunkard picked, with the Devil's 
 name, out of my conversation." If he began as a Fleming 
 this may be a sign that a form of this Interlude (which may 
 not have been the earliest) was based on the doings of the 
 three German Devils who are now only mentioned. Even 
 if we conclude that the Quarto's reading " cozen gar- 
 mombles " had anything to do with Count Frederick of 
 Mompelgard, this would be only a proof that this allusion 
 was written after he visited Windsor in 1592. 
 
 This crude Falstaff may have been a caricature of some 
 townsman of Stratford, as Sir William Bishop asserted 
 (according to Oldys), or he may have been merely one of the 
 natural butts of Farces, a very fat and very foolish old man. 
 Shakespeare may have used the familiar names, such as 
 Falstaff and Shallow, in a revision about 1599 because he 
 wanted to profit by their renown. The title of the Quarto 
 edition (which was printed in 1602 and 1619) proclaims that 
 these Characters appeared in the Play : it runs, " a most 
 pleasant and excellent conceited Comedy of Sir John Falstaff 
 and the merry Wives of Windsor. Intermixed with sundry 
 variable and pleasing humours of Sir Hugh the Welsh Knight, 
 Justice Shallow and his cousin M. Slender. With the 
 swaggering vein of Ancient Pistol and Corporal Nym." This 
 edition is only half as long as the other and may give a form 
 shortened to suit the Stage when the Interludes were shown 
 as one Play. Shakespeare may have revised the second part 
 of this Play, the Interlude of the adventure in the Forest of 
 Windsor, for a performance at Court, perhaps at Windsor 
 
 65 E
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Castle ; but he could not have written this Comedy about 
 the time when he wrote As Ton Like It and Twelfth Night 
 or after the Comedy of Falstaff had been a foil to the Pageant 
 of Kijig Henry the Fourth. 
 
 The Taming of the Shrew was derived from the forty-fourth 
 story in Don Juan Manuel's Co?ide Lucanor. Mr. Dowden 
 has coupled it and this Play as " rough and boisterous 
 Comedies " and Coleridge bracketed them in his Classifi- 
 cation of 1802 and Gervinus coupled The Taming of the Shrew 
 and The Comedy of Errors among the earliest plays. These 
 different views can be reconciled if these Plays were first 
 written in the days when The Co?nedy of Errors exposed 
 Shakespeare's rawness in Comedy. Perhaps Heminge and 
 Condell separated The Taming of the Shrew from the others 
 because it was governed by the later Induction, as they may 
 have ranked A Midsummer Nighfs Dream according to the 
 date of the setting added to it. 
 
 It may be that they put Measure for Measure before The 
 Comedy of Errors according to the date of a form of it which 
 was founded on Pericles and on a Play printed in 1578, Promos 
 and Cassandra, by Whetstone. Measure for Measure was 
 made noble and sorrowful in a final revision ; but it retains the 
 first form which Mr. Saintsbury, for instance, discerns. The 
 tale in this was Italian and so was the cynical and pitiless 
 mood. And a first form of Twelfth Night may have been 
 written as a companion to it. That Comedy is sweet and 
 mature and there is no trace of any rawness in it ; but Angelo 
 and Malvolio are brothers and both of them are tricked and 
 derided and the disguises and mistakes in it leave it a Comedy 
 of Errors combined with a gay story of love and with a cruel 
 deception. 
 
 The Comedy of Errors appears to have been partly founded 
 on the story of Pericles, for it has a tale of a shipwreck and a 
 lost child and a wife believed to be dead who is restored at 
 the end. The first form of this Comedy may have been 
 written as an imitation of Pericles and this may have been 
 changed to a travesty of Gascoigne's Supposes. It is not 
 known to have been printed before 1623, but there are no 
 
 66
 
 THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 
 
 signs of an elderly revision in it : I think that Shakespeare 
 left it little changed at the end because he valued it little 
 and that it w^as revised, as we have it, in 1594 to suit the taste 
 of the students who belonged to Gray's Inn. It was per- 
 formed for them on an appropriate festival. Holy Innocents' 
 Day (the twenty-eighth of December) in that year as we 
 know from Gesta Grayorum : " After such sport A Comedy 
 of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmi) was played by the 
 Players ; so that night began and continued to the end in 
 nothing but confusion and error ; whereupon it was ever 
 afterwards called The Night of Errors." 
 
 This Comedy, as we have it, was planned as a travesty 
 of the popular Error Plays, for in it their theme was made 
 frankly preposterous by adding the second pair of twins, 
 the two servants. 
 
 The Comedy printed next by Heminge and Condell, 
 Much Ado About Nothing, was published in 1600 in a Quarto 
 edition. Meres did not mention it in Palladis Tamia (unless 
 he referred to it as Lovers Labour'' s Won which he cited after 
 Love's Labour^s Lost), and this has been accepted as showing 
 that it must have been written between 1598 and 1600 ; but 
 that argument fails if, as I think, Mr. Saintsbury is right in 
 observing that Meres was only naming some instances of 
 popular Plays. We have no other reason for disputing the 
 place indicated by Heminge and Condell except the fact that 
 the style and the Stagecraft in this Play are mature, and this 
 might have been due to a revision about 1599. The heart- 
 lessness and shallow jocosity of the mood in this Play link it 
 with the Italianate Comedies. The tale in it is allied with 
 the one in Measure for Measure, as Davenant saw when he 
 blended these Comedies in his Law against Lovers. It is 
 based on one to be found in Bandello's Novelle and Belle- 
 forest's Histoires Tragiques. An English translation of 
 Ariosto's version of it in the Fifth Canto of Orlando Furioso 
 was printed in 1565 and seems to have been used in a Play 
 acted by Leicester's Servants in 1574, according to the Revels 
 Accounts, " My Lord of Leicester's men showed him matter 
 of Panecia," and in another mentioned in them as acted in 
 1583, " a History of Ariodante and Gennora, showed before 
 
 67
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Her Majesty on Shrove Tuesday at night, enacted by Mr. 
 Mulcaster's Children." The trick by which Margaret passes 
 for Hero is to be found also in Tira?it lo Bla7ich, which was 
 begun by Johannot Martorell in 1460 and printed in 1490 in 
 Catalan and was reproduced in Italian as Tirante el Bianco 
 by Lelio Manfredi about 1538. It was used too in The Mirror 
 of Knighthood. 
 
 When Shakespeare wrote the Play first he dealt with an 
 old popular talc familiarly known when he was young. Such 
 a subject might well have been chosen by him when he was 
 writing his Comedies borrowed or imitated from Italy. The 
 faults of this Play, the baseness and hardness of its impossible 
 story, are radical : the merits, the skill and the brilliancy, are 
 ornaments which may have been added when he had grown 
 to maturity. 
 
 The story of Benedick and Beatrice seems a separate 
 Interlude blended with a Play which resembles Cymbeline 
 and AlVs Well that Ends Well. It may have been acted apart 
 and this may have been why King Charles the First wrote 
 the name " Benedick and Bettrice " under the title of this 
 Play in his copy of the Folio of 1632 in the same way as he 
 added " Piramus and Thisbe " beneath the title of A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream and why the Treasurer's Accounts for 
 161 3 state that Burbage produced a Play called Benedicte 
 and Betteris at Court and why Robert Burton in the edition 
 of his Anatomy of Melancholy printed in 1628 added a note 
 " like Benedict and Bcttris in the Comedy." This was the 
 famous part of the Play, as is shown, for instance, by Leonard 
 Digges' Verses printed in John Benson's edition of Shake- 
 speare^ s Poems in 1640, 
 
 Let but Beatrice 
 And Benedick be seen, in a trice 
 The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes all are full. 
 
 If it was developed or added after Meres wrote Palladis 
 Tamia this would explain why he did not mention this Play. 
 If so, there may have been a revision about 1599, for William 
 Kemp seems to have quarrelled with Shakespeare or with his 
 associates in that year and it is known that he had taken the 
 part of Dogberry. 
 
 68
 
 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING 
 
 The English humour of Dogberry and his companions 
 repeats the simpHcity of the Rustical Players in A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream. This part may have begun as a brief Inter- 
 lude deriding the Watchmen, and this would account for their 
 prominence in a tale of Messina. Dogberry is an alien in 
 Sicily, like Bottom in Fairyland. This may have been a 
 common theme on the Stage, for Ben Jonson wrote in his 
 Induction to Bartholomew Fair, which was acted in 1614, 
 " And then a substantial Watch to have stolen in upon them 
 and taken them away with mistaking words, as the fashion 
 is in the Stage-practice." 
 
 Much Ado About Nothing is a composite Play (like so many 
 others) and this accounts for the clash between its different 
 moods. It may be that a form of it belongs to this time and 
 that Heminge and Condell took it to be the principal one 
 because a later revision only altered its style and developed 
 the wit-combats between the secondary lovers in it. This 
 may have been the story of Hero and Claudio told in an 
 Italianate mood. There is a trace of a first form when Hero, 
 who is afterwards as blameless as Imogen, says. 
 
 And truly I'll devise some honest slanders 
 To stain my cousin with : one doth not know 
 How much an ill word may empoison liking. 
 
 This may have been remembered from the Italian Romance 
 in which the deception was devised by a lady (though in the 
 Catalan Tirafit lo Blanch it had been assigned to a man) and 
 it suggests that the tale was to be as heartless as Troilus a?id 
 Cressida. The employment of slander in this tale was 
 repeated from the Two Gentlemen of Verona where Proteus 
 says, 
 
 The best way is to slander Valentine 
 
 With falsehood, cowardice, and poor descent ; 
 
 Three things that women highly hold in hate. 
 
 The picture of shrewishness appears in this Play, though it 
 is changed to be charming in Beatrice, as it did in The Comedy 
 of Errors, where Adriana is drawn as a shrewish wife and her 
 husband says, 
 
 69
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Go thou, 
 And buy a rope's end : that will I bestow 
 Among my wife and her confederates. 
 
 There are traces too of juvenile work when Claudio emulates 
 the Brothers in Cymbeli?ie, reading an epitaph and singing a 
 dirge by the tomb which he believes to be Hero's, and says, 
 
 Now unto thy bones good-night ! 
 Yearly will I do this rite, 
 
 before he goes to meet his new wife, and when Hero is restored 
 from the tomb. The difference between this tale and the 
 others in which wives are restored is that Claudio does not 
 even pretend to take any pleasure in recovering her : he says 
 " Another Hero " and then the merry story of Errors and 
 Masquerading continues. 
 
 Some students have seen in this Play the Comedy called 
 Love's Labour's Won mentioned by Meres. This would 
 suggest that this Play and Lovis Labour's Lost were written 
 at about the same time, and the places given to them by 
 Heminge and Condell would agree with that view; but I 
 think it more probable that AWs Well that Ends Well was 
 formerly called Lovers Labour's Won. 
 
 Valentine says in the first Scene of The Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona, 
 
 It boots thee not . . . 
 To be in love, where scorn is bought with groans ; 
 Coy looks with heartsore sighs ; one fading moment's mirth 
 With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights : 
 If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain ; 
 If lost, why then a grievous labour won ; 
 However but a folly bought with wit. 
 Or else a wit by folly vanquished. 
 
 These verses give the notion of Love in these Italianate 
 Comedies. Nearly all of them could have been named 
 Love's Labour's Won or Love's Labour' s Lost or Much Ado About 
 Nothing. 
 
 Love's Labour's Lost had as good a claim to be christened 
 Much Ado About Nothing as any of these. The nominal 
 
 70
 
 LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST 
 
 scene was laid in Navarre, and two of the chief Characters, 
 Biron and Longaville were named after associates of King 
 Henry the Fourth of France, who was King of Navarre from 
 1572 to 1589. This suggests that this Comedy belongs to 
 the years before 1589 when the English regarded him as a 
 Protestant hero before he changed his Religion. The true 
 scene was also in France but it was in Rabelais' Abbey of 
 Theleme, and another Character, Holofernes, was called 
 after Gargantua's master. The mood too is like Rabelais', 
 for this Play is a parody which we can read as a satire, if we 
 want to be wise, instead of interpreting it by our recollection 
 of the folly of Youth. It is a Comedy of happy young people 
 exchanging silly retorts in the brief intoxication of Youth 
 and in the glamour of moonlight. The answer to all wisdom 
 is plain in it, " Dictynna, goodman Dull." 
 
 It was printed in a Quarto edition in 1598 with the title, 
 " A Pleasant Conceited Comedy, called Lovers Labour'' s Lost, 
 as it was presented before Her Highness this last Christmas, 
 newly corrected and augmented. By W. Shakespeare." 
 This may indicate a revision about 1597. If so, this was 
 carelessly done, as is shown by the survival of passages which 
 he improved and expanded. He may have seen that a revision 
 with a heavier hand would only deprive it of its irrational 
 charm. Mr. Masefield says : " The Play is full of experiments. 
 Some of it is written in a loose swinging couplet, some in 
 quatrains, some in Blank Verse, some in the choice picked 
 prose made the fashion by Lyly." It seems to me the Play 
 is full of parodies rather : I do not see an experiment in " the 
 preyful Princess pierced and pricked a pretty pleasing pricket," 
 or in " More fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer 
 than Truth itself, have commiseration on thy heroical vassal. 
 The magnanimous and most illustrate King Cophetua set 
 eye upon the pernicious and indubitate beggar Zenetophon." 
 I suggest that Heminge and Condell's place for it furnishes 
 a clue to its drift. Shakespeare did not linger to copy different 
 manners ; but he turned to mock the old ways and the fascinat- 
 ing follies of Euphuism. 
 
 Lovers Labour's Lost is the Don Quixote of Euphuism, but 
 the former love lived in Shakespeare as it did in Cervantes : 
 he renounced, 
 
 71
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, 
 Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation. 
 Figures pedantical, 
 
 with Biron ; but he acknowledged with him, 
 
 Yet have I a trick 
 Of the old rage : bear with me; I am sick; 
 I'll leave it by degrees. 
 
 Lovers Labour^ 5 Lost and Romeo and 'Juliet are companions 
 because they are lyrical and thrilling with Youth and happiness 
 and the beginning of triumph. This may have been the 
 time when he wrote his juvenile Sonnets. There are three 
 Sonnets in this Play, one in the first Scene of the first Act, 
 beginning. 
 
 Study me how to please the eye indeed, 
 
 and another in the third Scene of the fourth Act, beginning. 
 
 So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not, 
 and a third in the same Scene, beginning. 
 
 Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye, 
 
 and there are many Quatrains which may have been quotations 
 from Sonnets, such as Biron's words. 
 
 Oh, if in black my lady's brows be decked, 
 It mourns that painting and usurping hair 
 Should ravish doters with a false aspect, 
 And therefore is she born to make black fair. 
 
 Here Shakespeare brought in the customary Braggart 
 and Pedant and the Mummer's Plays of the Worthies and a 
 Masque such as the English Gargantua, King Henry the 
 Eighth, loved when (as the Stage-direction has it) " Enter 
 Blackamoors with music ; Moth, the King, Biron, Longaville 
 and Dumain in Russian habits and masked." And he ended 
 his parody of them with another of the Traditional contests 
 between Summer and Winter. In this he described the 
 
 72
 
 CYMBELINE 
 
 Seasons not as poets had feigned them but as he knew them 
 
 to be, 
 
 When all aloud the wind doth blow, 
 And coughing drowns the Parson's saw, 
 And birds sit brooding in the snow. 
 And Marian's nose looks red and raw. 
 
 Then, admitting the charm of the old ways he had mocked 
 and saying good-bye to them, he concluded " The words of 
 Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way ; 
 we this way." 
 
 Some students have argued that this Play is a parody of 
 Lyly's Endimion, which seems to have been written before 
 1587, though it was not printed till 1591. That Comedy 
 may have also suggested the Fairy-tale part of the Midsummer 
 Night's Dream. It may have been helped in this by the 
 Prelude to Robert Greene's Scottish History of King James 
 the Fourth which may have been written before 1590. Mr. 
 Woodberry doubts this in Representative English Comedies^ 
 saying that " If James the Fourth with its Oberon preceded 
 A Midsummer Nighfs Dream — which is undetermined — it 
 was an unique inversion of the order which made Greene 
 always the second and not the first." But Greene should 
 not have rebuked Shake-scene for stealing his feathers if he 
 had paid him the same compliment, and in this instance he 
 may have been only second to Lyly. The Fairy-tale part 
 may have owed something to the Second Book of The Faery 
 Queen which was printed in 1590 and was current in manu- 
 script in 1589. 
 
 The mood of this Fairy-tale may have suggested Imogen's 
 adventure in Wales while her new name Fidele may have 
 been borrowed from Fidele and Fortunio. Imogen's harmless 
 drug and her trance (which may have been copied from 
 Boccaccio's Decameron) and her waking beside the dead body 
 which she took for her husband's are all to be found in Romeo 
 and Juliet. Mr. Saintsbury says of Measure for Measure in 
 his History of English Prosody^ " Shakespeare surely never 
 drew Pompey after he had conceived his great Clowns and 
 Lucio after he had drawn Benedick or even Sir Toby." In 
 the same way instead of concluding that Shakespeare imitated 
 
 73
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Romeo and Juliet in a juvenile manner when he was elderly, 
 I infer that the Tragical end of Romeo and Juliet sprang from 
 the childish Scene in which Imogen awoke and believed that 
 the headless Cloten was Posthumus. 
 
 Gervinus coupled Lovers Labour^s Lost with a lyrical 
 version of JWs Well that Ends Well. If that version was 
 called Lovers Labour's Won the name meant that Helena won 
 the labour of Love and nothing else, — 
 
 If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain 
 
 If lost, why then a grievous labour won. 
 
 Traces of that version are seen in the affectation of wit and 
 the trick played on Parolles and when Helena says, 
 
 Ere twice the horses of the Sun shall bring 
 Their fiery torches his diurnal ring, 
 Ere twice in murk and occidental damp 
 Moist Hesperus hath quenched his sleepy lamp, 
 
 and writes to explain her woes in a Sonnet, 
 
 I am Saint Jaques' pilgrim, thither gone, 
 Ambitious Love hath so in me offended. 
 That barefoot plod I the cold ground upon, 
 With sainted vow my faults to have amended. 
 
 This Comedy was based on a story in Boccaccio's Decameron^ 
 the ninth of the third day, " Giletta di Nerbona guerisce il Re 
 di Francia duna fistola, domanda per marito Beltrano di 
 Rossiglione." Shakespeare may have used the translation in 
 Paynter's Palace of Pleasure. Helena's trick was used in 
 the Greek Mythology and it had been repeated, for instance, 
 in Periander of Corinth, written by Parthenius, who (according 
 to Macrobius) was Virgil's tutor in Greek. The deception 
 of Parolles in this Play may have been a separate Interlude of 
 a Braggart's exposure. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet was printed in a Quarto edition in 1597 
 as " an excellent conceited Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet as 
 it hath been often with great applause played publicly." 
 The traces of revision in it are evident and admitted by all. 
 
 74
 
 ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 The fact that the Nurse says, " 'Tis since the earthquake now 
 eleven years " may show that a form of her speech was written 
 in 1591, for there was an earthquake in England in 1580. 
 Apart from this possible hint we only know that this Play 
 must have been first written in Youth. 
 
 It was probably founded on Arthur Broke's version of a 
 popular story or on an English Play acted before 1552, for 
 Broke in his Address to the Reader prefixed to Romeus and 
 Juliet (which was printed in that year) wrote that he had seen 
 the same argument " lately set forth on the Stage with more 
 commendation than I can look for." Shakespeare may have 
 used other Plays also, for instance, La Hadriana, by Groto, 
 which was printed in Venice in 1583. 
 
 The story in these Plays was as old as Afollonius of Tyre. 
 Ovid told it in the fourth book of his Metamorphoses^ using 
 the names Pyramus and Thisbe, 
 
 Juvenum pulcherrimus alter, 
 Altera, quas Oriens habuit, praelata puella. 
 
 Xenophon Ephesius told it (perhaps copying Ovid) in his 
 Greek Romance E-phesiaca, which may have been written in 
 the First Century. Gower repeated Ovid's version in the 
 Third Book of Confessio Amantisy spoiling it in his usual way, 
 and omitting the fact which was the root of the tragedy 
 " vetuere patres." In his story Piramus thought that Tisbe 
 was dead and 
 
 Suddenly 
 His sword all naked out he braid. 
 In his Fool-haste, and thus he said, 
 " I am cause of this felony. 
 So it is reason that I die. 
 And she is dead by cause of me," 
 
 and Tisbe killed herself with his sword. 
 
 The same Tragical end had been related by Plutarch when 
 he told how Antonius stabbed himself, thinking that Cleopatra 
 was dead, and how she died for his sake, and this is one of the 
 links between this young Play of young Love and that mature 
 Tragedy of elderly Passion, Antony and Cleopatra. There 
 may be another if Sir Walter Raleigh is right in surmising 
 
 75
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 that this Play sprang from the Story of Troilus, for Antony 
 and Cleopatra seems to have sprung from the last version of 
 Troilus and Cressida. 
 
 This ancient story seems to have been linked with Verona 
 by Luigi da Porto's La Giulietta which was printed in 1536 
 and was probably founded on one of Masuccio Salernitano's 
 Novelle printed in 1476. Bandello developed La Giulietta 
 in his Novelle, printed in 1554, and his version was put into 
 French by Francois Boaistuau de Launay and was printed in 
 1559 ^^ °^^ ^^ Belief orest's Histoires Tragiques. Arthur 
 Broke based his rhymed version on the French one which 
 Paynter employed in his Palace of Pleasure. 
 
 Mr. Masefield writes : " This Play is one of the early 
 Plays, written perhaps before Shakespeare was thirty years 
 old. It was much revised during the next few years ; but 
 a good deal of the early work remains. Much of the early 
 work is in rhymed couplets. Much is in picked Prose full of 
 quibbles and mistaking of the word. Another sign of early 
 work is the mention of the dark lady Rosaline . . . here 
 called by the same name, and described in similar terms, 
 viz. a high forehead, a hard heart, a white face, big black 
 eyes and red lips. Perhaps she appeared as one of the 
 Characters in the early drafts of the Play." 
 
 The reappearance of Rosaline not only connects this Play 
 with the Sonnets but also unites the first form of it with 
 Lovers Labour^s Lost. In the first Scene of this Play Romeo 
 enters worshipping Rosaline, 
 
 Oh, she is rich in beauty, only poor 
 
 That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store, 
 
 and Benvolio undertakes to cure him by showing another 
 beautiful lady. Romeo says, 
 
 Show me a mistress that is passing fair. . . . 
 Farewell : thou canst not teach me to forget, 
 
 and Benvolio answers, 
 
 I'll pay that doctrine, or else die in debt. 
 
 No one ever began a Tragedy in this jocular way, but this 
 might well have been the beginning of a Comedy which was 
 
 76
 
 ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 meant to repeat Love's Labour's Lost and became the fore- 
 runner of the merry revision of Much Ado About Nothing in 
 which Rosaline and Biron had different names, Beatrice and 
 Benedick. This mood is unbroken during the first couple 
 of Acts and till Mercutio is killed in the third. This form, 
 I think, was used as the base of part of the second form of 
 Much Ado About Nothing and was blended with a Tragical 
 Comedy which The Two Gentlemen of Verona suggested. 
 That form had linked The Two Gentlemen of Verona with 
 Cymbeline, repeating the tricks of the innocuous drug and the 
 supposed death and the waking and the return from the 
 tomb. I think that Shakespeare blended these forms as the 
 foundation of his lyrical descant. In the same way as he 
 travestied the popular Error Plays in The Comedy of Errors 
 and the old methods of Comedy in Lovers Lahour^s Lost, he 
 now mocked the fantastic foreign ways of expressing sorrow 
 and pain. He was not writing a Tragedy when he made 
 the Nurse say in the fourth Act, 
 
 O woe, O woeful, woeful, woeful day ! 
 Most lamentable day, most woeful day. 
 That ever, ever, I did yet behold ! 
 O day ! O day ! O day ! oh hateful day ! 
 
 and Paris rejoin, 
 
 O love ! O life ! not life but love in death ! 
 and Capulet echo then, 
 
 O child ! O child ! my soul and not my child ! 
 
 He was parodying Kyd's Spanish Tragedy or copying a French 
 fashion of Verse as light-heartedly as he echoed the Sonnets 
 imitated from Italy, for instance, when the Chorus recited, 
 
 Now old desire doth on his deathbed lie. 
 And young affection gapes to be his heir, 
 
 or Romeo said. 
 
 When the devout religion of mine eye 
 
 Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires ; 
 
 77
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 And these, who, often drowned, could never die, 
 Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars ! 
 One fairer then my love ! the all-seeing sun 
 Ne'er saw her match since first the World begun. 
 
 It may be that he took these six lines from the end of a Sonnet 
 which had been in his Sequence. 
 
 This Play is the nearest to the Poems of Love. It has the 
 eloquent sorrow of the Rape of Lucrece and the young delight 
 in beautiful things which is seen in the bonnets and in Venus 
 and- Adonis. When Juliet hears that Tybalt is killed she 
 raves in the manner of A Lover's Complaint. In this Play 
 Friar Laurence, who is a repetition of Friar Patrick in The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona, strikes the natural note when he explains 
 why Rosaline was callous to Romeo : 
 
 O, she knew too well 
 Thy love did read by rote and could not spell. 
 But come, young waverer, come go with me. 
 In one respect I'll thy assistant be. 
 For this alliance may so happy prove 
 To turn your household's rancour to pure love. 
 
 This is the note of a Comedy which might have been christened 
 AWs Well that Ends Well, one in which the child Juliet was 
 restored from the tomb, like the other innocent ladies, and 
 the jolly old Capulet danced off the stage with the Nurse. 
 Old Capulet (who is an Alderman of London disguised) and 
 the Comical Nurse are out of place in a tale with an unfor- 
 tunate ending. So are most of the Characters, including 
 the lovesick boy Romeo and the amorous child who makes 
 him forget Rosaline's coldness. Lope de Vega saw that such 
 a story should end happily when he wrote Castehifws y 
 Monteses ; but Shakespeare, when he revised it in the mood 
 of the Sonnets and of the other Poems of Love, made it as 
 wantonly pathetic as they are. He added a true Tragical 
 note when Tybalt exclaims, " I was hurt under your arm," 
 and Romeo answers, " I thought all for the best." This he 
 repeated afterwards when Kent said in King Lear, 
 
 We are not the first 
 Who with best meaning have incurred the worst. 
 
 78
 
 ROMEO AND JULIET 
 
 And this became a dominating note in this Play : every one 
 means well in it now and every one has helped the calamity. 
 But that calamity is only a chance which finishes the laughter 
 in tears. 
 
 It may be that his Tragical ambition revived when he 
 had succeeded in Comedies and that he turned aside to write 
 the first form of Coriolanus and to revise Titus Andronicus 
 as it was printed in 1594 before he made Romeo and Juliet 
 end sorrowfully. This Play, as it was probably acted with 
 Burbage as Romeo and Kemp as Peter and Shakespeare 
 as the loquacious Mercutio, who was prepared to revive and 
 join in the jig after the sorrows, and with Juliet performed 
 by an English boy of her age, in an open-air theatre by daylight 
 with a placard to show that it was a Tragedy of Midsummer 
 Moonlight in romantic Verona, must have been Comical in 
 spite of its eloquent recitation of grief. The sorrow in it is 
 the mere wantonness of Youth. Shakespeare could have 
 said with King Richard the Second, 
 
 Shall we play the wanton with our woes 
 
 And make some pretty match with shedding tears ? 
 
 These Plays of Youth are all full of the high spirits of 
 boyhood and whether they deal with Tragical or Comical 
 stories they are careless and light. And as the King says in 
 Hamlet, 
 
 Youth no less becomes 
 The light and careless livery that it wears 
 Than settled Age his sables and his weeds, 
 Importing health and graveness. 
 
 When in The Winter's Tale the worthy Antigonus suddenly 
 says, " I am gone for ever," and the Stage-direction adds, 
 " exit pursued by a bear " we are no more moved than the 
 first crowd in the Pit was while it laughed at the Clown's tale 
 of his doom, which was probably the more comic because the 
 bear had been recognized as a tame one from the neighbouring 
 Bear Garden. Neither was Shakespeare moved by any grief 
 for Antigonus or Lavinia or Imogen. The calamity of Romeo 
 and Juliet is too sad to be true. The true things in this Play 
 
 79
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 are the gaiety and the young ecstasy of Love in the Moon- 
 Hght. This descant on Love is the cHmax of the Plays of his 
 Youth in the same way as Antony and Cleopatra became the 
 crow^n of his Tragedies. 
 
 80
 
 THE POEMS OF LOVE 
 
 FRANCIS MERES wrote in Palladis Tamia, printed in 
 1598 : " As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to Hve in 
 Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in melli- 
 fluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare ; witness his Venus and 
 Ado7iis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private 
 friends, etc." In the same year another tribute to Shake- 
 speare was paid in Richard Barnfield's Eftcomion of Lady 
 Pecunia, 
 
 And Shakespeare, thou whose honey-flowing vein, 
 (Pleasing the World), thy praises doth obtain, 
 Whose Venus and whose Lucrece (sweet and chaste). 
 Thy name in Fame's immortal book have placed. 
 Live ever you, at least, in fame live ever. 
 Well may the body die, but Fame dies never. 
 
 In the next year he was praised in one of John Weever's 
 Epigrams which were probably written in 1597, 
 
 Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue, 
 
 I swore Apollo got them and no other : 
 
 Their rosy-tainted features clothed in tissue, 
 
 Some heaven-born goddess said to be their mother ; 
 
 Rose-cheeked Adonis, with his amber tresses, 
 
 Fair, fire-hot Venus charming him to love her. 
 
 Chaste Lucretia, virgin-like her dresses. 
 
 Proud lust-stung Tarquin seeking still to prove her, 
 
 Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not. 
 
 Their sugared tongues and power-attractive beauty ; 
 
 Say they are Saints, although that Saints they show not. 
 
 For thousands vow to them subjective duty : 
 
 They burn in love, thy children, Shakespeare, het them, 
 
 Go, woo thy Muse, more nymphish brood beget them. 
 
 And in the Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, which 
 
 81 F
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 was printed in 1606, and was probably written between 1598 
 and 1602, he was described as one 
 
 Who loves Adonis' love or Lucrece' rape. 
 His sweeter Verse contains heart-robbing life, 
 Could but a graver subject him content 
 Without Love's foolish lazy languish ment. ; 
 
 These tributes agreed that Shakespeare had imitated Ovid 
 in his Poems of Love, Venus and Adonis, first printed in 1593, 
 and The Rape of Lucrece, first printed in 1594. 
 
 Another tribute was paid to him in 1614 by Thomas 
 Freeman in his Rubbe and a Great Cast : 
 
 Shakespeare, that nimble Mercury, thy brain, 
 
 Lulls many hundred Argus eyes asleep ; 
 
 So fit for all thou fashionest thy vein. 
 
 At the horse-foot fountain thou hast drunk full deep ; 
 
 Virtue's or Vice's theme to thee all one is : 
 
 Who loves chaste life, there's Lucrece for a teacher ; 
 
 Who list read lust, there's Venus and Adonis, 
 
 True model of a most lascivious lecher. 
 
 Only one of these tributes mentions some Sonnets and that 
 reference sounds as if they were only known by repute as 
 Poems written for friends. This would explain why Barnfield 
 and Weever neglected them; but they had been published 
 with A Lover's Complahit five years before Freeman's verses 
 were printed. We have no record that the bonnets attracted 
 any kind of attention in 1609, and when they were printed 
 (with remarkable changes) in 1640 they seem to have been 
 neglected again. This apparent neglect of the Sonnets is the 
 only mysterious thing about the Poems of Love. 
 
 Many students have argued whether the third Earl of 
 Southampton or somebody else was drawn in the Sonnets. 
 If we could infer that Southampton was Romeo because 
 Lord Montague was one of his grandfathers or that he was 
 Dumain who is described as 
 
 82
 
 THE THIRD EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 The young Dumain, a well-accomplished youth, 
 Of all that virtue love for virtue loved : 
 Most power to do most harm, least knowing ill ; 
 For he hath wit to make an ill shape good, 
 
 this would have nothing to do with the merits of Romeo and 
 Juliet or Lovers Labour^s Lost. Still, if we could be certain 
 that he was drawn in the Sofinets this would help us to guess 
 when some of them were first written and would help to 
 explain the mystification when they were published in 1609 
 and the changes in 1640 and the apparent neglect, and it would 
 furnish a superfluous proof that the tale in them was not meant 
 to be true. So it is worth while to bear in mind what we know 
 of the young Earl of Southampton. 
 
 Honour in his Perfection, which may have been written by 
 Gervase Markham, records of the second Earl of Southampton 
 that " he was highly reverenced and favoured by all that were 
 of his own rank, and bravely attended and served by the best 
 gentlemen of those counties wherein he lived. His muster- 
 roll never consisted of four lacqueys and a coachman, but of 
 a whole troop of, at least, a hundred well-mounted gentlemen 
 and yeomen." The third Earl of Southampton was as proud 
 as his father, and his chief friends were always men of his rank, 
 the third Earl of Bedford, the fifth Earl of Rutland and the 
 second Earl of Essex for instance. In those days such Earls 
 as these were treated with deference by men of high rank. 
 Sir Fulke Greville relates how when Sir Philip Sidney had 
 been insulted by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford Queen 
 Elizabeth " presently undertakes Sir Philip, like an excellent 
 Monarch, lays before him the difference in degree between 
 Earls and Gentlemen, the respect inferiors ought to their 
 superiors." And it is recorded that when the arrogant Sir 
 Everard Digby was executed for the Gun-powder Plot he 
 first bowed respectfully to the Lords who were standing near 
 the scaffold and then, " with a show of equality," to the 
 gentlemen there. In those days a rich gentleman of ancient 
 descent could take pride in attending and serving one of the 
 Great Earls, such as Essex or Southampton, who held the 
 highest rank in a time when there was no Duke or Marquis 
 in England. 
 
 83
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The four Earls of Southampton were melancholy and 
 doomed to misfortune. It is recorded of the first Earl that 
 " fearing he should come to some open painful end, he poisoned 
 himself or pined away for thought." The second Earl, who 
 was left fatherless when he was five, was prominent in the 
 Catholic Plots and tried to escape from England in 1567 and 
 was sent to the Tower, charged with High Treason, in the 
 following year and again in the next, and was about to be 
 arrested again when he died young after his elder son's death. 
 The third Earl, who was left fatherless when he was eight, 
 began gloriously but was destined to see his dearest friends 
 perish and his dearest hopes fail. And Clarendon says of the 
 fourth Earl that he was " by nature much inclined to melan- 
 choly, and being born a younger brother, and his father and 
 elder brother dying upon the point together whilst he was 
 but a boy, he was at first much troubled to be called ' My 
 Lord ' and with the noise of attendance, so much he then 
 delighted to be alone. He had a great spirit : he had never 
 any conversation in the Court or obligation to it." 
 
 In those days it was often said that the new owners of 
 Monastic estates w^ere under a curse. These four Earls 
 owed their wealth to the fact that the first of them served 
 King Henry the Eighth and was rewarded with two of the Great 
 Abbeys, Beaulieu and Titchfield, both in the New Forest. 
 Their chief home was Titchfield House by the Sea (" a right 
 stately house " according to Leland), built from the ruins 
 of the Abbey of Titchfield. And the Catholics looked on 
 them as one of the families doomed by their homes and 
 cited the fact that in each generation the elder son died 
 before obtaining the Earldom. 
 
 The third Earl was brought up by his mother who was 
 rigidly Catholic. If (as is probable) she believed in the 
 curse, her fears must have been doubled by the fact that 
 her father, Anthony Browne, the first Viscount Montague, 
 held Battle Abbey, a home which has retained to our days 
 the reputation for entailing misfortune. And the melan- 
 choly which overshadowed this Earl's life may well have 
 begun when he was a child in Titchfield House with his 
 mother and his only sister Mary, who afterwards married 
 a belligerent Catholic, Thomas Arundel, the first Lord 
 
 84
 
 THE THIRD EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 Arundel of Wardour. He had Catholic masters, as is stated 
 in Allen's Report to the Pope in 1583 which names the chief 
 Catholic Lords, " the Earls of Cumberland, Oxford and 
 Southampton, who is yet but a minor but under Catholic 
 masters, and the Viscounts Montague and Morley." And 
 his official guardian, Lord Burghley, sent him to Cambridge 
 when he was aged about twelve. 
 
 In those days Catholics went to Oxford or Cambridge 
 very young so as to finish their studies before they were 
 sixteen, after which age they could only remain there if they 
 took the Oath of Supremacy, But this Oath does not seem 
 to have been exacted from the Lords at this time, so South- 
 ampton's early going to Cambridge may have been due to 
 the fact that Burghley wanted to take him from his Catholic 
 home and a life of solitude with his mother and sister. That 
 hfe may have helped to make him effeminate, and he was 
 probably guarded with excessive devotion because there 
 was no heir to his title. His name was entered at Gray's 
 Inn in London two years later, in 1587. 
 
 The palatial London home of his family, Southampton 
 House by Chancery Lane, stood opposite the gate of Gray's 
 Inn ; but we do not know whether he lived in it then or at 
 any time. It was famous then as a refuge for Priests. The 
 informer Benjamin Beard, who seems to have been one of 
 the Tichbornes, wrote in 1594: "This Butler was sometime 
 chamber-fellow with one Harrington, that serveth the Lady 
 Southampton, which maketh me guess that he is still har- 
 boured by him. They lay there, about eight years since, 
 in Southampton House, next chamber to Robert Gage 
 that was executed, and then he fled, being nominated to be 
 of Babington's Conspiracy." And Father Anthony Tyrell 
 (the wavering Jesuit who was three times reconciled to the 
 Anglican Church), in his Confession printed by Father John 
 Morris in his Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers in 1875, 
 admitted that he had alleged that John Ballard or Fortescue, 
 one of the leaders of the Babington Plot, had stayed with 
 Lady Southampton and he also avowed in it that he had 
 said that " Fortescue's man, whom he brought out of Corn- 
 wall, and a little boy, which was Henry Wells his son," were 
 lying then in Southampton House. The house seems to 
 
 85
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 have been leased for some years before 1591 to a Catholic 
 named Swithun Wells. In his time it was often searched 
 for Priests but in vain till in 1591 Father Jennings was caught 
 there in his vestments. He and two other Priests and three 
 laymen who were arrested with him were hanged and 
 quartered at Tyburn (under the Penal Laws according to 
 'Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers)^ and in the same year 
 Swithun Wells was executed in Holborn between South- 
 ampton House and Gray's Inn for having harboured the 
 Priests. This tragedy may have made the third Earl avoid 
 the house afterwards : we know, for instance, that he was 
 lodging in Drury Lane when he was a leader of the Essex 
 Revolt. But it may be that the house belonged for life 
 to his mother, who married Sir Thomas Heneage in 1594 
 when her son came of age, and Sir William Hervey of Kid- 
 brook (afterwards the first Lord Hervey of Ross) in 1598 
 and died in 1607. 
 
 The young Earl was courted from the first by the Catholics 
 because they expected him to rival his father as a champion 
 of theirs and by their opponents because it was important 
 to divert him from that. The students at Gray's Inn were 
 conspicuous as friends of the Stage, and the brilliant new- 
 comer must have been observed by the Players. We know 
 that he was fond of the Stage, for in 1599 it was recorded 
 of him that he and his friend Lord Rutland " come not 
 to Court, but pass away the time merely in going to Plays 
 every day." It may be that Shakespeare first saw him in 
 1587. 
 
 There is a chance that the young Earl may have stooped 
 to admit a vague connection between them. He had been 
 connected with Edward Ardcn of Parkhall in Warwickshire 
 through the Throckmortons and Catesbys and Brownes, 
 for Arden had married Mary Throckmorton. He would 
 have valued this then because Ardcn, who had been executed 
 in 1583, was ranked by the Catholics as one of their martyrs ; 
 and it is probable that Shakespeare could boast that through 
 his mother he had been a cousin of Arden's. In those days 
 remote connexions by marriage were still reckoned as 
 cousinship, though that word seems to have lost the wider 
 meaning given to it by Chaucer in the Shipna?i^s Tale, 
 
 86
 
 THE THIRD EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 And for as muchil as this good man 
 
 And eke this Monk, of which that I began, 
 
 Were both two iborn in one village, 
 
 The Monk him claimeth as for Cousinage. 
 
 Cousinship of this kind would have given a rich gentleman 
 a right to be seen in Southampton's train when he rode or 
 to follow him when he walked in the streets ; but Shakespeare 
 would have forfeited this because he was poor and because 
 he was earning his livelihood by the trade of a mountebank. 
 Apart from this, Shakespeare may have been attractive 
 enough to win a brief kindness from the arrogant boy. The 
 Sonnets claim nothing more : they say. 
 
 But out, alack ! he was but one hour mine . . . 
 Thus have I held thee as a dream doth flatter, 
 In sleep a King, but waking no such matter. 
 
 Southampton seems to have first attended the Court in 
 1 591 when he was about seventeen. Queen Elizabeth took 
 him into favour at once, partly because she always tried to win 
 the affection of the Catholic Lords and partly because she 
 loved the homage of boys when she began to be old. She was 
 then about sixty, and the young Earl of Essex was the chief 
 of her favourites. Southampton was soon recognized as one 
 who might rival Essex, and when they accompanied her to 
 Oxford in 1592 he was praised after the favourite in wel- 
 coming Verses, 
 
 Post hunc insequitur clara de stirpe Dynasta 
 Jure suo dives, quem South-Hamptonia magnum 
 Vendicat heroem, quo non formosior alter 
 Affuit, aut docta juvenis praestantior arte. 
 
 The only tradition which links him with Shakespeare is 
 recorded by Rowe in his Account of the Life of Shakespeare, 
 printed in 1709 : " There is one instance so singular in 
 the magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's that if I 
 had not been assured that the story was handed down by 
 Sir William Davenant, who was probably very well acquainted 
 with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted, 
 
 87
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand 
 Pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which 
 he heard he had a mind to. A bounty very great and very 
 rare at any time." Even if this story was true it would not 
 prove that the Earl and the Player were on terms of equality, 
 and it is open to doubt, for we have no reason to think that 
 Shakespeare ever made such a purchase. He only paid sixty 
 Pounds for his home at Stratford-on-Avon. It may mean 
 that Southampton enabled Shakespeare to buy a share in 
 his Company. This may have been done in 1594, in which 
 year the young Earl came of age and Shakespeare was named 
 as the first of the three Players summoned to Greenwich, 
 and in that case the gift may have redeemed a promise made 
 earlier, for instance when Venus a?id Ado?iis was printed in 
 1593. In any case the amount is incredible. Poets were 
 not paid on that scale then ; for instance, George Peele 
 dedicated the Honours of the Garter to the eighth Earl of 
 Northumberland in 1593 and (according to the Earl's House 
 Rolls) was paid " as my Lord's liberality " three Pounds. 
 
 In As Tou Like It Shakespeare made Rosalind, speaking 
 in the disguise of a boy, say : " He was to imagine me his 
 love, his mistress, and I set him every day to woo me : at 
 which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be 
 effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, 
 apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for, 
 every passion something and for no passion truly anything, 
 as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour." 
 He drew a youth of this kind in some of the Sonnets and in 
 A Lover^s Complaint ; and in Venus and Adonis he drew a 
 young boy, probably aged about fourteen, who might have 
 grown into a youth of this kind. 
 
 Southampton was a rosy-cheeked boy with long auburn 
 hair (as we know from his portraits painted a few years after 
 this) like Weever's 
 
 Rose-cheeked Adonis with his amber tresses. 
 
 Venus and Adonis begins 
 
 Even as the Sun with purple-coloured face 
 Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn.
 
 BRITAIN'S IDA 
 
 Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase ; 
 Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn : 
 Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, 
 And like a bold faced suitor 'gins to woo him. 
 
 " Thrice fairer than myself," thus she began, 
 *' The field's chief flower, sweet above compare. 
 Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man, 
 More white and red than doves or roses are ; 
 Nature that made thee, with herself at strife, 
 Saith that the world hath ending with thy life." 
 
 The same boy is described in Britain's Ida, a Poem which 
 was published by Thomas Walkley in 1715 : 
 
 Among the rest that all the rest excelled, 
 
 A dainty boy there wonned, whose harmless years 
 
 Now in their freshest budding gently swelled ; 
 
 His nymph-like face ne'er felt the nimble sheers, 
 
 Youth's downy blossom through his cheek appears : 
 
 His lovely limbs (but Love he quite discarded) 
 
 Were made for play (but he no play regarded) 
 
 And fit Love to reward, and with Love be rewarded. 
 
 High was his forehead, arched with silver mould, 
 
 (Where never anger churlish wrinkle dighted). 
 
 His auburn locks hung like dark threads of gold 
 
 That wanton airs (with their fair length incited) 
 
 To play amongst their wanton curls delighted ; 
 
 His smiling eyes with simple Truth were stored, 
 
 Ah ! how should Truth in those thief eyes be stored, 
 
 Which thousand Loves had stolen, and never one restored. 
 
 His lily cheek might seem an ivory plain, 
 More purely white than frozen Appenine ; 
 Where lovely bashfulness did sweetly reign. 
 In blushing scarlet clothed, and purple fine. 
 A hundred hearts had this delightful shrine 
 (Still cold itself) inflamed with hot desire. 
 That well the face might seem in divers tire 
 To be a burning snow, or else a freezing fire. 
 
 89
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 His cheerful looks and merry face would prove 
 
 (If eyes the index be where thoughts are read) 
 
 A dainty play-fellow for naked Love ; 
 
 Of all the other parts enough is said, 
 
 That they were fit twins for so fair a head ; 
 
 Thousand boys for him, thousand maidens died, 
 
 Die they that list for such his rigorous pride 
 
 He thousand boys (ah, Fool !) and thousand maids denied. 
 
 His joy was not in Music's sweet delight, 
 (Though well his hand had learned that cunning art) 
 Or daintier songs to daintier ears to indite ; 
 But through the plains to chase the nimble hart 
 With well-tuned hounds ; or with his certain dart, 
 The tusked boar or savage bear to wound : 
 Meantime, his heart with Monsters doth abound. 
 Ah Fool ! to seek so far what nearer might be found. 
 
 His name (well known unto these woody shades 
 Where unrewarded lovers oft complain them) 
 Anchises was. 
 
 It may be that this Anchises of Ida is a picture of the boy 
 who was called the Prince of the New Forest. Marlowe called 
 Ida a forest in the fifth Scene of the Second Part of Tambur- 
 laine, 
 
 In numbers more than are the quivering leaves 
 Of Ida's forest, where your Highness' hounds 
 With open cry pursue the wounded stag, 
 
 and the New Forest may have been Britain's Ida. South- 
 ampton always loved hunting and was famous for horse- 
 manship. Ve7ius and Adonis may have been current in 
 manuscript before publication, as many other Poems were 
 then and, like Britain's Ida, may have been written while he 
 was young enough to prefer horses to ladies. 
 
 The probable resemblance between Southampton and 
 Adonis proves little, for Adonis was often called rose-cheeked 
 as by Marlowe, for instance, in his fragment of Hero and 
 Leander. Neither can we be certain that he was drawn as 
 
 90
 
 HERO AND LEANDER 
 
 the effeminate youth with rosy cheeks and brown hair who 
 was described in the Sonnets : 
 
 A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted, 
 Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion. . . . 
 Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee 
 Calls back the lovely April of her prime. . . . 
 The lily I condemned for thy hand, 
 And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair : 
 The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, 
 One blushing shame, another white despair. 
 
 Amorous youths were often drawn effeminate then like 
 Marlowe's Leander, 
 
 Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, . . . 
 His dangling tresses that were never shorn. . . . 
 Some swore he was a maid in man's attire, 
 For in his looks were all that men desire. 
 
 It is possible that Leander was drawn from Southampton 
 whose tresses were probably unshorn in those days. In the 
 portrait of him at Welbeck, painted when he was about 
 twenty-one, his hair is very long and his pride in it is proved 
 by the fact that some of the tresses are shown dangling in 
 front. This way of wearing his hair was fantastic, for it 
 was not in the fashion, and Queen Elizabeth showed her 
 disapproval of it when she said that she was glad that Ambrose 
 Willoughby pulled some of his curls out during a quarrel at 
 Court. Still, Leander may have been only a conventional 
 type. But if we could conclude that Southampton was 
 drawn deliberately as the seducer in A Lover's Complainty 
 who is like both Adonis and the youth in the Sonnets, it 
 would become more probable that those two other pictures 
 were intended for him. 
 
 Here is Sir Sidney Lee's account of Southampton's picture 
 at Welbeck painted in 1595. (I cite him because he doubts 
 whether Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Com-plaint and has not 
 observed a portrait of Southampton in it.) " The eyes are 
 blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear and the expres- 
 sion sedate ; rings are in the ears ; beard and moustache are 
 at an incipient stage, and are of the same bright hue as the 
 
 91
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 hair in a picture of Southampton's mother that is also at 
 Welbeck. But however scanty is the down on the youth's 
 cheek, the hair on his head is luxuriant. It is worn very- 
 long and falls over and above the shoulder. The colour is 
 now of walnut but was originally of lighter tint." He writes 
 of his character : " Although gentle and amiable in most 
 relations of life, he could be childishly selfwilled and impul- 
 sive, and outbursts of anger involved him, at Court and 
 elsewhere, in many petty quarrels." And he quotes Bridget 
 Manners' description of him in 1594 as young and fantastical 
 and easily carried away. 
 
 Here is the picture in A Lover's Corti'plaint of 
 
 One by nature's outwards so commended. 
 That maidens' eyes stuck over all his face. 
 
 His browny locks did hang in crooked curls ; 
 And every light occasion of the wind 
 Upon his lips their silken parcels hurls. . . . 
 
 Small show of man was yet upon his chin ; 
 
 His phcenix down began but to appear. 
 
 Like unshorn velvet, on that termless skin, . . . 
 
 His qualities were beauteous as his form, 
 
 For maiden-tongued he was and thereof free. 
 
 Yet, if men moved him, was he such a storm 
 
 As oft twixt May and April is to see. 
 
 When Winds breathe sweet, unruly though they be. 
 
 His rudeness so with his authorized youth 
 
 Did livery falseness in a pride of truth. 
 
 Well could he ride, and often men would say, 
 " That horse his mettle from his rider takes ; 
 Proud of subjection, noble by the sway." . . . 
 He had the dialect and different skill, 
 Catching all passions in his craft of will. 
 
 That he did in the general bosom reign 
 Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted. 
 To dwell with him in thoughts, or to remain 
 In personal duty, following where he haunted. . . . 
 
 92
 
 THE SONNETS 
 
 Many there were that did his picture get, 
 
 To serve their eyes, and in it put their mind, 
 
 Like fools that in the imagination set 
 
 The goodly objects which abroad they find 
 
 Of lands and mansions, theirs in thought assigned : 
 
 And labouring in more pleasures to bestow them 
 
 Than the true gouty landlord which doth owe them : 
 
 So many have, that never touched his hand. 
 Sweetly supposed them mistress of his heart. 
 
 Sir Sidney Lee writes : " Shakespeare's many references 
 to his youth's painted counterfeit suggest that his hero often 
 sat for his portrait. Southampton's countenance survives in 
 probably more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries." 
 Shakespeare may have been one of the many who got the 
 boy's picture when he wrote in the Sonnets, 
 
 With my love's picture then my eye doth feast. 
 And to the painted banquet bids my heart. 
 
 If we could be sure that Southampton was the boy in 
 the Sonnets we could infer that some of them were written 
 about 1590 and many of them would be explained. The 
 Sonnets advising marriage may have referred to his reluctance 
 to marry Elizabeth Vere in 1590. The verses 
 
 Three beauteous Springs to yellow Autumn turned, 
 In process of the Seasons have I seen. 
 Three Aprils' perfumes in three hot Junes burned 
 Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green 
 
 may have referred to a meeting three years before, in 1587. 
 The verse 
 
 A man in hue, all hues in his controlHng, 
 
 instead of referring mysteriously to the fact that the Earl of 
 Essex was also Earl of Ewe (as Gerald Massey suggested) or 
 denoting that the boy was named William Hughes or that 
 Southampton controlled the Hue and Cry in the New Forest 
 may merely mean that like the seducer in A Lover's Com- 
 plaint he could turn red or white 
 
 93
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 As it best deceives 
 To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes, 
 Or to turn white and swound at tragic shows. 
 
 The verses 
 
 The Mortal Moon hath her ecHpse endured, 
 And the sad augurs mock their own presage, 
 
 may refer to Queen EHzabeth's danger in 1588 when the 
 Armada came and her emergence from it. Sir John Har- 
 ington in his Nugce Antiquce relates that Anthony Rudde, 
 when preaching before her in 1596, "fell to treat of more 
 plausible numbers, as 666 making Latinus, with which he 
 said he could prove the Pope to be Antichrist, also of the 
 fatal number 88, which being so long spoken of for a dangerous 
 year, yet it had pleased God that year not only to preserve 
 her but to give her a famous victory against the united 
 forces of Rome and Spain." Some students have argued 
 that this Sonnet implies that the boy had been imprisoned, 
 but it probably means that the Poet's love of him had appeared 
 " forfeit to a confined doom." This Sonnet may have been 
 one of the earliest and written when the Poet took courage 
 to proclaim his affection. 
 
 The question who was the Master-Poet might also be 
 explained by this date. At this time there was only one 
 poet of whom Shakespeare could write with such a show of 
 humility, echoing Lyly's comparison of himself to a cock- 
 boat and of Lord Oxford to a tall ship in his dedication of 
 Euphues and his England, 
 
 My saucy bark inferior, far to his, . . . 
 
 I am a worthless boat, 
 He of tall building and of goodly pride. 
 
 This Poet was Edmund Spenser, who was called " Great 
 CoHn, chief of Shepherds all " in a sonnet by Barnfield 
 printed in 1595. Spenser visited London during the Winter 
 of 1589 and the Spring of 1590 to publish three Books of 
 The Faery Queen and to find patrons for it, and during this 
 stay he lived in Essex House in the Strand. We cannot be 
 certain that he courted Southampton; but it would have 
 
 94
 
 THE MASTER-POET IN THE SONNETS 
 
 been natural. He may have written Poems to him which 
 have been lost (like so much of his work) or may have drawn 
 him as one of the Knights in the part of The Faery Queen 
 which has survived or in the part which has perished. 
 He wrote 
 
 With golden quill, 
 And precious phrase by all the Muses filed. 
 
 He was renowned for his learning : he wrote in The Tears 
 of the Muses, 
 
 Each idle wit at will presumes to make, 
 And doth the Learned's task upon him take. 
 
 And he called some of his Poetry " hymns " in the same 
 sense as Ronsard did, as, for instance, in Daphneida, printed 
 in 1 59 1 and current before, 
 
 Colin, her own shepherd, 
 That her with heavenly hymns doth deify. 
 
 The reference to " that affable familiar ghost " might 
 be explained if we had his lost book Dreams or a Sennighfs 
 Slumber, or it may have referred to his inspiration by Chaucer, 
 whom he addressed in the Fourth Book of The Faery Queen 
 as " most sacred, happy spirit." 
 
 The first stanzas of A Lover^s Complaint seem an imitation 
 or parody of the beginning of Spenser's Rui7is of Time, 
 
 There on the other side I did behold, 
 A woman sitting sorrowfully wailing. 
 
 That Poem was probably written about 1590, for Spenser 
 in his dedication of it to the Countess of Pembroke said that 
 since his late coming into England some of his friends had 
 blamed him for not lamenting his patrons late deceased, 
 Sidney who died in 1586, Leicester who died in 1588, and 
 Warwick who died in 1590. When he visited England again 
 Sidney had been dead for ten years. If the beginning of 
 A Lover''s Complaint was a humorous copy of the Ruins of 
 Time, this would agree with the notion that the Master- 
 Poet may have been Spenser. And this notion would be 
 supported if Mr. George Wyndham was right in thinking 
 
 95
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 that The Faery Queen was described in the verses in one of 
 the Sonnets, 
 
 When in the chronicle of wasted time, 
 I see descriptions of the fairest wights. 
 And beauty making beautiful old rhyme. 
 In praise of ladies dead and lovely Knights, 
 
 and if we could be sure that Shakespeare wrote the assertion 
 in The Passionate Pilgrim, 
 
 Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch 
 Upon the lute doth ravish human sense, 
 Spenser to me whose deep conceit is such 
 As passing all conceit needs no defence. 
 
 There would be little room for doubt left if we could 
 be sure that Spenser wrote Britain'' s Ida. That Poem 
 was published as his by Thomas Walkley, who wrote : " I 
 am certainly assured by the ablest and most knowing men 
 that it must be a work of Spenser's, of whom it were a pity 
 that anything should be lost." Others have thought that 
 it was not his because they have reckoned it unworthy of 
 him (which is a poor reason, for it is only a trifle meant to 
 flatter a boy) or because they considered him too holy to 
 write it, but it is now known that he did not claim to be 
 virtuous. In the Introduction to the Fourth book of The 
 Faery Queen, which was written in Ireland after this stay 
 in London, he wrote that Lord Burghley 
 
 My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite. 
 For praising Love as I have done of late. . . . 
 By which frail youth is oft to Folly led. 
 Through false allurement of that pleasing bait. 
 
 Burghley's anger would have been justified if Britain^s Ida, 
 which is openly loose, had been written to please his ward, 
 the young Earl. 
 
 An old story which is repeated in Mr. Percy Addleshaw's 
 Life of Sir Philip Sidney relates how Spenser submitted the 
 first Books of The Faery Queen to Southampton and was 
 kept waiting while the Poem was judged, and how the Earl 
 showed his delight by sending him twenty Pounds by a 
 servant and soon afterwards twenty more, as he continued 
 
 96
 
 DEDICATIONS 
 
 to read, and the same sum twice again, but then cried, " Turn 
 the fellow out of the house, for I shall be ruined if I read any- 
 further." This could only have happened in the Winter 
 of 1589 or the Spring of 1590 before that Poem was pubhshed, 
 and besides proving that Southampton was courted by- 
 Spenser, would show why he was not on the list of generous 
 patrons. 
 
 Whether this story is true or not it is faithful to the ways 
 of those times. Thomas Nashe wrote in Pierce Penniless, 
 printed in 1592, " Men of great calling take it of merit to 
 have their names eternized by Poets, and whatsoever pam- 
 phlet or dedication encounters them they thrust it up their 
 sleeves and scarce give him thanks that presents it." 
 
 The men who wrote these dedications hoped to be paid 
 for them by money or patronage, and some of them wished 
 their other readers to think that they were on intimate terms 
 with men of great calling : they could have said as John 
 Dryden did when he dedicated King Arthur to Lord Halifax 
 in 1691, " What I pretend by this dedication is an honour 
 which I do myself to Posterity by acquainting them that I 
 have been conversant with the first persons of the age in which 
 I lived." 
 
 Southampton received his share of such dedications. 
 Nashe, for instance, dedicated the Life of Jack Wilton to 
 him in 1594, writing " a new brain, a new wit, a new soul, 
 a new style, will I get me to canonize your name to Posterity 
 if in this my first attempt I have been not taxed of presump- 
 tion." And Barnabe Barnes wrote to him in 1593, 
 
 Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thrice sacred hand, 
 (Which sacred Muses make their instrument) 
 These worthless leaves which I to thee present. . . . 
 Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, with gracious eyes. 
 Those heavenly lamps which gave the Muses Hght, 
 Which give and take in course that holy fire, 
 To view my Muse with your judicial sight. 
 
 Gervase Markham addressed him in 1595, 
 
 Thou glorious laurel of the Muses' hill. 
 
 Whose eye doth crown the most victorious pen, 
 
 97 G
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Bright lamp of Virtue, in whose sacred skill 
 
 Lives all the bliss of ear-enchanting men, 
 
 From graver subjects if thy grave assays, 
 
 Bend thy courageous thought unto these lines. . . . 
 
 So shall my tragic lays be blessed by thee 
 
 And from thy lips suck their Eternity. 
 
 And about the same time Nashe dedicated his Choice of 
 Falefitines to the Right Honourable Lord S. with an apology 
 for wanton behaviour, 
 
 Pardon, sweet flower of matchless Poetry, 
 And fairest bud the red rose ever bare. 
 Although my Muse, divorced from deeper care, 
 Present thee with a wanton Elegy. 
 
 This may have referred to the belief that the first Earl 
 of Southampton married Stephen Gardiner's niece, and that 
 Stephen Gardiner's mother was Jasper Tudor's illegitimate 
 child. These things are open to doubt, but there is no other 
 connexion between the Wriothcsleys and the Red Rose of 
 Lancaster. Nashe wrote in another Sonnet at the end of 
 this Poem, 
 
 Thus hath my pen presumed to praise my friend. 
 
 Oh mightest thou likewise please Apollo's eye ! 
 
 No, Honour brooks no such impiety, 
 
 Yet Ovid's wanton Muse did not offend. 
 
 He is the fountain whence my streams do flow. . . . 
 
 My mind, once purged of such lascivious wit. 
 
 With purified words and hallowed verse 
 
 Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse 
 
 .That better may thy graver view befit : 
 
 Meanwhile it rests, you smile at what I write. 
 
 Or for attempting banish me your sight. 
 
 Shakespeare's two dedications to Southampton were 
 written in this conventional vein which Ben Jonson parodied 
 in Every Man in his Humour in 1598 : 
 
 To thee, the purest object to my sense. 
 The most refined essence Heaven covers, 
 
 98
 
 DEDICATIONS TO SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 Send I these lines wherein I do commence 
 The happ7 state of turtle-bilHng lovers ; 
 If they prove rough, unpolished, harsh and rude, 
 Hast made the waste : thus mildly I conclude. 
 
 Both were inscribed " To the Right Honourable Henry 
 Wriothcsley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield." 
 The first, of Venus and Adonis, ran thus : " I know not how 
 I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your 
 Lordship, nor how the World will censure me for choosing 
 so strong a prop to support so weak a burden, only if your 
 Honour seem but pleased, I count myself highly praised, 
 and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured 
 you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my 
 invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble 
 a godfather : and never after car so barren a land, for fear 
 it yield me still so bad a harvest, I leave it to your Honourable 
 survey and your Honour to your heart's content which I 
 wish may always answer your own wish and the World's 
 hopeful expectation." 
 
 And here is the dedication of The Rape of Liurece : 
 " The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end : 
 whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous 
 moiety. The warrant I have of your Honourable disposi- 
 tion, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured 
 of acceptance. What I have done is yours, what I have to 
 do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were 
 my worth greater, my duty would show greater ; meantime, 
 as it is, it is bound to your Lordship ; to whom I wish long 
 life still lengthened with all happiness." 
 
 In this dedication the words " What I have done is 
 yours, what I have to do is yours " may be an echo of Virgil's 
 statement to PoUio in the Eighth Eclogue, "A te principium : 
 tibi desinam." Neither of these dedications can be taken 
 as proving that the young Player was a friend of the Earl's 
 unless we are prepared to conclude that the unfortunate 
 Nashe (who had written Pierce Penniless, his Supplication 
 to the Devil in 1592 and the Apology of Pierce Penniless in 
 1593 with a patent sincerity) was also his bosom-friend. 
 
 There is a dedication too in the Sonnets : 
 
 99
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage, 
 
 Thy merit hath my duty strong knit, 
 
 To thee I send this written embassage. 
 
 To witness duty, not to show my wit : 
 
 Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine 
 
 May make seem bare in wanting words to show it. 
 
 But that I hope some good conceit of thine 
 
 In thy soul's thought all naked will bestow it ; 
 
 Till whatsoever star that guides my moving 
 
 Points on me graciously with fair aspect, 
 
 And puts apparel on my tattered loving, 
 
 To show me worthy of thy sweet respect : 
 
 Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee ; 
 
 Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me. 
 
 This may well have been addressed to the same patron, but 
 that cannot be taken as certain because the tone is con- 
 ventional. There seems to be a more definite clue in the 
 Sonnet beginning, 
 
 I grant thou wert not married to my Muse, 
 And therefore mayst without attaint o'erlook 
 The dedicated words which writers use 
 Of their fair subject, blessing every book. 
 
 This may mean that the boy addressed in the Sonnets had 
 overlooked a dedication to him, and we have no reason to 
 think that Shakespeare had dedicated Poems to anyone 
 except to Southampton. The dedication of The Rape of 
 Lucrece proves that the former one had not been neglected. 
 The first sentence in it, " The love I dedicate to your 
 Lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet without 
 beginning is a superfluous moiety," may mean that this 
 was the second half of a tribute or that it was the superfluous 
 (that is, the remaining) half a poem which had lost its begin- 
 ning. The Rape of Lucrece has no beginning, the first part 
 of its story is told in a shambling Prose argument and one 
 of its chief Characters, Tarquin, is only described through 
 his resemblance to Sinon. It does not seem probable that 
 a young Poet striving for Fame would have planned this. 
 It would have been explained if Southampton had been 
 
 100
 
 THE RAPE OF LUCRECE 
 
 depicted as Tarquin, for (if so) he or his older friends might 
 have objected to this, and the picture of Tarquin might 
 have been struck out of the Poem and with it the beginning. 
 In that case the dedication of the superfluous moiety might 
 have been overlooked. 
 
 The Poet describes how Lucrece looks at the Tapestry : 
 
 She throws her eyes about the painting round, 
 And who she finds forlorn she doth lament. 
 At last she sees a wretched image bound, 
 That piteous looks to Phrygian shepherds lent : 
 His face, though full of cares, yet showed content ; 
 Onward to Troy with the blunt swains he goes, 
 So mild that Patience seemed to scorn his woes. 
 
 In him the painter laboured with his skill 
 To hide deceit and give the harmless show. 
 An humble gait, calm looks, eyes wailing still, 
 A brow unbent, that seemed to welcome woe. 
 Cheeks neither red nor pale, but mingled so 
 That blushing red no guilty instance gave. 
 Nor ashy pale the fear that false hearts have, 
 
 But, like a constant and confirmed devil, 
 He entertained a show so seeming just. 
 And therein so ensconced his secret evil. 
 That jealousy itself could not mistrust 
 False-creeping craft and perjury should thrust 
 Into so bright a day such black-faced storms 
 Or blot with hell-born sin such saintlike forms. 
 
 The well-skilled workman this mild image drew 
 For perjured Sinon whose enchanting story 
 The credulous old Priam after slew. . . . 
 This picture she advisedly perused, 
 And chid the painter for his wondrous skill, 
 Saying, some shape in Sinon's was abused ; 
 So fair a form lodged not a mind so ill : 
 And still on him she gazed, and gazing still. 
 Such signs of truth in his plain face she spied. 
 That she concludes the picture was belied. 
 
 lOI 
 
 TJR^ APT 
 UNIVERPTTv OF '"ATTvoRNIA
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 '' It cannot be," quoth she, " that so much guile " — 
 
 She would have said — " can lurk in such a look " ; 
 
 But Tarquin's shape came to her mind the while, 
 
 And from her tongue "can lurk" from "cannot" took; 
 
 " It cannot be " she in that sense forsook, 
 
 And turned it thus, " It cannot be, I find. 
 
 But such a face should bear a wicked mind. 
 
 " For even as subtle Sinon here is painted. 
 
 So sober-sad, so weary and so mild. 
 
 As if with grief or travail he had fainted. 
 
 To me came Tarquin armed : so beguiled 
 
 With outward Honesty, but yet defiled 
 
 With inward Vice ; as Priam did him cherish 
 
 So did I Tarquin ; so my Troy did perish. . . . 
 
 " Such devils steal effects from lightless Hell, 
 For Sinon in his fire doth quake with cold. 
 And in that cold hot-burning fire doth dwell ; 
 These contraries such unity do hold 
 Only to flatter fools and make them bold." 
 
 Sinon bears a curious resemblance to the seducer in A Lover's 
 Comflaint, of whom it is said. 
 
 In him a plenitude of subtle matter, 
 
 Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives, 
 
 Of burning blushes or of weeping water. 
 
 Or swounding paleness ; and he takes and leaves 
 
 In cither's aptness, as it best deceives. 
 
 To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes. 
 
 Or to turn white and swound at tragic shows : 
 
 That not a heart which in his level came 
 
 Could 'scape the hail of his all-hurting aim. 
 
 Showing fair nature is both kind and tame ; 
 
 And, veiled in them, did win whom he would maim : 
 
 When he most burned in heart-wished luxury 
 
 He preached pure maid and praised cold chastity. 
 
 Thus merely with the garments of a Grace 
 The naked and concealed fiend he covered ; 
 
 I02
 
 A LOVER'S COMPLAINT 
 
 That he had feeled as much sorrow as I, 
 When that I heard him speak, and saw his hue, 
 But none the less I thought he was so true 
 And eke that he should soon repaire again 
 Within a little while, sooth to seyn. 
 And reason would eke that he must go 
 For his honour, as oft it happeth so. 
 Then made I virtue of necessity. 
 
 This last phrase, which is to be found, too, in Chaucer's 
 Knight's ^ale : 
 
 Then is it wisdom, as it thinketh me, 
 To maken virtue of necessity, 
 
 was echoed by Shakespeare when in Ki7ig Richard the Second 
 he made John of Gaunt say, 
 
 Teach thy necessity to reason thus, 
 There is no virtue like necessity, 
 
 and when in ^be Two Gentlemen of Verona he made the Second 
 Outlaw say : 
 
 Are you content to be our General, 
 To make a virtue of necessity ? 
 
 If the Lover'^s Complaint was a dehberate echo of the Falcon's 
 lament there is the less need to infer that it was an accusation 
 against Southampton, even if we conclude that he was drawn 
 in that Poem. Neither need we suppose that he had played 
 the part of Adonis if we conclude that William Barkstead's 
 Mirrha, the Mother of Adonis, printed in November, 1607, 
 lamented Mary formerly Countess of Southampton who had 
 died in that year as Lady Hervey, and referred to him in its 
 last lines : 
 
 But stay, my Muse, in thy own confines keep 
 And wage not war with so dear-loved a neighbour. 
 But having sung thy day-song, rest and sleep ; 
 Preserve thy small fame and his greater favour. 
 His song was worthy merit, Shakespeare, he 
 Sang the fair blossom, thou the withered tree. 
 
 105
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 It may be that a clue to the meaning of all these Poems of 
 Love is to be found in the note on Willobie his Avisa in which 
 the author explains that " in this discourse is lively represented 
 the unruly rage of unbridled fancy, having the reins to rove 
 at liberty, with the divers and sundry changes of affections 
 and temptations which Will set loose from Reason can devise." 
 That Poem was linked with Shakespeare (and perhaps witu 
 Southampton) by the lines in the Preface : 
 
 Yet Tarquin plucked his glistering grape. 
 And Shakespeare paints poor Lucrece' rape. 
 
 The initials given, H. W. and W. S., may indicate Southampton 
 and Shakespeare. H. W., whose name is given in full as 
 Henry Willobie, is described as " Italo-Hispalensis " — an 
 Italian Sevillan, or one who copied the manners of Italy and 
 Seville. The statement that " he would see whether it 
 would sort to a happier end for the new actor than for the 
 old player " does not mean that W. S. was old, but that he 
 was a former player of H. W's. part. Still, it may be meant to 
 suggest that he was a Player by trade. The theme may have 
 been a parody of the tale in the Sonnets and, if so, it is a proof 
 that some of them were known when it was printed in 1594, 
 in the same year as The Rape of Lucrece. And this would 
 explain why this little book was reprinted in 1609. The note 
 may mean that it derided the extravagant tales of the Tempta- 
 tions of Love which Will Shakespeare set loose from Reason 
 devised. 
 
 If Shakespeare had Southampton in mind when he wrote 
 some of the Sonnets and the Narrative Poems he might have 
 excused himself as the Poet did in the Sonnets : 
 
 Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you. 
 Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery ? 
 Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true. 
 And that your love taught it this alchemy, 
 To make of monsters and things indigest 
 Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble ? . . . 
 How can my Muse want subject to invent 
 While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my Verse 
 Thine own sweet argument ? . . . 
 
 106
 
 THE STORY IN THE SONNETS 
 
 What is your substance ? whereof are you made 
 That milhons of strange shadows on you tend ? 
 Since every one hath, every one, one shade, 
 And you, but one, can every shadow lend. 
 Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit 
 Is poorly imitated after you. . . . 
 Oh know, sweet love, I always write of you 
 And you and Love are still my argument. 
 
 Whether he drew Southampton in these Poems of Love as 
 a boy of fourteen and afterwards as an effeminate youth, or 
 had some other model, or imagined the boy and the youth, 
 it is evident that some of the Sonnets were written when he 
 was young. It so happened that two of them were printed as 
 his by Jaggard in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1598 with one 
 which came from Love'^s Labour'' s Lost. The second of these, 
 beginning, 
 
 Two loves I have of comfort and despair, 
 That like two spirits do suggest me still ; 
 My better angel is a man right fair. 
 My worser spirit a woman coloured ill, 
 
 tells the story about a dark lady and a treacherous friend which 
 some students have taken as a statement of truth. This was 
 a favourite theme, and there are similar stories in The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona and in Much Ado About Nothing, and in 
 Love'^s Labour'' s Lost. It was an Italianate story, and its mood 
 was denoted by a line in this Sonnet, 
 
 I guess one angel in another's hell, 
 
 which is a humorous reference to one of Boccaccio's Decameron 
 tales, the tenth of the third day, " Alibech diviene romita, 
 ad cui rustico monaco inscgna rimcttere il Diavolo in Inferno." 
 Instead of concluding that by a coincidence Shakespeare 
 found this old story repeated in his private affairs and then 
 proceeded to complain to the World that he had been betrayed 
 by a friend I infer that he chose it as a conventional theme. 
 
 Some students have argued that he could not have written 
 so passionately if the story was false ; but he wrote with as 
 sincere an emotion, for instance, in Macbeth and Othello, and 
 
 107
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 we do not conclude that he had killed his King or his wife. 
 He was aged about forty-five, and had written most of his 
 Tragedies when the Sonnets were printed in 1609. Like 
 Petrarch's So?ietti and Boccaccio's Rime they were written 
 from time to time in varying moods. The moods tell us 
 nothing about his private affairs, for no Lyrical Poem can ever 
 be taken as a statement of truth : it may be that he wrote 
 his most sorrowful Sonnets in his happiest times. Neither 
 can we conclude that a real Love was expressed by any of 
 them any more than we can be certain that a true Laura or 
 Amaryllis was worshipped. As he wrote in A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream, 
 
 As imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the Poet's pen 
 Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name. 
 
 Ariosto need not have been telling the truth when (like a 
 hundred other poets) he wrote in the Third Satire, 
 
 Altri vada a Parnaso, c'hora i'vegno 
 Dolci occhi a voi ; ne cheder altra aita 
 A versi mei se non da voi, disegno. 
 
 Still, the manner and mood of Shakespeare's Sonnets can help 
 us to guess when they were written. For instance, the two 
 printed last by Thorpe and beginning, 
 
 Cupid laid by his brand and fell asleep 
 
 and 
 
 The little Love-god lying once asleep, 
 
 which may have been copied from a Latin translation of 
 verses by Marianus Scholasticus, must have been written 
 when he was beginning to write. They probably belong to 
 the same time as the three Sonnets on Venus and Adonis, 
 which were printed as his in 7he Passionate Pilgrim. These 
 Sonnets may show that he began a Sonnet-sequence on Venus 
 and Adonis before he wrote his Narrative Poem. It is probable 
 that (like many other Poets) he wrote Sonnets in boyhood, 
 and it is certain that many of those printed in 1609 were 
 
 108
 
 THE SONNETS 
 
 written when his mind was mature. For instance, the Sonnet, 
 beginning 
 
 Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, 
 So do our minutes hasten to their end 
 
 has an elderly man's measured gravity and knowledge that 
 life is passing away. Cervantes wrote in this mood when he 
 was ending Don Quixote : " Como las cosas humanas no scan 
 eternas, vendo siempre en declinacion de sus principios hasta 
 llegar a su ultimo fin, especialmente las vidas de loshombres." 
 And the Sonnet beginning. 
 
 The expense of spirit in a waste of shame 
 Is lust in action, 
 
 which was probably based on the verses by Petronius Arbiter 
 
 Foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas. 
 Ft tsedet Veneris statim peracta, 
 
 seems an elderly comment of all the young tales of the 
 Temptations of Love. If the Sonnets were printed in a 
 rational Order, this should be the last of them all. 
 
 I think that the Sonnets of 1609 are a collection or selection 
 which Shakespeare made when he had reached the climax of 
 his Tragical work and that in a revision in his Tragical days 
 some of the early ones became passionate instead of fantastic 
 and the " dark lady " became a Cleopatra instead of the 
 Rosaline of Love'^s Labour's Lost. Some of the Sonnets oi 1609 
 are humorous Poems, for instance, the Will Sonnets which 
 may have been addressed to some lady (perhaps his friend, 
 Mrs. Davenant), who had a will of her own and a child 
 christened William, and others are trifles ; but many of them 
 have a solemn maturity and a sorrowful passion which were 
 alien to him when he was young. These darker Poems control 
 the mood of the rest. But, even as we have them, the Sonnets 
 keep a resemblance to the Narrative Poems. Mr. George 
 Wyndham, for instance, though he looked on them as later 
 work, wrote in his Essay on the Poems of Shakespeare : " It 
 is indeed strange to find how much of thought, imagery and 
 rhythm is common to Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets^ 
 
 109
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 There would be nothing strange in this if, as I think, many of 
 them were written before Venus and, Adonis was printed. 
 
 I think that the conventional Sonnets about a beautiful 
 boy and his behaviour in the Temptations of Love were first 
 written when Shakespeare was young enough to choose such 
 a theme and in the days when it was the fashion. The fact 
 that in them the Poet described himself as elderly proves 
 nothing, for this too was conventional. Richard Barnfield, 
 for instance, wrote when he was aged about twenty, 
 
 Behold my grey head, full of silver hairs, 
 My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face, 
 Cares bring old age, old age incrcaseth cares. 
 
 Barnfield's Sonnets, like Shakespeare's, were written in the 
 first person because this was the custom ; but this did not 
 mean that he drew himself as the elderly man or that he 
 loved a beautiful Ganymede. Neither need we conclude that 
 Virgil was worshipping a cruel Alexis when he wrote in the 
 Second Eclogue (which seems to be copied from the Third 
 and Eleventh Idylls of Theocritus), 
 
 O formose puer, nimium ne crede colori. 
 Alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur. 
 
 Even if Southampton was drawn as the boy in the Sonnets, 
 this would not prove that Shakespeare was shown in them as 
 the elderly lover or that the adoration was real ; but it would 
 explain why some of the " sugared Sonnets " were only known 
 among private friends (as Meres wrote in 1598), and why 
 Shakespeare may have not intended to publish the Sonnets 
 in 1609, for the fact that he had dedicated two other Poems 
 to Southampton would have made the resemblance notable, 
 and the amorous tone of them might have been misconstrued. 
 The signs of revision in the Sonnets appear to prove that he 
 wanted them to be published, and apart from this, any Poet 
 who had written such things must have hoped that they 
 would survive. He may have put them aside to be published 
 after he and Southampton had passed beyond the insults of 
 slander. There may have been an additional reason for such 
 a delay in the fact that their tone was more apt to be mis- 
 construed in those days. Some students have thought that 
 
 no
 
 THORPE'S EDITION OF THE SONNETS 
 
 an effeminate vice is suggested by the amorous Sonnets to a 
 beautiful hoy. In 1609 that vice was common at Court 
 and the King himself was accused of it. And I think that 
 Thorpe's dedication and Benson's changes are tokens that 
 when the Sonnets were printed in 1609 they were interpreted 
 as proofs of that vice. 
 
 Thorpe's dedication ran thus : " To the only begetter 
 of these insuing Sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that 
 eternity promised by our ever-living Poet, wisheth the well- 
 wishing adventurer in setting forth. — T. T." It seems to me 
 that this dedication to " the only begetter " was an obvious 
 insult. Boswell and others have argued that the only begetter 
 was the person who stole the Sonnets for Thorpe ; but the Poet 
 had promised eternity to the boy in the Sonnets, and not to a 
 future only thief of those Poems. Mr. Knox Pooler, in his 
 edition printed in 191 8, has observed that the word adventurer 
 is " an allusion to the Merchant Venturers, the insuing Sonnets 
 being Thorpe's cargo." He did not observe the facts that 
 Southampton was one of the chief patrons of the Merchant 
 Adventurers to America, where his name is retained by 
 Hampton River and Hampton Roads, and secured a charter 
 for them in 1609, and was in that year a member of the 
 Virginia Council. The words, " in setting forth," may be 
 an allusion to Prince Hal's words, " How shall we part with 
 them in setting forth ? " and Poins' reply, " Then will they 
 adventure upon the exploit themselves." In 1609 South- 
 ampton had made Catholic enemies by changing his Creed 
 in that year (as Sir Edwyn Sandys recorded) while his 
 triumphant feud with Lord Grey had already provided him 
 with Puritan ones, and he had offended the King and the 
 courtiers by his open disdain. He was living apart at Titch- 
 field ; but he had plenty of servants who would have been quick 
 to avenge an open affront. So Thorpe may have thought it 
 wiser to veil his dedication transparently by printing the 
 Earl's initials as W. H. instead of H. W. He may have arranged 
 the Sonnets to suit the meaning which he wished to allege, 
 beginning with those which offered a clue to men who 
 remembered that Southampton had twice resisted pressure to 
 marry when he was young. He may have printed A Lover's 
 Complaint with the Sonnets as a clue to the meaning of his 
 
 III
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 veiled dedication because the picture of Southampton in it 
 was easily recognized. And he may have meant it to be read 
 as Shakespeare's Complaint. When Lintott reprinted Thorpe's 
 book a hundred years later he called this fanciful poem A 
 Lover^s Complaint of His Angry Mistress, as if there was an 
 inversion of sex. 
 
 When John Benson printed the Sonnets as Poems in 1640 
 he grouped them in a different order and under separate 
 headings, and did this in such a way that nearly all of them 
 seemed addressed to a woman, and omitted several, including 
 the one which has the verses : 
 
 Oh know, sweet love, I always write of you, 
 And you and Love are still my argument, 
 
 and the one beginning. 
 
 Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness 
 
 and the one beginning, 
 
 Oh thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power 
 Dost hold Time's fickle glass, 
 
 and hid the sex in others, printing, for instance, " sweet love " 
 instead of " sweet boy " in the Sonnet beginning 
 
 What's in the brain that ink may character 
 Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit ? 
 
 In his Address to the Reader he wrote : " I here presume 
 (under favour) to present to your view some excellent and 
 sweetly composed poems of Master William Shakespeare, 
 which in themselves appear of the same purity, the Author 
 himself then living avouched ; they had not the fortune 
 by reason of their Infancy in his death, to have the due 
 accommodation of proportionable glory with the rest of his 
 ever-living Works, yet the lines of themselves will afford 
 you a more authentic approbation than my assurance any 
 way can, to invite your allowance ; in your perusal you shall 
 find them Seren, clear and elegantly plain, such gentle strains 
 as shall recreate and not perplex your brain, no intricate or 
 cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect, but perfect eloquence ; such 
 as will raise your admiration to his praise." He seems to have 
 
 112
 
 BENSON'S EDITION OF THE SONNETS 
 
 amused himself hy writing a part of this statement in irregular 
 Verse, for he could have printed it thus : 
 
 Elegantly plain, 
 
 Such gentle strain 
 
 As shall recreate 
 
 And not perplex your brain ; 
 
 No intricate 
 
 Or cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect, 
 
 But perfect eloquence, such as will raise 
 
 Your admiration to his praise. 
 
 His statement that these Poems had been in their infancy 
 when Shakespeare died was untrue, and it suggests that he 
 believed that all the copies of Thorpe's edition of 1609 
 (which he used in compiling his own, for he repeats its 
 mistakes) had been successfully hidden. Shakespeare could 
 not have avouched the accuracy of this tardy edition, which 
 has many misprints and contains some Poems written about 
 him after his death, so Benson's statement that he had avouched 
 its purity may only have meant that he had claimed that his 
 Poems printed in it were free from offence. And Benson's 
 assertion that the Poems contained no cloudy stuff to puzzle 
 intellect may have repudiated a meaning alleged. It may 
 be that the last Earl of Southampton had employed him to 
 hide a scandalous meaning insinuated by Thorpe. And in 
 any case his alterations appear to indicate that the Sonnets 
 had been interpreted in a scandalous way. We have no means 
 of knowing whether they served their only possible purpose, 
 for the Softnets were neglected again till Lintott revived 
 Thorpe's edition of them in 1709. Benson's edition may have 
 been small and only intended as a safeguard against the 
 reappearance of Thorpe's, or it may have been overlooked in 
 the troubled times which began with the Earl of Strafford's 
 impeachment in 1640. 
 
 None of this can be proved, but it seems the only way of 
 explaining how Shakespeare's most admirable Poems, the 
 Sonnets, came to be neglected so long. Though the old 
 fashion of writing Italianate Sequences of Sonnets was dead 
 (which was one of the reasons why it is improbable that 
 
 113 H
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare would have written a Sequence in his elderly- 
 days) there were many poets and scholars, such as Milton and 
 Herrick, who would have admired the Sonnets if these had 
 not been hidden from them and many men, such as Suckling, 
 who saw Shakespeare's supremacy, and we have no record 
 that anyone quoted or praised or imitated the Sonfiets till 
 Lintott revived them in 1709. It seems to me that the neglect 
 of the Sonnets of 1609 can only be explained by concluding 
 that they were quickly suppressed. And if they were quickly 
 suppressed by the man who had been drawn as the boy in 
 them, or by Shakespeare, we can infer that a slanderous 
 meaning had been given to them. But, of course, that would 
 not prove that this interpretation was right. Even a plain 
 statement from Thorpe would have been worthless, and his 
 veiled dedication may have been only a publisher's ingenious 
 advertisement. 
 
 One Poem ascribed to Shakespeare, The Phcenix and Turtle, 
 belongs (if it is his) to the days when he could write of Love 
 nobly. It was published in 1601 with ^^ Lovers Martyr or 
 Rosaline's Complaint, allcgorically showing the truth of Love 
 in the constant fate of the Phoenix and Turtle." The title 
 page of that Poem says, " Hereafter follow some poetical 
 essays on the former subject, viz., the Turtle and the Phoenix, 
 done by the best and chicfest of our modern writers, with 
 their names subscribed to their particular works, never before 
 extant, and now first consecrated by them all generally to 
 the love and merit of the true noble Knight, Sir John Salis- 
 bury." This has been taken as meaning that Sir John Salisbury 
 and his wife were the Turtle and the Phoenix, and this may 
 have been an old view, for Father Henry More, telling a 
 ghost-story in his History of the English Province of the Society 
 of Jesus, written in 1660, says " Lord Stourton called his wife, 
 a daughter of Edward, Earl of Derby, and sister to the Stanley 
 whose epitaph Shakespeare wrote." Sir John Salisbury's wife 
 was Ursula Stanley, who is said to have been an illegitimate 
 daughter of Henry, fourth Earl of Derby, but (unless the 
 Records have been misinterpreted) she lived after 1601 and 
 bore him some children though not till after that date. 
 Father Henry More may have thought that Poems must be 
 founded on fact, and (if he referred to this Poem) he was 
 
 114
 
 OVID'S EXAMPLE 
 
 probably wrong in thinking that Ursula Stanley and Anne 
 Lady Stourton were sisters. 
 
 This Poem was stated to be a poetical essay written on a 
 particular theme, and this dedication to Salisbury may have 
 been merely a compliment without any reference to his 
 private affairs. If Shakespeare wrote these beautiful Verses 
 he never wrote anything else like them. If he was intimate 
 with Jonson's friend Donne before he quarrelled with Jonson 
 in 1599, he may have echoed Donne's brooding austerity. 
 This is one of Donne's themes, as in The Relic, and in The 
 Funeral in which he described himself as Love's Martyr. 
 
 This Poem (if indeed it is Shakespeare's) could not have 
 been written by him when he was young enough and foolish 
 enough to write the three Narrative Poems and the juvenile 
 Sonnets, and to imitate Ovid as he did when he based Vefius 
 afid Adonis on Ovid's Amores and the Ravishment or The 
 Rafe of Lucrece on Ovid's Fasti. When Francis Meres wrote 
 that " the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and 
 honey-tongued Shakespeare," he saw that Shakespeare could 
 have pleaded (as Nashe did) that his juvenile faults were due 
 to Ovid's wanton example, — 
 
 Yet Ovid's wanton Muse did not offend. 
 
 He is the fountain whence my streams do flow. 
 
 And it may be that Shakespeare meant to plead this and to 
 hail young Southampton as his " flavus Apollo " when he 
 inscribed on the title page of Venus and Adonis the lines 
 from Ovid's Amores. 
 
 Vilia miretur vulgus ; mihi flavus Apollo 
 Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. 
 
 "5
 
 MIDSUMMER DREAMS 
 
 THE Editors of the First Folio printed seven Comedies 
 after Lovers Labour^s Lost in the following order : J 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As Tou 
 Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, AlVs Well that Ends Well, 
 Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale. It may be that all 
 these were written or revised in this order during the ten 
 years between 1593 and 1603 and that during this time 
 Shakespeare rewrote The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much 
 Ado About Nothing and The Tempest, and wrote his Chronicle 
 Pageant and a version of Troilus and Cressida (in the War of 
 the Poets) and forms of four of his Tragedies, Timon of 
 Athens, Othello, Julius Ccesar and Hamlet. 
 
 There were three seasons in his life as a writer, the Spring 
 and Summer and Autumn. The juvenile Plays had all the 
 charms of the Spring, a time of pleasant rain and promising 
 light. Four of these seven " Comedies " belong to the time 
 when it was Summer with him : they were mellow and 
 happy, the light was mature in them and the rain was forgotten. 
 But only the fourth Act of The Winter''s Tale seems to belong 
 to it and The Taming of the Shrew is a close version of a juvenile 
 Play and AlVs Well that Ends Well became a Tragi-comedy 
 later. And the Tragedies and Tragi-comedies written after 
 1603 were autumnal with the Winter at hand. 
 
 Sir Israel GoUancz writes in the Temple Shakespeare that 
 several elements " manifestly connect A Midsummer Nighfs 
 Dream with the group of early love-plays. Love's Labour'' s 
 Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of ErrorsJ'^ 
 And Mr. Saintsbury writes in his History of English Prosody, 
 " Next to Romeo and Juliet there are strong prosodic reasons 
 for taking A Midsummer Night's Dream.''' These views can 
 be reconciled if this Play was composed from two earlier ones 
 after Romeo and Juliet, as we have it, was written. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet had been a Tragedy of Midsummer 
 Moonlight : it dealt with four nights of a fevered Summer 
 in Italy, about a fortnight from Lammas-tide, the beginning 
 
 117
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of August. A Midsummer 'Night's Dream was a Comedy of 
 Midsummer Moonlight : it was meant to deal with four 
 nights of England's temperate Summer, for Hippolyta says 
 in the beginning, 
 
 Four nights will quickly dream away the time, 
 
 though this is no longer seen in the Play. It may be now 
 mainly concerned with the Eve of St. John, the Midsummer 
 Night on which the Fairies had power. These Plays are 
 companions : the Fairy-tale is a humorous comment on the 
 illusions of Love. The Woodland Comedy had another 
 companion, the Woodland Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, and 
 it is linked with The Te?npest because they are Fairy-tales. 
 Its woods and its pairs of lovers unite it with As Tou Like It ; 
 but that is an older Comedy seen with Jaques' eyes instead of 
 Mercutio's. It is another Comedy of Errors^ though these 
 are caused by a Fairy spell and not by resemblance, and The 
 Taming of the Shrezo was connected with it by the Induction, 
 though till then it had been more akin to The Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona — Sly is dreaming awake, as Bottom is, and he and 
 his friends could have acted an Interlude with Starveling 
 and Quince : all these honest men could have figured among 
 Falstaff's recruits and he was a minion of the moon in his 
 turn. There are obvious links with other Comedies, too, but 
 these are enough to afford an example of the way in which 
 many of the Plays are united. None of them can be studied 
 apart, for each is illuminated by others. 
 
 Shakespeare found his Fairies in England ; but he gave 
 them a King and Queen from foreign Romances. The Fairies 
 of England were a miniature race, dwindled perhaps as the 
 immemorial belief in the Wood-spirits had faded. Queen 
 Mab was one of them in Mercutio's speech, as she was in 
 Drayton's Nymfhidia, which does not seem to have been 
 printed before 1627, but may have been written at a much 
 earlier date. Drayton says in it, 
 
 Then since no Muse hath been so bold. 
 Or of the later or the old. 
 Those elvish secrets to unfold 
 Which lie from others' reading ; 
 118
 
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 
 
 My active Muse to light shall bring 
 The Court of that proud fairy King. 
 
 He represented Oberon as married to Mab, as Herrick did in 
 the Fairy Temple or Oberoii's Chapel, published in his Hesperides 
 in 1647 ; but this was an error, for Oberon was not one of our 
 Fairies : he was imported by Chaucer from a foreign Romance, 
 Huon of Bordeaux, and he was full-grown, like other foreign 
 Fairies, for instance, Melusine in the Mediaeval Romance of 
 Partenay, which was printed in French in 1478 and in German 
 about the same time and in Spanish in 1489 and translated 
 into English in manuscript some twenty years later. Ben 
 Jonson may have known better when he gave him no wife in 
 his Masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince, which was published 
 in his Folio of 161 6, but this may have been due to the fact 
 that Prince Henry acted the part. And in his Particular 
 Entertainment of the Queen and Prince, v\a"itten in 1603 and 
 first printed in 1616, he wrote, 
 
 This is Mab, the Mistress Fairy, 
 That doth nightly rob the dairy, 
 
 but did not give her a husband. Spenser copied Oberon's 
 name from Chaucer, but Greene used another form of it, 
 " Oboram," in the Prelude to his Scottish History of King 
 James the Fourth ; and a third version of it, " Oberion," was 
 assigned to a dumb Devil who was said to have served Cardinal 
 Wolsey. 
 
 Even in Chaucer's time Fairyland had faded away. The 
 Wife of Bathes Tale began : 
 
 In the old days of King Arthour, 
 
 Of which that Britons speken great honour, 
 
 All was this land fulfilled of Faery : 
 
 The Elf-Queen and her joly company 
 
 Danced full oft in many a green mead ; 
 
 This was the old opinion, as I rede, — 
 
 I speak of many hundred years ago 
 
 For now no more can none see elves mo. 
 
 Here, of course, Chaucer used the word Faery as meaning 
 enchantment, as Spenser did. 
 
 119
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare found the name Titania in Ovid's Metamor- 
 fhosesy where it is a form of Diana ; but in The Merchant's Tale 
 Chaucer gave the Queen of Faery's name as Proserpina and 
 this example was followed, for instance, in a song which was 
 in Campion's and Rossiter's Book of Airs, printed in 1601, 
 
 In myrtle arbours on the downs 
 
 The Fairy Queen, Proserpina, 
 
 This night by moonshine leading merry rounds. 
 
 Chaucer's Proserpina was married to Pluto, — 
 
 Pluto, that is King of Faerie, 
 And many a lady in his company 
 Following his wife, the Queen Proserpina. 
 
 Sir Thopas in The Host's Tale was only seeking an Elf- 
 Queen, and found one who was Oberon's wife, — 
 
 Me dreamed all this night, pardie, 
 An Elf-Queen shall my Leman be. 
 
 It has been suggested that Chaucer remembered Artemis and 
 Persephone when he made this distinction ; but it is more 
 probable that he was copying the foreign Romances. Sir 
 Thopas did not expect to find a miniature leman. That 
 Elf-Queen was full-grown, like the fair ladies who wove their 
 spells in the Morte (T Arthur, and when Bottom imitated Sir 
 Thopas he was not loved by Queen Mab but by a foreign 
 Titania who was big enough to be mated with him. 
 
 Though Puck was English by birth he was not one of the 
 Fairies. A Fairy says to him in this Play, 
 
 Either I mistake your shape and making quite. 
 Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite. 
 Called Robin Goodfellow. . . . 
 Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, 
 You do their work, and they shall have good luck, 
 
 and Puck answers. 
 
 Thou spcakest aright ; 
 I am that merry wanderer of the night, 
 I jest to Oberon and make him smile. 
 
 120
 
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 
 
 He belonged to a bigger race of humorous spirits. Mr. 
 Charles Squire says in his Mythology of the British Islands : 
 " We shall hardly do wrong in regarding such spectres as 
 the degraded gods of a pre-Aryan race, like the Irish Lepre- 
 chauns and Pookas, who have nothing in common with the 
 still beautiful, still noble figures of the Tuatha De Danaun." 
 Puck dealt in practical jokes and he was a stranger among 
 the innocent midgets who frolicked in Fairyland as the old 
 Leprechaun was in Tyrnanoge, the Land of the Young. 
 
 The Fairy-tale part of this Play seems to have been first 
 written in Rhyme, and I think that Shakespeare re-wrote it 
 and blended it with the rest in the Autumn of 1594. That 
 date seems suggested by Titania's account of the weather and 
 by the signs that this Play was connected with a marriage 
 and written for a performance at Court. 
 
 In 1594 the Summer was wet. Simon Forman's Diary 
 states that " these months of June and July were very wet 
 and wonderful cold. . . . There were many great floods 
 this summer." Stow's Chronicle supports that assertion : 
 " This year in the month of May, fell many great showers of 
 rain, but in the month of June and July much more ... all 
 which notwithstanding in the month of August there followed 
 a fair Harvest, but in the month of September fell great rains 
 which raised high waters." And in King's Lectures upon 
 Jonas it was said that " the Spring was very unkind by reason 
 of the abundance of rains that fell ; our July hath been like 
 to a February, our June even as an April, so that the air must 
 needs be corrupted : God amend it in His mercy and stay 
 this plague of waters. . . . We may say that the course of 
 nature is very much inverted : our Summers are no Summers, 
 our Harvests are no Harvests." He disagrees with Stow on 
 this point, and must have been right since there could not 
 have been a fair Harvest in such weather as this. Titania in 
 the second Act says : 
 
 Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, 
 As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea 
 Contagious fogs ; which, falling in the land, 
 Have every pelting river made so proud. 
 That they have overborne their continents. . . . 
 
 121
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The fold stands empty in the drowned field, . . . 
 The nine men's morris is filled up with mud. . . . 
 
 The Spring, the Summer, 
 The childing Autumn, angry Winter, change 
 Their wonted liveries. 
 
 Oberon's speech in the second Act about Cupid aiming 
 
 At a fair vestal throned by the West 
 
 is plainly a compliment to the Queen who 
 
 passed on, 
 In maiden meditation, fancy free 
 
 in her sixty-third year. It is the only one to be found in the 
 Plays. This may show that the Queen disliked this compliment 
 paid by a mere Player and a servant of hers to an old lady 
 who had always been notoriously amorous, though she might 
 have accepted such nonsense amiably as a gentleman's homage 
 if it had been spoken to her privately by Essex or Raleigh. 
 We know that even when some gentlemen acted a Device 
 to amuse her in the following year at York House in the 
 Strand she did not thank them for praise : Rowland Whyte 
 wrote to Sir Robert Sidney, " the Queen said that if she had 
 thought there would have been so much said about her, she 
 would have not been there that night, and so to bed." 
 
 The Treasurer's Accounts for 1 594-1 595 state that 
 Shakespeare and Burbage and Kemp presented " two several 
 Comedies or Interludes " before her at Greenwich on the 
 twenty-sixth and twenty-eighth of December, St. Stephen's 
 Day and Innocents' Day. The setting of the Fairy-tale 
 shows that the Play as we have it celebrated a marriage and 
 the third Earl of Bedford was married at Stepney on the 
 twelfth of December. While none of these indications would 
 be conclusive if it was taken apart, their agreement leaves 
 little doubt that this Play was one of the Comedies acted 
 before the Queen in December 1 594. 
 
 This Earl of Bedford was one of Southampton's dearest 
 friends at this time : he was the friend coupled with him 
 in this year as too young and fantastical to be a fit husband 
 for Bridget Manners. We have no record that Shakespeare 
 had been summoned to entertain the Court before this, and 
 
 122
 
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 
 
 the fact that he was named first of the three leading Players 
 may show that this summons was a favour to him. It is 
 possible that Southampton rewarded his homage by obtaining 
 for him the favour of a Royal Command. 
 
 Shakespeare was not concerned with the marriage except 
 as Snug was when he said, " Masters, the Duke is coming from 
 the temple, and there is two or three lords and ladies more 
 married : if our sport had gone forward we had all been made 
 men." If he had wished to flatter a bridegroom he would 
 not have chosen a mockery of the illusions of Love. It 
 was his business to produce a Play suited to Queen Elizabeth's 
 taste, and he may have taken the part of Oberon, leaving 
 Theseus to Burbage and Bottom to Kemp, because he wished 
 to recite the compliment which was paid to the Queen. 
 
 The Fairy-tale is spoilt by the setting, which was provided 
 to please that superior audience, the Court, and to explain 
 to it that the writer knew the Play to be foolish. The charm 
 of the Comedy lies in its simplicity and juvenile sweetness, 
 not in the wisdom of the older spectators who appear on the 
 stage. The setting was made Classical to suit the Queen's 
 taste. It was suggested to him by Chaucer's Knighfs Tale^ 
 in which Hippolyta was " the fair hardy queen of Scythia," 
 and perhaps by the Life of Theseus in North's version of 
 Plutarch, and it helped to denote that Oberon and Titania 
 belonged to foreign Romances. It clashed with the English 
 scene of the Fairy-tale and the farcical Interlude of the 
 Rustics of England. The stage audience was Athenian 
 because Athenian meant wise, and it may be that when 
 Shakespeare put the Queen and her Court in the Athenians' 
 place as spectators, he did this with the private amusement 
 which he must have felt when he described her immunity 
 from the dangers of Love. If he had merely wished to provide 
 a superfluous explanation that Fairyland was not meant to 
 be true he need only have copied Lyly's Prologue to The 
 Woman in the Moon : 
 
 Remember all is but a poet's dream, 
 The first he had in Phoebus' holy bower, 
 
 but his ironical setting turned his Fairies to ridicule as well 
 as his Rustics. 
 
 123
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 There are two separate Interludes in this Play as we have 
 it. They were written apart, the Fairy-tale first, I think, 
 and then the farcical one showing how Rustics acted a Tragedy. 
 
 It may be that the Fairy-tale was suggested to him by 
 The Cradle of Security which (according to Willis' Mount 
 labor) was acted at Gloucester about 1570 and may have 
 been also exhibited in the neighbouring town of Stratford- 
 on-Avon then. In this Interlude or Moral, a King or some 
 great Prince was transformed while he was asleep by three 
 ladies " who fastened a visard like a swine's snout upon his 
 face, and then discovered his face that the spectators might 
 see how they had transformed him." Or he could have been 
 guided to it by the fact that the Mummers wore the heads of 
 Apes and Asses and Swine. 
 
 Besides, such transformations belong to the World's stock 
 of stories. There are many of them in the Arabian Nights^ 
 Entertainments, for instance, in the Tale of the Three Calendars 
 and the History of Sidi Nouman. And the belief in them is 
 shown by an Arab Legend which tells how a Saint had a 
 favourite Ass named Abdullah and how some evil men stole 
 it and tied a Tailor instead and how, when the Saint saw 
 the change, the Tailor alleged that he had been turned into 
 an Ass for ten years as a penalty for beating his mother-in-law 
 and had resumed his first shape during the night and how 
 when the Saint, believing him, went to buy a new Ass he saw 
 his own for sale in the market-place and exclaimed, " O 
 Abdullah, Son of Iniquity ! have you been beating your 
 mother-in-law again ? " Shakespeare may have known 
 something about the most famous of all these stories, the one 
 told in Metamor-phoseon Libri XI (de Asino Aureo) by Apuleius, 
 in which Lucius is turned into an Ass through a mistake but 
 (unlike Bottom) prefers choice food to hay. Or he may have 
 read the one told in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, 
 printed in 1584, according to which in the City of Salamin 
 in the Kingdom of Cyprus an Englishman, " a sturdy young 
 fellow," was turned into an Ass by Witchcraft and only 
 rescued after three years when " being near to a Church, he 
 heard a little sacring-bell ring to the Elevation of a Morrow 
 Mass, and not daring to go into the Church, lest he should 
 have been driven out with cudgels, in great devotion he fell 
 
 124
 
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 
 
 down in the Churchyard upon the knees of his hinder-legs 
 and did Uft his forefeet over his head." Or the change 
 might have been suggested to him by Ovid's Metamorphoses, 
 or he may have known the old nursery-song which comes 
 nearest to Titania's illusion : 
 
 There was a lady loved a swine : 
 Honey," said she, 
 
 Pig-hog, pig-hog, wilt thou be mine ? " 
 Hunc " said he. 
 
 I'll build thee straight a silver sty. 
 Honey," said she ; 
 And in it, dearest, thou shalt He." 
 Hunc " said he. 
 
 I'll pin it with a silver pin. 
 
 Honey," said she ; 
 
 That thence thou may'st go out and in." 
 
 Hunc " said he. 
 
 So, Sweetheart, wilt thou have me now, 
 Honey ? " said she ; 
 
 Speak quickly, or my heart will break." 
 Hunc " said he. 
 
 The Farce of the Rustical Players seems to have been acted 
 apart after his time, for " the Merry Conceited Humours of 
 Bottom the Weaver as it hath been publicly acted by some of 
 his Majesty's Comedians, and lately privately presented by 
 several apprentices for their harmless recreation, with great 
 applause " was printed in 1661. In Tate's Cuckold's Haven, 
 which was printed in 1685, one of the Characters says, " Why 
 I will act thee a better Play myself. What wilt thou have ? 
 T^he Knight of the Burning Pestle, or the Doleful Comedy of 
 Piramus and Thisbe ? That is my masterpiece. When Piramus 
 comes to be dead, I can act a dead man rarely. The raging 
 rocks and shivering shocks shall break the locks of prison 
 gates." And in New Shreds of the old Snare, printed in 1624, 
 we have the reference, " as for flashes of light, we might see 
 very cheap in the Comedy of Piramus and Thisbe, where one 
 comes in with a lanthorn and acts Moonshine." 
 
 125
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 This part appeared in the Play as it was printed in the 
 Quarto edition dated 1 600, which may have been pubhshed 
 in 1619, but we have no means of knowing whether it was 
 represented at Court. This is doubtful, for the Play, as we 
 have it, seems too long for an Interlude and the Queen's 
 interest in her Rustics was small. 
 
 The German Absurda Comica Oder Herr Peter SqtientZy 
 which was printed in 1 663, has the same mockery of Rustical 
 acting ; but Andreas Gryphius claimed that this was not 
 copied from a foreign example. The subject was an obvious 
 one in Germany as well as in England since in both Countries 
 the Rustics had acted Religious and other Plays for themselves 
 from time immemorial. This Interlude, as it survives in a 
 Midsummer Night's Dream^ is plainly shortened, for instance 
 in the first Act Quince chooses three Players who have no 
 part in it now. 
 
 The story of Pyramus and Thisbe was popular. It had 
 been printed, for instance, in The Book of the Cyte of Ladies 
 in 1521 and again in 1562 " a book entitled Pyramus and 
 Thisbe," and in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallafit Inventiofis 
 in 1578 and in a Ha?idful of Pleasant Delights in 1584. Shake- 
 speare could have found it in Chaucer's Merchafifs Tale : 
 
 O noble Ovid, well sayst thou, God wot ! 
 What sleight is it, though it be long and hot. 
 That he nyl find it out in some manere t 
 By Piramus and Thisbe men may leere ; 
 Though they were kept full long streyte overall, 
 They ben accorded rowning through a wall " 
 
 or in the Third Book of Gower's Confessio Aniantis. Besides, 
 he had probably read it in Ovid's Metamor-phoses and he had 
 referred to it in Titus Andronicus^ — 
 
 So pale did shine the Moon on Pyramus, 
 When he by night lay bathed in maiden blood. 
 
 He chose it as the theme of this Interlude because it afforded 
 scope for mocking the shifts of Rustical Players. And he 
 had an eye to the shifts of his own associates when they were 
 compelled to act Moonlit scenes in the afternoon in an open- 
 air theatre and to suggest so many things which could not be 
 
 126
 
 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 
 
 depicted with their scanty resources. He was mocking his 
 trade, as he did when he drew the Players in Hamlet. 
 
 This was natural if he hoped that the Courtiers, or some 
 of them, would remember that he was a poet and had claims 
 to gentility though he had been driven to the trade of a 
 mountebank. He may even have hoped that the Queen 
 might have heard that he had published two Poems. When 
 in the setting of this Play he described hunting and dogs in 
 the fourth Act he expected some of his heroes (including 
 Southampton) to recall how the poet of Venus and Adonis 
 had proved his knowledge of horses ; and this Comedy is 
 written throughout as if it was the work of a man who merited 
 a better employment. 
 
 He used the common device of a Play set in a Play as in 
 Love'^s Labour's Lost and in Hamlet, and the device of a setting 
 as when he re-wrote The Taming of a Shrew. The rhyming 
 Play which survives in the Fairy-talc had been a companion 
 to Titus Andronicus. When Hermia says, 
 
 And in the wood where often you and I 
 Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie, 
 
 and Titania says. 
 
 Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed, 
 While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, 
 
 they are innocently echoing Tamora's invitation of Aaron to 
 golden slumber. This rhyming Play is full of echoes of 
 Chaucer, for instance the music of the beginning of The 
 Merchanfs Tale, 
 
 Weeping and wailing, care and other sorrow 
 I know enough, 
 
 is repeated when Hermia says in the third Act, 
 
 Never so weary, never so in woe, 
 
 Be-dabbled with the dew and torn with briars. 
 
 The farce in Prose, Pyramus and Thisbe, which now only 
 survives shortened and carelessly linked with it, had a later 
 companion, the Comedy of Falstaff. These Interludes, each 
 combined with a dissimilar one, were taken from life. The 
 
 127
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 doings of Bottom and his friends were a comment on Fairy- 
 land as those of Falstaff and his ridiculed Chivalry. These 
 Interludes, like, for instance, the use of Lance in The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona and of Launcelot in The Merchant of 
 Venice, and of all the Clowns and Fools and of the Rustics 
 in The Taming of The Shrew and As Ton Like It and The 
 Winter^s Tale brought Shakespeare's Country in touch with 
 the real life of his day. These were the true things in his 
 work before he was ripe enough to attain the darker truth of 
 his Tragedies. 
 
 The next Comedy in the Folio Order is The Merchant of 
 Venice which would be a Tragi-comedy now if it was not 
 controlled by Midsummer mirth, for the laughter in it is on 
 the brink of calamity and the fortunate ending is a sudden 
 escape. Indeed, as we have it, there is a Tragical story told 
 in its laughter, — the Tragedy of Shylock the Jew, the old man 
 who ends in disgrace, forsaken by the daughter he loved, 
 robbed and betrayed, denying his Creed to purchase a miser- 
 able remnant of life. 
 
 This Play was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1598 
 and named in Palladis Tamiam the same year; but we have 
 no means of knowing when it was written. Even the time of 
 its publication is doubtful, for Mr. Greg and others have 
 argued that the Quarto edition dated 1600 was printed in 
 1 619. A Play called The Venetian Comedy was acted by the 
 Admiral's Men in 1594 according to Hcnslowe's Diary, and 
 this may have been a version of The Merchant of Venice. 
 Shylock was one of Burbage's parts : his Funeral Elegy said. 
 
 Heart-broke Philaster, and Amintas too, 
 
 Are lost for ever with the red-haired Jew 
 
 Which sought the bankrupt merchant's pound of flesh, 
 
 By woman-lawyer caught in his own mesh. 
 
 But we know that his Company acted with the Admiral's Men 
 in 1594. 
 
 Some students have argued that The Merchant of Venice 
 was first written in 1594 because Rodcrigo Lopez was 
 executed then and have thought that Shylock was a picture 
 of him. But Shylock could never have been a popular 
 
 128
 
 THE MERCHANT OF VENICE 
 
 physician at Court. Bacon wrote in his Re-port of Lofez^ 
 Treason : " This Lopez, by nation a Portuguese and suspected 
 to be in sect secretly a Jew, though here he conformed himself 
 to the rites of the Christian Religion, had for a long time 
 professed physic in this land, by occasion whereof, being withal 
 a man very observant and ofhcious and of a pleasing and 
 applicable behaviour, in that regard, rather than for any 
 great learning in his faculty, he grew known and favoured at 
 Court." And he describes him as " though a man in sem- 
 blance of a heavy wit, yet indeed, subtle of himself." 
 
 We have no portrait of Lopez, unless the " Chandos 
 Portrait of Shakespeare," which looks like a picture of a 
 Portuguese Jew and agrees with Bacon's description, should 
 be reckoned as one. But all we know of him through his 
 trial, when Essex and Antonio Perez hunted him down on a 
 false charge, agrees with Bacon's account. It is probable 
 that his real offence was a plot against Antonio Perez, for this 
 would explain why Burghley tried to protect him. And 
 there is no record that he was called a Jew before that. 
 
 It may be that the dislike felt for Jews was embittered 
 by the statement that Lopez had been one of them secretly 
 and this may have led to a revival of this Play in that year ; 
 but the first form could not have belonged to this time. 
 
 In this Play, as we have it, a savage tale like Titus Andronicus 
 is combined with the gaiety of the amorous youths in Lovers 
 Labour^s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona^ and these 
 opposite elements of the story are softened with a happy 
 maturity. Shylock and his hatred are true and therefore the 
 Play fails as a Comedy : it could only be one if he was inter- 
 preted as a farcical monster ; if we are allowed to behold him 
 as a suffering man the laughter is spoilt. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare wrote Shylock^s Revenge as a 
 Tragedy like Titus Andronicus when he was beginning to 
 write, and the Choice of the Caskets as an Italianate Comedy 
 in the days when he wrote The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and 
 in a revision in 1594 blended them in a Comedy in which he 
 made Shylock a real Jew instead of a bugbear. Perhaps 
 Burbage was tired of the showers of bitten apples which showed 
 the general detestation of Shylock and so asked for redeeming 
 qualities ; or it may be that Shakespeare's greater knowledge 
 
 129 I
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 of life and the sympathy which came with the years compelled 
 him to make Shylock a man, though he knew that this broke 
 the harmony of this Midsummer Dream in the same way as 
 Malvolio's nobility made Sir Toby detestable. If Bottom 
 had not been left farcical the beauty of his adventure would 
 fade in the misery of losing his vision : he remained too dull 
 to believe that he had been loved by Titania, 
 
 In sleep a King, but waking no such matter : 
 
 he says, " I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what 
 dream it was ; man is but an ass if he go about to expound 
 this dream." And The Merchant of Venice can only be 
 expounded by recognising that it was re-written in a different 
 mood. 
 
 The legend of a murderous Jew demanding a pound of 
 flesh and the story of the Choice of the Caskets may have been 
 Spanish before they were Italian, for Jews were much more 
 hated in Spain than in Italy and the Prince of Morocco has 
 the pride and the gallantry of the Moors of Granada. Mr. 
 Addington Symonds suggested that the cruelty seen in The 
 Jew of Malta betokens the origin of that story in Spain, and 
 the same cruelty marks The Merchant of Venice though it is 
 softened when Shylock is allowed to survive. If this story 
 had ended in its natural way Shylock would have been punished 
 like his brothers in wickedness, Aaron the Moor in Titus 
 Aridronicus and lago in Othello and Barabas in the Jew of 
 Malta who dies boiled on the Stage. Barabas dies without 
 wavering, saying, 
 
 I would have brought confusion on you all. 
 Damned Christian dogs and Turkish infidels, 
 
 and so do Aaron and lago ; but Shylock, who had been glaring 
 with hatred and sharpening his knife on his shoe a few minutes 
 before, breaks and cringes when he is foiled. This collapse 
 and the scornful pardon it earns are appropriate to a Comical 
 villain, a mere butt like Parolles. 
 
 Alleyn used to wear a false nose when he acted Barabas 
 for the Admiral's Men, according to Samuel Rowley, who 
 mentions " the artificial Jew of Malta's nose " in his Search 
 for Money which was first printed in 1609, and we can conclude 
 
 130
 
 AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 that Burbage wore one too and a red wig and red beard when 
 he was acting as Shylock. The usurer must have been despised 
 and repulsive to justify Antonio's scorn. Shylock was a 
 caricature studied from life. There must have been Jews 
 in London in Queen Elizabeth's time though the old Statutes 
 which banished them were still unrepealed. That is proved 
 by this picture, and besides in those days London was begin- 
 ning to be a centre of commerce and a market of gold. 
 
 Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's tale of the Jew's savage demand 
 and of his defeat by a lady had been printed in Italy in 1558. 
 The tale of the Caskets had been printed in England in 1577 
 in Richard Robinson's version of Gesta Romanorum, and there 
 had been many stories about penniless Christians converting 
 and marrying the daughters of Jews. In this Play, as we 
 have it, the Casket Scenes are apart and they are written in a 
 different mood and with an open imitation of Marlowe. 
 Shakespeare may have borrowed the notion of linking them 
 with the crude Wager-story from a Play called The Jew, 
 mentioned by Stephen Gosson in his School of Abuses, printed 
 in 1579, as " representing the greediness of worldly choosers 
 and bloody minds of usurers." His Jew shows the difference 
 between him and his master : he watched some old money- 
 lender setting his snares and held him to mockery ; Marlowe 
 found his noble Barabas in his conquering heart. 
 
 While The Merchant of Venice keeps the hardness and 
 shallowness of Love'^s Labour''s Lost beneath its bloom of 
 maturity these are not found in As Ton Like It, the Play 
 which comes next in the Folio of 1623. This Play, like 
 Twelfth Night and the fourth Act of The Winter's Tale, blends 
 wisdom with laughter : these are the work of a man old 
 enough to see Life as it is and young enough to take delight 
 in it still ; there is humour in them instead of witty derision, 
 and Shakespeare looks on his young lovers with Jaques in 
 them, singing with Amiens, 
 
 Most friendship is feigning ; most loving mere folly : 
 Then heigh-ho ! the holly ! 
 This life is most jolly. 
 
 This older mood indicates that years had gone by or that 
 
 131
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 something had aged him. We do not know when As Tou 
 Like It was written. It does not seem to have been printed 
 before the FoHo of 1623 ; but it is mentioned with King Henry 
 the Fifths Every Man in His Humour and Much Ado About 
 Nothing in the Stationers' Register between entries in May 
 and August, 1600. Coleridge put it in before The Merchant 
 of Venice in his Classification of 18 19; but the FoHo Order is 
 supported, for instance, where Antonio says in The Merchant 
 of Venice, 
 
 I hold the World, but as the World, Gratiano, 
 A Stage where every man must play his part, 
 And mine a sad one, 
 
 and Jaques expands this familiar reflection into, 
 
 All the World's a Stage, 
 
 And all the men and women merely Players. 
 
 The date commonly accepted, 1599, ^^7 ^^ ^ig^t, for this 
 would agree with the entry in the Stationers' Register and 
 with our safest guide, the mood in the Comedy. It may be 
 that after Shakespeare re-wrote The Merchant of Venice, as 
 we have it, he wrote as a companion to it a Tragi-comical 
 form of Othello, The Moor of Venice, and then (perhaps 
 partly because he was disheartened by a failure in it) turned 
 from his Comedies to his Chronicle Pageant for several years 
 and then wrote As Tou Like It in the quiet of Stratford. 
 During these years he lost his only son Hamnet in 1596 and 
 many hopes when he died, and bought a home in Stratford- 
 on-Avon in 1597 and repaired it in 1598. It may be that 
 after his son's death he was wiser and softened by sorrow and 
 had found peace in resignation. 
 
 This Comedy is the third Forest-play but, unlike the two 
 others, Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, 
 it gives the name of the Forest. He changed the Ardennes 
 of Lodge's Rosalynde to the Forest of Arden when he founded 
 this Play on that delightful Romance. 
 
 Part of the story of Rosalynde was based on The Tale of 
 Gamelyn, which has often been printed as Chaucer's since 
 1 72 1 though it appears to be an older Romance which he had 
 intended to use. In that Tale Sir John de Boundys divided 
 
 132
 
 AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 his property among his three sons, and the youngest was 
 maltreated and robbed by the eldest and took refuge with 
 outlaws who made him their King. When he came on them 
 they were feasting under the trees ; 
 
 Then Gamelyn under the Wood looked right, 
 Seven score of young men he saw well adight, 
 All set at meat in company about. 
 
 In Lodge's version Rosader found a banished King in the 
 Forest : " It chanced that Gerismond, the lawful King of 
 France, banished by Torismond, who with a lusty crew of 
 outlaws lived in that Forest, that day in honour of his birth 
 made a feast to all his bold yeomen, and frolicked it with 
 store of wine and venison, sitting all at a long table under the 
 shadow of lemon trees." These lemon trees indicate that 
 he was thinking of a Southern Romance when he changed the 
 old tale of adventure to a Pastoral Story. There were no 
 women and no shepherds in it and the wicked eldest brother 
 was hanged at the end of it ; but a Pastoral Story needed 
 amorous ladies and impossible shepherds and a fortunate 
 close. 
 
 It may be that when he set his story in France and named 
 the old knight Sir John de Bordeaux, recalling Sir Huon de 
 Bordeaux, he reminded his readers that these stories were 
 French. And Shakespeare may have meant to do this when 
 he called the old Knight Sir Rowland de Bois and his son 
 Orlando, for he probably knew that these were the French 
 and Italian forms of one name. 
 
 The English Pastoral convention established by Sidney's 
 Arcadia was borrowed from France. The Latin Bucolics 
 had a different falsity. The Greek goatherd's flock was as 
 dear to him as his lost Amaryllis ; but Corydon neglected his 
 task to wander under the beeches and Mopsus carved his 
 song on their boles and Gallus sighed to emulate him, — 
 
 Certum est in silvis, inter spelaea ferarum, 
 Malle pati tenerisque meos incidere amorcs 
 Arboribus. 
 
 When Longus wrote The Lesbian Pastorals of Daphnis 
 and Chloe in the Second Century or at the beginning of the 
 
 133
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Third he copied Virgil's dangerous Forest, though he kept the 
 earher Greek veracity, as when he said that the Rustics sang 
 with the harsh and grating voices of peasants as if they had 
 been labouring with mattock and hoe. His Romance was a 
 Pastoral because Daphnis and Chloe were foundlings who had 
 been adopted by shepherds, and its pleasant adventures were 
 naidicov naiyvia^ the sports of children. The Pastorals 
 founded on Boccaccio's Ameto were older and they were 
 French in their mood ; the shepherdesses in them were like 
 Watteau's pretty ladies who minced among impossible sheep. 
 This falsity is not to be found in Aucassin et Nicolete, 
 which seems to be of Arabic origin and to have been written 
 in the Thirteenth Century. When Nicoletc came to the 
 Forest she slept on its brink because she was afraid of its 
 dangers : " Si s'endormi dusqu'au demain a haute prime, 
 que li pastorel isgirent de la vile et geterent lor bestes entre le 
 bos et la riviere, si se traient d'une part a une mout belle 
 fontaine qui estoit au cief de la Forest, si estendirent une 
 cape se missent lor pain sus." These Rustics lived in a town 
 and took their cows and sheep to pasture between the trees 
 and the river and feasted on bread and water beside the 
 spring in the Forest and they were silent and shy. The 
 other whom Aucassin met was drawn from life, " grans estoit 
 et mervellex et lais et hidex." So was the peasant in the 
 twenty-fourth Canto of Dante's Injerno : 
 
 Lo villanello, a cui la roba manca, 
 Si leve e guarda, e vede la campagna 
 Bianchcggiar tutta . . . 
 
 e prende suo vincastro, 
 E fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia. 
 
 And the later pictures of the amorous peasants in the Pastorals, 
 
 and in the Stornelli were known to be false, as Lorenzo de' 
 Medici proved when he wrote truly in Neticia da Barberino. 
 When Boccaccio, who had a French mother and was 
 probably born in Paris, wrote his Ameto about 1342, he took 
 his laughing method from France in the same way as he based 
 his Filicopo on Floris et Blanch ejieur. And the French Kings 
 of Naples helped to make the Songs of Provence familiar in 
 Italy and to teach the Italians a fanciful gaiety which was 
 
 134
 
 AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 alien to them. The next important Pastoral, the rambling 
 Romance called Arcadia, was written about 1489 by Jacopo 
 Sannazaro, a Neapolitan of Spanish descent who served a 
 French King of Naples. The Ameto and the Arcadia were 
 copied by two Portuguese Writers, Bernardim Ribeiro, who 
 wrote Menina e Mo^a before 1523, and Jorge de Monte- 
 mayor or Montemor, who wrote his unfinished Diana 
 Enamorada in CastiHan about 1542 though it does not seem 
 to have been printed before 1589. The Arcadia and the 
 Diana Enamorada seem to have been the chief sources of 
 Phihp Sidney's Arcadia. Apart from this derivation from 
 Boccaccio's Ameto these were French in their mood, for all 
 the earlier writers of Spain and Portugal were taught by 
 their neighbours in the hills of Provence. 
 
 There were few flocks of sheep in Italy or Spain or Provence, 
 and the peasants in those Countries were apt to tend goats 
 on the hills or swine under the trees. The few shepherds 
 there had to find pasture under the trees because the open 
 country was parched. This was one of the reasons why the 
 shepherds in Pastorals inhabited Forests, and besides, these 
 provided adventures with wild beasts and with robbers. 
 This Woodland nature of the Pastoral Stories helped to make 
 them absurd in England where the shepherds were numerous 
 and every one knew that they seldom danced in the Woods 
 or wrote Sonnets or carved their loves on the trees. 
 
 The English Woodland Romances were the Robin Hood 
 Ballads and Plays which were mainly concerned with feasting 
 and fighting under the greenwood tree and were imitated in 
 France in such Comedies as Robin et Marion. The men in 
 the Pit found the Pastoral convention ridiculous. So did 
 Shakespeare and he turned it to ridicule. As Tou Like It 
 is an ironical Comedy. Instead of interpreting the tale by 
 a setting as he did in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream and The 
 Taming of the Shrew, he provided a wise man and a Fool to 
 censure its folly. 
 
 Lodge's imitation of Lyly's Eufhues and of Sidney's 
 Arcadia retained the form invented in France, the alternate 
 employment of Prose and Verse which is seen in Aucassin et 
 Nicolete with the headings " Or dient et content et fabloient " 
 and " Or se cante." This form seems to show that such 
 
 135
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Romances were told alternately by a man who recited and 
 another who sang; but by his time Verse was only employed 
 to decorate the story with " Sonnets " (which were amorous 
 verses not bound by a particular form) or with Eclogues such 
 as the one between Montanus and Corydon inserted in 
 Rosalynde. 
 
 Lyly may have copied his Euphues from the traditional 
 account of Euripides who was said to have been dissolute and 
 to have ended his days in solitude in a cavern at Salamis. 
 And Lodge may have seen his own character in the picture 
 of Euphues (who had sinned in his Youth and had wandered 
 and had retired to be calm) though he was still restless when 
 he was writing this tale during a long voyage at Sea. 
 
 Lodge wrote in his Address to the Gentlemen Readers : 
 " To be brief, gentlemen, room for a soldier and sailor that 
 gives you the fruit of his labours that he wrote in the Ocean, 
 where every line was wet in the surge and every humorous 
 passion counterchecked with a storm. If you like it, so ; 
 and yet I will be yours in duty if you be mine in favour." 
 He took the more pleasure in this dream of the Woods because 
 he was far from land when he wrote. And Lope de Vega 
 resembled him in this, if it is true that he wrote his Pastoral 
 Novel Arcadia on board the San Juan with the Armada. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare took delight too in Rosalynde 
 because he was an exile from the Forest of Arden when it was 
 published ten years after Euphues and his England and in the 
 same year as Sidney's Arcadia and the first Books of The Faery 
 Queen. In those days it was in the height of the fashion and 
 he was young enough to appreciate its fanciful charm and 
 merry enough to parody it ; but in 1599 the fashion had faded 
 with Queen Elizabeth's enjoyment of it, and he treated the 
 story smilingly, retaining its charm while he was denying its 
 truth with Touchstone and Jaqucs. 
 
 There are signs of haste or change in this Play, as when 
 Celia is described by Le Beau as taller than Rosalind who 
 claims the boy's part because she is " more than common 
 tall," though Orlando (of whom Phcbe admits that he is not 
 very tall) says that she is just as high as his heart. This seems 
 to show that Rosalind was meant to be short (probably to suit 
 the Boy-player who represented her) and that her own state- 
 
 136
 
 AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 ment of her height was from Lodge " I, thou seest, am of a 
 tall stature and would very well become the person and 
 apparel of a page." But Le Beau's statement is contradicted 
 by Oliver : 
 
 The boy is fair, 
 
 Of female favour, and bestows himself 
 
 Like a ripe sister ; the woman low 
 
 And browner than her brother. 
 
 Orlando's impossible failure to recognise Rosalind is also from 
 Lodge, — " Rosader, who took him flat for a shepherd's swain, 
 made him this answer." So is the Wicked Brother's repentance 
 and his fortunate marriage. In Lodge's version Rosader knew 
 Saladin but was not recognised till he said, " Know Saladin 
 that thou hast met with Rosader." In Shakespeare's they 
 knew one another but the repentance became more sudden 
 and only caused by the rescue. In one point his tale is wilder 
 than Lodge's, for the second Wicked Brother, Duke Frederick, 
 is quickly reformed but King Torismond is defeated and 
 killed. In the same way as Lodge had softened the Tale of 
 Gamelyn by reforming and sparing Saladin, Shakespeare now 
 softened Rosalyiide by converting Duke Frederick, and the 
 story became less credible in each of its stages. 
 
 These Midsummer Comedies might all have been named 
 Airs Well that Ends Well or As Ton Like It or What Tou Will. 
 In this Play Jaques says, " Come, more, another stanzo — call 
 you 'em stanzo ? " and Amiens replies, " What you will, 
 Monsieur Jaques." Its name was probably suggested by 
 Lodge's Preface to Rosalynde, " if you like it, so," and it gave 
 a clue to the meaning and the mood of this Comedy. 
 
 There seems to be one notable misprint in this Play. 
 When Jaques parodies " Under the Greenwood Tree," with 
 its call, " come hither, come hither, come hither," in his 
 reply, 
 
 If it do come to pass 
 That any man turn Ass, 
 
 he is now made to sing, 
 
 Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame. 
 
 It has been alleged that these cryptic words are a Welsh or 
 
 137
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 an Irish call, but it may be that they were the Latin for " come 
 hither," " Hue veni " (as in Catullus, 
 
 Hue veni nivco gerens 
 Luteum pede soccum), 
 
 pronounced in the old way, and that when he was asked, 
 " What's that Ducdamc ? " he answered, " 'Tis a Greek 
 invocation to call fools into a circle," because the question 
 had shown that it was Greek to the illiterate Amiens. If so, 
 it may also have been Greek to the Printer who decided to 
 put " Ducdame " instead. 
 
 The name Jaques was borne by Englishmen then, for 
 instance by Captain Jaques, who fought under Sir William 
 Stanley in Flanders, but it is a French name here, like Amiens 
 and Le Beau, and a sign that all the outlaws are French. 
 This is shown too when we are told in the first Scene that the 
 banished Duke is " in the Forest of Arden and a many merry 
 men with him, and there they live like the old Robin Hood 
 of England," and that Orlando is " the stubborncst young 
 fellow of France." 
 
 This Forest of Arden is never said to be Enghsh. Still, 
 when in the fifth Act a Rustic named William, who is aged 
 five and twenty and is content with his wit and wisdom and 
 wealth, thanks God that he was born in a Forest, Shakespeare 
 may have been thinking of himself and his home. This may 
 have been a sign that this Play was first written when he was 
 aged about five and twenty. Though it is now mature and 
 serene the changes or contradictions in it may show that there 
 was an earlier form. He was aged about twenty-six in 1590, 
 the year in which Rosalynde and Arcadia were printed, and 
 he may have parodied a prevalent fashion then as he did in 
 Love's Labour's Lost, instead of returning to it nine years or so 
 after it was ruling at Court. This would be probable if we 
 could be sure that he drew Lodge as Jaques and George 
 Whetstone as Touchstone. 
 
 Thomas Lodge, who was a son of a Lord Mayor of London, 
 was born about 1558 and after education at Oxford and 
 Lincoln's Inn abandoned the Law for Literature. He seems 
 to have led a dissolute life when he was young, and he was 
 given to travel ; he sailed to the Canaries with Clarke in 
 
 138
 
 AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 1588 and to Brazil with Cavendish in 1591 and visited 
 France several times. Early in 1589 he published Scilla's 
 Metamorphoses, Enterlaced with the unfortunate Love of 
 Glaucus, afterwards called Glaucus and Scilla, which seems to 
 have been imitated by Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis. And 
 he seems to have renounced work for the Stage then, for he 
 vowed in it, 
 
 To write no more of that whence shame doth grow, 
 
 Or tie my pen to penny-knaves delight, 
 
 But live with fame and so for fame to write. 
 
 In the next year he published Rosalynde : Euphues'' Golden 
 Legacy found in his cell at Silexdra. About 1596 he changed 
 his Religion (becoming a Catholic) and his manner of life and 
 married and left London for Essex. After this he became a 
 physician, but devoted his leisure to translating Josephus and 
 Seneca. He was named in the Recusant List of 1604 and 
 seems to have been in trouble for the Gunpowder Plot, which 
 was planned at White Webbs in Essex, for he fled to France 
 in 1605 and did not obtain leave to return till 1610. And he 
 died about nine years after Shakespeare. 
 
 Lodge's Romances and his Poems were melancholy : 
 Rosalynde, for instance, is full of mournful reflections. If 
 Shakespeare drew him as Jaques, who had been a libertine 
 and a wanderer, he may have added some touches after Lodge 
 had become a Convertite in 1596. It may have amused him 
 to make Lodge (who had written Diogenes his Singularities) 
 a cynical critic of Euphuism's dainty devices. And the fact 
 that Lodge was in his Youth a close friend of Robert Greene's 
 and had written a Looking-glass for London and England with 
 him about 1587 might have suggested another reason for this. 
 
 We do not know when George Whetstone was born, though 
 we can guess that this was about 1544, ^^^ when he died, for 
 there is no trace of him after 1587 when he published a 
 version of the Babington Plot. Like Lodge, he provided 
 Shakespeare with the base of a Play, for Measure for Measure 
 was partly founded on his Promos and Cassandra, printed in 
 1578. If, like Greene, he resented this liberty, Shakespeare 
 may have drawn him with Lodge as Touchstone of whom 
 
 139
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Celia says in the first Act that Fortune " hath sent this natural 
 for our whetstone, for always the dullness of the fool is the 
 whetstone of the wits." It so happened that Whetstone had 
 published The 1 ouch stone for the Times in 1584. The clownish 
 Fool's part in this Comedy was to act as a whetstone for wit 
 and a touchstone for the pleasant illusions. 
 
 If we could be certain that these two men (who were 
 probably hostile to Shakespeare) had been drawn in this Play, 
 this would suggest that there had been an earlier version, 
 partly because Lodge had renounced work for the Stage in 
 1589 and London in 1596, and we have no record of Whetstone 
 after 1587, and partly because Jaques and Touchstone, as we 
 have them, are Characters too admirable to be caricatures. 
 Shakespeare may have sketched Jaques and Touchstone and 
 many other Characters from men of his time, for we have 
 evidence that he was supposed to copy his Characters from 
 living men often ; but if he did, he transformed theiri by 
 putting his own nature in them. Even if there remained a 
 resemblance to Essex or Southampton in Hamlet or to 
 Burghley in Polonius or to Ben Jonson in Falstaff or to Marston 
 in Pistol or to Lodge in Jaques, all these had become children 
 of Shakespeare. And Jaques seems to speak with Shake- 
 speare's own voice. 
 
 Shakespeare does not seem to have taken the part of 
 Jaques, if we can trust the legend that he was seen as Old 
 Adam (whose name he borrowed from Lodge, who took it 
 from Gamelyii)^ for these come on the Stage together. But 
 that legend may deal with a later time. If we could be 
 certain that he chose such a part as Old Adam in 1599 we 
 could infer that he was tired of the Stage. 
 
 Whether Touchstone was drawn from Whetstone or 
 merely christened with intent to annoy him, he now belongs 
 to the group of wise Fools with Fcste in Twelfth Night and 
 Lavache in AWs Well that Ends Well and the nameless Fool 
 in King Lear. All these are Court-jesters. They were 
 not copied from the Vice in the Morals or any other jesters 
 in the Morality or Miracle Plays. They may have been 
 suggested by Greene's Ralph Simncl (the King's Fool in 
 Friar Bacon), or Nashe's Will Smnmer, but if so, they were 
 derived from Court-fools. Nashe's Will Summer probably 
 
 140
 
 AS YOU LIKE IT 
 
 took more than his name from King Henry the Eighth's 
 favourite Jester. 
 
 George Cavendish told in his Life of Cardinal Wolsey 
 how when the fallen Cardinal parted from Norris on Putney- 
 Heath he sent his Fool to the King, perhaps because he 
 wished to retain one faithful friend at the Court : " ' I 
 am sorry,' quoth he, ' that I have no condign token to send 
 to the King. But if ye would, at this my request, present 
 the King with this poor Fool, I trust his Highness would 
 accept him well, for surely for a nobleman's pleasure he is 
 worth a thousand Pounds.' So Master Norris took the 
 Fool with him, with whom my Lord was fain to send six 
 of tall yeomen to conduct and convey the Fool to the Court, 
 for the poor Fool took on and fired so in such rage when he 
 saw that he must needs depart from my Lord. Yet not- 
 withstanding, they conveyed him with Master Norris to the 
 Court where the King received him most gladly." This 
 poor Fool, Master WiUiams otherwise Patch, who raged 
 and wept when he was dragged from the master whom the 
 wise had forsaken, may have been the chief model of the 
 Fool in King Lear. 
 
 I think that Lavache in AlVs Well that Ends Well was 
 the first of Shakespeare's Court-jesters because he is the 
 worst, and he may have been copied from Greene's Ralph 
 Simnel. Feste, the malicious Fool in Twelfth Night, seems 
 an improved version of him and may have been partly drawn 
 from Queen Elizabeth's Fool, Pace, of whom Bacon recorded 
 in his Apophthegms how " Pace, the bitter Fool, was not suffered 
 to come at Queen Elizabeth because of his bitter humour," 
 and how when she relented and said to him, " Come on. 
 Pace, now we shall hear our faults," Pace replied, " I do not 
 use to talk of that all the town talks of." But the loving 
 Fool in King Lear, who pines away when he loses^ X^ordelia, 
 and the kindly Fool Touchstone, who rivals him in fidelity, 
 have little in common with them except their wit and their 
 singing. These two, I think, were drawn at a time when 
 Shakespeare had learnt to value love more than laughter. 
 
 Donald Lupton wrote of the Players in his London and the 
 Country Carbonadoed, " they practice a wise order, for most 
 commonly the wisest man is the Fool." This was Touch- 
 
 141
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 stone's view when he said, " I do now remember a saying, 
 * the Fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man doth know 
 himself to be a fool,' " and it may have been Shakespeare's 
 when he was wise enough to know his own folly. 
 
 Sir Walter Raleigh writes of this Comedy : " A minute 
 examination of this Play has given a curious result. No 
 single bird, or insect, or flower, is mentioned by name. The 
 words ' flower ' and ' leaf ' do not occur. The trees of the 
 Forest are the oak, the hawthorn, the palm-tree and the 
 olive. For animals, there are the deer, one lioness, and one 
 green and gilded snake. The season is not easy to determine ; 
 perhaps it is Summer ; we hear only of the biting cold and 
 the wintry wind." These things are natural in a tapestry- 
 picture, like the Narrative Poems, and it may be that this 
 fanciful atmosphere is one of the signs that Shakespeare 
 had written a form of this Play when he wrote Venus and 
 Adonis and The Two Gentlemen of Verona ; but, if he did, he 
 transformed it when he was able to draw robust English 
 girls and boys and his two wisest Jesters, Touchstone and 
 Jaques. The first scene may have been meant to be French, 
 like the scene of Love''s Labour^s Lost, but all the Characters 
 of the Play are now English though the Forest of Arden is 
 in the Country of Dreams. 
 
 The Taming of the Shrew, which was printed next in the 
 Folio of 1623, is a boisterous farce. It does not seem to 
 have been printed before 1623. Its place in the Folio sug- 
 gests that it was revised after As Tou Like It was written. 
 If that Play was written at Stratford during the Summer of 
 1599, this one may have been hastily revised at that time 
 for a performance by his Company there. This was a farce 
 fit to amuse the Rustics of Stratford, and the local allusions 
 which were added to it would have been welcome to them 
 though lost on the Londoners. Mr. Saintsbury suggests 
 in The Cambridge History of Literature that it was written 
 at Stratford for a local performance. 
 
 Coleridge in his Classification of 1802 put the old Taming 
 of The Shrew and the old King John as transition works 
 (Uebcrgangswerke) at the beginning and couples the present 
 form of this Play with The Merry Wives of Windsor as 
 
 142
 
 THE TAMING OF THE SHREW 
 
 " worked-up afresh (umgearbeitet) " between the later King 
 John and Measure for Measure. I think that this guess was 
 nearly right though I suspect that there was a still older 
 form which Shakespeare adapted. 
 
 The oldest form survives in the jingling verses, for 
 instance, 
 
 And as he stooped again to take it up, 
 This mad-brained bridegroom took him such a cuff. 
 That down fell priest and book and book and priest, 
 " Now take them up," quoth he, " if any list." 
 
 The second form is in the early Blank Verse : 
 
 You wrong me, Signor Gremio ; give me leave, 
 I am a gentleman of Verona, Sir. 
 
 The last form is seen in some of the Prose, for instance, 
 Biondello's speech in the third Act beginning " Why, Petru- 
 chio is coming in a new hat and old jerkin " and in the 
 Induction. 
 
 In the same way as the setting of A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream explained that Fairy-tale to the Court the Induction 
 brought the people of Stratford into touch with this farce. 
 Christopher Sly had Bottom's brief illusion of greatness. 
 The Rustics who saw this farce, which had been written 
 for a different audience, were in Christopher's place. The 
 Players were brought in, as they were in A Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream and in Hamlet^ to act a Play within a Play, 
 as they did in all their performances since all the spectators 
 were acting the Tragical Comedies of their private affairs. 
 
 We can trace Christopher Sly's deception to The Sleeper 
 Awakened m The Arabian Nights^ Entertainments vAnch. relates 
 how the Caliph Haroun Al-Raschid deceived Abou Hassan. 
 The many authors who imitated this trick (for instance, 
 Calderon in La Vida es Sueno) were repeating a tale told 
 in forgotten days in the East. When Duke Philip of Bur- 
 gundy played this trick about 1440 (according to Luis Vivez), 
 he was acting a farce already long familiar in Spain through 
 the old stories imported by the Moors of Granada. 
 
 Shakespeare may have found his Induction in The Taming 
 of A Shrew, which was printed in 1594, 1596 and 1607. 
 
 143
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 That old farce may have been the foundation of this one as 
 the troublesome Reign of King John was of King John or it 
 may have been a separate version of an earUer Play. For 
 instance, the lines in the last Act of The Taming of The 
 ShrezVf 
 
 Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot, 
 And place your hands below your husband's foot : 
 In token of which duty, if he please. 
 My hand is ready, may it do him ease, 
 
 do not seem later than the similar ones in The Taming of A 
 
 Shrew, 
 
 Obey them, love them, keep and nourish them, 
 If they by any means do want our helps, 
 Laying our hands under their feet to tread. 
 
 There are two tales in this farce. The one about 
 Bianca's three lovers was borrowed from George Gascoigne's 
 Supposes, and the other, the story of the taming, is traced to 
 the Moors of Granada and through them to the East. When 
 Don Juan Manuel, who died in 1347, wrote El Conde Lucanor 
 he took most of " the fifty pleasant tales of Patronio " from 
 the neighbouring Moors. His tale of " What happened 
 to a Young Man on his Wedding-day " related that there 
 were two Moors who were friends and that one of them had 
 a promising son and the other had a termagant daughter. 
 In it the son insisted on marrying the termagant because 
 she was rich though his father and hers tried to dissuade 
 him, and he subdued her on the wedding-day by feigning 
 ferocity, killing a dog and a cat and a horse for disobeying 
 his orders. This was repeated in the Notti Piacevoli di 
 Straparola and in the Novelliero Italiano and in Z^ Collection 
 de Legrande WAussy and elsewhere. It was probably 
 invented in Persia, like most of the Arabian Nights'' Enter- 
 tainments, for the humour of such Sanskrit collections as 
 the Ocean of Tales (Kathasaritsagara) is milder and is more 
 lenient to women. 
 
 Shakespeare may have thought it Italian though when 
 he set it in Padua he followed the fashion of that time, as 
 he did when he linked The Tern-pest with Milan and two 
 
 144
 
 ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL 
 
 Plays with Verona and two' with Venice. By using the 
 famiHar device* of the Induction he transported the story 
 to England and labelled it as one fit to amuse Christopher 
 Sly. 
 
 This Play has often been coupled with The Merry Wives 
 of Windsor (for instance by Coleridge and Mr. Dowden) 
 and it may be that both were revised about the same time to 
 please the townsmen of Stratford. This would agree with 
 the view that The Merry Wives of Windsor, as we have it, 
 was written about 1599, and it would help to explain the 
 possible statement in Kemp's Nine Days'' Wonder that the 
 merry host of the Inn was drawn from John Shakespeare. 
 It may be that in these Plays Shakespeare drew his neigh- 
 bours at home comically in the same way as he used names 
 which are to be found in the Recusant Lists of Warwickshire, 
 such as Page, Bardolph, Bates, Bolt and Fluellen, for his 
 Comical Characters. 
 
 The date of AWs Well that Ends Well, the Comedy printed 
 after The Tanning of The Shrew in the Folio of 1623, is obscured 
 by revisions. This Play does not seem to have been printed 
 before the Folio of 1623. Coleridge in his Classification of 
 1 8 19 put it among the earliest Plays, but he probably meant 
 this to be subject to his note in his Classification of 1802, 
 where he ranked it as the first of the Second Epoch " after- 
 wards worked-up afresh (umgearbeitet) especially Parolles." 
 
 Sir Israel Gollancz, who inclines to take it to be Lovers 
 Labour's Won (as Coleridge did), writes, " The Play was 
 probably originally a companion Play to Love'^s Labour'' s Lost 
 and was written about the years 1 590-1 592." I think 
 that the second form of this Play was written before 
 the revision of Twelfth Night and suggested it. Three 
 versions are visible, — an Italianate Comedy and a skilful 
 revision in the mood of Twelfth Night and a Tragi-comedy 
 written with a darker intention. The second form is to be 
 seen, for instance, when the Countess debates with her 
 Clown or Jester, Lavache. It is the principal one, for the 
 Tragi-comical version, which was written when Shakespeare 
 had begun to be elderly, was never completed and so the 
 Play was left a Comedy spoilt. 
 
 145 K
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Parollcs is impossible because he is drawn in contra- 
 dictory moods. The Parolles of the first Act could never 
 have been fooled in the fourth. And the Helena who 
 converses with him in the beginning could never have chosen 
 to tell her grief in a Sonnet. Some of the Editors have 
 seen fit to reject that talk of virginity because they consider 
 it a blot on the Play ; but I think that it survives from the 
 first form in the manner of the second revision. So does the 
 Countess's advice to her son which is expanded by Polonius 
 in Hamlet, — 
 
 Love all, trust a few, 
 Do wrong to none ; be able for thine enemy 
 Rather in power than use ; and keep thy friend 
 Under thy own life's key. 
 
 This was a conventional opening and it had been used in 
 Rosalynde when the dying Knight says, " Therefore, my 
 sons, choose a friend as the Hyperborei do the metals, sever 
 them from the ore with fire and let them not bide the stamp 
 before they be current : so try them and then trust." In 
 this Play the advice is wasted on Bertram as is Helena's love. 
 He survives from the days when Shakespeare could admire 
 such a boy. In the first fo]>m he was meant to be admirable 
 and Helena's love was the same as the lady's in A Lover's 
 Complaint. The last Helena could never have loved him or 
 forced herself upon him or stooped to the stale trick which 
 Mariana employed in Measure for Measure : her wisdom 
 and nobility clash with a tale fit to amuse the merry ladies 
 of Florence. 
 
 I think that Twelfth Night or What Tou Will, the Comedy 
 printed next in the Folio of 1623, sprang from this Play. 
 We do not know when it was written, and we have no earlier 
 edition of it. 
 
 The Twelfth Night after Christmas, which was the 
 Feast of the Epiphany, January the sixth, had been associated 
 with Plays since El Misterio de Los Reyes Majos had been 
 written for it about the Twelfth Century. It marked the 
 close of the rejoicings at Christmas. Shakespeare's Company 
 acted at Greenwich at Christmas in 1594, ^595> ^59^' ^59^ 
 
 146
 
 TWELFTH NIGHT 
 
 and 1599 and at Whitehall in 1597 and at Richmond (which 
 the Queen called " a Winter box for her Age ") in 1600. 
 In some of these years, for instance, in 1597 and 1600 (and 
 perhaps in all, except in 1594) they acted on Twelfth Night. 
 Sir Sidney Lee says that this Play was designed for the Twelfth 
 Night of 1 599-1 600 and adds " the alternative title. What 
 Tou Will, repeats the easy levity of As Tou Like Ity While 
 this casual name may show that this Play was first seen on 
 Twelfth Night at Court, it may have also meant that there 
 was a tone of Christmas jollity in it instead of a mocking 
 Carnival mood. 
 
 John Manningham's Diary proves that a form of this 
 Play was seen at the Middle Temple in February, 1601-1602 : 
 he wrote, " At our feast we had a Play called Twelfth Night 
 or What Tou Will. Much like the Comedy of Errors or 
 Menechmi in Plautus, and most like and near to that in 
 Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the 
 steward believe his lady-widow was in love with him by 
 counterfeiting a letter as from his lady, in general terms, 
 telling him what she liked best in him and prescribing his 
 gesture in smiling, his apparel, etc., and then when he came 
 to practise, making him believe they took him to be mad." 
 
 One change is indicated in this, for Olivia is not described 
 as a widow in the Play as we have it. This change was 
 probably made to leave her masterful courting of Viola and 
 Sebastian more seemly by reducing her age. While she 
 was a widow this Play was still nearer to JWs Well that Ends 
 Well, a development of the Scene in that Comedy (the third 
 in the first Act), where the Countess of Rousillon consults 
 with her steward. Malvolio may have been made by com- 
 bining the solemn steward with the fantastic Parolles who, 
 when he was fooled, confessed himself to Morgan whom he 
 supposed to be a Friar. 
 
 I think that a first form of this Play closely linked with 
 The Comedy of Errors was written after the first version of 
 AlVs Well that Ends Well. I infer this from the fact that 
 the story of the deception is heartless. Shakespeare could 
 not have chosen a noble gentleman's heartbreak as the theme 
 of a jest after he had drawn Jaques. The noble strain in 
 Malvolio may have been added in the riper days when he 
 
 H7
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 changed the Comical Shylock to a suffering man shamefully 
 used. Malvolio, who began as a laughing-stock, a fool and 
 a hypocrite, was changed, I think, to_a _gentleman blinded 
 by Love and nearly driven to madness by a conspiracy of 
 drunkards^ and fools. In the first form drunkenness and mad- 
 ness were Comical. In the last form Malvolio is pitied, 
 and though Sir Toby Belch keeps his name (and justifies 
 it when he says, " a plague o' these pickle herrings ") he is 
 amiably fuddled and destined to be reformed by Maria. 
 Some students complain that a man of his rank should not 
 have married a servant, but in doing this they forget that 
 she was a gentlewoman. 
 
 Malvolio's dream was a version of The Sleeper Awakened. 
 His misfortune was nearer to Abou Hassan's than Sly's or 
 Bottom's had been, for he shared his imprisonment in chains 
 as a madman. But in the last form of the Play he was more 
 akin to Don Quixote than to any of them. 
 
 It may be that after Shakespeare had written the second 
 revision of AlVs Well that Ends Well he altered Much Ado 
 About Nothing, which was printed in a Quarto edition in 
 1600, and then turned to Twelfth Night. The two themes 
 in this Play, the Error's Tale and the deception, may have 
 been written first as separate Interludes, but they are now 
 linked with such skill that the customary Errors become 
 only a setting for Malvolio's mistake. The theme of the 
 Interlude of the Errors was old. He may have found it in 
 the Italian Comedies called Gli higaiini and Gli Ingannati, 
 which were partly derived from Ariosto's Suppositi ; but 
 there was no need of a particular model for this hackneyed 
 device. The Interlude of Malvolio's deception must have 
 seemed probable to people who when they heard him reflect, 
 " there is example for it : the lady of the Strachy married 
 the yeoman of the wardrobe," remembered how the Tudors 
 had risen because King Henry the Sixth's widow had married 
 Owen Tudor, a yeoman of her wardrobe, and how the second 
 Duchess of Suftolk of King Henry the Eighth's time and 
 the next Duchess of Suffolk had married men of similar 
 rank (Richard Bertie and Adrian Stokes), and how the widow 
 of the eighth Earl of Northumberland married her steward, 
 Francis Fitton, in 1588. And Olivia's wooing of Viola, 
 
 148
 
 THE WINTER'S TALE 
 
 whose rank was nothing to her and seemed to her lower 
 than Malvoho's, explained why he considered her encour- 
 agement possible. 
 
 This Play is linked, for instance, with Pericles and The 
 Winter'' s Tale and The Tempest by the shipwreck and its part 
 in the story, and with Romeo and Juliet and As Tou Like It 
 and The Merchant of Venice by the tone of the love-making 
 and with The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona and Much Ado About Nothing by smartness and a 
 juvenile gaiety. If Shakespeare wrote it first at this time 
 he was ringing the changes on the old happy themes before 
 he abandoned them. 
 
 This Play is a triumph of Stage-craft. When it is seen 
 on the Stage all its elements chime together like the notes 
 of a song. This sets it apart from the other Midsummer 
 Comedies except the last version of Much Ado About Nothing, 
 which was probably written about the same time. It 
 may be that he wrote two other Comedies, Falstaff's in King 
 Henry the Fourth and the fourth Act of The Winter^s Tale, 
 and changed the first form of The Tempest from a fantastic 
 Romance of Magic founded on Pericles to a Fairy-tale Comedy 
 linked with A Midsummer Night's Dream, and combined 
 two juvenile Plays in a satirical version of Troilus and Cressida 
 about this time before he turned to his Tragedies. 
 
 The Winter^s Tale is put next to Twelfth Night in the 
 First Folio, but this would have been done if Heminge 
 and Condell had looked on it as the last of the Comedies, 
 whether it had been revised in these days or at the end of 
 his work. Only the fourth Act is a Comedy. Though it 
 resembles As Tou Like It in many ways it differs from 
 it in lacking the ironical mood, which may have been due 
 to the fact that As Tou Like It began as a parody, like Love''s 
 Labour^ s Lost, though, it also prevails in A Midsummer Night^s 
 Dream. This Comedy is a delighted glimpse of Rustical 
 England, in spite of the fact that it is set in Greene's 
 Country, " Bohemia." It may have been written at Strat- 
 ford when Shakespeare had begun to enjoy his home in the 
 fields though he was still fettered to the trade of the Stage. 
 
 A second form of The Tempest may have been written 
 there too in a domestic serenity, and retouched in 1603 as a 
 
 149
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 farewell to his trade. Troilus and Cressida may have been 
 rewritten in London in the War of the Poets. But the 
 metrical tests are enough to prove that these Plays were all 
 revised later, and Falstaff's Comedy shines in the dark 
 Chronicle Pageant ; so Twelfth Night, as we have it, is the 
 last of the Comedies. The sympathy due now to Malvolio 
 helps to explain why it was the last. In the same way as 
 Falstaff's laughter announced the end of the false Chronicle 
 Pageant, the pity shown now for Shylock and Malvolio 
 proved that the time for jesting was over. 
 
 In Twelfth Night the insistence that all this is a Midsummer 
 Dream haunts the merry fooling again. Sebastian says, 
 
 What relish is in this ? how runs the stream ? 
 Or I am mad or else this is a dream : 
 Let Fancy still my sense in Lethe steep. 
 If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep. 
 
 Fabian says, " here is more matter for a May morning." 
 And the singing Clown, Feste, ends these happy dreams with 
 his song : 
 
 When that I was and a little tiny boy, 
 With hey ho ! the wind and the rain ! 
 A foolish thing was but a toy. 
 For the rain it raineth every day. 
 
 150
 
 THE CHRONICLE PAGEANT 
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON wrote in his General Observations 
 on Shakespeare^s Plays : " Shakespeare seems to have 
 designed that the whole series o£ actions from the beginning 
 of Richard the Second to the end of Henry the Fifth should 
 be considered by the reader as one work, upon one plan, 
 only broken into parts by the necessity of exhibition." It 
 may be that Shakespeare had no thought of a reader while 
 he furnished these Plays ; but his intention to unite them is 
 evident, and this is a justification of the Folio Order. He 
 may have written them as separate Scenes and united them 
 later according to the different Reigns. The Plays from 
 King Richard the Second to Ki7ig Henry the Sixth are a Pageant 
 of the Contest between the Houses of York and Lancaster 
 called the Wars of the Roses. The two other Histories, the 
 Life and Death of King John and the Famous History of 
 King Henry the Eighth, may have been planned as part of 
 another Pageant of the Contest between the Crown and 
 the Church. Though they are apart they are linked with 
 all the others as Scenes of a Chronicle Pageant of the Annals 
 of England. 
 
 Every Scene in this Pageant, except the second part of 
 King Richard the Second and a lost form of King Henry the 
 Eighth, was openly founded on older Plays such as The 
 Troublesome Reign of King John and The Famous Victories 
 of King Henry the Fifth and The True Tragedy of Richard 
 Duke of Tork and the Death of Good King Henry the Sixth, 
 which were probably made from the stock of the Traditional 
 Stage by Robert Greene and Thomas Kyd and George Peele 
 and others under the influence of Christopher Marlowe 
 or with his help. And the second part of Ki^ig Richard 
 the Second was an open imitation of Marlowe's Edward the 
 Second, which was entered in the Stationers' Register in 
 1593 and printed in 1594. 
 
 We know little about Christopher Marlowe except that 
 
 151
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 he was a shoemaker's son and was born in Canterbury in 
 1564, a couple of months before Shakespeare's birth, and 
 was educated at a Grammar-School there and at Benet 
 College at Cambridge (now called Corpus Christi) and 
 wrote some Poems and Plays and perished in 1593. He 
 seems to have left Cambridge in 1583, and at some time 
 between 1585 and 1588 he won sudden renown with his 
 magnificent Poem, T amburlaiiie . 
 
 Swinburne wrote of him : " He first, and he alone, 
 guided Shakespeare into the right way of work. His music, 
 in which there is no echo of any man's before, found an 
 echo in the more prolonged, but hardly more exalted, har- 
 mony of Milton. He was the greatest, the most daring and 
 inspired pioneer in all our Poetic Literature." 
 
 The dates of all Marlowe's Works are uncertain. He 
 may have begun with his translations from Ovid's Amores 
 and from Lucan's Pharsalia and the first form of Dido Queen 
 of Carthage at Cambridge, and may have written the two 
 Parts of ^ amburlaine next and The Massacre at Paris with 
 Kyd and then the beginning of The Jew of Malta and then 
 Edward the Second and then the two first Sestiads of Hero 
 and Leander and then part of the Tragical History of Doctor 
 Faustus. It is probable that he took some share in writing 
 Lusfs Dominion or the Lascivious Queen, which was printed 
 as his in 1657, and The Troublesome Reign of King John and 
 other Chronicle Histories ; but if so this was hack-work and 
 only written for bread. And he may have helped others 
 to write a version of Pericles. Only Tamburlaine and Edward 
 the Second have survived as he wrote them : only the first 
 Act and the first Scene of the second Act of The Jew of 
 Malta are his, and Doctor Faustus was degraded by others. 
 
 In his part of The Jew of Malta Barabas stands as a con- 
 queror, like Faustus and Tamburlaine. He is a Merchant- 
 King, sending his Argosies to ransack the World for him, 
 and he is a noble Jew, scorning the Christians. He says of 
 them, 
 
 I can see no fruits in all their faith 
 
 But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride ; 
 
 when he is robbed by them he says, 
 
 152
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 The man that dealeth righteously shall live ; 
 And which of you can charge me otherwise ? 
 
 and in the first Scene of the second Act he is shown praying 
 for help, 
 
 Oh Thou that with a fiery pillar led'st 
 The Sons of Israel through the dismal shades, 
 Light Abraham's offspring, and direct the hand 
 Of Abigail this night. 
 
 Then Marlowe cast the beginning of this Tragical Poem aside 
 and allowed others to tack a childish Melodrama to it when 
 he saw that no Company would dare to perform it, or he 
 finished it and others destroyed the rest of it and added the 
 part adapted to the popular taste. In the third Scene 
 of the second Act another Barabas, the villainous Jew of the 
 Traditional Stage, proclaims his enormity, 
 
 As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights. 
 And kill sick people groaning under walls ; 
 Sometimes I go about and poison wells. 
 
 We know that Doctor Faustus was maimed. Philip 
 Henslowe, after recording in his Diary that it had been 
 acted in 1594, wrote, " paid unto Thomas Dekker, the 20th 
 December, 1597, for additions to Faustus 20 shillings, and 
 five shillings for a Prologue to Tamburlaine,'' and recorded 
 a loan " unto the Company, the 22nd of November, 1602, 
 to pay unto William Birde and Samuel Rowley for their 
 additions to Doctor Faustus.''^ We can infer that all these 
 additions were in the Play when it was printed in 1604. 
 Marlowe may have left it unfinished when he was killed, 
 or his form of it may have been degraded to gratify the 
 taste of the Pit. I think that his version was a Tragical 
 Poem, and that all the Comical Scenes and the Prose were 
 added to it, mainly by Dekker whose rhythm is seen, for 
 instance, when Faustus says, " Though my heart pants and 
 (Quivers to remember that I have been a Student here these 
 thirty years. Oh ! would that I had never seen Wirtem- 
 berg, never read book." 
 
 When the second edition of Tamburlaine was printed in 
 
 153
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 1592 it had an Address to the Reader which said, " I have 
 purposely omitted and left out certain fond and frivolous 
 gestures, disguising and in my opinion far unmeet for the 
 matter, which I thought might prove more tedious unto the 
 wise than any way else to be regarded, though haply they 
 have been of some vain conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, 
 what time they were showed upon the Stage in their graced 
 deformities : nevertheless now to be mixtured in print with 
 such matters of worth, it would prove a great disaster to 
 so honourable and stately a history." This statement 
 agrees with the first lines of the Prologue, 
 
 From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
 And such conceits as Clownage keeps in pay, 
 We'll lead you to the stately tent of War, 
 
 and it is a proof that Tamburlaine was degraded with Clown- 
 age when it was first seen. 
 
 Marlowe seems to have founded Tamburlaine the Great 
 on two Spanish Books, Vida y Hazanas Del Gran Tamerlan, 
 printed in 1582 (an account of a journey made in the East 
 between 1403 and 1406 by Ruy Gonzales de Clavigo) and 
 Pedro Mexia's Life of Timur printed in 1543. And he may 
 have founded The Jew of Malta on a Spanish Romance, as 
 Mr. Addington Symonds suggested. His Barabas appears 
 to be a proud Spanish Jew, one of the many exiles from 
 Spain, and leaves the Stage saying, 
 
 Hermoso placer de los dineros. 
 
 The Spanish nature of Tamburlaine (which Robert Greene 
 recognized when he mocked that proud Poem in his Comical 
 History of Alphonsus King of Arragon) is seen in the begin- 
 ning, but the Spanish pride vanishes and only the Spanish 
 cruelty of the story is left. Marlowe's heart went to the 
 Spaniards because they were a Nation of conquerors, and 
 his Poetry thrilled with the dignity and splendour of Spain. 
 He lived in days when the English began to rival the Span- 
 iards : the men in the Pit appreciated the greatness of 
 Tamburlaifie because they were conscious that their Country 
 was great ; they rejoiced in heroic tales of old Wars and 
 
 154
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 exulted with King Henry the Fifth because they were 
 conquerors. 
 
 Mr. Tucker Brooke says in his Tudor Drama : " Tambur- 
 laine is, more than any other Drama, the source and original 
 of the EngHsh History Plays." But he also says that the 
 English Heroic Plays were coeval with the Religious Stage. 
 Marlowe transmuted the immemorial Chronicle Plays, and 
 he was the first to write English Tragedies as passionate Poems. 
 
 Marlowe himself is obscured like his Barabas and Faustus. 
 There is no portrait or description of him, and we only know 
 that he was called Haughty Tamerlane and Kind Kit. An 
 enemy's insult and the accident of death in a brawl have 
 left him defamed. 
 
 Robert Greene, who had already attacked him in his 
 Perimedes, printed in 1588, saying that two Gentlemen- 
 Poets had his Poetry in derision, " for that I could not make 
 my verses jet upon the Stage in Tragical buskins, every 
 word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bowbell, daring 
 God out of Heaven, with that Atheist, Tamburlaine," wrote 
 on his death-bed in A Groafszvorth of Wit bought with a 
 Million of Repentance : " Wonder not (for with thee will I 
 first begin) thou famous gracer of tragedians, that Greene, 
 who hath said with thee, like the fool in his heart, ' there 
 is no God,' should now give glory unto His greatness. Why 
 should thy excellent wit, His gift, be so blinded that thou 
 should'st give no glory to the giver ? . . . Defer not (with 
 me) till the last point of extremity, for little knowest thou 
 how in the end thou shalt be visited." 
 
 If Marlowe had been convicted of Atheism he would 
 have been burnt at the Stake, like Francis Kett, who may 
 have taught him at Cambridge (for he was a Fellow of Benet) 
 and was executed in 1589 for interpreting the Bible hereti- 
 cally. This public accusation was printed in 1592, and on 
 the eighteenth of May, 1593, the Privy Council issued a 
 warrant for his arrest. He was killed on the first of June 
 in that year, but his friend Thomas Kyd was arrested on 
 a suspicion of Atheism and is said to have been tortured to 
 extract an avowal. We know nothing more of Kyd except 
 that he died in poverty in 1595. Neither do we know how 
 Marlowe was killed. 
 
 155
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 One version says that he was stabbed on the deck of the 
 Golden Hiiid, which was moored then near Deptford as a 
 show and a drinking-booth, as it was when Paul Hentzner 
 wrote in 1598, " before taking the air down the River, the 
 first thing that struck us was the ship of that noble Pirate, 
 Sir Francis Drake," and when Ben Jonson wrote in Every 
 Man in His Humour , " Drake's old ship at Deptford may 
 sooner circle the World again." Another account says 
 that he was killed in a fight in the dark in the little village of 
 Deptford. Francis Meres wrote in Palladis Tamia : " As 
 the Poet Lycophron was shot to death by a certain rival of 
 his, so Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by a 
 bawdy serving-man, a rival in his lewd love." Somewhere 
 in that riverside village and in some obscure fray a fugitive 
 from Justice had perished, and though he was mourned by 
 some friends (as by Edward Blunt, for instance, who wrote 
 of him when he dedicated Hero and Leander to Thomas 
 Walsingham in 1598, " the impression of the man that hath 
 been dear to us living an after life in our memory ") no one 
 knew England's irreparable loss when he died. 
 
 Marlowe may have been only guilty of doubt. Accord- 
 ing to the Harleian Manuscripts, a few days before he died 
 an informer, Richard Bame or Baine, charged him with 
 saying that " if there is any God or good Religion it is in 
 the Papists, and that all Protestants are Hypocritical Asses." 
 The drift of his share of Faustus is profoundly rehgious. 
 This I take to be his last Play, and this, I think, was why 
 some one added to it, 
 
 Terminat hora diem, terminal auctor opus. 
 
 This play and Edward the Seco?id lack the young glory of 
 Tamburlat7ie, the pride of the song and the intoxicating 
 joy of the singer ; his voice is older in them, but it is 
 still noble and great. If (as most students have thought) 
 Edward the Second was written just before he was killed, 
 its severe concentration is not compatible with a riotous life. 
 The fact that the two Thomas Walsinghams of Scadbury 
 at Chislehurst (cousins of the more famous Sir Francis) 
 were his intimate friends and often his hosts in his last days, 
 as when the warrant was issued, is enough to throw doubt 
 
 156
 
 MARLOWE AND SHAKESPEARE 
 
 on the legend that he fell in a drunken brawl. Even accord- 
 ing to Greene he was a Gentleman-Poet, though (apart 
 from his character) his claim to that rank depended on his 
 education at Cambridge. 
 
 The issue of the warrant against him seems to have been 
 a part of an attempt to destroy Sir Walter Ralegh, who 
 was accused of Atheism too, but succeeded in defending 
 himself. This would explain why the Queen's Ministers 
 took the trouble to persecute two writers of Plays who cannot 
 have been of any importance in the eyes of the State though 
 they were the two men who taught Shakespeare how to 
 write Tragedies. Marlowe may have been killed while he 
 was resisting an attempt to arrest him. The man who 
 killed him alleged that he had been attacked without cause 
 and that Marlowe's brain had been pierced by his own dagger, 
 and the acceptance of this improbable story may be a sign 
 that it was advisable to cover the truth. 
 Marlowe died before he was thirty. 
 
 Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight. 
 And burned is Apollo's laurel bough, 
 
 and even to these last verses of Faustus somebody added a 
 ridiculous close. 
 
 That sometime grew within this learned man. 
 Faustus is gone : regard his hellish fall 
 Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise. 
 
 Mr. Havelock Ellis says of Edward the Second in his Chris- 
 topher Marlowe, printed in the Mermaid Series, " it was not 
 till ten years later that Shakespeare came near to this severe 
 reticence, these deep and solemn tones." During those 
 ten years between 1593 and 1603 Shakespeare, who (though 
 he was of about the same age) was only a beginner when 
 Marlowe was supreme as a dramatist, learnt from him how 
 to fashion his Tragedies through the long pupilage of his 
 Chronicle Pageant. 
 
 When in Edward the Second the King said to the Abbot, 
 
 Father, this life contemplative is Heaven : 
 Oh ! that I might this life in quiet lead ! 
 But we, alas, are chased, 
 
 157
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 he spoke in the mood of Shakespeare's sorrowful Kings. 
 And Shakespeare's explanatory villains resembled Mortimer 
 in Edward the Second and Guise, who said in the Massacre 
 at Paris, 
 
 Now Guise begin thy deep-engendered thoughts, 
 
 and Gloster, who said in the True Tragedy of Richard Duke 
 of Torky 
 
 I will go clad my body in gay ornaments. 
 
 And lull myself within a lady's lap, 
 
 And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. 
 
 Oh monstrous man to harbour such a thought ! 
 
 Why Love did scorn me in my mother's womb. . . . 
 
 Tut ! I can smile and murder when I smile. 
 
 The confessions of wickedness must have survived from 
 the Traditional Stage, for a child writing a Play would make 
 a villain proclaim his iniquity as Aaron the Moor did in 
 Titus Andronicus, 
 
 Oh how this villainy 
 Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it ! 
 Let fools do good, and fair men call for Grace, 
 Aaron will have his soul black like his face, 
 
 or as Barabas did in the Scenes added to Marlowe's share of 
 The Jew of Malta. But Marlowe employed them with a 
 Tragical dignity which Shakespeare repeated in Ki7ig Lear 
 and Othello. And Shakespeare's sorrowful Kings were 
 imitated from Marlowe's Edward the Second, for though he 
 wrote a form of King Henry the Sixth before that Play was 
 written, he added the melancholy meditations to it after 
 1595- 
 
 Shakespeare drew his knowledge of History from the 
 Chronicle Plays and from popular legends and from such 
 Chronicles as came to his hand. It may be that he thought 
 most of the legends, as the Prince does in King Richard 
 the Third when he asks whether the Tower of London was 
 built by Julius Caesar and says. 
 
 Is it upon record ? or else reported 
 Successively from Age to Age he built it ? 
 
 158
 
 CHRONICLE HISTORIES 
 
 and replies to Buckingham's answer, 
 
 But say, my lord, it 'was not registered, 
 Methinks the truth should live from Age to Age 
 As 'twere retailed to all posterity, 
 Even to the general all-ending day. 
 
 The natural result was that his picture of the events of 
 the Past was wildly inaccurate ; but this was nothing to him 
 for his chief aim was to please the men in the Pit. He had 
 to agree with their inherited notions and to introduce fight- 
 ing and din to split the ears of the groundlings, who (as 
 Hamlet says) were, for the most part, capable of nothing but 
 inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. If he had laboured 
 to polish beautiful verses he would have wasted his time and 
 would have damaged the success of his Pageant by separating 
 it from his hearers. He had to write scores of passages of 
 deliberate fustian, long recitations whose only merit was 
 eloquence, because these were the main stuff of the Tra- 
 ditional Pageants ; and his Kings and Queens and great 
 Lords had to talk and behave in the old impossible way. 
 
 Only two of these History Plays, King Henry the Fourth 
 and King Henry the Fifth, are mentioned as performed at 
 the Court in Queen Elizabeth's time, and this may have 
 meant only that Episodes from them were exhibited. And 
 we have no evidence that any of them were provided for 
 the students of Law. The Queen knew too much about 
 Kings to take any delight in these conventional Monarchs, 
 and the young students were supposed to have learnt a little 
 knowledge of History. When Thomas Heywood edited 
 the barbarous Play founded on a fragment of Marlowe's 
 Jew of Malta in 1633 he printed a Prologue and Epilogue 
 " spoken at Court " and others " to the Stage at the Cock 
 Pit." The Prologues and Epilogues of this Pageant are all 
 addressed to the Pit. 
 
 Shakespeare found his own Tragical voice while he was 
 writing this Pageant from time to time during the years of 
 1593 to 1603, when Plays of this nature were required by 
 his Company, and so his Tragedies sprang directly from a 
 national root. I think that he set little value on these 
 Chronicle Plays, for they have few signs of revision after 1603.
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 He may have looked on them as apart from all the rest of 
 his work, for indeed they are not properly his, except the 
 last Acts of King Richard the Second and the Comical Inter- 
 lude of Falstaff's adventures in King Henry the Fourth. 
 Shakespeare gave life to many of the Traditional puppets 
 and sometimes ennobled the old stories, but Marlowe showed 
 him the way. 
 
 According to Henslowe's Diary, Lord Strange's Men 
 acted a new Play called Henry the Sixth at the Rose Theatre 
 on the third of March, 1 591-1592. It must have scored 
 a startling success if it was the Play cited by Nashe in his 
 Pierce Pe?iniless which was licensed in August 1592. Nashe 
 wrote, " how would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror 
 of the French, to think that after he had been two hundred 
 years in his tomb he should triumph again on the Stage 
 and have his bones embalmed with the tears of ten thousand 
 spectators (at least, at several times) who in the tragedian 
 that represented his person, beheld him fresh bleeding." 
 
 ^he First Part of King Henry the Sixth is vivid and crude. 
 Mr. Masefield writes of it : " the work as a whole is one of 
 the old formless Chronicle Plays which inspired the remark 
 that if an English Dramatist were to make a Play of St. George 
 he would begin with the birth of the Dragon." He adds : 
 " Shakespeare's mind could never at any stage of his career 
 have sunk to conceive the disgusting scene in which Joan 
 of Arc pleads." 
 
 This Part deals mainly with the fighting in France and 
 depicts it with a reckless confusion. Talbot, for instance, 
 dies lamenting his son. 
 
 Where is my other life ? mine own is gone : 
 
 Oh, where's young Talbot ? Where is valiant John ? 
 
 before Joan of Arc is burnt in Anjou. The real Talbot fell 
 lighting about twenty-two years after she had suffered in 
 Rouen. Of course, there is no historic foundation for the 
 Scene in the Temple Garden when the roses are plucked. 
 The Wars of the Roses were not known by that name till 
 they were ending or over, and the Red Rose appears to have 
 been borne first as a badge by Owen Tudor in Wales. This 
 
 160
 
 KING HENRY THE SIXTH 
 
 Scene and the next, in which Mortimer (as he dies in the 
 Tower) explains his right to the Throne to Richard Plan- 
 tagenet, who knew all about it already, may have been added 
 by Shakespeare in a revision when he wished to connect this 
 Part with the others. In the Second Part Richard Plan- 
 tagenet is called Richard, Duke of York. He explains the 
 rights of his House over again, and this would not have been 
 necessary if the First Part had then belonged to the Play. 
 The First Part does not seem to have been printed before 
 1623. Forms of the two other Parts were printed as the 
 First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Famous Houses 
 of Tork and Lancaster in 1594 and The True Tragedy of 
 Richard Duke of Tork and the Death of Good King Henry 
 the Sixth in 1595. These were reprinted separately in 1600 
 and together in 1619 as the Whole Contention between the two 
 famous Houses, Lancaster and Tork, divided into two parts 
 and newly corrected and enlarged. These two Plays seem 
 to have been acted before September 1592, for Robert 
 Greene, who died in that month, parodied a verse in the 
 Third Part, 
 
 Oh, Tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide 
 
 in his Groat' sworth of Wit. 
 
 The title-page of the Quarto edition of the True Tragedy 
 said that it was " sundry times acted by the Right Honour- 
 able the Earl of Pembroke his Servants." Henslowe's 
 Diary stated that the new Henry the Sixth was acted fifteen 
 times in 1592, and Nashe cannot have written Pierce Penniless 
 later than July in that year. If Henslowe's Play was the 
 First Part of King Henry the Sixth it is improbable that ten 
 thousand spectators could have seen it at the Rose when 
 Nashe wrote, and since that Play succeeded and was shown 
 through the year it is not likely that the two other Parts 
 would have followed it before the month of September. 
 Neither is it likely that if Shakespeare had written the three 
 Parts a rival Company would have acted the Third while 
 the First was being shown on the Stage. 
 
 It may be that the Second Part (the Contention) was 
 Henslowe's Henry the Sixth and Pembroke's Men may have 
 performed the Third Part (the True Tragedy) competing 
 
 161 L
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 with it. Greene may have parodied a popular line written 
 by Marlowe in the T^rue Tragedy^ meaning to indicate that 
 he was one of the men who wrote the Contention. The verse 
 
 Oh, Tiger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide, 
 
 is in the speech beginning 
 
 She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France, 
 
 which was written cither by Marlowe (as many students have 
 thought) or as a deliberate imitation of him. When Nashe, 
 writing a few months after Lord Strange's Men had produced 
 " Henry the Sixth^^'' said that ten thousand spectators (at 
 least, at several times) had embalmed Talbot with tears he 
 may have meant that the Pageant of the fighting in France 
 had been acted several times before 1592. Indeed, he may 
 not have referred to Shakespeare's Pageant at all, for this 
 theme must have been a popular one and often shown on 
 the Stage, as was asserted in the Epilogue to King Henry 
 the Fifth, 
 
 Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King 
 Of France and England, did this King succeed ; 
 Whose state so many had the managing 
 That they lost France, and made his England bleed, 
 Which oft our Stage hath shown. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare founded his Pageant of the 
 fighting in France on an old Chronicle History when he was 
 beginning to write. Marlowe and Greene and Peele may 
 have written a form of The Contention about 1591, and may 
 have sold it to Strange's Men, who may have employed 
 Shakespeare to alter it. Greene's complaint proved that 
 Shakespeare had not been working with him and the other 
 Dramatists whose feathers were taken. Marlowe and Greene 
 and Pcclc may have written The True Tragedy meanwhile 
 and may have sold it to Pembroke's Men because they resented 
 the fact that a mere Player had improved The Contefition 
 and had been given all the credit of it. This would explain 
 not only why Greene raged against Shake-scene in 1592 and 
 why Pembroke's Men may have performed the True Tragedy 
 while " Henry the Sixth " was shown at the Rose but also 
 
 162
 
 KING HENRY THE SIXTH 
 
 why Francis Meres did not cite King Henry the Sixth among 
 Shakespeare's Tragedies in Palladis Tamia in 1598 and why 
 the three Parts are dissimilar. 
 
 The First Part is a primitive Pageant which seems made 
 from the stock of the Traditional Stage. It may have ended 
 with the fourth Scene of the fifth Act — 
 
 So now dismiss your army when ye please, 
 For here we entertain a solemn peace, 
 
 before Shakespeare revised it, introducing the King (who was 
 aged about ten when Joan of Arc suffered) when he wished 
 to connect it with the two other Parts. The Second Part, 
 The Contention, is a Rhetorical Pageant in Blank Verse, which 
 seems to have been written mainly by Marlowe and Greene 
 and Peele, combined with Comical Scenes in Prose which 
 were probably inserted by Shakespeare. The Third Part, 
 The True Tragedy, is the most mature of the three, a masculine 
 Pageant in Blank Verse, and it seems to have been written 
 mainly by Marlowe with some assistance from Greene and 
 Peele. In this Part, the King's title to the Throne is debated 
 in the first Scene of the first Act, as it is in the second Scene of 
 the second Act of the Second Part, and this and a comparison 
 of the lists of the Characters would be enough to suggest 
 that these two are separate Plays. 
 
 Shakespeare may have bought the True Tragedy after 
 1595, and linked it with the two other Parts when he was 
 shaping his Pageant. In it there is a pause in the fighting : 
 the Stage direction says " alarms still, and then enter Henry 
 solus," and the King in a speech of thirteen lines laments the 
 Wars, saying 
 
 Would God that I were dead, so all were well ! 
 Or would my crown suffice, I were content 
 To yield it them and lead a private life. 
 
 Then the man who has killed his father in ignorance and the 
 other who has killed his son enter, and the King grieves with 
 them. In the Third Part, as we have it, this glimpse of pity 
 becomes the core of the Play. In the fifth Scene of the second 
 Act the King's long meditation, beginning. 
 
 This battle fares like to the morning war 
 163
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 closely resembles King Richard the Second's in the third 
 Scene of the third Act of the Play called by his name, 
 beginning 
 
 What must the King do now ? Must he submit ? 
 
 and his exclamation 
 
 Oh, piteous spectacle ! Oh bloody times ! 
 
 resembles the Abbot's in King Richard the Second, 
 
 A woeful Pageant have we here beheld. 
 
 This Scene clashes with the mood of this Part. If Shakespeare 
 bought the True Tragedy after he had written the last part 
 of Richard the Second he may have added this Scene to make 
 the Kings similar and to show the same weakness and kindness 
 fatal when his Pageant began and when it drew to a close. 
 And this meditation seems his own comment on the Wars of 
 his Pageant. 
 
 When Samuel Johnson wrote that Shakespeare had intended 
 the Plays from King Richard the Second to King Henry the 
 Fifth to be considered one work he observed that the three 
 Parts of King Henry the Sixth and King Richard the Third 
 have scant connection with them. These four separate Plays 
 are closely united : King Richard the Third has more in 
 common with the First Part of King Henry the Sixth than with 
 the others, but it is the Third Part of the Contention between 
 the Houses of York and Lancaster. The King's prophetic 
 denunciation of Gloster and Gloster's soliloquy, beginning, 
 
 What will the aspiring blood of Lancaster 
 
 Sink into the ground ? I thought it would have mounted, 
 
 in the sixth Scene of the fifth Act of the Third Part of King 
 Henry the Sixth (which were in the True Tragedy, and seem 
 to have been written by Marlowe) are the real beginning of 
 the Tragedy of King Richard the Third. But since King 
 Henry has no part in this Play Queen Margaret is brought 
 back from France to speak in his stead. In the last lines of 
 King Henry the Sixth (as in the True Tragedy) she was banished 
 to France, where in fact she took refuge and died poor and 
 
 164
 
 KING RICHARD THE THIRD 
 
 forgotten. In the third Scene of the first Act of this Play- 
 she appears without explanation of her presence among her 
 enemies and curses them freely. Hastings says, 
 
 My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses, 
 
 and Rivers replies 
 
 And so doth mine, I muse why she is at liberty. 
 
 She appears again in the fourth Act and says, 
 
 So now prosperity begins to mellow 
 And drop into the rotten mouth of Death, 
 Here, in these confines, slily have I lurked 
 To watch the waning of my adversaries : 
 A dire induction am I witness to. 
 And will to France. 
 
 Queen Margaret is employed in this Play like a Senecan ghost 
 demanding revenge. The Duchess of York says to her in 
 this Scene, 
 
 Blind sight, dead life, poor mortal-living ghost, 
 Rest thy unrest on England's fruitful earth, 
 
 and Queen Elizabeth says to her. 
 
 Oh thou did'st prophesy the time would come 
 When I should wish for thee to help me curse 
 That bottled spider, that foul, bunch-backed toad. 
 
 Queen Margaret exults in her knowledge of their sorrow and 
 says, 
 
 Fare-well, York's wife, and Queen of sad mischance. 
 These English woes will make me smile in France, 
 
 and Queen Elizabeth says. 
 
 Oh thou, well-skilled in curses, stay awhile 
 And teach me how to curse mine enemies. 
 
 There would have been no need to employ Queen Margaret 
 if this part of the Pageant had been already controlled by 
 King Henry the Sixth's final prophecy. Neither would there 
 have been any need for Gloucester to proclaim his enormity 
 
 165
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 if he had done this already in King Henry the Sixth. The fact 
 that the speech at the beginning of this Play seems an echo 
 of his other soliloquy may be a sign that Shakespeare wrote it 
 after 1592 and before he had annexed the True Tragedy. 
 
 King Richard the Third was printed in Quartos in 1597, 
 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612, 1622, 1629 and 1634. All these 
 editions except the first were ascribed to Shakespeare. The 
 Folio has many small changes and omits some lines and adds 
 some two hundred. There had been other Plays on this 
 theme, for instance, a Latin imitation of Seneca which was 
 acted at Cambridge before 1583 and the True Tragedy of 
 King Richard the Third, which was printed in 1594 ; and we 
 have no reason to doubt that the Hunch-back had gnashed 
 his teeth often on the Traditional Stage. I think that the 
 Scenes in which the hideous King fascinates the Lady Anne 
 first and Queen Elizabeth later (like the similar one in the 
 Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, in which Lady Grey 
 subjugates King Edw^ard the Fourth) survive from old Plays 
 because I do not believe that Shakespeare or any man of his 
 time was primitive enough to imagine them. The Scene 
 before the battle of Bosworth is frankly preposterous. After 
 this the Play is hurriedly finished. The King appears in a 
 Scene thirteen lines long and shouts for a horse and disappears 
 and then (according to the Stage-direction) he enters again 
 with Richmond and fights with him and is killed, and the 
 victor goes out, " retreat and flourish," but this is not in the 
 Play. Then in a last Scene Richmond enters and says, 
 
 The days is ours ; the bloody dog is dead, 
 
 and Derby brings him the Crown, saying, 
 
 Lo, here, this long usurped royalty. 
 
 From the dead temples of this bloody wretch 
 
 Have I plucked off, 
 
 and Richmond says, 
 
 We will unite the white rose and the red. 
 Smile Heaven upon this fair conjunction. 
 That long have frowned upon their enmity ! 
 What traitor hears me and says not Amen ? 
 
 166
 
 KING RICHARD THE THIRD 
 
 England hath long been mad, and scarred herself. . . . 
 Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again : 
 That she may long live here, God say Amen ! 
 
 This is the end of an old Chronicle Pageant not of a 
 Tragedy. 
 
 I think that in Shakespeare's first version Clarence was 
 drowned in the traditional butt of malmsey and that this 
 was seen to be ludicrous and the First Murderer compro- 
 mised in a revision, saying. 
 
 Take that and that : if all this will not do, 
 I'll drown you in the malmsey butt within. 
 
 The Second Murderer thinks that Clarence is dead when he 
 is carried away ; he says, 
 
 A bloody deed, and desperately dispatched ! 
 How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands 
 Of this most grievous, guilty murder done. 
 
 But Clarence's Ghost appears to have forgotten the 
 stabbing : it says, 
 
 I, that was washed to death with fulsome wine. 
 Poor Clarence by thy guile betrayed to death. 
 
 I think that the Stage-direction " enter Richard and 
 Richmond ; they fight ; Richard is slain " refers to a spectacle 
 introduced by the Players. The last Scene does not suggest 
 that the sickly youth Richmond had been able to kill his 
 terrible enemy. As a matter of fact, the King could not 
 reach him at Bosworth and was killed by the troopers in the 
 thick of the fight, and his Crown was brought to one of the 
 Stanleys (either Lord Stanley, afterwards the first Earl of 
 Derby, or his brother Sir William), who gave it to Richmond. 
 The last Scene, as we have it, is consistent with this. 
 
 Shakespeare must have been a beginner when he first 
 wrote this Play. There was to be a time when he was able 
 to take North's version of Plutarch's Life of Antoniiis and 
 found a noble Tragedy on it. Now he used Sir Thomas More's 
 Life of King Richard the Third or Holinshed's repetition of 
 
 167
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 it, for instance, in the Scene in the Tower, in the third Act, 
 and if that Scene is compared with More's narrative it sounds 
 hke a child's echo of a Tragical story told by a man. 
 
 The Latin version of More's Life of King Richard may 
 have been based on one by Cardinal Morton. Though 
 Morton's view may have been distorted by hatred the picture 
 of King Richard is life-like. He is shown repenting the 
 murder of the two Httle Princes. Here is More's Enghsh 
 version : " I have heard by credible report of such as were 
 secret with his chamberers that he never had quiet in his mind, 
 never thought himself sure. When he went abroad, his eyes 
 whirled about, his body privily fenced, his hand ever on his 
 dagger, his countenance and his manner like one always 
 ready to strike again. He took ill rests at night, lay long 
 waiting and musing, sore wearied with care and watch, 
 rather slumbered than slept, troubled with fearful dreams, 
 suddenly sometimes started up, leapt out of bed and ran 
 about the chamber ; so was his restless heart continually 
 tossed and tumbled with the tedious impression and stormy 
 remembrance of this abominable deed." This picture is 
 possible but Shakespeare's is not. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare's first form of this Pageant 
 and the True Tragedy of Ki?ig Richard the Third and the 
 True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of Tork were all based on a 
 Chronicle History performed by the Strolling Players soon 
 after the Hunch-back had been seen on the Throne. Shake- 
 speare, I think, wrote his first form as a Revenge-play when 
 he was beginning to write and revised it about 1596 before 
 he meant to use the True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of Tork 
 in this Pageant. The primitive work in this Play has the 
 vigour and crudity of the First Part of King Henry the Sixth, 
 and its effect is transformed by the note struck in the noble 
 beginning and by the beauty and dignity of a few other 
 passages, such as Clarence's dream. By these changes a Play 
 as young as Titus Andronicus was ennobled to one which 
 foretold the supremacy of Macbeth and Othello. 
 
 The Tragedy of King Richard the Second was printed in 
 Quartos twice in 1597 and again in 1608, " with new additions 
 of the Parliament Scene and the deposing of King Richard," 
 
 168
 
 KING RICHARD THE SECOND 
 
 and in 1615 and 1634. The First Folio edition is the Quarto 
 of 1608 expanded a Httle and corrected in places. 
 
 There were other Plays dealing with this unfortunate 
 King. One, The Life afid Death of Jack Straw, was written 
 about 1587 and printed in 1593 ; another, which is in the 
 Egerton Manuscripts in the British Museum, does not seem 
 to have been printed before 1870, and a third, which Simon 
 Forman saw acted in 161 1, is lost. 
 
 There are two separate Plays or Scenes of the Pageant 
 in King Richard the Second. In the first of these King Richard 
 is drawn as a detestable tyrant ; he is suspicious and crafty, 
 he distrusts Norfolk and Bolingbroke and banishes both. 
 When he hears of John of Gaunt's illness, he says, 
 
 Now put it, God, in the physician's mind. 
 To help him to his grave immediately ! 
 The lining of his coffers shall make coats 
 To deck our soldiers for these Irish Wars. 
 
 He insults the dying man, calls him, 
 
 A lunatic, lean-witted fool. 
 Presuming on an ague's privilege, 
 and says, 
 
 And let them die, that age and sullens have : 
 For both hast thou and both become the grave. 
 
 And when his uncle is dead he seizes all his belongings, saying. 
 
 Think what you will, we seize into our hands. 
 His plate, his goods, his money and his lands. 
 
 Meanwhile John of Gaunt has been shown as a patriot, 
 and so has Bolingbroke who goes into exile, saying. 
 
 Where'er I wander, boast of this I can, 
 Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman. 
 
 This part, I think, was fashioned by others from an old 
 rhyming Chronicle History. Here is a sample of it in the 
 first Act, 
 
 This we prescribe, though no physician. 
 Deep malice makes too deep incision : 
 
 169
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed ; 
 Our Doctors say this is no month to bleed. 
 Good Uncle, let this end where it begun : 
 We'll calm the Duke of Norfolk, you your son. 
 
 This is worthy of the Poet who wrote. 
 
 Oh where's young Talbot ? Where is valiant John ? 
 
 I think that Shakespeare did little to this vigorous part. 
 
 When the King reappears in the third Act he is totally 
 changed. When he is asked " How brooks your Grace 
 this air ? " he replies. 
 
 Needs must I like it well : I weep for joy 
 
 To stand upon my kingdom once again. 
 
 Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand. 
 
 Though rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs : 
 
 As a long-parted mother with her child, 
 
 Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting. 
 
 So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth. 
 
 Like Queen Margaret, he thinks of his enemies as spiders 
 and toads and invokes curses on them, and he adds 
 
 Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords : 
 This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones 
 Prove armed soldiers, ere her native King 
 Shall falter under foul Rebellion's arms. 
 
 He says, 
 
 Not all the water in the rough rude sea 
 Can wash the balm off from an anointed King ; 
 The breath of worldly men cannot depose 
 The deputy elected by the Lord. 
 
 I think that with the second Scene in the third Act 
 Shakespeare began his Tragedy of King Richard the Second. 
 The King is tender and sorrowful ; he says to Aumerle, 
 
 For God's sake let us sit upon the ground 
 And tell sad stories of the death of Kings, 
 
 and when he is about to surrender he says. 
 
 170
 
 KING RICHARD THE SECOND 
 
 What must the King do now ? Must he submit ? 
 The King shall do it : must he be deposed ? 
 The King shall be contented : must he lose 
 The name of King ? of God's name, let it go : 
 I'll give my jewels for a set of beads, 
 My gorgeous Palace for a hermitage, 
 And my large Kingdom for a little grave, 
 A little little grave, an obscure grave. 
 
 It is no wonder that the Queen says in the fifth Act, 
 
 What, is my Richard both in shape and mind 
 Transformed and weakened ? 
 
 He replies. 
 
 In vdnter's tedious nights sit by the fire 
 
 With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales 
 
 Of woeful ages long ago betid : 
 
 And ere thou bid good-night, to quit their griefs. 
 
 Tell thou the lamentable tale of me. 
 
 And send the hearers weeping to their beds. 
 
 York describes how the King enters London : 
 
 Men's eyes 
 Did scowl on gentle Richard ; no man cried " God save him ! " 
 No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home : 
 But dust was thrown upon his sacred head ; 
 Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off. 
 His face still combating with tears and smiles, 
 The badges of his grief and patience. 
 
 This might have been written of King Henry the Sixth, and 
 when the King meditates at Pomfret he speaks in Hamlet's 
 vein, 
 
 Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves 
 That they are not the first of fortune's slaves 
 Nor shall not be the last. . . . 
 This music mads me ; let it sound no more ; 
 For though it have holp mad-men to their wits, 
 In me it seems it will make wise men mad. 
 
 171
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 In the first part Bolingbroke and Norfolk are noble and 
 the King is rapacious and the curses are invoked on his head. 
 In the second part Bolingbroke is a treacherous rebel and a 
 murderer who betrays his own tool. When Exton says to 
 him, 
 
 From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed, 
 
 he replies. 
 
 They love not poison, that do poison need, 
 Nor do I thee, though I did wish him dead, 
 
 and now the curses which are destined to bring so many 
 calamities are due to his crimes. 
 
 The fifth Act and the end of the fourth seem founded on 
 an old rhyming Chronicle which survives in such couplets as 
 
 Speak it in French, King, say " Pardonne moi." 
 Dost thou teach pardon pardon to destroy ? 
 
 but most of the second part of the Play is a mild Imitation of 
 Marlowe's Edward the Second. 
 
 If the two parts were taken as composing one Play there 
 would be no defence for these changes ; but they are explained 
 by the treatment of King Richard's calamity as a different 
 theme. I think that the second Part was written by Shake- 
 speare in 1593 as a separate Tragedy or Tragical Poem. 
 While he imitated Edward the Second he had The Massacre 
 at Paris in mind. Guise says in that Play, 
 
 Set me to scale the high Pyramides, 
 And thereon set the diadem of France, 
 I'll either rend it with my nails to naught, 
 Or mount the top with my aspiring wings, 
 Although my downfall be the deepest hell. 
 
 And King Richard says, 
 
 Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot 
 Unlikely wonders ; how these vain weak nails 
 May tear a passage through the flinty ribs 
 Of this hard world, my ragged prison-walls 
 And for they cannot, die in their own pride. 
 172
 
 KING HENRY THE FOURTH 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare wrote the second part of this 
 Play as the beginning of the Contest which ended in the Wars 
 of the Roses and that he made the King plaintive and 
 innocent because the calamities entailed by his doom would 
 not have been merited if his fate had been just. This part 
 may have failed on the Stage because the spectators were 
 accustomed to see a different picture of King Richard the 
 Second. This would account for the facts that he seems to 
 have turned from his Pageant to other work for three years 
 and that he spoilt this Play by prefixing a careless revision of 
 the first part which showed the usual King. 
 
 I think that he revised it about 1596 to make it a part of 
 the Pageant and tacked it to King Henry the Fourth in the 
 fifth Act where Bolingbroke says, 
 
 Can no man tell of my unthrifty son ? 
 'Tis full three months since I did see him last. . . . 
 Inquire at London 'mongst the Taverns there, 
 For there, they say, he daily doth frequent 
 With unrestrained loose companions. 
 
 Prince Hal was about twelve when King Richard died, 
 so according to this he began his revelling early. Another 
 link which connects this Play with King Henry the Fourth 
 and King He7iry the Fifth is the fact that the two later Kings 
 remember the doom entailed on their House and pray to be 
 delivered from it. This doom was invoked when the pious 
 King Richard foretold the Wars of the Roses : 
 
 Tell Bolingbroke — for yond methinks he stands — 
 
 That every stride he makes upon my land 
 
 Is dangerous treason : he is come to open 
 
 The purple testament of bleeding war ; 
 
 But ere the Crown he looks for live in peace, 
 
 Ten thousand bloody crowns of mother's sons 
 
 Shall ill become the flower of England's face. 
 
 The First Part of King Henry the Fourth was printed in a 
 Quarto edition early in 1598 as The History of Henry the 
 Fourth ; with the battle at Shrewsbury, between the King a?id 
 Lord Hefiry Percy^ surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North, 
 
 173
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 With the humorous coticeits of Sir John Falstaff. There were 
 other Quarto editions in 1599, 1604, 1608, 161 3, 1622, 1632 
 and 1639. The Stationers' Register has an entry dated 
 August the fourth, 1600, " Henry the Fifth, a book to be 
 stayed " ; and one dated August the twenty-third of the 
 same year, " two books, one called Much Ado About Nothing, 
 the other The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth with the 
 Humours of Sir John Falstaf.^^ This may mean that the 
 First Part of King Henry the Fourth was printed as if the Play 
 was complete, and that King Henry the Fifth was prepared 
 for the press before the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth 
 and then postponed till the other Play had been published in 
 1600. 
 
 We do not know when the First Part of Kijig Henry the 
 Fourth was written. Mr. Chalmers contended that the 
 opening lines plainly allude to the fighting in Spain in 1596. 
 But they plainly allude to King Henry's hope to lead a 
 Crusade " in stronds afar remote." And Sir Israel GoUancz 
 thinks that the words in Fhe Return from Parnassus, " I shall 
 no sooner open this pint-pot, but the word like a knave tapster 
 will cry, ' Anon, anon, Sir ! ' " seem to be obvious reminis- 
 cences of the tapster's reply " Anon, anon. Sir ! " But they 
 only mean that the old tapsters said this in the same way as 
 their successors were accustomed to answer " Coming, Sir, 
 coming ! " 
 
 There were allusions in 1598 when Meres in Palladis 
 Tamia wrote, " There is nothing but roguery in villainous 
 man," and when Toby Mathew wrote to Dudley Carleton, 
 " Honour pricks them on, and the World thinks that Honour 
 will quickly prick them off again." And there may have 
 been one in 1599 when Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His 
 Humour, which was acted first in that year, ended with the 
 words, " You may (in time) make lean Macilente as fat as Sir 
 John Fal-Staffe." But these allusions merely support the First 
 Quarto's evidence that this Part was performed about 1 598. 
 
 The curious construction seems to indicate that this Play 
 was compounded from two opposite parts. Two contrasted 
 stories are told in it. In the first Scene in a Palace in London 
 the King hears of Hotspur's triumph at Holmedon and regrets 
 that his own son is so different, 
 
 174
 
 KING HENRY THE FOURTH 
 
 Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him, 
 See riot and dishonour stain the brow 
 Of my young Harry. 
 
 In the second Scene Prince Hal is shown living in riot and 
 dishonour with Falstaff. In the third Scene, in the Palace, 
 Hotspur meets and defies the King and plans a rebellion. 
 Throughout the Play, Scenes of a Rhetorical Pageant in Blank 
 Verse are in conflict with others of vulgar humour in Prose, 
 and Hotspur is contrasted with Falstaff. This contrast was 
 found in the Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth, which 
 was written by men who worked carelessly in different moods 
 and made a patchwork between them. But the Falstaff 
 Scenes are not patches. The opposite Plays in the First Part 
 of King Henry the Fourth are too admirable to have been 
 written together. Shakespeare could not have turned from 
 Falstaff's loud laughter to Hotspur's proud eloquence again 
 and again any more than Cervantes could have v^rritten Don 
 Quixote with a fantastic Romance. 
 
 Cervantes intended to ridicule the Spanish and Portuguese 
 Romances of Chivalry ; but he wrote one more chivalrous 
 than any of these : he set out to tell the adventures of a 
 farcical Knight ; but he found that his own sad heart rode 
 with Don Quixote. He was guided by the Italian travesties, 
 such as Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, begun about 1482, 
 in which the hero Renaud of Les Quatre Fils Aymon became 
 the lovelorn Rinaldo, and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in which 
 the hero of the Chanson de Roland became Orlando and went 
 out of his mind and massacred sheep, thinking them Saracens. 
 Their fantastic mood had been natural, for Italy had never 
 been chivalrous ; but his echo of it derided things he had 
 loved. Still, he did not mock Chivalry, but only the wild 
 Romances dealing with it, and the two which were praised 
 first by Don Quixote in the first Chapter of the Second Part 
 (when he said " Quien mas honesto y mas valiente que el 
 famoso Amadis de Gaula ? quien mas discreto que Palmerin de 
 Inglaterra ? ") were spared when all the rest were condemned. 
 The third praised by Don Quixote (when he said " Quien mas 
 acomodado y manual que Firante el Blanco ? ") may have 
 founded the fashion, for it was printed as Firant lo Blanch in 
 
 175
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 1490 while Amadis de Gaula does not seem to have been 
 printed before 1508. All three were linked with the English 
 home of Romance of which Boiardo wrote in his Orlando 
 InnamoratOy 
 
 Fu gloriosa Bcrtagna la grande 
 
 Una stagion per I'armc e per I'amore. . . . 
 
 Ed or sua fama al nostro tempo dura. 
 
 Johannot Martorell, who began Tirant lo Blanch in 1460 and 
 wrote three of its Parts, said that he had translated them from 
 English into Portuguese and then into Catalan, and though 
 this may have been only a conventional statement he copied 
 Guy of Warwick and set some of the story in England. 
 
 Garci or Garcia de Montalvo, who wrote the first books 
 of Amadis de Gaula between 1492 and 1504, set his story 
 mainly in England, using, for instance, the name Vindilisora 
 for Windsor. And when Francisco de Moracs wrote Palmerin 
 de Inglaterra about 1544 he chose an English hero and drew 
 the romantic City of London. Like Tira?it lo Blanch, these 
 two later Romances may have been Portuguese before they 
 were Spanish, for Montalvo seems to have founded Amadis 
 on a Portuguese version written by Joham de Lobeira, 
 and Palmerin de Inglaterra seems to have been written in 
 Portuguese first. In any case they were compounded from 
 International stories, including the French and Celtic 
 Romances. When Primaleon, which was printed in 15 12, 
 was described as translated from Greek to Castilian this may 
 have been an admission that this school of stories revived the 
 mood of such Greek Romances as Apollonius of Tyre. 
 
 The conquering spirit of Portugal and Spain in the days 
 when those Countries led the World in discoveries chimed 
 with the old tales of adventure. These books were loved 
 by the wanderers who named California after an Island 
 described in Las Sergas de Esplandian, printed in 1508 : and 
 Amadis is said to have been printed in some thirty editions 
 before 1587. Mr. Henry Thomas writes in his S-panish and 
 Portuguese Romances of Chivalry : " During the hundred years 
 following the publication of Amadis of Gaul, some fifty new 
 chivalresque Romances appeared in Spain and Portugal. 
 They were published at an average rate of almost one a year 
 
 176
 
 KING HENRY THE FIFTH 
 
 between 1508 and 1550; nine were added between 1550 
 and the year of the Armada ; only three more came out 
 before the publication of Don Quixote.'''' Their vogue ended 
 with Spain's conquering mood when the Invincible Armada 
 was shattered. 
 
 When the First Part of Do7i Quixote was printed in 1605 
 Cervantes was about fifty-eight and he had known many 
 miseries and many adventures : he wrote as a man, already 
 old and despairing, who had been maimed on the glorious day 
 of Lepanto when he was young and had seen the supremacy 
 of his Nation depart. But even now, though he derided the 
 dead Romances, he did not dream of insulting the Chivalry 
 which had governed his life and is immortal in the nature of 
 Spain. 
 
 Shakespeare was some twenty years younger when the 
 First Part of KiTig Henry the Fourth was printed in 1598, 
 and his life had been tame and his position was servile. There 
 is no sign in his Plays that Malory or Froissart attracted him 
 or that he had any belief in the old visions of Chivalry. It 
 is probable that he was in London in 1588, and he may have 
 shared England's conquering mood then ; but it had faded 
 in 1598, and the old popularity of the Chronicle Histories 
 was departing with it when he contrasted them with a picture 
 of the everyday World. Falstaff lives in his Pageant like 
 Sancho Panza in the tale of Don Quixote^ or like Bottom in 
 Fairyland, and his laughter (like Sancho's) announced that an 
 immemorial fashion was dead. 
 
 Shakespeare wrote in this Play with his accustomed 
 neglect of the historical facts, for though the real Prince 
 fought at Shrewsbury, he was only sixteen then and did not 
 kill the fierce Hotspur who was then about forty. And the 
 tale ends in laughter when Falstaft' rises up from feigned death 
 to stab the dead hero and pretends to have killed him and 
 carries him off to claim the reward. Hotspur's great dreams 
 have ended in the derision of fools. 
 
 The two Parts of King Henry the Fourth and the Lije of 
 King Henry the Fifth could have been printed as the Three 
 Parts of King Henry the Fifth, and they were all founded on 
 the Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth, containing the 
 
 i-jy M
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Honourable Battle of Agincourt which was licensed in 1594 
 and printed in 1598. The King, who had appeared as BoHng- 
 broke in Kuig Richard the Second, is changed in the same way 
 as King Richard is in that Pageant. He begins, 
 
 So shaken as we are, so wan with care, 
 Find we a time for frighted peace to pant. 
 
 He is as melancholy as the later King Richard and King Henry 
 the Sixth and Hamlet. He meditates, in the Second Part : 
 
 Oh God ! that one might read the book of fate 
 And see the revolution of the times ! . . . 
 
 Oh, if this were seen 
 The happiest youth, viewing his progress through. 
 What perils past, what crosses to ensue 
 Would shut the book, and sit him down and die. 
 
 In the First Part of the Play called by his name because it 
 dealt with his Reign, he is in the background and Hotspur 
 is the Tragical figure. In the Play called King Henry the 
 Fifth, Prince Hal has been changed to a repetition of Hotspur. 
 Indeed, we might take the picture of Hotspur as the first 
 sketch of King Henry the Fifth. This Play or Dramatic 
 Recitation was meant to be a paean of patriotism : it is the 
 climax of all the praises of England in the rest of the Pageant 
 and it is an echo of Marlowe's conquering mood. 
 
 King Henry the Fifth was England's national hero, the 
 last King who had conquered in France, and he must have 
 been often seen on the Traditional Stage. Nashc wrote in 
 Pierce Penniless : " If you tell them what a glorious thing it 
 is to have Henry the Fifth represented on the Stage, leading 
 the French King prisoner, and forcing both him and the 
 Dauphin to swear fealty." This Play, which is linked with 
 the Traditional Stage by the Famous Victories of King Henry 
 the Fifth, keeps a great deal of the old Traditional stuff, for 
 instance, the Scene in which the French Lords begin in 
 French to explain who they are and then continue their 
 conversation in English and the Scenes in which a Scot and 
 a Welshman and an Irishman talk and those in which Katharine 
 attempts to speak English. This was the fashion which 
 Philip Sidney had condemned in his Apology for Poesy, written 
 
 ■78
 
 KING HENRY THE FIFTH 
 
 about 1581, as "against the law of hospitality to jest at 
 strangers, because they speak not English as well as we do." 
 This obsolete stuff and the Comedy of Pistol are blended 
 with Shakespeare's only Poem of Conquest. 
 
 One clue to the date of King Henry the Fifth is in the 
 Prologue to the fifth Act : 
 
 Were now the general of our gracious Empress, 
 As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, 
 Bringing rebellion broached on his sword. 
 How many would the peaceful city quit. 
 To welcome him ! 
 
 Though there was constant fighting in Ireland it seems 
 safe to conclude that this general was Essex, who went to his 
 disastrous command there in March, 1599, and returned in 
 September of that year in disgrace, and we can infer that these 
 lines were written while there was hope of his triumph. This 
 passage is one of the signs that the Prologues in this Play were 
 written before 1600 though they were not printed in the 
 Quarto editions. Even this clue tells us little, for Shakespeare 
 might have added these verses in a revision in 1599. 
 
 There would be another clue if we could be certain that 
 John Marston was drawn as Pistol, as Mr. George Wyndham 
 and Mr. Seccombe and Mr. Allen suggested. Shakespeare 
 may have applied the name Pistol to Marston, who seems 
 to have carried a pistol and to have been accustomed to 
 beatings, for Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that 
 he had many quarrels with Marston and beat him and took 
 his pistol from him. This clue would agree with the other, 
 for the War of the Poets began about 1598, and the picture 
 of Marston may have been part of Shakespeare's share in 
 that feud. 
 
 Nicholas Breton wrote in his Post with a Packet of Mad 
 Letters, printed in 1603, " I saw the Play of Ancient Pistol 
 where a craking coward was well cudgelled for his knavery." 
 This suggests that the Play of Ancient Pistol was written 
 and acted as a separate Interlude since he could hardly have 
 used this name for the History of King Henry the Fifth. 
 If so, Shakespeare may have combined a shortened version 
 of it with his Rhetorical Pageant in the same way as he seems 
 
 179
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 to have blended Falstaff's Comedy with King Henry the 
 Fourth, and this would explain why the Quarto edition, 
 printed in 1600 and 1602, and either in 1608 or 1 61 3, was 
 called the Chronicle History of Henry the Fifth with his battle 
 at Jgi?icourt in France. Together with Ancient Pistol. 
 
 Pistol does not appear in the First Part of King Henry the 
 Fourth. In the Second Part he appears in the second Act 
 after Doll Tearsheet has said of him that he is " a swaggerer 
 and the foul-mouthedst rogue in England " (which resembles 
 the account of Thersites in Troilus and Cressida), and after 
 a little ranting in a parody of Marlowe and Peele, he is driven 
 out of the room by Falstaff, and he is seen again in the fifth 
 Act when in the same vein he announces the King's death 
 and again at the end when he only says a few words. This 
 use of Pistol, which seems a mere repetition of a Character 
 already familiar, may be one of the signs that the Seco?id Part 
 of King Henry the Fourth was written after King Henry the 
 Fifth. Pistol is seen in a similar subordinate way in Fhe 
 Merry Wives of Windsor. If Marston was drawn as Pistol in 
 the War of the Poets, it is probable that the chief picture of 
 him, the one in which he is cudgelled, was the first and that 
 the others were mere reappearances of a popular butt. That 
 picture seems drawn from life : Coleridge said in his seventh 
 Lecture on Shakespeare, " I know no Character in the Plays 
 (unless indeed Pistol be an exception) which can be called 
 the mere portrait of an individual." 
 
 In the Epilogue to the Second Part of King Henry the 
 Fourth the Dancer says : " Be it known to you, as it is very 
 well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing Play, to pray 
 your patience for it, and to promise you a better. I meant 
 indeed to pay you with this ; which, if like an ill venture it 
 come unluckily home, I break and you, my gentle creditors, 
 lose." It seems reasonable to conclude that the Dancer 
 referred to a Play written by Shakespeare. The Folio of 1623 
 prints no Epilogue admitting a failure and promising a popular 
 Play ; but it seems to omit many Epilogues, for we have 
 reason to think that one was always spoken before the dancing 
 began. And it may be that this lost Epilogue admitting a 
 failure was at the end of King John. 
 
 180
 
 KING JOHN 
 
 All we know about the date of King Johi is that Meres 
 mentioned it in Palladis Tamia in 1598. It is possible that 
 he was referring to ^he Troublesome Reign of King John, 
 which was printed in 1591 without a writer's name, and in 
 161 1 as written by W. Sh., and in 1622 as by W. Shakespeare ; 
 but it is more probable that he had in mind a recent revision 
 of it now represented by The Life and Death of King John, 
 which seems to have appeared first in the Folio of 1623. This 
 would explain why he cited it at the end of his list of Chronicle 
 Histories — King Richard the Second, King Richard the Third, 
 King Henry the Fourth and King John. 
 
 The two Parts of The Troublesome Reign seem to have been 
 roughly shaped by Marlowe and others from a Traditional 
 Play written while King Henry the Eighth was making War 
 on the Monks. Shakespeare struck out the ribald scenes 
 about Monks, though he still made the King speak in the 
 attitude of King Henry the Eighth, 
 
 Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name 
 
 So slight, unworthy and ridiculous. 
 
 To charge me to an answer as the Pope. 
 
 Tell him this tale ; and from the mouth of England 
 
 Add this much more, that no Italian priest 
 
 Shall tithe or toll in our dominions ; 
 
 But as we under Heaven are Supreme Head, 
 
 So under Him that great supremacy 
 
 Where we do reign, we will alone uphold. 
 
 In this he followed the authors of The Troublesome Reign 
 who held that King John was a forerunner of King Henry 
 the Eighth, 
 
 Whose arms shall reach unto the Gates of Rome, 
 And with his foot tread down the strumpet's pride, 
 That sits upon the chair of Babylon. 
 
 The same view of King John's defiance of Rome was held by 
 John Bale, a belligerent Protestant who had been a Carmelite 
 Friar when he was young, and was Bishop of Ossory in King 
 Edward the Sixth's time. We do not know when Bale wrote 
 his King Johan, which does not seem to have been printed 
 before 1838, but it was probably before 1540, the year in 
 
 181
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 which he first fled to Germany after Cromwell had fallen, 
 for after that time he must have doubted the piety of King 
 Henry the Eighth. The " Interlude concerning King John," 
 which (according to the Calendar of State Papers) was acted 
 for Cranmcr in 1538, may have been a form of this play. 
 
 The fact that Shakespeare's King John does not seem to 
 have been printed before 1623 may be a sign that it was 
 unpopular, and this may have been due to the fact that the 
 ribaldry was omitted from it. 
 
 The Life and Death of King John is openly founded on 
 The Troublesome Reig?i. It begins with a Scene in which 
 King John defies France and says, 
 
 Our Abbeys and our Priories shall pay 
 This expedition's charge. 
 
 Then the Bastard Faulconbridge enters as a young hero of 
 old-fashioned Romance and immediately proves his royal 
 descent. Then come the usual arguments and the usual 
 curses : Constance says, 
 
 Oh lawful let it be 
 That I have room with Rome to curse awhile. 
 
 The Play ends with the King dying of poison after 
 surrendering his Crown to the Pope, and Pembroke says that 
 he is singing and the Prince replies, 
 
 I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan. 
 Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death. 
 And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings 
 His soul and body to their lasting rest. 
 
 Then King John is brought on the Stage, dying in agony, 
 and he says, 
 
 I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen 
 Upon a parchment, and against this fire 
 Do I shrink up. . . . 
 
 And none of you will bid the winter come 
 To thrust his icy fingers in my maw. 
 Nor let my Kingdom's rivers take their course 
 Through my burned bosom, nor entreat the North 
 To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips 
 
 182
 
 KING HENRY THE FOURTH 
 
 And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much, 
 I beg cold comfort. 
 
 Here is Shakespeare's own music coming after the false 
 pathos about the pale faint swan singing. The fierce King 
 dies like Lucrece, of whom it was said, 
 
 And now this pale swan in her watery nest 
 Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending, 
 
 or like Emilia in Othello who said 
 
 I will play the swan 
 And die in music. 
 
 And even these last verses echo others in Lust's Dominion^ 
 
 Oh, I grow dull, and the cold hand of sleep 
 Hath thrust his icy fingers in my breast. 
 
 In this Pageant false Pathos (as in the Scene between 
 Arthur and Hubert) and conventional ranting are blended 
 with the dawning supremacy of his Tragical mood. 
 
 Mr. Tucker Brooke in his Tudor Drama says : " Virtually 
 everything necessary to fit the Henry the Fourth Plays for 
 their original purpose as preliminary to a drama on the Reign 
 of Henry the Fifth is accomplished in the First Part. . . . 
 The Play needs only Scenes indicating the King's death and 
 the final dismissal of Falstaff to stand forth, as we may suspect 
 it was first designed, perfect in itself and a full induction to 
 the treatment of the hero's triumphant reign." And he says, 
 " the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, like the Second Part 
 of Tamburlainey seems to be an originally unpremeditated 
 addition, occasioned by the enormous effectiveness of the 
 by-figure of Falstaff." He adds that " much of it is a mere 
 variation of material already used in the First : and the effect 
 of the two Parts when taken together is less that of steady 
 dramatic progress than of a march and counter-march." 
 While agreeing with all this, I think that it is one of the 
 signs that King Henry the Fifth was written before the 
 Second Part of King Henry the Fourth. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare wrote Hotspur's Tragedy and 
 
 183
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the battle of Shrewsbury as a Scene in his Pageant, and then 
 King Henry the Fifth and the battle of Agincourt as another, 
 and then (having completed the Pageant of the Wars of the 
 Roses by filling up the gaps between King Richard the Second 
 and King Richard the Third) wrote the Comedy of Falstaff 
 suggested by the Comical patches in the old Famous Victories 
 of Henry the Fifth, and then blended this with Hotspur's 
 Tragedy as King Henry the Fourth and then wrote an Interlude 
 about Ancient Pistol as a caricature of Marston in the War 
 of the Poets and then used part of this to provide Comical 
 Scenes for King Henry the Fifth, and then rewrote Fhe 
 F rouble some Reign as a Prelude to a different Pageant of the 
 Contest between the Crown and the Church, which was to 
 include the History of King Henry the Eighth, and then after 
 King John failed on the Stage (partly because he had taught 
 his audience to look for Comical Scenes in his Pageant) yielded 
 to a demand for a reappearance of Falstaff in the Second Part 
 of King Henry the Fourth. 
 
 The Epilogue to that Second Part ended as follows : " One 
 word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed 
 with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story, 
 with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine 
 of France : where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of 
 a sweat, unless already a' be killed with your hard opinions, 
 for Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not the man. My 
 tongue is weary : when my legs are too, I will bid you 
 good night : and so kneel down before you ; but, indeed, to 
 pray for the Queen." 
 
 This passage seems to have been added by somebody else 
 as a reluctant apology for the use of Oldcastlc's name after 
 the Play had been produced on the Stage, for in the Quarto 
 edition the first paragraph of the Epilogue ended with the 
 words " and so kneel down before you, but, indeed, to pray 
 for the Queen." It seems to me that this passage could not 
 have referred to the Pageant of the Triumph of Agincourt, 
 and was a conditional promise of a Comedy " with Sir John 
 in it," bringing Queen Katharine again on the Stage, and I 
 infer that she had already caused merriment in King Henry 
 the Fifth. It may be that this promise was left unfulfilled 
 because the Second Part was tepidly welcomed. This Part 
 
 184
 
 KING HENRY THE FOURTH 
 
 is much the more admirable and mature of the two, but 
 (perhaps for that reason) it does not seem to have been Hked 
 as well as the other, for we have only one Quarto edition of 
 it while we have seven of the First. Indeed, it has never been 
 popular, for it has been seldom performed. And I infer that 
 the announcement of Falstaff's death was inserted in King 
 Henry the Fifth after the second part of the Epilogue was 
 heard on the Stage. 
 
 The words " Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the 
 man," referred to the fact that the Comical Knight was 
 called Sir John Oldcastle first, as is shown by the Prince's 
 words in the First Party " as the honey of Hybla, my old lad 
 of the Castle." Nicholas Rowe in his Account of the Life of 
 Shakespeare explained this alteration : " It may not be 
 improper to observe that this part of Falstaif is said to have 
 been written originally under the name of Oldcastle : some 
 of that family being then remaining, the Queen was pleased 
 to command him to alter it, upon which he made use of 
 Falstaff." This statement may have been based on the one 
 made by William James in his dedication of Fhe Life and 
 Defence of the Noble Knight and Martyr, Sir John Oldcastle, 
 printed in 1625, " offence being worthily taken by personages 
 descended from his title, as peradventure by many others 
 who ought to have him in honourable memory." 
 
 Sir Sidney Lee is inaccurate when he writes, " Influential 
 objection was taken by Henry Brooke, eighth Lord Cobham, 
 who succeeded to the title on March the fifth, 1 596-1 597, 
 and claimed descent in the female line from the historical 
 Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard leader, who sat in the House of 
 Lords as Lord Cobham." This Lord Cobham was not 
 descended from Oldcastle. Joan De la Pole, who was Baroness 
 Cobham in her own right, married five times and left an only 
 child, Joan, by her second husband. Sir Reginald Braybrooke. 
 Her fourth marriage made her Oldcastle's third wife, and 
 her title descended to the Brookes through her daughter, 
 who married Sir Thomas Brooke. Sir John Oldcastle sat 
 in the House of Lords as Lord Cobham, in his wife's right, 
 from 1409, the year when he married her, till 141 3, the year 
 when he was arrested, but he was not known by that title : 
 his followers in 141 3 used the watchword "for Sir John 
 
 185
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Oldcastle," and the King's proclamation stated that one of 
 their aims was " to divide the realm into confederate districts 
 and to appoint Sir John Oldcastle President of the Common- 
 wealth." 
 
 According to all the contemporary authorities Oldcastle 
 led a profligate life till he became the chief of the Lollards ; 
 but in later times this was denied by some Protestant writers 
 who thought that he had shared their Religion though if 
 they had read his defence they would have seen their mistake. 
 Still, even Fuller had his doubts about Oldcastle. He wrote 
 of him in his Worthies of Englaftd, printed in 1662 : " It is 
 easily known out of what purse this black penny came, the 
 Papists railing on him for a heretic, and therefore he must 
 also be a coward, though indeed he was a man of arms, every 
 inch of him, and as valiant as any in his Age " ; but in his 
 Church History, printed in 1655, he says : " Let Mr. Foxe 
 be his compurgator, I dare not, and if my hand were on the 
 book, I would take it back again. Yet so that as I will not 
 acquit, I will not condemn him, but leave all to the revelation 
 of the righteous judgment of God." 
 
 If we could be certain that one of the Cobhams intervened 
 in this matter this would give us a clue to the date when the 
 Comedy of Falstaff was first seen on the Stage. William 
 Brooke, seventh Lord Cobham, was Lord Chamberlain for 
 about seven months beginning in August, 1596. Since he 
 seems to have been inclined to Puritanism and was linked 
 through his title with Oldcastle he may have forbidden his 
 Servants to use Oldcastle's name. This would agree with the 
 date commonly accepted by students : Sir Israel Gollancz 
 says, " there is almost unanimity among scholars in assigning 
 the First Part of Henry the Fourth to the year 1 596-1 597." 
 The eighth Lord Cobham (Henry Brooke) had no power 
 over the Chamberlain's Servants and he was in disfavour at 
 Court because he was a Puritan leader, and George Carey, 
 the second Lord Hunsdon, who was Lord Chamberlain after 
 the seventh Lord Cobham (as his father had been before him 
 from 1583 to 1596), disliked the Puritans as much as the 
 Queen did, and would not have intervened in this way any 
 more than she would have done if she had stooped to give the 
 matter a thought. 
 
 186
 
 KING HENRY THE FOURTH 
 
 The change may have been merely due to the fact that 
 the use of Oldcastle's name had given offence as the Epilogue 
 to the Second Part indicates. In 1599 Philip Henslowe 
 employed four of his Dramatists, Anthony Munday, Michael 
 Drayton, Robert Wilson and Richard Hathaway, to compile 
 a Play called the First Part of the True and Honourable History 
 of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham. This 
 Play, which was printed in 1600 or 161 9, may have been an 
 answer to Shakespeare's picture of Oldcastle. This seems 
 shown by its Prologue : 
 
 It is no pampered glutton we present, 
 Nor aged councillor to youthful sin. 
 But one whose virtue shone above the rest, 
 A valiant martyr and a virtuous Peer. 
 
 This was followed in 1 60 1 by John Weever's Mirror of 
 Martyrs, or the Life and Death of the Valiant Captain and 
 most godly martyr. Sir John Oldcastle, Knight, Lord Cobham, 
 in which there were quotations from the Second Part of King 
 Henry the Fourth. Sir John Oldcastle and this Poem seem 
 proofs that there was an outcry against the Comical picture of 
 Oldcastle, which had nothing to do with the fact that Baroness 
 Cobham had been one of his wives. 
 
 Anthony Munday was famous for his zeal as a Protestant. 
 He had first become prominent in 158 1 when he gave evidence 
 against Father Campion, the Jesuit, who was tortured on 
 the Rack in the Tower by another dramatist, Thomas 
 Norton, one of the authors of the Tragedy of Gorboduc, acted 
 in 1 561 and printed in 1565. Munday wrote the English 
 Roman Life and an attack on Father Campion, which was 
 afterwards used in Holinshed's Chronicle, probably either by 
 John Hooker or John Stow, since Holinshed seems to have 
 died about 1580. The Catholic view of him is expressed, 
 for instance, in the True Account of the Death and Martyrdom 
 of M. Campion (which was probably written by Thomas 
 Pound), in which he was called Cogging Munday, " who was 
 first a Stage-Player, no doubt a calling of some credit, after 
 an apprenticeship, which time he well served with deceiving 
 of his master, then wandering towards Italy, became by his 
 own account a cozener in his journey. Coming to Rome, he 
 
 187
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 was charitably received there, but never admitted into the 
 Seminary, as he pleaseth to He." This view may have been 
 just, for even TopcHffe, who employed him to harry the 
 Catholics, accused him of theft. He may have borne a 
 private grudge against Shakespeare in the same way as Greene 
 did, for he seems to have been the author of Fidele and 
 Fortunio, which was one of the sources of The Tzvo Gentlemen 
 of Verona ; but his Protestant zeal would have been enough to 
 account for his taking the chief part in writing Sir John 
 Oldcastle as he seems to have done. The fact that this 
 Play was written in 1599 or 1600 may show that Oldcastle's 
 name was still retained on the Stage though it had been 
 changed in the Quarto of 1598. 
 
 According to the Sidney Papers, Rowland Whyte wrote 
 to Sir Robert Sidney in March, 1 599-1600, about a feast given 
 by the Lord Chamberlain, the second Lord Hunsdon, to 
 the Flemish Envoy Verreiken : " upon Thursday my Lord 
 Chamberlain feasted him, and made him a very great and 
 delicate dinner, and there in the afternoon his Players acted 
 before Sir John Oldcastle to his great contentment." Since 
 the Chamberlain's Servants would not have acted a rival 
 play belonging to Henslowe they may have performed the 
 separate Comedy of Falstaff as an Interlude then, still using 
 the name of Oldcastle. 
 
 In A Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, printed in 1604, 
 it was said, " How like you, mine host ? Did I not tell you 
 he was a mad round knave and a merry one, too ? And if 
 you talk of fat Sir John Oldcastle, he will tell you he was his 
 great-grandfather." Nathaniel Field wrote in Amends for 
 Ladies, printed in 161 8, " Did you not see the piece in which 
 the fat Knight, hight Oldcastle, told you plainly what was 
 honour ? " In the Wandering Jew Felling Fortunes for 
 Englishmen, printed in 1640, Glutton says, " I am a fat 
 man. ... I do not live by the sweat of my brow, but am 
 almost dead by sweating. I eat much but can talk little : 
 Sir John Oldcastle was my great-grandfather's father's uncle : 
 I come of a huge kindred." 
 
 William Bagwell in Fhe Merchant Distressed, printed in 
 1644, wrote " they have no skill in martial discipline, yet they 
 begin as if they durst to fight, with Sir John Oldcastle, that 
 
 188
 
 KING HENRY THE FOURTH 
 
 high-flown Knight." And Fuller wrote in his Church History 
 of Britain, that the Stage-Poets " having made themselves 
 very bold and others very merry at the memory of Sir John 
 Oldcastle, whom they have fancied a boon companion, a 
 jovial roysterer, and yet a coward to boot : the best is Sir 
 John Falstaff hath relieved the memory of Sir John Oldcastle 
 and of late is substituted buffoon in his place." It is not 
 likely that Fuller would have written about 1654 ^^^^ ^^^ 
 change had been made " of late " if the name had been 
 altered about 1597. 
 
 The name Falstaff was borrowed from the cowardly 
 Knight who is now called Sir John Fastolfe in the First Part 
 of King Henry the Sixth. Heminge and Condell printed his 
 name as Falstaff, and this was changed to Fastolfe by Theobald. 
 And this form of the name may have been the traditional one, 
 for Sir John Fastolfe was called Falstaff in Rymer's Foedera 
 and Falstolf in the French Chronicles. The picture of him 
 in King Henry the Sixth was as unjust as traditional ones 
 commonly are, for though Talbot accused him of showing 
 cowardice at the Rout of Patay in 1428, Bedford decided that 
 the charge was untrue. Mr. Gairdner suggested in his 
 Lollardy and the Reformation in England that Shakespeare 
 used Falstaff's name because it was believed that he had 
 been a Lollard like Oldcastle. But we know a good deal about 
 Falstolfe or Falstaff (through the Paston Letters, for instance) 
 and there is no proof that he took sides with the Lollards. 
 It is possible that the fact that he owned the Boar's Head 
 Tavern in Southwark may have led the Players to link Falstaff's 
 adventures with the Boar's Head in Eastcheap ; but nothing 
 recorded of him shows any resemblance to the Comical 
 Knight. 
 
 Shakespeare found Oldcastle named as one of Prince Hal's 
 riotous friends in the Famous Victories of King Henry the 
 Fifth. Oldcastle seems to have been one of the figures of the 
 Traditional Plays. Father Robert Parsons, for instance, 
 writing about 1603, spoke of him as " that Ruffian Knight, 
 as all England knows, commonly brought in by the Comedians 
 on their Stage." If Oldcastle was a traditional butt as a 
 fat and cowardly Knight (an English Miles Gloriosus) this 
 would explain why the Players used his name or reverted to 
 
 189
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 it after it had been changed in the printed versions of King 
 Henry the Fourth. 
 
 The change may have been made when the Puritans 
 seemed rising to power and may have been undone while 
 they suffered and restored in the days when they were 
 beginning to triumph. Meanwhile the Quartos may have 
 kept it because it was enforced by their licence. But it was 
 observed in a performance at Court in February 1612-1613 
 when (according to the Treasurers' Accounts) Sir John Falstaff, 
 which may have been the Comedy part from the Pageant, 
 was twice acted by His Majesty's Servants. 
 
 It may be that while Shakespeare drew Oldcastle-Falstaff 
 partly from some men of his time (such as Ben Jonson) and 
 partly from his own heart he was faithful to the traditional 
 build, for he could not have drawn a familiar Character 
 strangely. This may help to explain why Falstaff seems to 
 be out of place in Shakespeare's shadowy World and to belong 
 to a more primitive time. Though his philosophy belongs to 
 no Country (for he would have agreed with Omar Khayyam's 
 maxim in the twenty-third Quatrain in Mr. Heron Allen's 
 edition, " Drink, rob on the highway, and be benevolent ") 
 he was essentially English ; but he sinned and rejoiced with a 
 Mediaeval simplicity : he could have ridden with Chaucer's 
 Pilgrims or sung the old verses ascribed to Walter Map, 
 
 Meum est propositum in tabcrna mori : 
 
 Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, 
 
 Ut dicant cum venerint Angelorum chori, 
 
 " Deus sit propitius huic peccatori ! " 
 
 Falstaff seems to belong to Rabelais' World rather than 
 Shakespeare's, but this does not make him less English. 
 Rabelais' loud mirth was not limited by the borders of France, 
 and indeed it might be contended that he drew his Gargantua 
 from King Henry the Eighth. He published the first books of 
 La Vie du Grand Gargatitua in 1532, about twelve years after 
 France had rung with the doings of the huge English King at 
 the Field of the Cloth of Gold when (according to Hall's 
 Chronicle of England) the motto, " Faictc bonne chere quy 
 voudra," was written over the entrance of the English Pavilion. 
 And King Henry the Eighth (of whom it was recorded that 
 
 190
 
 KING HENRY THE EIGHTH 
 
 the three next fattest men in England could fit into his 
 waistcoat) was a Falstaff compounded with an English 
 Othello. 
 
 Chaucer or Rabelais would have left Falstaff rollicking 
 and immortally young, and it may be that Shakespeare had 
 intended to spare him and (though he hanged Bardolph and 
 Nym in King Henry the Fifth) had first written that Play 
 without " Sir John in it " partly because he would have spoiled 
 it if he had followed the historical truth by making his hero 
 send him to death. He avoided that risk when he made 
 Falstaff die of disease, and he may have mentioned his death 
 partly because the nature of a Pageant required that the end 
 of the chief people in it should be recorded. Perhaps he made 
 his English Silenus die in despair because he was turning from 
 the glamour of Pageants and the laughter of Comedies to the 
 darkness of truth. 
 
 The Prologue to King Henry the Eighth begins — 
 
 I come no more to make you laugh : things now 
 That bear a weighty and a serious brow. 
 Sad, high and working, full of state and woe, 
 Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, 
 We now present. Those that can pity, here 
 May, if they think it well, let fall a tear : 
 The subject will deserve it. Such as give 
 Their money out of hope they may believe. 
 May here find truth too. ... 
 
 Only they 
 That come to hear a merry bawdy play, 
 A noise of targets, or to see a fellow 
 In a long motley coat guarded with yellow, 
 Will be deceived, for, gentle hearers, know 
 To rank our chosen truth with such a show 
 As fool and fight is, besides forfeiting 
 Our own brains and the opinion that we bring 
 To make that only true we now intend. 
 Will leave us never an understanding friend. 
 
 Sir Henry Wotton wrote in 1613 (in a letter preserved in 
 
 191
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Reliqtiia W ottoniancs) about the burning of the Globe 
 Theatre in that year during " a new Play called All is True, 
 representing some principal pieces in the reign of Henry the 
 Eighth." The title Jllis True agrees with the Prologue, but 
 this Pageant, as we have it, docs not. This does not seem to 
 have been printed before the Folio of 1623 and there it was 
 called The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the 
 Eighth, and was the last of the Histories. 
 
 Coleridge, in his Classifications of 1802 and 1 8 19 put this 
 Play in his Third Epoch after Henry the Fifth, calling it (in 
 1819) "a sort of Historical Masque or Show Play." This 
 would be a natural place for it if Shakespeare had planned 
 another Pageant of the Contest between the Crown and the 
 Church which had been introduced by King John. But 
 while this Play has the structure of his Chronicle Pageant its 
 manner does not seem to be his. 
 
 Some students suggest that he had Fletcher's help in this 
 Play while others contend that Fletcher and Massinger 
 founded it on their recollections of one written by him and 
 lost when the Globe was burnt in 161 3. But the Play would 
 not have been lost even if every copy had been burnt with 
 the Globe, for the Players could have remembered their 
 parts, and even if Shakespeare had sought Fletcher's assistance 
 (for once and for no visible reason) he would not have asked 
 him to rewrite the whole Play. 
 
 This Pageant has two opposite versions of the historical 
 truth, a Catholic and a Protestant one, and this may explain 
 why a Play partly written by Shakespeare was rewritten and 
 completed by others, perhaps Fletcher and Massinger. 
 
 The first three Acts and the second Scene of the fourth 
 are mainly written from a Catholic standpoint : Queen 
 Katharine, another Hcrmione, is the heroine, the King's 
 scruples and Anne Bullen's reluctance are hypocritical, and 
 Wolsey is shown as he was seen by the Catholics. The picture 
 of Wolsey was copied from Holinshed who had relied mainly 
 on two Catholic books, George Cavendish's Life of Cardinal 
 Wolsey (which he probably read in manuscript, for it does 
 not seem to have been printed before the garbled edition of 
 1641), and Father Campion's account of Wolsey, which was 
 written in 1569 about the time when he was reconciled to 
 
 192
 
 KING HENRY THE EIGHTH 
 
 the Catholic Church. In those days the CathoHcs ascribed 
 their calamities to Wolsey's ambition and to King Henry the 
 Eighth's amorous nature. So do these three Acts, but in 
 this they differ from Holinshed and from Edward Hall's 
 Triumpha?it Reign of Henry the Eighth^ printed in 1542 or 
 1548, which had also been used in them. All this is changed 
 in the first Scene of the fourth Act and in the fifth Act : 
 Anne Bullen and Cranmcr are praised and the story is the 
 Protestant version and seems based on John Foxe's Acts and 
 Monuments of the Church., commonly called the Book of 
 Martyrs, printed in Latin in 1559 and in English in 1563. 
 And this part ruins the Play by contradicting the rest. 
 
 If the Catholic version of the story was true Queen 
 Katharine was wronged and the King's marriage to Anne 
 Bullen was void and Queen Elizabeth was born illegitimate. 
 Here was reason enough why most of this Play could not 
 have been acted while Queen Elizabeth lived, and besides 
 she could not have wished her father and mother to be shown 
 on the Stage by her own Company, the Chamberlain's 
 Servants. During her life they acted two Plays dealing with 
 King Henry the Eighth's Troublesome Reign, Sir Thomas 
 More., printed in 1834, and Thomas, Lord Cromwell, printed in 
 1602, and though the King was important in each he was not 
 shown in either of them. It is probable that the Admiral's 
 Men, who acted Plays concerned with Cardinal Wolsey in 
 1601 and 1602, were equally cautious ; but this is not certain, 
 for these Plays have been lost. But about two years after her 
 death Prince Henry's Company of Players performed Samuel 
 Rowley's When you See me, you Know me, or the Famous 
 Chronicle of Kifig Henry the Eighth, and this was rivalled by a 
 Chronicle History of her own early days written by Thomas 
 Heywood and called // you Know not Me, you Know Nobody. 
 
 In the days when the Queen was nearing her end the 
 Catholics hoped that the new King would show kindness to 
 them for his mother's sake. And many of them thought then 
 that his wife Anne of Denmark shared their rehgion. They 
 were probably wrong in this, for though Mr. Gardiner in 
 his History of England says that she was a Catholic, Father 
 Richard Blount, who succeeded Father Garnet as the head of 
 the English Jesuits, doubted this in a report sent to Rome, 
 
 193 N
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 In any case, she did nothing for them, and King James 
 blighted their hopes, mainly because he needed their fines, 
 and in 1605 the crazy Gunpowder Plot made him their 
 enemy. 
 
 If Shakespeare wrote or sketched a form of this Play 
 during the old Queen's last years he must have intended to 
 postpone its performance and may well have supposed that 
 the employment of the Catholic version would not be a 
 drawback when King James had come to the Throne. The 
 first three Acts differ from all the other Scenes of his Pageant 
 except the second part of Ki7ig Richard the Second, and this 
 may be due to the fact that they were not founded on a 
 Chronicle History. It may be that when he had finished his 
 form of the Contest between the Houses of Lancaster and 
 York he turned to the theme chosen by Hall, The Union of 
 the two noble and illustrate families of Lancaster and Tork 
 and the Reign of the High and Prudent Prince, King Henry 
 the Eighth, the Indubitate Flower and Heir of both the said 
 Lineages. If so, he no longer depended on the views of the 
 Chronicles, for that Prudent Prince was still distinctly 
 remembered. It may be that when he had written part of 
 a new Pageant, the Scenes showing Buckingham's doom and 
 the Cardinal's fall and Queen Katharine's desertion and death, 
 he turned to Tragical work and (instead of re-writing them 
 in a Protestant version to suit the taste of the times after the 
 Gunpowder Plot) abandoned the task, but allowed his 
 Company to profit by them. And his Company may have 
 employed Fletcher and Massinger to write a Play founded on 
 his Catholic version. This would explain why only the 
 structure of the Catholic part seems to be his and why 
 Heminge and Condell printed the Play as his after his death. 
 
 If (as Elze contended) he wrote this Pageant in 1603 the 
 old Queen's death in that year would account for his selecting 
 a theme which would have been banned during her life. 
 This seems a more probable date, for it is not likely that he 
 would have written such a Play at a time when it could not 
 have been acted. And in this case he may have laid this 
 Pageant aside when the Bye-Plot of 1603 aroused ill-feeling 
 against the Catholics and may have abandoned it after the 
 Gunpowder Plot of 1605. 
 
 194
 
 KING HENRY THE EIGHTH 
 
 In 1 613 he had nearly finished his life-work and had 
 (according to most students) written the last form of The 
 Tevi'pest ; he had only three years of life left, and it seems 
 certain that he was spending them in Stratford-on-Avon. 
 I do not think that he would have written a Play then with 
 Fletcher or with any one else who was living in London or 
 would have reverted to his old Pageants then or could have 
 planned this one (which is rhetorical and much less dramatic 
 than the real events) after his Tragedies. 
 
 In 161 3 John Fletcher was at the height of his fame : he 
 had finished the Plays which he had written with Francis 
 Beaumont and probably with others whose names have not 
 been recorded. If Shakespeare's associates had wished to 
 employ somebody to refashion a derelict abandoned by him 
 ten years before this, the choice of Fletcher would have been 
 natural. And since in that year Fletcher, who was then 
 aged thirty-four, began working with Philip Massinger, then 
 aged about thirty, he might well have chosen him to help 
 in his task. 
 
 There is no sign that Fletcher was ranked as a friend or 
 an admirer of Shakespeare's : he seems to have belonged to 
 the school who regarded Ben Jonson as the Lord of the 
 Theatre. This may be enough to explain why King Henry 
 the Eighth appears to have been re-written throughout, or it 
 may be that Shakespeare stipulated for this when he allowed 
 his old Catholic Pageant to be altered to a Protestant one. 
 I think that Massinger re-wrote the first four Acts and that 
 Fletcher added some passages and wrote the first Scene of 
 the fourth Act and the fifth Act hastily. 
 
 Some students have argued that this Play is not Fletcher's 
 because it is unlike his Romantic ones ; but it does not differ 
 from V alentinian, written before 1619, more than John Ford's 
 Perkin Warheck, written about 1634, does from his Broken 
 Heart, written about 1633. Ford's Perkin Warheck imitated 
 Edward, the Second in an attempt to revive the Chronicle 
 Pageants, and its Prologue repudiated the " unnecessary 
 mirth " of such Histories as King Henry the Fourth. King 
 Henry the Eighth had the same model and aim, and its Prologue 
 repudiated Shakespeare's fool and fight and clatter of targets. 
 I do not think that Shakespeare would have turned to denounce
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 his own methods or to imitate Marlowe again as he had done 
 when he wrote the second part of Ki7ig Richard the Second ; 
 but two younger writers might have done this (as Ford 
 afterwards did) when they attempted to show how a Chronicle 
 Pageant ought to be written. 
 
 Some students have argued that the popular speeches in 
 King Henry the Eighth^ for instance, Wolsey's good-bye to 
 Cromwell in the third Act, are too admirable to have been 
 written by Fletcher. Even if we were prepared to admit 
 that Fletcher did not attain this level or pass it at other times 
 this would not prove that he did not soar to it once, and I 
 do not believe that Shakespeare would have seen any reason 
 for copying him in 1613. It seems plain that such verses as 
 
 And, when I am forgotten, as I shall be . . . 
 Say, Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory. 
 And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour 
 Found thee a way, out of his wreck, to rise in ; 
 A sure and safe one, though thy master missed it. . . . 
 Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition, 
 
 or those in Wolsey's soliloquy. 
 
 Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, 
 This many summers in a sea of glory, 
 
 were written by the poet who wrote in Valentinian, 
 
 Call in your lady-bawds and gilded pandars, 
 And let them triumph too and sing to Caesar, 
 
 and in Bonduca 
 
 See that huge battle moving from the mountains. 
 
 This lilting rhythm is like the Sapphics of Horace, such as. 
 
 Integer vitae, scclerisque purus, 
 
 and Fletcher may have learnt it from him. Shakespeare's 
 different mind could not have liked the accurate composure of 
 Horace, and besides, the odds are that he knew little about him, 
 for his knowledge of Latin Poetry seems to have been limited 
 to a schoolboy's acquaintance with Ovid and Mantuanus and 
 Virgil. And Fletcher's favourite lilt would have been alien 
 
 196
 
 KING HENRY THE EIGHTH 
 
 to him even in his lyrical days and repellent when his Verse 
 had acquired a solemn maturity. 
 
 Most of this Play is written with Massinger's contented 
 monotony, and his apparent share in the task suggests another 
 possible reason for the acceptance of the Catholic story, since 
 he seems to have been a Catholic during most of his life. Mr. 
 Arthur Symons, for instance, writes in his Philip Massinger, 
 printed in the Mermaid Series, " It is conjectured by Gifford 
 that Massinger, during his residence in the University, had 
 ' exchanged the Religion of his father for one at that time the 
 object of terror, persecution and hatred.' ... In support 
 of this hypothesis, Gifford points particularly to the Virgin 
 Martyr, The Renegado and The Maid of Honour. I cannot 
 think the evidence of these Plays conclusive, but such as it is, 
 it certainly goes a long way in favour of the supposition." 
 He adds that the Catholic religion would have attracted a 
 man of Massinger's temperament, " and he would certainly 
 have every opportunity of association with it in a University 
 of such Catholic and Conservative principles as Oxford." 
 This seems supported by the little we know of Massinger's 
 life, for instance, by the fact that he was forsaken by his first 
 patron, the third Earl of Pembroke (of whom Clarendon wrote 
 that he was " a great lover of his Country and of the Religion 
 and Justice which he believed could only support it, and his 
 friendships were only with men of these principles ") and by the 
 fact that Queen Henrietta Maria showed him a particular favour. 
 
 It seems to me that if Heminge and Condell had not 
 printed this Play as Shakespeare's, we could conclude that 
 Massinger wrote the Catholic Scenes about 1613 and that 
 Fletcher retouched them with his lyrical eloquence and added 
 the contradictory Act to suit the mood of that time. This 
 would not be disproved by its structure since that was based 
 on Marlowe's Edward the Second. And this Play's resemblance 
 to King Richard the Second may be due to the fact that (like 
 that early Pageant) it echoes Edward the Second, for instance, 
 in Wolsey's farewell, for its first verses, 
 
 Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear 
 In all my miseries ; but thou hast forced me. 
 Out of thy honest truth to play the woman 
 
 197
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 seem derived from King Edward's parting from Leicester, 
 
 Leicester, if gentle words might comfort me, 
 Thy speeches long ago had eased my sorrows, 
 For kind and loving hast thou always been. 
 
 It seems to me that Heminge and Condell's inclusion of 
 this Play in the Folio of 1623 can only be explained by inferring 
 that Shakespeare had written a form of it which was rewritten 
 afterwards by Fletcher and Massinger. In that case this 
 Play should be ascribed to Fletcher and Massinger in the same 
 way as, for instance, King Henry the Sixth is given to Shake- 
 speare. If he called his sketch of this Pageant All Is True^ he 
 may have meant this to show that he was turning from Plays 
 which could be fitly named As Ton Like It. He may have 
 intended his last Pageant to be his first mature Tragedy. 
 Perhaps he could have said as Fletcher did in the Prologue, 
 
 I come no more to make you laugh : things now 
 That bear a weighty and a serious brow, 
 Sad, high and working, full of state and woe, 
 Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, 
 We now present. 
 
 198
 
 THE TRAGEDIES 
 
 SHAKESPEARE lived in passionate times, and they grew 
 darker as he came to maturity. During those years he 
 watched the fantastic boys whom he had admired in his Youth 
 grow to heroic men and struggle and fall and he saw Queen 
 Elizabeth yield to Old Age at last and die broken-hearted. 
 
 During the years between 1593 and 1603 ^^^ third Earl of 
 Southampton, for instance, triumphed at Court and cast 
 the Royal favour away for Elizabeth Vernon and became 
 linked in passionate friendship with her cousin, the second 
 Earl of Essex, fought under him at the capture of Cadiz in 
 1596, sailed with him as a Vice-Admiral in command of a 
 Ship-Royal, The Garland, in 1597 and was knighted by 
 him when Villa Franca was taken " ere he could dry the sweat 
 from his brows or put his sword in his scabbard " (according to 
 Markham) and went with him to more fighting in Ireland 
 in 1599, returned with him to help his fatal Revolt, rode with 
 him to call London to arms in 1601 and was sentenced to 
 death for this in the Guildhall and was kept in the Tower till 
 Queen Elizabeth died. The effeminate boy to whom Shake- 
 speare had dedicated his Poems of Love had changed to the 
 reckless soldier who stood on the leads of Essex House, saying : 
 " Let his Lordship do his pleasure. If he blow us up, we 
 shall be the nearer Heaven. We purpose not to yield without 
 hostages, for we have made our choice rather to die like men 
 with swords in our hands." 
 
 There is no reason to doubt that one of Shakespeare's 
 feigned Tragedies, King Richard the Second, was set in the 
 true one of the Essex Revolt as the Murder Play was in 
 Hamlet. Bacon recorded in his Account of the Arraignment 
 of Merrick, one of the leaders of that Revolt : " And farther 
 to prove him privy to the Plot ... it was given in evidence 
 that the afternoon before the Rebellion, Merrick, with a great 
 company of others that afterwards were all in the action, had 
 procured to be played before them the Play of deposing 
 
 199
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 King Richard the Second. Neither was it casual, but a Play- 
 bespoken by Merrick. And not so only, but when he was 
 told by one of the Players that the Play was old, and that 
 they should have loss in playing it because few would come to 
 it, there were forty Shillings extraordinary given to play it, 
 and so thereupon played it was. So earnest he was to satisfy 
 his eyes with the sight of that Tragedy, which he thought 
 soon after his Lordship should bring from the Stage to the 
 State, but that God turned it upon their heads." Camden, 
 too, wrote in his Annals that the Play was old, " Merrick was 
 accused that he had with money procured an old out-worn 
 Play of the tragical deposing of King Richard the Second to 
 be acted on the public Stage before his companions." King 
 Richard the Second would have been old in i6oi and no 
 longer attractive, for the fashion had changed. The King's 
 deposition was omitted from it when it was printed in 1597. 
 Though the Queen did not resemble the pathetic King 
 drawn in the second part of that History she was accused of 
 yielding to favourites, and the Essex Revolt was a plot to 
 dethrone her and put her under restraint on the ground of 
 senile decay. This was why in her last days (according to 
 Sir John Harington in Nugcs Aritiqtice, printed in 1769) she 
 said, " I know I am not mad : you must not think to make 
 Queen Jane of me," remembering how Queen Joanna of 
 Castile was supplanted on the ground of Insanity. It seems 
 certain that she described Shakespeare's Play when she saw 
 William Lambarde's Pandecta Rotulorum at Greenwich in 1601. 
 " I am Richard the Second : know ye not that ? " she said 
 (according to Lambarde) ; and when he replied, referring to 
 Essex, " Such a wicked imagination was determined and 
 attempted by a most unkind gentleman, the most adorned 
 creature that ever your Majesty made," she rejoined, " He 
 that forgets God will also forget his benefactor. The Tragedy 
 was played forty times in open streets and houses." 
 
 If Shakespeare took any part in T^he Tragedy of King Richard 
 the Second when it was performed on that February afternoon 
 in the Globe, before Southampton and Rutland and hundreds 
 of gentlemen who had sworn to rebel with them, he was like 
 one of the Players in Hamlet. But there was no mention of 
 his name in the Records. 
 
 200
 
 THE GUNPOWDER PLOT 
 
 Another true Tragedy in which he must have taken a 
 particular interest was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. If 
 he was living then in Stratford-on-Avon he was in the midst 
 of that Plot. Clopton House, which Sir Everard Digby hired 
 for it, was near Stratford, and so was Norbrook, the moated 
 grange where John Grant, another of the Conspirators, lived, 
 and the fugitives rode through Stratford to Huddington, 
 still hoping to raise the Standard of Rebellion in Warwickshire. 
 
 There were about a dozen Conspirators in the beginning 
 of the Gunpowder Plot, all of them gentlemen except 
 Catesby's servant. Bates, nearly all of them kinsmen or 
 connected by marriage and linked with Warwickshire, and 
 all, except perhaps Bates, men who (like several of the 
 prominent Jesuits, Fathers Campion and Parsons and Garnet, 
 for instance) had been Protestants and had been reconciled 
 to the Catholic Church. They may have been driven by 
 the zeal of new converts, but most of them had been mainly 
 remarkable as reckless adventurers. A painting by Van den 
 Passe called " Concilium Septem Nobilium Anglorum Con- 
 jurantium " shows all the first leaders as men with twisted 
 moustaches and short beards and long hair and rich clothes 
 and high steeple-crowned hats. 
 
 Two at least of the Gunpowder Plotters, Catesbv and 
 Tresham, had ridden in the Essex Revolt with many other 
 Catholics. Cecil had taunted Essex himself with being a 
 Catholic, saying, " Your Religion appears by Blunt, Davis 
 and Tresham, your chiefest counsellors for the present, 
 and by promising Toleration hereafter." But this was 
 probably false, though the Earl's wife (who was Walsingham's 
 daughter and Philip Sidney's widow) became a Catholic 
 afterwards, like his sister Penelope, who had been Sidney's 
 first love and the Stella of the Astrophel Poems. Bacon 
 wrote of him in his Declaration of the Treasons of Robert, 
 Earl of Essex : " knowing there were no such strong and 
 drawing cards of popularity as Religion, he had not neglected, 
 both at this time and long time before, in a profane policy 
 to serve his turn, for his own greatness, of both sorts of 
 factions, both of Catholics and Puritans." And, like the 
 Essex Revolt, the Gunpowder Plot was a crazy blow by 
 desperate gentlemen. 
 
 201
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare saw these things, not as we see them deliber- 
 ately obscured by the Records, but enacted around him. 
 It may be that he thought of such men as Catesby, who after 
 leading wild lives sacrificed all, when he wrote in his Sonnets, 
 
 To this I witness call the fools of time, 
 
 Which die for goodness who have lived for crime. 
 
 When he wrote his feigned Tragedies he must have 
 remembered the real ones in which they were set. Harington 
 wrote of Essex in his Nugce Antiques : " My Lord of Essex 
 shiftcth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion 
 so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason as 
 right mind. . . . The Queen well knoweth how to humble 
 his haughty spirit : his haughty spirit knoweth not how to 
 yield ; and the man's soul secmcth tossed to and fro like the 
 waves of a troubled sea." In all Shakespeare's last Tragedies 
 haughty spirits were broken and souls were tossed to and fro. 
 
 In the Plays printed as Tragedies by Heminge and Condell, 
 except the two Juvenile Poems Titus A?idro?iicus and Romeo 
 and Juliet and the unfinished Tragl-comedy Cymbeline, 
 heroic hearts fall. Excessive strength Is the theme of each 
 of these Tragedies. Each of them dealt with a man of 
 whom it might be said in the words of the twenty-third 
 Sonnet that he was like 
 
 Some fierce thing, replete with too much rage, 
 Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart. 
 
 Even in Julius Ccesar, which is apart from all the rest of 
 these Tragedies and links them with the Chronicle Pageant, 
 Caesar's strength Is excessive and dooms him in the everyday 
 World. Macbeth is overborne by ambition and distracted 
 by the sight of the Weird Sisters and the sudden temptation 
 linked with their prophecy. Hamlet is too great for his 
 time, and he is half crazed by his beloved father's appeal 
 and the agony of condemning his mother. King Lear is 
 too great to be a King, and he turns against his daughter 
 Cordelia because he loves her too well. For the same reason 
 Othello, who is too great to live with Venetians, kills Desde- 
 mona. Antony is strong enough to conquer the World 
 
 202
 
 THE THEME OF THE TRAGEDIES 
 
 and then to cast it away and count it well lost. Coriolanus 
 and Timon are doomed to misery because they are too 
 great. In all these Plays the crows peck the eagles. And 
 we can say of each of the victims as Cassius said of Caesar, 
 
 He doth bestride the narrow World 
 Like a Colossus. 
 
 There is no weakness in any of them except the excessive 
 strength that weakened his heart. All of them are on the 
 brink of Insanity, even Caesar, for he has the Falling Sickness 
 (like Othello) and yields to an impossible dream. And this 
 Insanity is the dotage of strength. 
 
 In the Tragedies ascribed now to Lucius Annaeus Seneca 
 Madness was inspired by the Gods or by ghosts who were 
 in search of revenge. It resembled Possession by Evil Spirits 
 and made its victims subordinate : Juno rules Hercules in 
 the Hercules Furens. Shakespeare copied this in three of 
 these Tragedies, changing the stories in an attempt to show 
 Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet dominated by Spirits. 
 
 Plutarch did not assert that Caesar's ghost came to 
 Brutus. The Life of Julius Caesar in North's version of 
 Plutarch says : " Above all, the ghost that appeared unto 
 Brutus showed plainly that the Gods were offended with 
 the murder of Caesar. . . . He saw a horrible vision of a 
 man of a wonderful greatness and dreadful look which at 
 the first made him marvellously afraid. But when he saw 
 that it did him no hurt but stood by his bedside and said 
 nothing, at length he asked it what it was. The image 
 answered him, ' I am thy 111 Angel, Brutus, and thou shalt 
 see me by the City of Phillipes.' Then Brutus replied again 
 and said, ' Well, I shall see thee then.' " And the same 
 story is told in the Life of Brutus. In Julius Ceesar Brutus 
 sees the same Evil Spirit though the Stage-direction says, 
 " Enter the Ghost of Caesar." But in the next Act he 
 exclaims, 
 
 O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet ! 
 
 Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords 
 
 In our own proper entrails, 
 
 and he says to Volumnius, 
 
 203
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The ghost of C^sar hath appeared to me 
 Two several times by night. 
 
 Phitarch's 111 Angel was transformed to resemble the ghost 
 seen in Seneca's TroadeSy 
 
 Emicuit ingens umbra Thessalici ducis. 
 Antony had prophesied this in the Third Act, 
 
 And Caesar's spirit, ranging for Revenge, 
 With Ate by his side, come hot from Hell, 
 Shall in these confines with a Monarch's voice 
 Cry " Havoc " and let slip the dogs of war. 
 
 In the same way though Shakespeare found the Weird 
 Sisters in Holinshed's version of the tale of Macbeth he 
 gave them more prominence (though probably less than is 
 held now by the Witches) and he added the ghost of Banquo 
 and changed the story of Hamlet told by Saxo Grammaticus 
 and Belleforest, introducing a spectre which was intended 
 to be as dominant as the ghost of Achilles. 
 
 In the rest of the Tragedies, King Lear, Othello, Antony 
 and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and limon of Athens, there is no 
 echo of the Senecan Madness. Edmund says in King Lear : 
 " This is the excellent foppery of the World, that when we 
 are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behaviour 
 — ^we make guilty of our disasters the Sun, the Moon and 
 the Stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly 
 compulsion ; knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical 
 predominance ; drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced 
 obedience of planetary influence ; and all that we are evil in, 
 by a divine thrusting on." In these Tragedies Seneca's 
 " divine thrusting on " is replaced by the passions in the 
 hearts of the victims. 
 
 This change in the Tragedies seems one of the signs 
 that the first three should be dated the first. I think that 
 when Shakespeare devoted himself to Tragical work he 
 turned to Seneca's Tragedies, guided perhaps by the fact 
 that Ben Jonson set that example. Those Tragedies were 
 not meant for the Stage : they were frames for rhetorical 
 and long recitations. Their influence checked the action 
 of Hamlet while the hero declaimed the platitudes of a 
 
 204
 
 JULIUS C.ESAR 
 
 borrowed philosophy ; but it fades from these Tragedies as 
 if Shakespeare outgrew his master and saw that philosophical 
 arguments can only impede a story of Passion and that 
 victims dominated by ghosts must be subordinate. He may 
 have found too that Caesar's ghost had little effect, since 
 Brutus was Stoical enough to defy it, and that Banquo's 
 had less, since Macbeth was already doomed when it came, 
 and that Hamlet persisted in disobeying his father's. 
 
 In these Tragedies all the suffering men are old or have 
 begun to be elderly, except Brutus whose age could not 
 be changed and Hamlet who could not have been made 
 older without leaving the King's and Queen's reciprocal 
 love senile. Macbeth's way of life 
 
 Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf, 
 
 and Othello is declined into the vale of years and Antony's 
 hair is grey. The love in these last Tragedies is a comrade- 
 ship closer because the lovers are clinging in the shadow of 
 Death, and it is no longer the chief thing in the story, except 
 in Antony and Cleopatra, but blended with other passions 
 as strong in elderly people. 
 
 Harington wrote in a letter in his Nugce Antiques that 
 when the old Queen had listened to some fanciful verses in 
 her last year she said, " When thou dost feel creeping Time 
 at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less. I am past 
 my relish for such matters." And it may be that Shake- 
 speare had lost his relish for fooleries. Old Age began soon 
 in those days : Cardinal Wolsey, who had been called the 
 old Cardinal for several years, died aged fifty-four ; King 
 Henry the Eighth, the old King, died aged fifty-eight ; 
 old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster, died aged 
 about sixty, and Kent in King Lear was described as an 
 ancient ruffian when he was aged forty-eight. Besides, 
 Shakespeare was writing for Players who had ceased to be 
 young ; Burbage, for instance, could succeed as Othello, 
 but Romeo was out of his reach. 
 
 We do not know when 'Julius Ccesar was written, and 
 there is no sign that it was printed before 1623. But John 
 Weever wrote in The Mirror of Martyrs, printed in 1601, 
 
 205
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The many-headed muhitude was drawn 
 
 By Brutus' speech that Caesar was ambitious : 
 
 When eloquent Mark Antony had shown 
 
 His virtues, who but Brutus then was vicious ? 
 
 Since Weever's Poem was a protest against Shakespeare's 
 treatment of Oldcastle in King Henry the Fourth, and since 
 we have no reason to think that any other EngHsh dramatist 
 wrote a contest in eloquence between Brutus and Antony, 
 we can infer that a form of Julius Ccesar was known in i6oi. 
 In the next year Henslowe employed Drayton and others 
 to write a Play called Ccesar^s Fall, but if it was ever written 
 it has been lost. This task may be a sign that Henslowe's 
 rivals had recently found a Play about Caesar profitable. 
 It was the custom to mirror current affairs, as when Ben 
 Jonson used Simon Forman's fame in The Alchemist and 
 mentioned him in Fhe Devil is an Ass and linked Catiline 
 with the Gunpowder Plot, making, for instance, Cicero say, 
 
 I told too, in the Senate, that their purpose 
 Was on the Fifth (the Kalends of November) 
 To have slaughtered this whole order. 
 
 The Players may well have been content to produce Plays 
 about Csesar at a time when so many Conspirators in England 
 and France had sought the renown of Tyrannicide ; but 
 even if we could be sure that Julius Ccesar was produced 
 at this time this would not prove that Shakespeare had not 
 dealt with this subject when he was young. 
 
 The theme had been popular long before this not only 
 in France and Italy but also in England. For instance, 
 Machyn's Diary seems to show that a Play called Julius Ccesar 
 was acted at Court in 1562, and The Second, and Fhird Blast 
 of Retreat from Theatres, printed in 1580, said, " And if they 
 write of histories that are known, as the Life of Pompey, 
 the martial affairs of Caesar and other worthies, they give 
 them a new face to turn them like counterfeits to show 
 themselves on the Stage," and a Play called The Tragedy of 
 Ccesar and Pompey was mentioned in Gosson's Plays Confuted 
 in Four Actions in 1 5 81. 
 
 Sir Sidney Lee writes of this Play that " the metrical 
 
 206
 
 JULIUS C^SAR 
 
 features hover between early regularity and late irregu- 
 larity," and says that this is one of the traits which " suggest 
 a date of composition at the midmost point of the drama- 
 tist's career," the Autumn of 1600. But since I do not 
 believe that any author ever wrote in his early way and his 
 later one at the same time I take this as showing that in this 
 Play, as we have it, Shakespeare rewrote earlier work. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare wrote a short Play dealing 
 with Caesar's Fall and another dealing with the Revenge of 
 Caesar's Ghost when he was beginning and connected them 
 about 1594 and rewrote them in a deliberate imitation of 
 Seneca's rhetorical contests when he turned to his Tragedies 
 about 1600. These could be called the First and Second Parts 
 of Julius Ccesar, and may have been still acted separately, 
 for they are balanced and the chief Scene in each is a rhetori- 
 cal contest. 
 
 The Scene which was most admired in those days is 
 the dialogue between Brutus and Cassius in the fourth Act. 
 Leonard Digges, for instance, wrote in his verses printed in 
 Benson's edition of Shakespeare's Poems in 1640 : 
 
 Impossible with some new strain to outdo 
 
 Passions of Juliet and her Romeo, 
 
 Or till I hear a Scene more nobly take 
 
 Than when thy half-sword parleying Romans spake. . . . 
 
 So I have seen when Caesar would appear, 
 
 And on the Stage at half-sword parley were 
 
 Brutus and Cassius, O, how the audience 
 
 Were ravished ! with what wonder went they thence ! 
 
 And when this Tragedy is seen on the Stage its climax is 
 not the killing of Caesar but Antony's triumph when he over- 
 comes Brutus in eloquence. 
 
 That contest was not recorded by Plutarch. In the 
 Life of Julius Caesar he mentioned only Brutus' speech : 
 " The next morning, Brutus and his confederates came into 
 the market-place to speak unto the people, who gave them 
 such audience that it seemed they neither greatly approved 
 nor allowed the fact, for by their great silence they showed 
 that they were sorry for Caesar's death, and also that they 
 
 207
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 did reverence Brutus." In the Life of Marcus Antonius 
 he only mentioned his speech : " And therefore when 
 Caesar's body was brought to the place where it should be 
 buried, he made a funeral oration in commendation of Caesar, 
 in accordance with the ancient custom of praising noble 
 men at their funerals. ... In fine, to conclude the oration, 
 he unfolded before the whole assembly the bloody garments 
 of the dead, thrust through in many places with their swords, 
 and called them malefactors, cruel and cursed murderers. 
 With these words he put the people into such a fury that 
 they presently took Caesar's body and burnt it in the market- 
 place." And in the Life of Marcus Brutus the two speeches 
 made at different times are briefly recorded. 
 
 Shakespeare may have founded Antony's speech on 
 those given in these Lives and (as Sir Israel Gollancz has 
 suggested) he may have used Hamblet's Oration in the sixth 
 chapter of Bclleforest's History of Hamhlet when he wished 
 to provide Brutus with eloquence. 
 
 Mr. Bradley says in his Shakesperean Tragedy, " But for 
 the name given to this Play, presumably to attract the 
 public, no careful reader would hesitate to call Brutus the 
 hero." But this belief (which seems to have been first 
 suggested by Schlcgel) is disproved by the fact that the sym- 
 pathy of the men of that time could not have been attracted 
 by Brutus. Even Schlegel admitted that Cassius was drawn 
 superior to Brutus in discernment and strength of will, and 
 it is plain that Mark Antony was intended to win the audience 
 in the same way as he won the crowd in the Forum. Schlegel 
 and his followers saw a Hamlet in Brutus and this won their 
 hearts, but Shakespeare was not writing for them. 
 
 There are two pictures of Brutus to be seen in this Play. 
 The first was a vain dupe, a sham Stoic, and a mouther of 
 platitudes, who was meant to excite the hatred of the audi- 
 ence and leave their sympathy with Caesar unchecked. For 
 instance, in the third Scene of the fourth Act Brutus asserts 
 that he has no news of his wife and Messala says. 
 
 Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell : 
 
 For certain she is dead, and by strange manner. 
 
 Brutus replies, 
 
 208
 
 JULIUS C/ESAR 
 
 Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala : 
 With meditating that she must die once 
 I have the patience to endure it now. 
 
 Messala says, 
 
 Even so great men great losses should endure, 
 
 and Cassius adds, 
 
 I have as much of art in this as you. 
 But yet my nature would not bear it so. 
 
 Then Brutus puts the matter out of his mind, saying, 
 
 Well, to our work alive. What do you think 
 Of marching to Philippi presently ? 
 
 His attitude here is an affectation of Stoicism, which Cassius 
 supports, for they had both known of Portia's death before 
 Messala arrived. 
 
 The second Brutus is noble : even Antony says of him 
 at the end of the Play, 
 
 This was the noblest Roman of them all : 
 
 All the conspirators, save only he, 
 
 Did that they did in envy of great Caesar ; 
 
 He only, in a general honest thought 
 
 And common good to all, made one of them. 
 
 In saying this Antony undoes his own work in the Forum, 
 for he justifies Brutus. 
 
 It may be that when Shakespeare wrote the first forms 
 of this Roman Pageant he followed the traditional view told, 
 for instance, in Chaucer's Monk^s Tale : 
 
 To Rome again repaireth Julius, 
 With his triumphe laurial full high. 
 But on a time Brutus and Cassius, 
 That ever had to his estate envy. 
 Full privily hath made conspiracy 
 Against this Julius in subtle wise, 
 And cast the place in which he should die 
 With daggers bright, as I shall you devise, 
 209 o
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 This Julius to the Capitol went 
 Upon a day, as he was wont to goon, 
 And in the Capitol anon him hent 
 This false Brutus and his other foon. 
 
 This would explain why the Senate-house is confused 
 with the Capitol in this Play, as we have it, as it was in the 
 one mentioned in Hamlet as performed at the University 
 long ago when Polonius was young. Chaucer's sympathy 
 was all given to Caesar, as Suffolk's was when he said in the 
 Second Part of Ki?ig Hejiry the Sixth : 
 
 Great men oft die by vile Bczonians ; 
 A Roman sworder and banditto slave 
 Murdered sweet Tully ; Brutus' bastard hand 
 Stabbed Julius C^sar. 
 
 and as the Queen's was when she said in the Third Part of 
 that Pageant : 
 
 O traitors ! murderers ! 
 They, that stabbed Cccsar, shed no blood at all, 
 Did not offend nor were not worthy blame 
 If this foul deed were by to equal it. 
 
 In this Play, as we have it, Brutus' rebellion is justified, 
 even by Antony, because Caesar had ended as a tyrant in 
 dotage. And if we could be sure that this form was written 
 in 1601, in the days when " the tyrant's reign " was still 
 in the list of the afflictions of Life cited by Hamlet, we could 
 infer that it extenuated the Essex Revolt. Essex was in 
 Brutus' place, striking against the old Queen who had over- 
 whelmed him with benefits and alleging her tyrannous 
 dotage as his only excuse. Marullus' speech in the first 
 Act, beginning " Wherefore rejoice ? " may be a sign that 
 this Play was written after Essex had failed. The men who 
 heard it may have remembered the recent Prologue in King 
 Henry the Fifth : 
 
 The Mayor and all his brethren in best sort, 
 Like to the Senators of the antique Rome, 
 With the Plebeians swarming at their heels. 
 Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in. 
 
 210
 
 JULIUS CiESAR 
 
 If they remembered this and the fact that this Company of 
 Players had risked and incurred the Queen's displeasure by 
 acting Ki7ig Richard the Second for the Essex Conspirators, 
 they may well have thought of their former favourite, Essex, 
 who was doomed by trusting their love, when they heard 
 Marullus say : 
 
 O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, 
 
 Knew you not Pompey ? Many a time and oft 
 
 Have you climbed up to walls and battlements. 
 
 To towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops. 
 
 Your infants in your arms, and there have sat 
 
 The livelong day with patient expectation 
 
 To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome : . . . 
 
 And do you now strew flowers in his way 
 
 That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood ? 
 
 Be gone ! 
 
 Run to your houses, fall upon your knees. 
 
 Pray to the Gods to intermit the plague 
 
 That needs must light on this ingratitude. 
 
 In this Play the ingratitude of Brutus is partly exonerated 
 because it is surpassed by the ingratitude of the Romans to 
 Pompey and then to Caesar and then to Brutus himself when 
 he had slain his benefactor for them. Essex had struck 
 because he had trusted the Londoners, but when he rode 
 up the Strand and Fleet Street to Ludgate and then to 
 Cheapside, there was nobody to answer his call. Bacon 
 wrote in his Account of The Treasons : " There was not in 
 so populous a city one man from the chiefest citizen to the 
 meanest artificer or prentice that armed with him ; so as 
 being extremely appalled, as divers that happened to see 
 him there might visibly perceive in his face and countenance, 
 and almost molten with sweat, though without any cause 
 of bodily labour, but only by the perplexity and horror of 
 his mind, he came to Smith's house the Sheriff." 
 
 This probable connexion between Julius Ccesar and the 
 Essex Revolt is, I think, one of the examples that prove 
 that if we wish to understand Shakespeare's Plays and to 
 guess when they were written we must remember the his- 
 torical facts. The theatres were centres of gossip, and the 
 
 211
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Corporation of London stated in 1597 that they were the 
 ordinary places for masterless men and contrivers of Treason. 
 And most of the Plotters of those days were well known to 
 all in the little City of London. For instance, young Chidiock 
 Tichborne, who joined the Babington Plot of 1586 (as he 
 confessed) " for the love of Antony Babington," said as he 
 stood under the Gallows, " Before this thing chanced we 
 lived together in most flourishing estate. Of whom went 
 report in the Strand, Fleet Street and elsewhere in London 
 but of Babington and Tichborne ? " And Babington 
 haunted the theatres, according to a Ballad called Antony 
 Babington''s Comflaint, 
 
 To be a good lawyer my mind would not frame, 
 I addicted was so to pleasure and given so to game. 
 But to the Theatre and Curtain would often resort. 
 Where I met companions fitting my disport. 
 
 The Queen was glorious and loved when Shakespeare 
 was young, and if he wrote juvenile forms of Julius Ccesar 
 when the Babington Plot was recent it would have been a 
 natural thing to follow Chaucer in making Brutus detestable. 
 But when she beheaded Essex she lost the love of the Lon- 
 doners : though they had not helped him they mourned 
 for him, and after this they were silent when they saw her 
 go by. She mourned for him too, though when the news 
 of his death was brought to her while she played the Spinet 
 she continued playing to show how little she cared, for in 
 her last days when she was haunted by visions and told one 
 of her ladies that she saw her own body " exceedingly lean 
 and fearful in a light of fire," one of her courtiers recorded 
 of her : " She sleepeth not by day, as she used ; neither 
 taketh she rest by night : her delight is to sit in the dark 
 and (sometimes with shedding tears) to bewail Essex." If 
 Shakespeare wrote this Play, as we have it, when Essex was 
 mourned even by the Queen it would have been natural 
 to extenuate the conduct of Brutus. Besides, he may have 
 remembered how he had admired Southampton when they 
 were young and how Essex had befriended the Players. 
 
 When in the third Act he made Antony say that Caesar 
 fell 
 
 212
 
 JULIUS C/ESAR 
 
 Even at the base of Pompcy's statue, 
 Which all the while ran blood 
 
 he took this from the words in the Life of Julius Caesar in 
 which North misinterpreted or tried to improve Amyot's 
 version, " he was driven, either casually, or purposedly by 
 the counsel of the Conspirators, against the base whereupon 
 Pompey's image stood, which ran all of a gore blood till he 
 was slain." But this and the speech about Pompey in the 
 first Act may be signs that the two parts of this Play were 
 intended to be Scenes of a Roman Chronicle Pageant begin- 
 ning with the favourite theme of Caesar and Pompey, in which 
 Cleopatra might have ensnared Caesar when she was young 
 and Antony when she was wrinkled with time. Henslowe's 
 Diary proves that a Play called Ccesar and Pomfey was per- 
 formed by the Admiral's Men in 1594 and one called the 
 Second Part of Ccesar in 1595, and since we know that the 
 Chamberlain's Servants were acting with the Admiral's 
 Men at Newington Butts in 1594 it is possible that these 
 Plays were by Shakespeare. The Scene in the fifth Act 
 when Brutus ran on his sword may have suggested the greater 
 one when Antony copied him. 
 
 The two pictures of Brutus and the different manners 
 seem signs that this Play was founded on an earlier version, 
 and this, I think, would be proved if we could be sure that 
 it was planned as a Tragedy, for otherwise we would have 
 to conclude that when he set out to write a Tragedy of Julius 
 Ccesar he wrote one in which Caesar was drawn without 
 sympathy and killed incidentally and overshadowed by an 
 eloquent follower and an eloquent foe. But this proof is 
 lost if (as I think) this Play is a rhetorical Pageant in two 
 Scenes or Parts, for in that case it would have been named 
 in the same way as King Henry the Fourth was. 
 
 Mr. Dowden says of this Play in his Shakespeare Primer, 
 " There is no tempestuousness of passion, and no artistic 
 mystery." This separates it from the rest of the Tragedies. 
 Most of the Characters are drawn without sympathy, and 
 this may be one of the signs that this Play, as we have it, 
 was written at about the same time as a version of Troilus 
 and Cressida. The tepidity of the picture of Caesar may be 
 
 213
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 partly due to the fact that Plutarch wrote of Caesar with 
 caution because the subject was dangerous. After compar- 
 ing him with Alexander he said : " You look here, Reader, 
 to see to which of the two I should give precedency ; but 
 since the World hath been too little for the one and the 
 other, I should go too far if I plainly spake what I thought." 
 And this Play may have been weakened also because Shake- 
 speare founded it on three different Lives in Plutarch instead 
 of only using one as in Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. 
 But it seems to me that the tepidity and weakness are also 
 signs that Shakespeare wrote this Play first when he was too 
 young to do justice to its theme and rewrote it when he was 
 writing still with dexterous Stage-craft, instead of emotion, 
 and externally and feeling his way to his own Tragical method. 
 
 A version of Hamlet would have been timely too when 
 Essex had shown Hamlet's hesitation and frenzy. It is a 
 curious coincidence that Essex had been in Hamlet's place 
 in another way if there was any truth in the story that 
 Leicester, his mother's second husband, poisoned her first 
 one, the first Earl of Essex. Without concluding that Shake- 
 speare deliberately drew Essex as Brutus and Hamlet we 
 may imagine that he had him in mind when he dealt with 
 characters whose fate was like his. This would help to 
 explain the connection between Brutus and Hamlet which 
 is commonly recognized. That connection would be further 
 explained if Shakespeare's attempt to turn the Pageant of 
 Julius C^sar into The Tragedy of Brutus convinced him that 
 it was impossible to make Brutus a hero and led him to 
 write a version of Hamlet in which another student of Philo- 
 sophy grappled vainly with the everyday World. That 
 version of Ha?nlet may have been the one represented in the 
 Quarto of 1603. If that form was rewritten in 1603 or 1604 
 to please Queen Anne of Denmark and her brother Duke 
 Ulric, who was in England during part of those years, as it 
 was printed in the Quarto of 1604, and if a form of Macbeth 
 had been written meanwhile in 1603 i^ honour of King 
 James' Accession, this would explain why Heminge and Condell 
 printed Hamlet after Macbeth. If Shakespeare had needed a 
 motto for Hamlet he could have found one in Brutus' words, 
 
 214
 
 MACBETH 
 
 Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
 And the first motion, all the interim is 
 Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. 
 
 Macbeth does not seem to have been printed before the 
 Folio of 1623, and so we cannot be certain when Shakespeare's 
 work on it ended. It is much shorter than the rest of the 
 Tragedies, and this supports the impression that an opening 
 Act was obliterated like the beginning of I'he Ra-pe of Lucrece. 
 
 There are two Macbeths here, as in other Plays there are 
 two Othellos, two Shylocks, two Angelos and several Hamlets. 
 The first Macbeth is the one who says at the end of the fourth 
 Scene of the first Act : 
 
 The Prince of Cumberland ! that is a step 
 On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap, 
 For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires ; 
 Let not light see my black and deep desires : 
 The eye wink at the hand ; yet let that be 
 Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. 
 
 The second Macbeth is described by his wife immediately 
 afterwards in the fifth Scene : 
 
 Yet do I fear thy nature ; 
 It is too full of 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. 
 
 The first Macbeth is akin to Aaron the Moor in Titus 
 Andronicus and the second to Hamlet, and these passages are 
 as widely apart, one is juvenile and the other mature. 
 
 There are two Lady Macbeths also. One is akin to Tamora 
 in Titus Andronicus : this is the one of whom Malcolm is 
 thinking at the end when he says. 
 
 Producing forth the cruel ministers 
 
 Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen. 
 
 The other is the woman who says, " All the perfumes of Arabia 
 
 215
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 will not sweeten this little hand." She does not want the 
 Crown for herself (as in Holinshed's version) — she only thinks 
 of her husband : she overcomes the weakness which holds 
 him from the attempt he had suggested to her, but she only 
 does this because she wishes him to be great. Though she 
 still says in the first Act, 
 
 Come, thick night, 
 And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell. 
 That my keen knife sec not the wound it makes, 
 
 she has no part in the bloodshed, except when she smears the 
 servants with blood, and her own nature shrinks from it : she 
 says. 
 
 Come, you spirits 
 That tend on mortal thoughts, unscx me here. 
 And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full 
 Of direst cruelty ! 
 
 like Juno, who in the Hercules Furens said. 
 
 Me, me, Sorores, mente dcjectam mea 
 Versate primam, facere si quicquam apparo 
 Dignam noverca. 
 
 The first Lady Macbeth was like one of Chaucer's wicked 
 elderly Queens, 
 
 O Sultaness, root of Iniquity, 
 Virago thou ! 
 
 The second was one of the women stronger than men who 
 lived in those times ; she might have been copied from the 
 popular notion of the Duchess of Northumberland of King 
 Edward the Sixth's reign who was believed to have forced 
 her wavering husband to execute Somerset and to strike for 
 the Throne. The first could never have known the second's 
 unavailing remorse. 
 
 This Tragedy has a radical weakness : Macbeth as he is 
 drawn in it now could no more have murdered his benefactor 
 asleep and trusting to him than his wife could have smeared 
 the sleeping servants with blood. There is a similar defect 
 in its manner : shambling Blank Verses and passages of 
 
 216
 
 MACBETH 
 
 juvenile fustian survive from an early form of the Play, 
 staining its beauty. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang, in his Social History of Englafid in 
 the Seventeenth Century, said in a note on the passage in Kemp's 
 ISline Days' Wonder about " the penny poet w^hose first making 
 was a miserable stolen story of Mac Doel — or Mac-Dobeth or 
 Mac-Somewhat," " it may not be beyond the reach of 
 conjecture that Shakespeare's Company about 1600 had 
 put a Macbeth on the Stage as a feeler in James's interest ; 
 for Kemp's Shake-rags is much in the style of Greene's Shake- 
 scene." But if this passage can be taken as proving anything 
 of the kind it would show that Shakespeare had borrowed or 
 had stolen this theme when he was beginning to write. There 
 may have been an older Play on this subject ; but in any case 
 Holinshed's Chronicle, the book which Shakespeare used, was 
 available when he was beginning. 
 
 Mr. Saintsbury says in the Cambridge History of English 
 Literature : " Those who (if there be any such) believe that 
 Shakespeare wrote the whole of Macbeth and that he wrote 
 it about 1605, must have curious standards of criticism. To 
 believe that he wrote the whole of it is quite easy — indeed, 
 the present writer has little or no doubt on the matter ; but 
 the belief is only possible on the supposition that it was 
 written at rather different times." 
 
 I think that Shakespeare worked on this Play three times 
 at least, first in the early days when he wrote Titus Andronicus 
 and again when he reshaped that crude form in honour of 
 King James' Accession and again about 1610, and that 
 some one changed it later by shortening it and turning the 
 Weird Sisters to Witches. 
 
 Some students who think that this Play was written 
 about 1605 support that opinion by finding in the Porter's 
 words, " here's an equivocator . . . who committed treason 
 enough for God's sake " — an allusion to Father Henry Garnet's 
 defence. But the theory of Equivocation was old : the early 
 Greek Fathers of the Church had upheld it and Saint Augus- 
 tine had dissented from them. It had been often debated, for 
 instance at Father William Weston's trial in 1587, and Father 
 Robert Southwell's in 1595, and Father John Gerard's 
 examination in 1597. It held that a man might be justified 
 
 217
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 in deceiving, as by an evasion or an ambiguous answer, when 
 some greater mischief would be wrought by the truth. Father 
 Weston recorded in his Account of His Life : " To all these 
 interrogations I replied with brevity and ease, confessing all 
 such things as might be revealed without injury to others, 
 denying those which they had no right to press on me, and 
 which I could not without sin betray to them." And Father 
 Garnet said at his trial : " As I say it is never lawful to 
 equivocate in matters of Faith, so also in matters of human 
 conversation it may not be used promiscually or at our 
 pleasure, as in matters of contract, or matters of testimony, 
 or before a competent Judge, or to the prejudice of any third 
 person, in which case we judge it altogether unlawful." In 
 his defence he attempted to explain the distinctions of 
 Scholastic Philosophy which were meant to decide whether 
 there were times when the truth could be hidden without the 
 malice of lying. 
 
 There are scores of equivocations in Shakespeare's Plays ; 
 as in Macbeth when Macduff says. 
 
 The tyrant has not battered at their peace ? 
 
 and Ross answers, 
 
 No, they were well at peace when I did leave them, 
 
 and when the Apparitions deceived Macbeth, as he recognized 
 at the end when he said. 
 
 And be those juggling friends no more believed 
 That palter with us in a double sense, 
 
 and there are virtuous lies, as when in Othello Desdemona 
 answers Emilia's question, " Who hath done this deed ? " 
 by saying, " Nobody, I myself." 
 
 Even if we could conclude that the Porter's speech had 
 any connection with the Gunpowder Plot this would not 
 prove that Macbeth was first written in 1 606, since it could 
 have been added in a revision about that time, which may 
 have caused the reference in The Puritan, or the Widow of 
 Watling Street, printed in 1607, " instead of a Jester, we'll 
 have a fellow in a white sheet sit at the upper end of the 
 table." 
 
 218
 
 MACBETH 
 
 Coleridge rejected the Porter's speech because he dishked 
 it. He said in his Notes on Some Other Plays : " This low 
 soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterwards, I 
 believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand, 
 perhaps with Shakespeare's consent ; and finding it take, he, 
 with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed, just 
 interpolated the words ' I'll devil-porter it no further : I 
 had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go 
 the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.' " But this 
 was one of Coleridge's lapses from a rational criticism. This 
 phrase is certainly Shakespeare's — he wrote in Hamlet of 
 " the primrose path of dalliance," and in AlVs Well that Ends 
 Well of " the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and 
 the great fire " — but so is all the rest of the speech. Lady 
 Macbeth remembers the knocking when she walks in her 
 sleep ; she says, " To bed, to bed, there is knocking at the 
 gate," in the same way as she recalls her words of Macbeth, 
 
 And that which rather thou dost fear to do 
 Than wishest should be undone 
 
 and his words 
 
 If 'twere done when 'tis done, 
 
 when she says " What's done cannot be undone ; to bed, to 
 bed." It may be that one of her sayings in this scene, " Hell 
 is murky," is a similar echo, and that he said in the third Act, 
 
 Light thickens, and the crow 
 Makes wing to the murky wood, 
 
 and not to " the rooky wood." And it may be that the 
 Porter appeared in the first form of this Tragedy, for the 
 Porter of Hell was one of the Characters of the Mystery Plays, 
 and these were more likely to be in Shakespeare's mind in 
 his Youth than in the days when they were things of the 
 Past. 
 
 King James showed Shakespeare's Company favour 
 (perhaps partly because they had acted King Richard the 
 Second for the Essex Conspirators), and gave them the title 
 of the King's Servants or His Majesty's Servants in May, 
 1603, naming Shakespeare second among them. In November, 
 
 219
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 1603, they were summoned to act at Wilton House while the 
 King planned one of his Tragi-comedies there, the trick of 
 bringing Markham and Cobham and Grey to the Block at 
 Winchester and sparing their lives at the last moment. 
 Macbeth was a Play suited to please him since he claimed to 
 be descended from Banquo, and it may well have been 
 performed for him then, for it would have been natural 
 to pay such a compliment on an early occasion. This 
 would support the Folio Order, but it cannot be proved, and 
 it matters the less because we have evidence that one of the 
 chief things in this Play was changed after 1 610. 
 
 Simon Forman, the Wizard, wrote in the Book of Plays 
 and Notes thereof in his Diary : " In Mackbeth at the Globe, 
 1 610, the twentieth of April, Saturday, there was to be 
 observed first how Mackbeth and Bancko, two noblemen of 
 Scotland, riding through a wood, there stood before them three 
 women Fairies or Nymphs." This agrees with Holinshed's 
 statement : " suddenly in the midst of a land there met them 
 three women in strange and ferly apparel, resembling creatures 
 of an elder world, whom when they attentively beheld, 
 wondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and 
 said, ' All hail ! Macbeth, Thane of Glamis ' ... the 
 second of them said, ' Hail ! Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor.' But 
 the third said, ' All hail ! Macbeth, that shalt hereafter 
 be King of Scotland.' . . . This was reputed at the first 
 some vain fantastical illusion by Macbeth and Banquo . . . 
 but afterwards the common opinion was that these women 
 were either the Weird Sisters, that is (as you would say) the 
 Goddesses of Destiny, or else some Nymphs or Fairies, endued 
 with knowledge of Prophecy by their Necromantical Science, 
 because everything came to pass as they had spoken." Gawin 
 Douglas had already translated the Latin Parcae by " Weird 
 Sisters," and he and Holinshcd used " weird " as a noun 
 meaning " doom," as it had done in its older English form 
 " wirdc," and the Anglo-Saxon one " wyrde." 
 
 Simon Forman was then earning his livelihood by practising 
 Witchcraft as he had done for many years : one of the entries 
 in his Diary reads : '' This I made the Devil write with his 
 own hands in Lambeth Fields, 1596." For three years before 
 1 610 he had been busy weaving spells and making drugs at 
 
 220
 
 MACBETH 
 
 the bidding of the young Countess of Essex, the wife of the 
 third Earl, to help her to win Robert Carr's love. In this 
 year she grew desperate and employed him to make drugs 
 which she could give to her husband. He would have shared 
 the doom of the other Wizards or poisoners who were executed 
 for dealing with her if he had not died before the Poison Plot 
 was betrayed. The year after he saw Macbeth acted he died in 
 fulfilment of one of his own prophecies while he was crossing 
 the River, returning to his home at Lambeth. " Being in the 
 middle of the Thames," Antony a Wood writes, " he presently 
 fell down, and once said ' an impost ' and so died, whereupon 
 a most sad storm of wind immediately followed." Simon 
 Forman knew all about Witches, and if he had seen three 
 represented on the Stage in Macbeth he would not have called 
 them " Fairies or Nymphs." So the entry in his Diary proves 
 that in 1610 Shakespeare was still following Holinshed's 
 version and making Macbeth and Banquo encounter the 
 three Fates or three Nymphs or Fairies. Otherwise the chief 
 Wizard in England would have watched the Stage- Witches 
 in the same way as the Essex Conspirators saw King Richard 
 the Second. 
 
 King James was also an expert in the matter of Witchcraft : 
 he had proclaimed his belief in the Black Art in his Demonology, 
 printed in 1599, ^^^*^ ^^ repealed an old Statute (5 Eliz. c. 16) 
 against " conjuration, witchcraft and dealing with evil and 
 wicked spirits, treasure-seeking or the intent to provoke any 
 person to unlawful love " in the Twelfth Public Act of His 
 First Parliament, early in 1604, re-enacting it with new 
 penalties. There had been many charges of Witchcraft in 
 Queen Elizabeth's Reign, for instance, the cases of the Witches 
 of Saint Osees or Saint Osyths in 1582 and of the Witches of 
 Warbois in 1589, but they increased rapidly because he 
 supported them. In 161 2 twenty women were arrested for 
 Witchcraft in Lancashire and twelve of them hanged, according 
 to Thomas Pott's Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the 
 County of Lancaster, printed in 161 3. 
 
 This increasing belief in Witchcraft helps to explain why 
 some one changed the Weird Sisters to Witches in or after 1610. 
 There are many signs of this change. Macbeth says to the 
 Weird Sisters, 
 
 221
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 In the name of truth, 
 Are ye fantastical, or that indeed 
 Which outwardly ye show ? 
 
 Banquo says of them, 
 
 The earth hath bubbles as the water has. 
 
 And these are of them : whither are they vanished ? 
 
 and Macbeth answers : 
 
 Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted 
 As breath into the wind. 
 
 Then Banquo rejoins : 
 
 Were such things here as we do speak about ? 
 Or have we eaten on the insane root 
 That takes the reason prisoner ? 
 
 In all this Macbeth and Banquo hesitate as in Holinshed's 
 version where " this was reputed at the first some vain 
 fantastical illusion " by them, and share the doubts of Horatio 
 who says to the Ghost in Hamlet, 
 
 Stay, illusion. 
 If thou hast any sound, or use of voice, 
 Speak to me ! 
 
 and of Brutus, who says when his 111 Angel comes to his tent 
 in Julius Ccesar, 
 
 I think it is a weakness of my eyes 
 
 That shapes this monstrous apparition. 
 
 It comes upon me. Art thou any thing ? 
 
 Art thou some god, some angel or some devil ? . . . 
 
 Now I have taken heart thou vanisheth. 
 
 And though Macbeth does not doubt that he sees Banquo's 
 Ghost he recognizes that it is unreal, saying to it, 
 
 Hence horrible shadow, 
 Unreal mockery hence. 
 
 If the Weird Sisters were still unreal they could not throw 
 the ingredients into the cauldron. Though they still called 
 
 222
 
 MACBETH 
 
 themselves the Weird Sisters (or according to the First Folio 
 version, the Weyward Sisters) when they sang, 
 
 The Weird Sisters, hand in hand 
 Posters of the sea and land, 
 Thus do go about, about, 
 
 they were changed to mere Witches when Macbeth said. 
 
 You seem to understand me 
 By each at once her choppy fingers laying 
 Upon her skinny lips : you should be women. 
 And yet your beards forbid me to interpret 
 That you are so. 
 
 These Witches were not impalpable Spirits, but bearded 
 old women who were accustomed to ride on broomsticks at 
 night, and only their beards made Macbeth think them 
 unnatural. 
 
 Two Songs are named in the Witch Scenes : the Stage 
 Directions say in the third Act " Music and a song with 
 * Come away, Come away,' " and in the fourth Act " Music 
 and a Song, ' Black Spirits.' " It so happens that both these 
 Songs are to be found in Thomas Middleton's Play, The 
 Witch. 
 
 Swinburne wrote of Macbeth with his usual eloquence in 
 his Essay on Thomas Middleton : " That the editors to whom 
 we owe the miserably defaced and villainously garbled text 
 which is all that has reached us of Macbeth, not content with 
 the mutilation of the greater Poet had recourse to the inter- 
 polation of a few superfluous or incongruous lines or fragments 
 from the lyric portions of the lesser Poet's work — that the 
 Players who mangled Shakespeare were the pilferers who 
 plundered Middleton — must be obvious to all but those (if 
 any such yet exist anywhere) who are capable of believing 
 the unspeakably impudent assertion of those mendacious 
 malefactors that they have left us a pure and perfect edition 
 of Shakespeare. These passages are all thoroughly in keeping 
 with the general tone of the lesser Poet's work : it would be 
 tautology to add that they are no less utterly out of keeping 
 with the general tone of the other. But in their own way 
 nothing can be finer : they have a tragic liveliness in ghastli- 
 
 223
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 ness, a grotesque animation of horror, which no other poet 
 has ever conceived or conveyed to us. The difference between 
 Michel Angclo and Goya, Tintoretto and Gustave Dore, 
 docs not quite efface the right of the minor artists to existence 
 or remembrance." 
 
 Since Simon Forman's notes show that the Weird Sisters 
 were changed to Witches in or after 1610, we can guess that 
 this was done because the audience preferred solid Witches 
 to impalpable Spirits. If Shakespeare did it, he wrote for 
 once in a manner which has been taken as Middleton's, and 
 may have acknowledged the debt to him by employing two 
 of his Songs. If Middlcton did it, he wrote for once with a 
 strength greatly beyond his usual scope, and the use of those 
 Songs would have been an obvious way of claiming the 
 credit. 
 
 Middleton's Witch seems to have been copied from Jonson's 
 Masque of the Queens, which was acted at Whitehall in 
 February, 1609-1610, and printed in 1616. Ben Jonson wrote 
 in the Introduction to it : " Because Her Majesty (best knowing 
 that a principal part of life in these spectacles lay in their 
 variety) had commanded me to think on some new dance, 
 that might precede hers, and have the place of a foil or false 
 Masque : I was careful to decline, not only from others but 
 mine own steps in that kind, since the last year I had an 
 anti-masque of boys, and therefore now devised that twelve 
 women in the habit of Hags or Witches, sustaining the persons 
 of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc., the opposites to good 
 Fame, should fill that part, not as a Masque, but a spectacle of 
 strangeness." He added that the Scene was " an ugly Hell, 
 which flaming beneath, smoked unto the top of the roof. . . . 
 These Witches with a kind of hollow and infernal Music came 
 forth from thence. First one, then two and three and more, 
 till their number increased to eleven, all differently attired, 
 some with rats on their heads, some on their shoulders, others 
 with ointment-pots at their girdles ; all with spindles, 
 timbrels, rattles or other venefical instruments, making a 
 confused noise with strange gestures. The device of their 
 attire was Master Jones his, with the invention and archi- 
 tecture of the whole Scene and Machine. Only I prescribed 
 them their properties of vipers, snakes, bones, herbs, roots 
 
 224
 
 MACBETH 
 
 and other ensigns of their Magic, out of the authority of 
 ancient and later writers, wherein the faults are mine, if there 
 be any found, and for that cause I confess them." 
 
 I do not think that Ben Jonson would have written in 
 this way if similar Witches using similar language had already 
 sung and danced in Macbeth, so this statement seems to me 
 to support Forman's assertion that the Weird Sisters were 
 still Fairies or Nymphs in l6io. 
 
 Jonson's Witches begin, 
 
 Sisters stay, we want our Dame, 
 Call upon her by her name, 
 And the charm we use to say, 
 That she quickly anoint and come away. 
 
 In his marginal comments he writes : " Among our vulgar 
 Witches the honour of Dame (for I so translate it) is given 
 with a kind of pre-eminence to some special one at their 
 meetings. . . . When they are to be transported from place 
 to place they use to anoint themselves and sometimes the 
 things they ride." When one of his witches proclaims, 
 
 I had a dagger, what did I with that ? 
 Killed an infant to have his fat, 
 
 he explains " their killing of infants is common, both for 
 confection of their ointment (whereto one ingredient is the 
 fat boiled, as I have showed before out of Paracelsus and 
 Porta), as also out of a lust to do murder." And when 
 another sings, 
 
 I went to the Toad breeds under the wall ; 
 I charmed him out and he came at my call. 
 I scratched out the eyes of the Owl before, 
 I tore the Bat's wings, what would you more ? 
 
 he explains : " These also both by the confessions of Witches 
 and testimony of Writers are of principal use in their Witch- 
 craft." His Dame is not Hecate, for in her Invocation she 
 
 says. 
 
 You that have seen me ride when Hecate 
 Durst not take chariot, 
 
 225 p
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and in his marginal note (which is fortified, like the rest, with 
 many Classical references) he says that Hecate " was believed 
 to govern in Witchcraft, and is remembered in all their 
 invocations." His Spectacle ends with the Witches singing. 
 
 About, about, and about. 
 Till the mists arise and the lights fly out : 
 The images neither be seen nor felt. 
 The woollen burn, and the waxen melt ; 
 Sprinkle your liquors upon the ground, 
 And into the air, around, around. 
 
 " At which with a strange and sudden music they fell into a 
 Magical dance." And his last note of them says, " The 
 manner also of their dancing is confused, and to be done with 
 great religion : Boden adds that they use brooms in their 
 hands, with which we armed our Witches, and here we leave 
 them." 
 
 Instead of concluding that Jonson took his Witches from 
 Shakespeare for a Court Entertainment, as he must have done 
 if Macbeth had been acted with the Witches in it some years 
 before, and lavished his learning to prove that all Shakespeare's 
 details were justified by Classical writers, I infer that the 
 Witches seen in Macbeth came from his Spectacle. Middleton 
 introduced Hecate in control of his Witches, probably 
 imitating Jonson in this, and since Hecate had nothing to do 
 with English or Scottish Witchcraft the same use of her seems 
 one of the signs that the Witches in Macbeth were derived from 
 Ben Jonson's Masque of the Queens. 
 
 It does not seem probable that Shakespeare would have 
 paid him the compliment of such imitation after 1610 or 
 that the Players would have employed Middleton to imitate 
 Jonson while Jonson was still working for them. It may be 
 that Ben Jonson altered Macbeth after 1610 (and probably 
 after 1 61 6) for a performance at Court to suit the King's 
 taste, and shortened it and introduced his own Witches 
 instead of the Weird Sisters or Destinies. He may have 
 introduced the three Apparitions to utter words which the 
 Weird Sisters had spoken in a second appearance, and he may 
 have modelled the Show of the Eight Kings on his Masques. 
 This is one of the three of Shakespeare's Tragedies which 
 
 226
 
 MACBETH 
 
 he mentioned by name (and only when he wished to find 
 fault with them) for, according to Dryden, " in reading some 
 bombastic speeches of Macbeth, which are not to be under- 
 stood, he used to say it was horror." Since he had so little 
 respect for Shakespeare's methods he would not have hesitated 
 to alter the Play according to his notions of art. 
 
 Middleton was modest by nature and did not exhibit the 
 boldness or the strength of this change anywhere else. The 
 resemblance between these Witches and his may be due to 
 the fact that they all sprang from the Spectacle in the Masque 
 of the Queens. The two Songs used in both Plays may have 
 been borrowed from The Witch for Macbeth or repeated in it, 
 for it does not seem to have been printed before 1778, and 
 in either case they may have been written by Jonson, who may 
 have helped Middleton in The Witch, as he did in The Widow, 
 which was printed in 1652. 
 
 This change dominates the mood of the Play. Macbeth's 
 doings are altered as Hamlet's would be if instead of the Ghost 
 he saw a solid Devil adorned with horns and a tail. It may be 
 that Shakespeare could no more have imagined solid Witches 
 when he dealt with the Other World than Ben Jonson could 
 have drawn a shadowy Ghost. And it may be that Macbeth 
 owes much of its success on the Stage to an alteration which 
 wrenched it from Shakespeare's Country to the everyday 
 World. 
 
 One effect of this change is that Macbeth is overcome by 
 the Devil. The Weird Sisters were merely prophetic, and 
 even if they uttered the words now assigned to the Apparitions 
 they only equivocated like the Greek Oracles. The Witches 
 are openly in league with the Devil and the prophecy " Thou 
 shalt be King hereafter " has become a temptation. Neither 
 the Weird Sisters nor the Witches foretold that Macbeth 
 would murder the King. According to Holinshed he thought 
 at first that the prophecy meant that he would succeed to the 
 Throne " by the Divine Providence," and even when he 
 began to think of Rebellion was more moved by his wife ; 
 " the words of the Weird Sisters also greatly encouraged him 
 thereto ; but especially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt 
 the thing, as she was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable 
 desire to bear the name of Queen." The real temptation 
 
 227
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 did not come from the Weird Sisters, but from the King's 
 uninvited visit to Inverness, of which Macbeth could have 
 said with King John, 
 
 How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds 
 Makes ill deeds done ! 
 
 In the Play, as we have it, this visit is a second temptation 
 linked with the prophecy. 
 
 The force of this temptation was less in the Play as it 
 was before it was shortened. In that form Macbeth saw his 
 wife before the visit was planned and suggested the crime to 
 her. She says in the seventh Scene of the first Act : 
 
 What beast was it 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. 
 
 He did this before he saw the Weird Sisters, and so they were 
 of much less importance because they merely strengthened 
 his project. 
 
 Simon Forman suggested another change when he wrote, 
 " And when Mackbeth had murdered the King, the blood 
 on his hands could not be washed ofi^, by any means, nor from 
 his wife's hands, which handled the bloody daggers in hiding 
 them, by which means they became both much amazed and 
 offended." In the Play, as we have it, Macbeth says in the 
 second Act, 
 
 Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
 Clean from my hand ? 
 
 and Lady Macbeth answers. 
 
 My hands are of your colour, but I shame 
 To wear a heart so white. I hear a knocking 
 At the South entry : retire we to our chamber : 
 A little water clears us of this deed. 
 
 228
 
 HAMLET 
 
 She echoes his words and her own when she says in the fifth 
 Act, seeming to wash her hands, " Out, damned spot, out I 
 say. Yet who would have thought the old man to have had 
 so much blood in him ? 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." 
 
 In the Play, as we have it, she does not see the Weird 
 Sisters or Witches, and Banquo's Ghost is hidden from her : 
 she is only in touch with the Other World through her husband. 
 Perhaps Shakespeare saw that this effect would be spoilt by 
 a Scene in which she and her husband could not wash the 
 blood from their hands and so cancelled that superfluous 
 horror. According to Forman, she did not smear the servants 
 with blood, but only handled the bloody daggers in hiding 
 them. This may be a sign that in the form of this Play acted 
 in 1610 she was absolved from any share in the crime except 
 her encouragement of her wavering husband, and that a 
 later version of it (which may have been Ben Jonson's) restored 
 her former iniquity. 
 
 This Play, as we have it, is damaged because it is confused 
 with a young story of horrors and because it is controlled by 
 the change of the Weird Sisters to Witches, for this changes 
 its atmosphere and while making it popular and fit to attract 
 the roughest audience degrades it by altering a Poem to 
 Prose. While like Hamlet and Ki7ig Lear and Othello it has 
 a nobility and passionate strength which set it apart from 
 Julius Casar, it is divided, like them, from Antony and 
 Cleopatra because its chief Characters are partly transformed 
 and because the merits and faults of Titus Andronicus are 
 still to be seen. 
 
 Robert Burton wrote of the Diseases of the Mind in The 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, printed in 1621, " Dotage, Fatuity 
 or Folly is a common name to all the following species as 
 some will have it. Laurentius and Altomarus comprehended 
 Madness, Melancholy and the rest under this name and call 
 it the Summum genus of them all." And when he defined 
 Melancholy he wrote, " The Summum genus is Dotage or 
 Anguish of the Mind, saith Areteeus. . . . We properly 
 call that Dotage, as Laurentius interprets it, when some one 
 
 229
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 principal faculty of the Mind, as Imagination or Reason, is 
 corrupted, as all melancholy persons have." 
 
 While all these last Tragedies deal with dotage only two 
 of them, Hamlet and King Lear, are concerned with Melan- 
 choly tending to Madness, for though Timon is thought 
 crazy his savage indignation is justified. There is the same 
 theme in these Plays, the Melancholy or the Anguish of Mind 
 of a nature too noble for the everyday World. 
 
 Shakespeare could have said to Hamlet and Lear with the 
 Messenger in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, 
 
 Too much sadness hath congealed your blood, 
 And Melancholy is the nurse of Frenzy. 
 
 These Plays are companions because Hamlet sprang from 
 Kyd's S-panish Tragedy, and King Lear from Shakespeare's 
 imitation of it in Titus Andronicus. 
 
 All we know of the publication of Hamlet is that a crude 
 form of that Play now called the First Quarto was printed in 
 1603 and a much longer one in the following year and that 
 this was reprinted in 1605 and 161 1 and was changed in the 
 Folio of 1623. 
 
 There is an entry in the Stationers' Register on July 26, 
 1602, according to which a printer named Roberts entered 
 a book called The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince Denmark, " as 
 it was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his Servants." 
 A bookseller named Nicholas Ling published the First Quarto 
 in the following year without a printer's name, calling it 
 " The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, By 
 William Shakespeare, As it hath been divers times acted by 
 His Highness's Servants in the City of London, as also in the 
 two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere." 
 And in 1604 the Second Quarto was published with the title 
 page, " The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. 
 By William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to 
 almost as much again as it was, according to the true and 
 perfect copy, at London, printed by J. R. for N. L." 
 
 Some students have held that the First Quarto was a 
 pirated version and that the entry in the Stationers' Register 
 referred to the second one which was legitimate and corrected 
 the other. Still, both were produced by Nicholas Ling, and 
 
 230
 
 HAMLET 
 
 it may be that all the Quartos were pirated. Heminge and 
 Condell seemed to affirm this in their Address to the Reader 
 in the Folio of 1623, but Mr. Pollard, for instance, contends 
 in his Shakespeare'' s Fights with the Pirates that they only 
 referred to four inaccurate Quartos, Romeo and Juliet of 
 1597, King Henry the Fifth of 1600, The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor of 1602, and Hamlet of 1603. In any case, the First 
 Quarto of Hamlet seems to have been compiled from rough 
 notes taken while the Play was performed and the Second 
 one printed from an accurate copy. 
 
 The entry in the Stationers' Register seems to prove that 
 the Play was called Hamlefs Revenge in 1602, and the Quartos, 
 taken together, show that many changes in it were made in 
 or after 1603 — even some of the names of the Characters are 
 altered ; for instance, in the First Quarto Polonius is called 
 Corambis. 
 
 Thomas Lodge wrote in Wifs Misery and the World's 
 Madness, printed in 1596, that Hate- Virtue " looks as pale as 
 the vizard of the Ghost which cried so miserably at the 
 theatre like an oyster-wife, ' Hamlet, Revenge.' " In Satiro- 
 mastixy which is ascribed to Dekker and others and seems 
 to have been acted in 1601, Captain Tucca says, " My name 
 is Hamlet Revenge." In Westward Ho, which was printed 
 in 1607, we read, " Ay, but when light wives make heavy 
 husbands, let their husbands play mad Hamlet and cry 
 revenge." And in Rowland's Night Raven, which was printed 
 in 1620, there are the words, " I will not cry ' Hamlet, revenge 
 my griefs.' " It has been argued that these and similar 
 allusions must show that there was another Play on this theme 
 because the Ghost does not cry " Hamlet, revenge ! ", but 
 this seems a rash inference. In the Play, as we have it, the 
 Ghost says, 
 
 If ever thou didst thy dear father love, 
 Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. 
 
 It may be that in the early forms of this Play he cried " Hamlet, 
 revenge ! " under the Stage, and that this was altered to 
 " Swear " because it had become ludicrous through its use 
 as a catchword, or this may have been done because the call 
 was too openly copied from the Ghost in Jeronimo, whose cry 
 
 231
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 for revenge was cited by Dekker in The Seveii Deadly Sins of 
 London, printed in 1606 : " I would that every miserable 
 debtor that so dies might be buried at his creditor's door, 
 that when he strides over him he might think he still rises 
 up (like the Ghost in Jeronimo) crying * Revenge.' " 
 
 Henslowe's Diary proves that a Play called Hamlet was 
 acted in 1594 at Newington Butts by the Admiral's Men 
 performing with the Chamberlain's Servants. Since the two 
 Companies were acting together this may have been 
 written by Shakespeare. It is possible that a juvenile Play 
 was revised and revived in 1 601 and, if so, there is no need 
 to imagine that there was another popular Hamlet which 
 has been lost. The fact that Meres did not cite Hamlet in 
 1598 may only mean that it was obsolete then like all the other 
 Plays of Revenge except Jeronimo and Titus Andronicus. I 
 do not think that Shakespeare would have turned to employ 
 their obsolete methods if he had been inventing a Play in 
 1601. 
 
 Many of the faults of the First Quarto seem due to the 
 fact that it was founded on notes. For instance, while in the 
 Second Quarto Polonius says, 
 
 But do not dull thy palm with entertainment 
 Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade, 
 
 the First Quarto makes Corambis say, 
 
 But do not dull the palm with entertain 
 Of every new unfledged courage. 
 
 And throughout the First Quarto the Prose and Blank Verse 
 are confused and misprinted as they might have been if they 
 had been copied from recitation alone. 
 
 Throughout the Second Quarto revision and expansion 
 are evident. In the First Quarto Leartcs (whose name is 
 Laertes afterwards) says of Ofelia, 
 
 So she is drowned : 
 Too much of water hath thou, Ofelia, 
 Therefore I will not drown thee in my tears. 
 Revenge it is must yield this heart relief, 
 For woe begets woe, and grief hangs on grief. 
 
 232
 
 HAMLET 
 
 In the Second Quarto, Laertes says, 
 
 Too much of water hast thou, poor Opheha, 
 
 And therefore I forbid my tears : but yet 
 
 It is our trick ; nature her custom holds 
 
 Let shame say what it will ; when these are gone, 
 
 The woman will be out, 
 
 and the Queen says. 
 
 One woe doth tread upon another's heels 
 So fast they follow. 
 
 The first version seems a faulty note of a passage which was 
 revised in the second. 
 
 The revision sometimes omits passages, for instance 
 when Hamlet says in the Second Quarto, " That's villainous, 
 and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it," 
 the first Quarto continues in Prose, printed as Verse, 
 
 And then you have some again that keep one suit 
 Of jests, as a man is known by one suit of 
 Apparel, 
 
 and gives examples of such jests which may show that the 
 blame was meant for Kemp who had quarrelled with Shake- 
 speare's Company in 1599 or in the following year. If these 
 jests were Kemp's favourite ones a hit of this kind might 
 well have been short-lived in the Play. 
 
 This passage, the advice to the Players, offers a clue to 
 the date of one of the versions. The years in which Essex 
 was seen hesitating and half demented like Hamlet, 1600 
 and 1 60 1, were marked by three things which had a personal 
 effect on the Players : these were the War of the Poets and 
 the sudden success of the Boy-Players, the Children, and 
 the Privy Council Decree of June, 1600, against " the im- 
 moderate use and company of Play Houses and Players," 
 according to which only two Theatres, The Fortune and 
 Globe, were to be used, and these only on two days in a 
 week, and no Plays were to be acted elsewhere in or near 
 London. There are allusions to these things in the second 
 Act of this Play when Hamlet asks why the Tragedians of 
 the City are travelling and Rosencrantz answers, " I think 
 
 233
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 their inhibition comes by reason of the late innovation," 
 and adds that there is " an eyrie of children . . . these are 
 now the fashion," and that they are now employed in a feud, 
 " there was for a while no money bid for argument unless 
 the Poet and the Player went to cuffs in the question." 
 And Roscncrantz' assertion that the boys carry it away, 
 " ay, that they do, my lord, Hercules and his load too," 
 may refer to Ben Jonson, who ceased working for the Cham- 
 berlain's Servants in 1599 '^^'^ wrote Cyrithia's Revels for 
 the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel in 1600. 
 
 This advice to the Players is abbreviated in the First 
 Quarto. There Gilderstone only says that the Tragedians 
 travel because 
 
 Novelty carries it away. 
 For the principal public audience that 
 Came to them are turned to private Plays 
 And to the humour of children. 
 
 This may have been a hasty note of that passage, and in any 
 case it proves that this Quarto was not merely a version of an 
 obsolete Play. And it is not probable that the allusions to 
 the War of the Poets and the Privy Council Decree were 
 added after 1602. 
 
 It may be that the Scenes with the Players were a separate 
 Interlude written as a companion to the Interlude of the 
 Rustical Players in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream. The City 
 Tragedians are introduced in the same way as the Players 
 are in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, and they 
 act samples of their old stock-in-trade, a Murder-Play with 
 a Dumb-show, and a Senecan Tragedy. Since both these 
 entertainments were obsolete in 1601 we can infer that this 
 Interlude was earlier work. 
 
 The Senecan Tragedy is a plain imitation of Dido, Queen 
 of Carthage. That Play was printed in 1594, and in it the 
 same scene is described and Pyrrhus stands still after Priam's 
 death, 
 
 So leaning on his sword, he stood stone still. 
 Viewing the fire wherewith rich Ilion burnt. 
 
 In this imitation of it Pyrrhus hesitates before he kills Priam, 
 
 234
 
 HAMLET 
 
 So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, 
 And like a neutral to his will and matter, 
 Did nothing. 
 
 But as we often see, against some storm, 
 A silence in the heavens, the rack stands still. 
 The bold winds speechless and the orb below 
 As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder 
 Doth rend the region, so after Pyrrhus' pause 
 Aroused vengeance sets him new awork ; 
 And never did the Cyclops' hammer fall 
 On Mars's armour, forged for proof eterne. 
 With less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword 
 Now falls on Priam. 
 
 It may be that these speeches survive from a Tragedy which 
 Shakespeare had written or had begun to write in his Youth. 
 In the Play, as we have it, Hamlet knew that he stood in 
 Pyrrhus' place. 
 
 And like a neutral to his will and matter, 
 Did nothing, 
 
 and this was why he had asked the Players to remember that 
 speech. The Play itself has the same hesitation. Mr. 
 Masefield says of it, " The baffling of Fate's purpose leads 
 to a condition in life like the ' slack water ' between tides. 
 . . . The Play seems to hesitate and stand still while 
 the energies spilled in the baffling of Fate work and simmer 
 and grow strong." 
 
 This Interlude of the Players Is a comment on the rest 
 of the story in the same way as the Comedies of the Rustical 
 Players and of Falstaff are comments on A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream and the Tragedy of Hotspur. It is divided 
 in the Play, as we have it, as those other Interludes are. It 
 seems to be meant to be a token of Sanity, for it shows Hamlet 
 as one who Is still able to give sober advice and as one who 
 was fond of acting and able to simulate emotion at will. 
 And it may have been blended with the Tragedy of Hamlet's 
 Revenge when he began to be sane. 
 
 The statement of Hamlet's age is one of the changes in 
 the Play as we have it. When in the fifth Act the First 
 
 235
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Clown is asked how long he has been a grave-maker he says, 
 " Of all days in the year, I came to it that day that our last 
 King Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras ... it was that very 
 day that young Hamlet was born," and he adds, " I have 
 been sexton here, man and boy, these thirty years." This 
 can only mean that Hamlet is thirty. In the First Quarto 
 this Clown says of Yorick's skull, 
 
 Here's a skull hath been here this dozen years, 
 
 but in the Second Quarto he says, " This skull has lain in 
 the earth three and twenty years." Hamlet must have been 
 a child in the days when Yorick kissed him and carried him. 
 According to the Second Quarto, he was seven years old 
 when Yorick died. If so, the First Quarto exhibited him 
 as only nineteen. 
 
 It is probable that in the First Quarto Yorick was meant 
 to suggest Richard Tarleton, who acted the Clown Derick 
 in The Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth and died 
 about a dozen years before 1601, in 1588. If so, we can 
 infer that the Scene with the sextons was one of the things 
 added in 1601. 
 
 It is a coincidence that the Earl of Southampton was 
 aged thirty in 1603. If we could conclude that he was 
 drawn as Hamlet we could infer that the first version was 
 written when he was young. If Shakespeare first saw him 
 in 1587 and quickly professed a fantastic admiration for 
 him, he may have borne him in mind when he was writing 
 a Tragedy as he may have done also in Italianate Comedies 
 like Lovers Labour'' s Lost. And it so happened that South- 
 ampton was linked with the story of Hamlet. 
 
 That story as it was told by Saxo Grammaticus seems 
 partly based on the Mediaeval Romance of Bevis of Ham-pton. 
 In that Romance the wicked Sir Murdure killed the hero's 
 father, Sir Guy, and struck off his head : 
 
 To a Knight he took his head in hand, 
 " Go," he said, " and bear this fonde 
 To the Countess that is so bright. 
 And say I come to her bower this night," 
 
 and Bevis rebuked his mother when he was seven, swearing 
 
 236
 
 HAMLET 
 
 to avenge his dead father, and twice afterwards before his 
 adventures, and kept his word by boiling Sir Murdure. 
 
 Amaury Duval, in his Histoire Littcraire de la France^ 
 contended that this story was French and that Sir Bevis 
 came from Antonne, but though it was probably first written 
 in French, it dealt with the English home of Romance and 
 the English version recognized this, setting the tale in Putney, 
 for instance, and ending. 
 
 Thus endeth Bevis of South Hampton, 
 King and Knight of great renown. 
 
 The young Earl of Southampton was frequently compared to 
 Sir Bevis, as when he was welcomed at Oxford in 1592, 
 
 Jure suo dives quem South-Hamptonia magnum 
 Vendicat heroem, 
 
 and when Peele praised him in Anglorum F erics in 1595. 
 But though the melancholy which haunted his life and his 
 outbursts of rage and sudden recklessness gave him a resem- 
 blance to Hamlet, this was shared by his friend Essex, who 
 was nineteen when he first became prominent in 1588 and 
 was thirty-two when he was beheaded. Though both 
 must have been in Shakespeare's mind in the days following 
 the Essex Revolt, his last Hamlet has more in common with 
 Essex. 
 
 It may be that he made Hamlet a youth first because 
 he was young himself and ripened him because his own 
 heart had grown to maturity. And he had another reason 
 for making Hamlet mature in 1603 in the fact that Richard 
 Burbage, for whom the Character was written, was then 
 about thirty-six. Besides, the meditations came better 
 from a grown man than from a boy of nineteen. 
 
 The fact that this change is made in the Second Quarto 
 appears one of the signs that the Play represented in the 
 First Quarto was a hasty revision. The change was imper- 
 fect, for Hamlet still acted with the moods of a boy because 
 this was essential to the drift of the Play. Even if Hamlet 
 was thirty Shakespeare could still have called him young : 
 in Much Ado About Nothing he wrote, " How giddily a turns 
 about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and- 
 
 237
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 thirty." And when Southampton was aged about twenty- 
 eight Cecil called him " the poor young Earl." 
 
 This was a change from the original story, and there was 
 another when in the Second Quarto the Queen no longer 
 said, 
 
 But as I have a soul, I swear by Heaven 
 I never knew of this most horrid murder, 
 
 and no longer took sides with Hamlet, saying, 
 
 I will conceal, consent, and do my best 
 What stratagem so e'er thou shalt devise. 
 
 In the Play, as we have it, she stands neutral, hesitating between 
 her son and her husband. This change extenuates Hamlet's 
 wild behaviour to her. 
 
 Another change in the Play is the omission of a definite 
 Creed. The Ghost is apart from all the rest in the Plays, 
 for it is the only Catholic one. Reginald Scot wrote in his 
 Discovery of Witchcraft, printed in 1584 : " How common 
 an opinion was it among the Papists that all souls walked 
 on the earth after they had departed from their bodies ! 
 In so much as it was in the time of Popery a usual matter 
 to desire sick people on their death-beds to appear to them 
 after their death and to reveal their estate. . . . The 
 walking of these souls (saith Michael Andreas) is a most 
 excellent argument for the proof of Purgatory, for (saith 
 he) these souls have testified that which the Popes have 
 affirmed on that behalf. . . . They never appear to the 
 whole multitude, seldom to few and most commonly to one 
 alone." 
 
 In Shakespeare's time there were many Catholic stories 
 of ghosts seeking prayers, for instance, the one recorded 
 in Father Matiger^s Narrative, printed in Troubles of Our 
 Catholic Forefathers, according to which the eighth Lord 
 Stourton's ghost appeared to Father Cornelius, who was 
 saying Mass in Sir John Arundell's house in London : " the 
 dead man appeared to him at the Altar entirely surrounded 
 with flames. . . . The Father asked him wherefore he 
 was in that state and what he wished for. The apparition 
 mentioned who he was and in what suffering : he entreated 
 
 238
 
 HAMLET 
 
 his prayers and those of all of them : then he vanished." 
 In this story the ghost was only seen by Father Cornelius, 
 though Lord Stourton's mother, who had married Sir John 
 Arundell, was hearing the Mass. 
 
 In this Play as we have it a Catholic version survives, 
 contradicted by a Roman Philosophy : Hamlet still laments 
 that his father died without the Last Sacraments, but now 
 (after seeing his ghost and hearing it prove the rejected 
 Doctrine of Purgatory) he can speak of. 
 
 The undiscovered country from whose bourne 
 No traveller returns. 
 
 In the First Quarto, the passage beginning " To be or 
 not to be " runs thus : 
 
 To be or not to be, ay, there is the point. 
 
 To die, to sleep, is that all ? Ay, all : 
 
 No, to sleep, to dream, ay, marry there it goes, 
 
 For in that dream of death, when we awake 
 
 And borne before an everlasting Judge, 
 
 From whence no passenger ever returned. 
 
 The undiscovered country, at whose sight 
 
 The happy smile and the accursed are damned. 
 
 But for this, the joyful hope of this. 
 
 Who'd bear the scorns and flattery of the World 
 
 Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor ? 
 
 The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged. 
 
 The taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign. 
 
 And thousand more calamities besides. 
 
 To grunt and sweat under this weary life. 
 
 When that he may his full Quietus make 
 
 With a bare bodkin, who would this endure 
 
 But for a hope of something after death ? 
 
 This first version looks like a confused note of a passage which 
 had been changed, but the man who made such a note could 
 hardly have mistaken the drift by adding the joyful hope 
 and the compensating Justice of God. 
 
 It may be that when Shakespeare revised Hamlet in i6oi 
 he began a change which he developed in 1603, turning it 
 into a Philosophical Play in Seneca's manner. And it may 
 
 239
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 be that this change was suggested by the revision of Julius 
 Ccesar in which he copied Plutarch by making Brutus expound 
 the Stoic Philosophy. 
 
 He may have studied the younger Seneca's Philosophical 
 Works, such as Ad Lucilium Efistolce Morales, as well as 
 his Tragedies, for he seems to echo them often. For instance, 
 in the eighty-second Epistle, Contra delicias, Seneca writes : 
 " Ilia quoque res morti nos alienat, quod hsec jam novimus : 
 ilia ad quae transituri sumus, nescimus qualia sint, et horremus 
 ignota. Naturalis praeterea tenebrarum metus est, in quas 
 adductura mors creditur." Still, such meditations are 
 common to all who have ever paused to reflect, and so we 
 cannot conclude that when Shakespeare made Polonius 
 advise Laertes on friendship he was thinking of Seneca's 
 third Epistle, " Diu cogita, an tibi in amicitiam aliquis 
 recipiendus sit. Cum placuerit fieri, toto ilium pectore 
 admitte," or that when he helped himself to other men's 
 work he was guided by the sixteenth Epistle, " Quicquid 
 bene dictum est ab ullo, meum est," any more than we can 
 decide that when he made Hamlet fear Death he remembered 
 Bacon's Essay on Death (which was first printed in 1597), 
 beginning, " Men fear Death as children fear to go in the 
 dark : and as that natural fear in children is increased with 
 tales, so is the other." Neither need we think that he bor- 
 rowed Hamlet's doubts from the Troades as when the Chorus 
 says, 
 
 Verum est, an timidos fabula decipit, 
 
 or Andromache says. 
 
 Si manes ha bent 
 Curas priores, nee perit flamma amor, 
 
 or that he was remembering Catullus', 
 
 Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum 
 Illuc undc negant redire quenquam 
 
 or any of the scores of such phrases in the poets of Rome 
 when he wrote of the country from which no traveller returns. 
 If he turned in these days from Ovid to Seneca's Medita- 
 tions and Plutarch he resembled Montaigne, who wrote 
 when he had secluded himself in his country home in his 
 
 240
 
 HAMLET 
 
 fortieth year that he had loved Ovid in his Youth and had 
 grown weary of him, " Sa facihte et scs inventions qui m'ont 
 ravy autrefois, a peine m'entretiennent-elles a cette heure. 
 . . . Les Hvres qui me servent c'est Plutarque, depuis 
 qu'il est Frangois, et Seneque." The younger Seneca's 
 Philosophical Works had always been popular, partly because 
 his reflections were mediocre and practical and partly because 
 the tone of his piety led Tradition to say that he was a 
 Christian and a friend of Saint Paul's. Chaucer, for instance, 
 wrote of him in The Man of Law's Tale, 
 
 Well can Senck and many philosopher 
 Bywaylen Time, more than gold in coffer, 
 
 and in The Tale of Melibeus, " Measure of weeping should 
 be conserved after the lore of Christ that teacheth us Senec," 
 and in The Monk^s Tale, 
 
 For of Morality he was the flower. 
 
 The author of Piers Plowman wrote. 
 
 And proven it by Seneca 
 That all .thing under Heaven ought to be in commune. 
 
 And Ben Jonson showed his admiration by borrowing much 
 of Seneca's wisdom. 
 
 All the meditations in Hamlet are as old as the hills, 
 and this is one of the reasons why this Play is immortal. 
 The note of mediocrity in them has ensured them a fame 
 which would not have crowned a difficult greatness. For 
 instance, in the passage beginning " To be or not to be," 
 the reflections on the sorrows of Life and on the terror of 
 Death will always be popular because they are common ; 
 but the more beautiful Sonnet, 
 
 Tired with all these, for restful death I cry 
 
 and the supreme harmonies of Measure for Measure are 
 " caviare to the general." 
 
 In Plutarch's Life of Marcus Brutus Cassius explains the 
 Vision according to the Epicureans : " In our sect, Brutus, 
 we have an opinion that we do not always feel or see that 
 which we suppose we do both see and feel, but that our senses 
 
 241 Q
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 being credulous and therefore easily abused (when they are 
 idle and unoccupied in their own objects) are induced to 
 imagine they see and conjecture that which in truth they 
 do not. . . . For our imagination doth upon a small fancy 
 grow from conceit to conceit, uttering both in passions and 
 forms of things imagined. For the mind of man is ever 
 occupied, and that continual moving is nothing but an 
 imagination. But yet there is a further cause of this in you. 
 For you, being by nature given to melancholic discoursing, 
 and of late continually occupied, your wits and senses having 
 been once laboured, do easier yield to such imagination." 
 
 Hamlet is weary of life and given to melancholic dis- 
 coursing before he sees the Ghost. Even in the First Quarto 
 he says, 
 
 The spirit that I have seen may be the Devil, 
 And out of my weakness and my melancholy. 
 As he is very potent with such men. 
 May seek to damn me. 
 
 In the First Quarto Ofelia says, 
 
 O young Prince Hamlet ! the only flower of Denmark, 
 
 He is bereft of all the wealth he had, 
 
 The jewel that adorned his feature most 
 
 Is filched and stolen away, his wits bereft him. 
 
 In the Second Quarto she does not say this, and when Polonius 
 
 asks " Mad for thy love ? " she replies. 
 
 My Lord, I do not know, 
 But truly I do fear it. 
 
 In the First Quarto the King says after this, 
 
 Right noble friends, that our dear Cousin Hamlet 
 
 Hath lost the very heart of all his sense 
 
 It is most right, and we most sorry for him, 
 
 but in the similar passage in the Second Quarto he says, 
 
 Something you have heard 
 Of Hamlet's transformation : so I call it 
 Sith not the exterior nor the inward man 
 Resembles that it was. 
 242
 
 HAMLET 
 
 The people who saw the Play which the First Quarto repre- 
 sented were told that Hamlet was mad immediately after 
 his hysterical merriment when he encountered the Ghost, 
 and they had no reason to think that they were being misled. 
 In the Second Quarto the other Characters hesitate, and 
 they are the best judges because they have seen much that 
 is not shown on the stage : Ophelia would not suffer so 
 much if she was sure that he raved. 
 
 In the original story Hamlet simulated Insanity to 
 protect himself against the King's malice. It may be that 
 Shakespeare changed this when he made the story resemble 
 The S-panish Tragedy by introducing the Ghost in it and by 
 making it end tragically. In the Play, as we have it, the 
 King shows no malice till he is threatened by Hamlet. It 
 may be that in the first version Hamlet shared the distrac- 
 tion of old Hieronimo and Titus Andronicus, who are both 
 partly sane : Hieronimo says, 
 
 I am not mad : 
 I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques, 
 
 in the same way as Andronicus says, 
 
 I am not mad : I know thee well enough, 
 
 and as Queen Elizabeth said, " I am not mad : you must not 
 think to make Queen Jane of me." This may have been 
 changed gradually to put Hamlet in touch with the audience, 
 but even in the Play, as we have it, his Sanity is left open 
 to doubt. Horatio's grief is the best evidence for it, since 
 he must have known the truth, and he is supported when 
 Fortinbras says at the end, 
 
 He was likely had he been put on 
 To have proved most royally. 
 
 But Hamlet's soliloquies and his talk with the Ghost are 
 as distracted as his Scenes with his mother or with the King. 
 If we judge him by the Play, as we have it, we can only con- 
 clude that he was more mad than he thought he was though 
 more sane than some other people believed. And this seems 
 more evident if we compare this Play with The Spanish 
 Tragedy and Titus Andronicus. No dramatist intending 
 
 243
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 to write a Play in which his hero should merely feign madness 
 would begin it by making him long to kill himself while he 
 is alone. There is no room for doubt in King Lear when 
 Edgar is simulating Insanity. 
 
 Anthony Scolokcr wrote in Daiphantus or the Passions 
 of Love, printed in 1604, " Or to come home to the vulgar's 
 element, like friendly Shakespeare's Tragedies where the 
 Comedian rides when the Tragedian stands on tip toe, faith, 
 it should please all like Prince Hamlet. But in sadness then 
 it were to be feared would run mad," and he said that the 
 Lover, 
 
 Puts off his clothes, his shirt he only wears. 
 Much like mad Hamlet, then as passion tears. 
 
 In Westward Ho, printed in 1607, it was said, " Let their 
 husbands play mad Hamlet and cry Revenge," and in Dek- 
 ker's Lanthorn and Candle-light, printed in 1609, " but if 
 any mad Hamlet, hearing this, smell villainy and rush in 
 by violence." 
 
 These references cannot determine whether Hamlet 
 was supposed to be mad or to be feigning Insanity ; but 
 there may be a clue to their meaning in Samuel Johnson's 
 note on this Play. He wrote in his General Observations, 
 " If the dramas of Shakespeare were to be characterized, 
 each by the particular excellence which distinguishes it 
 from the rest, we must allow to the Tragedy of Hamlet the 
 praise of variety. The incidents are so numerous that the 
 argument of the Play would make a long tale. The Scenes 
 are interchangeably diversified with merriment and solem- 
 nity ; with merriment that includes judicious and instruc- 
 tive observations ; and solemnity, not strained by poetical 
 violence above the natural sentiments of man. New Char- 
 acters appear from time to time in continual succession, 
 exhibiting various forms of life and particular modes of con- 
 versation. The pretended madness of Hamlet causes much 
 mirth." 
 
 It so happened that Hamlet was one of the few Plays by 
 Shakespeare which had always been popular. Betterton 
 had won fame as the Prince and as he seems to have begun 
 acting in 1659 '^^^ ^^ have joined Davenant's Company in 
 
 244
 
 HAMLET 
 
 1661 he may well have known how Burbage looked on this 
 part. It is probable that Garrick adopted the traditional 
 view when he followed Betterton and that when Johnson 
 wrote " the pretended madness of Hamlet causes much 
 mirth " he was repeating the verdict of the people who saw 
 Burbage as Hamlet. If so, Hamlet was rather a Comical 
 than a Tragical Character, and this would explain why 
 Scoloker appears to allege that he tore off his clothes (as 
 Lear did in the storm) except his shirt, in one of the Scenes. 
 This Tragi-comical idea of Hamlet would explain why he 
 mocked the Ghost and Polonius and jested with the Players 
 and Gravediggers. 
 
 Johnson's note proves that this Play was shown in his 
 day not as a Tragedy but as a Tragi-comical Pantomime 
 in the Classical sense. And the things in it which could 
 be reckoned as faults if it was judged as a Tragedy are justified 
 if it is taken to be a Pantomime, a picture of life the more 
 accurate because it contrasts sorrow and laughter and because 
 misunderstandings and doubts and baffled dreams darken 
 its mirth. A Tragedy can only be checked by the repetition 
 of platitudes and it must be left ineffectual if the purposes 
 fail and it must have the climax of a Tragical moment. 
 In this Play there are no Tragical moments, unless we include 
 the casual slaughter which repeats the indiscriminate end 
 of Jitus Jndronicus : the chief picture of Hamlet shows him 
 holding a skull and making the most obvious reflections on 
 it. He is above all things a spectator, and this (which would 
 be a fault in a Tragedy) keeps him in touch with the audience 
 watching the Play. He interprets the Tragedy, which is 
 part of the Pantomime, instead of controlling it and he is 
 the victim of his own meditations. This justifies these 
 meditations : they express the thoughts of the audience 
 and therefore (as Johnson remarked) they are not strained 
 by poetical violence above the natural sentiments of man. 
 The poetical violence which lifted Macbeth and King Lear 
 and Othello and Anto7iy and Cleopatra above the scope of 
 everyday Life separated the Tragical victims of those Plays 
 from the audience and those Plays were made alien by a 
 terrible beauty. 
 
 The vagueness of Hamlet's character now keeps him in 
 
 245
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 touch with people who could not see their own nature in 
 a definite hero. Coleridge, for instance, and Goethe and 
 Schlegel were able to see themselves depicted as Hamlet 
 though they had very little in common with the English 
 of Queen Elizabeth's time. This vagueness may be due to 
 the fact that the boy of the first version, the Andronicus- 
 Hamlet, remains confused with the Essex-Hamlet, the man 
 whose soul is tossed to and fro. Perhaps Shakespeare knew 
 Hamlet too intimately to draw him distinctly, as a father 
 looks on his son remembering him a baby in arms. 
 
 It may be that he recognized the advantage of this. 
 Actors of all sizes and shapes or of any character or none 
 can attempt Hamlet's part because he is vague. And the 
 Play itself shares this advantage — it can be acted in any 
 language or mood. The melancholy Victorian version with 
 its sorrowful Prince, who would have scorned to cause 
 laughter by only wearing a shirt, was no less admired than 
 Garrick's bright Pantomime. The profound German 
 Hamlet of recent days was as popular as the old Der Bestrafte 
 Brudermord, a Comical Tragedy which must represent an 
 early form of this Play since it keeps the old names, such 
 as Corambis. This Play is the more lifelike because its 
 meaning is left open to doubt, like the drift and the character 
 of current affairs. And it is universal because Hamlet 
 expresses the common thoughts of Mankind. 
 
 246
 
 THE TRAGEDIES 
 
 II 
 
 AN entry in the Stationers' Register dated November 
 the twenty-sixth, 1607, records that King Lear was 
 played " before the King's Majesty on St. Stephen's Night 
 at Christmas last " and in the next year a Quarto edition 
 was pubhshed under the title, " Mr. William Shakespeare his 
 True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear 
 and his three Daughters. With the unfortunate life of 
 Edgar, son and heir to the Earl of Gloster, and his sullen 
 and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam. As it was played 
 before the King's Majesty at Whitehall upon St Stephen's 
 Night in Christmas Holidays." This Quarto was printed 
 again in the same year or in 1619. The title page of 
 the Quartos may have been written in 1607 or the Tragedy 
 may have been acted at Court both in that year and in 
 1606. 
 
 Sir Israel GoUancz, who says that " the Play of King Lear 
 may safely be assigned to the year 1605," cites for proofs of 
 this the entry in the Stationers' Register, the fact that 
 (according to him) the names of Edgar's devils and many 
 of the allusions in the fourth Scene of the third Act were 
 derived from Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Im- 
 postures, which was first published in 1603, and the facts 
 that " British man " is substituted for " Enghshman " in the 
 famous Nursery rhyme and that the mention of late 
 eclipses may refer to the eclipse of the sun in October, 
 1605. But none of these things can prove that this Play was 
 first written then. 
 
 The entry in the Stationers' Register in 1607 may deal 
 with a late form of this Tragedy and in any case cannot 
 prove when it was written. If the word " Englishman " was 
 altered to " British man " in allusion to the fact that King 
 James ruled the whole Island of Great Britain, this change 
 might have been made at any time after 1603. Besides, if 
 this was a change, it may have been due to the fact that 
 
 247
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Lear was King of Britain. In those days eclipses were often 
 linked with tragic events, as when Othello said, 
 
 Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse 
 Of Sun and Moon. 
 
 Sir Israel Gollancz says : " This supposition is borne out by 
 the fact that John Harvey's Discoursive Problems Concerning 
 Prophecies, printed in 1588, actually contains a striking 
 prediction thereof (hence the point of Edmund's comment, 
 ' I am thinking of a prediction I read this other day ')." 
 But if Edmund referred to that book he might have read 
 it "this other day" in 1588. And even if we can conclude 
 that Edgar refers to the Exorcisms mentioned by Harsnett, 
 he might have done this before 1586. 
 
 Richard Bancroft, who was Bishop of London from 1597 
 to 1604, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury, seems 
 to have compiled Harsnett's book. Father Antony Rivers 
 wrote to Father Robert Parsons in June. 1602, " His Lord- 
 ship is in hand with a piece of work touching the incon- 
 tinency of Priests, for which purpose he hath called unto 
 him Tyrell and some such lost companions." In 1603 
 Samuel Harsnett, who was then Bancroft's chaplain and 
 became Archbishop of York in 1629, published the fruit of 
 Bancroft's industry as " A Declaration of Egregious Popish 
 Impostures to withdraw the hearts of Her Majesty's subjects 
 from their allegiance and from the truth of Christian Re- 
 ligion professed in England, under the pretence of casting 
 out Devils, practised by Edmonds alias Weston a Jesuit, and 
 divers Romish Priests, his wicked associates." Father William 
 Weston wrote afterwards, in his Account of his Life (which 
 was probably first written in Spanish), " The book is a vile 
 book, full of the foulest insinuations." Father Anthony 
 Tyrell, Bancroft's chief witness, was arrested in 1586, and 
 in that year (according to his later Confession published by 
 Father John Morris in his Troubles of our Catholic Fore- 
 fathers) defended the Exorcisms when he was questioned 
 first, but afterwards yielded. His evidence is of no value 
 on either side because he recanted all his confessions and 
 was three times converted to the Anglican Church when he 
 
 248
 
 KING LEAR 
 
 was in prison, though he ended by escaping to Belgium 
 when he was old and dying as a Jesuit there. 
 
 These Exorcisms, which Bancroft or Harsnett denounced 
 in 1603, were mainly conducted at Sir George Peckham's 
 house at Denham near Uxbridge and Lord Vaux' house at 
 Hackney before 1586. It is probable that the theatre-goers 
 were not interested in polemical tracts (even when they were 
 able to read) and would have understood the allusions, if 
 there were any, much better in days when the Exorcisms 
 were recent than they would have done when Harsnett 
 produced his belated version of them. Indeed, any 
 such allusions might show that King Lear was first written 
 when the Exorcisms near London were the talk of the 
 town. 
 
 Some students think that King Lear was partly derived 
 from a Play called the True Chronicle History of King Leir 
 and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordelia, which 
 was printed in 1605, " as it hath been divers and sundry 
 times lately acted." That Play was of an obsolete fashion, 
 and it seems to have been licensed in 1594. Sir Israel Gol- 
 lancz writes : " It may be pronounced a very favourable 
 specimen of the popular ' comedies ' of the period to which 
 it belonged {circa 1592) with its conventional classicism, its 
 characteristic attempts at humour, its rhyming couplets." 
 If it was acted in 1604 there must have been a particular 
 reason for reviving it then. There would have been such 
 a reason if Shakespeare's King Lear had revived interest 
 in it. Sir Israel Gollancz writes : " It looks indeed as though 
 the original intention of the publishers was to palm off their 
 Leir as identical with the great Tragedy of the day." This 
 date, 1604, would agree with King Lear's position in the 
 Folio Order, and that is confirmed also by the resemblance 
 between the themes and the structure of this Play and of 
 Hamlet. King Lear is a Tragical Pantomime : two separate 
 Tragedies are entangled in it and it is crowded with 
 Characters and with Scenes which illuminate a terrible 
 story. 
 
 The different manners of King Lear, as we have it, prove 
 that Shakespeare had worked on it at different times. In 
 the first Scene Kent says, 
 
 249
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Fare thee well, King : sith thus thou wilt appear, 
 Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here, 
 
 and the King of France says : 
 
 Gods, gods ! tis strange that from their coldest neglect 
 
 My love should kindle to inflamed respect. 
 
 Thy dowerless daughter. King, thrown to my chance, 
 
 Is Queen of us, of ours, and our fair France : 
 
 Not all the Dukes of waterish Burgundy 
 
 Can buy this unprized precious maid of me. 
 
 Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind : 
 
 Thou losest here, a better where to find. 
 
 And in the first Scene of the second Act Gloucester says : 
 
 O madam, my old heart is cracked, is cracked ! . . . 
 
 lady, lady, shame would have it hid ! . . . 
 
 1 know not, madam : 'tis too bad, too bad. 
 
 These and similar lines are juvenile work. Throughout the 
 Play, and especially in the first couple of Acts, there are 
 passages of an older Blank Verse such as he wrote when he 
 was finding his music. And all this prentice work is com- 
 bined with passages of his most beautiful Prose and of his 
 perfect Blank Verse. 
 
 Apart from the manner the incidents of King Lear are 
 enough to prove that he wrote a form of this Play when he 
 was young. The first Scene, for instance, is juvenile and 
 the blinding of Gloucester on the Stage is a horror which 
 he could only have planned in the days when he wrote Titus 
 Andronicus : though he threatened one like it afterwards when 
 he was writing King John he made the cruel Hubert relent. 
 
 He may have founded the Tragedy of Kifig Lear and his 
 daughters on Albion'' s England, printed in 1586, or Holin- 
 shed's Chro7iicle, printed in 1578 and 1587, or The Mirror 
 for Magistrates, printed in 1587; and his use of the name 
 Cordelia instead of Cordcill or Cordila (which may have 
 been a later change) was probably borrowed from the second 
 book of The Faery Queen, which was printed in 1590 and 
 had been current before. He may have founded the tragedy 
 of Gloucester and his Sons on a chapter in Philip Sidney's 
 
 250
 
 KING LEAR 
 
 Arcadia, printed in 1590 but written In 1580 and 1581, 
 " the pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind 
 king and his kind son," or on the source of that story. It 
 would have been natural to turn to these sources when they 
 were new ; but it does not seem probable that he would have 
 depended only on the books of that time many years later. 
 In all the old sources the tale ended with King Lear's 
 restoration by his daughter Cordeill or Cordelia, who reigned 
 after him and died in old age. Spenser's version was : 
 
 So to his Crown she him restored again, 
 
 In which he died, made ripe for death by eld, 
 
 And after wished it should to her remain : 
 
 Who peacefully the same long time did weld, 
 
 And all men's hearts in due obedience held ; 
 
 Till that her sister's children, woxen strong. 
 
 Through proud ambition against her rebelled 
 
 And overcomen kept in prison long. 
 
 Till weary of that wretched life, herself she hong. 
 
 Shakespeare altered this with the cruelty of ^itus Aiidronicus, 
 and this seems one of the signs that the first form of this Tragedy 
 sprang from that Play in which there is another crazed 
 father, another innocent girl and another monster of wicked- 
 ness loved by another murderous Queen. And I think 
 that the Tragedy of Gloucester must also have belonged to 
 that time. These two Tragical Plays, I think, were revised 
 about 1593 with 'Titus Audronicus and combined then because 
 the fashion demanded longer Plays at that time. This 
 second form may have been the Play called King Leare 
 which (according to Henslowe's Diary) was acted at the Rose 
 Theatre in 1594, " by the Queen's Men and My Lord of 
 Sussex, together." And I think that it was the base of the 
 Tragedy of King Lear as we have it. The success of Macbeth 
 may have helped Shakespeare to turn to another Chronicle 
 History in which King James could see the fate of another 
 very remote ancestor shown, since he claimed descent from 
 King Lear through the Tudors, who (according to Welsh 
 pedigrees) were descended from Regan. And Hamlet's 
 sullen and assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam may have 
 reminded him of the story of Edgar. 
 
 251
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 King Lear is a Tragedy of the dotage of strength. In 
 the same way as Hamlet's fatuity or dotage began before 
 his suspicions were confirmed by the Ghost and Macbeth 
 had been wrenched to crime by ambition before he saw the 
 Weird Sisters (as his story was told before the Play had been 
 shortened), Lear's dotage preceded the things which crazed 
 him, the belief that his best-beloved daughter was cold to 
 him and the ungrateful behaviour of his two others and 
 the storm on the heath. Regan says of him in the first Act, 
 " 'Tis the infirmity of his age : yet he hath ever but slen- 
 derly known himself," and Goneril answers, " The best 
 and soundest of his time hath been but rash ; then must we 
 look to receive from his age, not alone the imperfections of 
 long ingrafted condition, but therewithal the unruly way- 
 wardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them." 
 His love and trust only convince them that he is losing his 
 wits. Edmund thinks in the same way of his father ; he 
 says, " I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppres- 
 sion of aged tyranny, which sways not as it hath power but 
 as it is suffered." Essex might have spoken thus of the 
 Queen. 
 
 Lear raged against Cordelia because he loved her too 
 much, and this links his doom with Hamlet's and Othello's. 
 All three were wrecked by the hardness of the everyday 
 World, like the sad Kings of the Chronicle Pageant. " Is 
 there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts ? " 
 says King Lear, and when he is dying Kent says, 
 
 He hates him 
 That would upon the rack of this tough world 
 Stretch him out longer. 
 
 Othello, the most sane of the three, is the only one driven 
 to the deed of a lunatic, for Hamlet is justified ; and Lear, 
 who is the wildest, hurts nobody. Even Lear's madness 
 is left open to doubt when he is most frenzied. When he 
 is raving with the storm on the heath or when in the fourth 
 Act he comes in fantastically dressed with wild flowers, 
 like Ophelia, he sees the world as it is. Shakespeare cannot 
 have meant pitiless insight to be a sign of Insanity when he 
 gave it to Hamlet and to Lear and to Timon : these men 
 
 252
 
 KING LEAR 
 
 were set apart from the World by their greatness and misery 
 and saw it the better because they were apart. 
 
 In the Scene in the storm when the Fool says, " Here's 
 a night pities neither wise man nor fool," and " this cold 
 night will turn us all to fools and madmen," five Charac- 
 ters meet (Lear, Kent, Gloucester, the Fool and Edgar) 
 and only one of them is behaving with Sanity, for Edgar is 
 disguised as a madman and Gloucester grows as crazed as 
 the King ; he says : 
 
 Thou sayest the king grows mad ; I'll tell thee, friend, 
 
 I am almost mad myself : I had a son. 
 
 Now outlawed from my blood ; he sought my life, 
 
 But lately, very late : I loved him, friend. 
 
 No father his son dearer : truth to tell thee. 
 
 The grief hath crazed my wits. What a night's this ! 
 
 Edgar's simulated Insanity is a comment on Lear's natural 
 frenzy. It was congenial to him, for when he appears in 
 the first Act Edmund says : " And pat he comes like the 
 catastrophe of the old Comedy : my cue is villainous melan- 
 choly with a sigh like Tom o' Bedlam." His disguise was 
 hardly sufficient even in the dark on the heath, for Gloucester 
 says afterwards : 
 
 In the last night's storm I such a fellow saw. 
 Which made me think a man a worm : my son 
 Came then into my mind, and yet my mind 
 Was then scarce friends with him. 
 
 And the Fool's folly (or simulation of it) matches with 
 Edgar's. 
 
 This Fool is the Court-jester of the Midsummer Comedies, 
 Touchstone, of whom Celia says in As Ton Like It, 
 
 He'll go along o'er the wide world with me, 
 
 and Feste in Twelfth Night, whose last song he continues 
 when he sings in the storm. 
 
 He that has and a little tiny wit. 
 With hey ho ! the wind and the rain ! 
 Must make content with his fortunes fit. 
 For the rain it raineth every day. 
 
 253
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 He is a shrewd knave and unhappy and would ask nothing 
 better than to go over the wide world with Cordelia. The 
 Knight says of him, " Since my young Lady's going into 
 France, Sir, the Fool hath much pined away," and Lear 
 answers, " No more of that : I have noted it well." He 
 vanishes in the midst of the Tragedy after the storm, saying, 
 " And I'll go to bed at noon," and there is no more mention 
 of him unless Lear is thinking of him when he says, " And 
 my poor fool is hanged." It may be that as the Play was 
 first written he was faithful to the King to the last and died 
 defending him and Cordelia and this was altered because 
 he had won the hearts of the audience through a natural 
 sympathy and so his disaster would have been too heart- 
 rending though the distant calamities of Kings could be 
 borne. His had been the part of a Chorus, to interpret 
 the Play and keep the audience in touch with Lear's tragedy, 
 and this was no longer required after the storm, for Lear 
 had been broken and the end was in sight. 
 
 The storm may be one of the signs that King Lear, as 
 we have it, was written after Macbeth. I think that it was 
 suggested by the thunder and lightning when Macbeth 
 and his friend saw the Weird Sisters and that it must have 
 been written later because the whole effect is developed. 
 This storm is the more effective because it is a natural one, 
 and it becomes the culminating Scene of the Tragedy, which 
 is made a story told in a storm instead of in the haunted 
 night like Macbeth, and is set out of doors instead of in the 
 rooms of a Castle like nearly all the hesitations of Hamlet. 
 The King grieves with the raving of the wind in the night. 
 This storm enforces the whole drift of the Play, " Why, 
 thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy 
 uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no 
 more than this ? Consider him well." These skies were 
 natural, and so were the passions which devastated Lear 
 and the rest, and this links King Lear with the two other 
 supreme Tragedies Othello and Antony afid Cleopatra, and 
 with two revised after them, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens : 
 all these are apart from any Creed and not guided by any 
 Devil or Ghost. 
 
 King Lear is too loving and generous and great for this 
 
 254
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 World. He is so great that he surrenders this World's greatness 
 without giving a thought to it : he only values his Kingdom 
 because he can divide it among the children he loves. This 
 divides him from Macbeth who had sacrificed his soul for a 
 Kingdom ; and his recklessness contrasts him with Hamlet 
 who was made impotent by thinking too much. He towers 
 over these, and even over his only rivals in greatness, Othello 
 and Antony, because they are dominated by women while 
 his love is a father's and only asks to give all. He discovers 
 too late that one of his three children repaid all his devotion, 
 and his faithful Fool might have sung the Song in As Tou 
 Like It to him — 
 
 Blow, blow, thou winter wind ! 
 
 Thou art not so unkind 
 
 As man's ingratitude. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare left this sorrowful Poem inten- 
 tionally tangled because its picture of Life gained truth by 
 repeating Hamlet's Pantomime method, or that effect may 
 be due to the blending of two juvenile Plays when Andronicus 
 lived reincarnated as Lear. In either case it agrees with 
 the passionate medley of the storm in the night. When Lear, 
 who has been as mad as the vexed Sea, passes out of reach 
 of such storms Kent says. 
 
 Vex not his ghost ! O let him pass ! 
 
 Two of the Tragedies, Othello and Hamlet^ are linked with 
 King Lear by the domination of Chance. Hamlet was ended 
 by a casual slaughter, and the chance that Edmund's warning 
 was given just too late governed King Lear, which otherwise 
 would have been a Tragi-comedy closing in reconciliation 
 and joy, like Cymbeline. If Desdemona had not happened 
 to drop the handkerchief while Emilia was with her and if 
 Cassio had not happened to give it to Bianca at once and she 
 had not happened to restore it to him while Othello was 
 watching him, lago's chief evidence could not have been 
 proffered. And as Mr. Masefield has said, " Had EmiHa 
 come a minute sooner or a minute later, the end of the Play 
 would have been very different." 
 
 This development of the action of Chance helps to denote 
 
 255
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the order of the Plays it controls. The final chances in Hamlet 
 and King Lear were foretold by the moods of the Plays and 
 therefore they are not really accidents, and they govern the 
 Tragedy by shaping its end. But the chances in Othello 
 control the story throughout, as when the messengers recalling 
 the Moor to Venice and giving his place to Cassio arrive 
 just at the moment when the news will be fatal. These 
 chances are destined because they are the tools of the doom 
 which Desdemona incurred ; but this is disguised till all the 
 story is told : they come as true accidents which prove to be 
 fatal at the end of it all. Othello foretells them when he 
 speaks of his story, 
 
 Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances. 
 
 In the similar Italian Romance, // Cafitano Moro, in Cinthio's 
 Hecatommithi, the Ancient contrived the theft of the handker- 
 chief, employing his child to steal it for him. If we could 
 be certain that Shakespeare founded this Play on it, the change 
 about this would be one of the proofs that this employment 
 of Chance was deliberate ; but though the Play, as we have it, 
 resembles Cinthio's story there are signs that an earlier form 
 had differed from it. It may be that Shakespeare founded 
 the first form of Othello on a Spanish version (which may have 
 been written before Cinthio's) in the days when he wrote 
 Titus Andronicus and afterwards made it resemble the Italian 
 one more. 
 
 This Play does not seem to have been printed before 
 the Quarto edition of 1622, so we cannot know when he made 
 the final changes in it. If the ReveVs Book of 1605 is genuine 
 it proves that a Play called Othello was acted at Whitehall in 
 1604. Prince Lewis Frederick of Wiirtemberg saw a Play of 
 this name at the Globe in 1610. And the Accounts of Money 
 Expended by the Treasurer of the Chamber between Michael- 
 mas 161 2 and 1 61 3, prove that a Play called The Moot of 
 Venice was acted by His Majesty's Servants during that time. 
 But the Elegy on JBurbage, who died in 161 8, seems to show 
 that the Play as it was printed in 1622 had been changed 
 from the form acted by him. It says of him, 
 
 But let me not forget one chiefest part 
 Wherein, beyond the rest, he moved the heart, 
 
 256
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 The grieved Moor, made jealous by a slave, 
 Who sent his wife to fill a timeless grave, 
 Then slew himself upon the bloody bed. 
 
 This statement that Othello was made jealous by a slave seems 
 supported in the Play as we have it. For instance, lago says. 
 
 Though I am bound to every act and duty, 
 I am not bound to all that slaves are free to, 
 
 and in the fifth Act Montano says of him, 
 
 I'll after that same villain. 
 For 'tis a damned slave, 
 
 and Othello says of him, 
 
 O cursed slave ! 
 and Lodovico says, 
 
 O thou Othello, that wert once so good. 
 Fallen in the practice of a damned slave, 
 What shall be said to thee ? . . . 
 
 For this slave. 
 If there be any cunning cruelty, 
 That can torment him much and hold him long. 
 It shall be his. 
 
 All this can be explained if lago had begun as a slave and not 
 as an Ancient. And that would explain how his wife was 
 Desdemona's servant, employed, for instance, to lay the 
 sheets on the bed, and not a lady-in-waiting. 
 
 Gildon wrote in his Reflections on Rymer's Short View of 
 Tragedy, printed in 1694 : " I am assured, from very good 
 hands, that the person who acted lago was in much esteem of 
 a comedian, which made Shakespeare put several words and 
 expressions into his part, perhaps not so agreeable to his 
 character, to make the audience laugh who had not yet learnt 
 to endure to be serious a whole Play." If lago was partly 
 Comical this may explain why Leonard Digges wrote in his 
 verses prefixed to Benson's edition of Shakespeare's Poems, 
 printed in 1640, 
 
 Sejanus too was irksome ; they prized more 
 Honest lago and the jealous Moor. 
 
 257 R
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 If Shakespeare made this change for Posterity or to please 
 himself and not for the Stage of his own time, this would 
 show that he still worked on his Plays to improve them with 
 no prospect of gain. 
 
 In the third Act of Ben Jonson's Poetaster there are 
 allusions — 
 
 Who calls out murder ? Lady, was it you ? 
 
 and " You shall see me do the Moor : Master, lend me your 
 scarf a little," which may mean that a form of Othello was 
 known in 1600 or 1601. The first may refer to Emilia's words 
 after Desdemona calls out, " O falsely, falsely murdered ! " 
 
 Alas, what cry is that ? . . . 
 Out and alas ! that was my lady's voice, 
 
 and the other may show that Desdemona was strangled. 
 Othello's description of the napkin or handkerchief. 
 
 There's magic in a web of it : 
 A sybil that had numbered in the world 
 The Sun to course two hundred compasses, 
 In her prophetic fury sewed the work, 
 
 now only seems intended to alarm Desdemona, since if this 
 had been true it would have been natural to tell her before. 
 This may show that she was strangled with it before the Play 
 was governed by Chance. 
 
 lago's assertion that the handkerchief is spotted with 
 strawberries may be a sign that Shakespeare had only heard 
 the story told and forgot (or never knew) why a mulberry 
 might have been the badge of the Moor. Mulberries were 
 known then in England : they seem to have been grown first 
 at Sion House by the Thames, and he is said to have planted 
 a mulberry tree in his own garden. So there was no reason 
 why he should have altered the badge if he had remembered 
 that " moro " was the Italian for " mulberry " and also for 
 " Moor." 
 
 This double meaning of " moro " explained why Three 
 Mulberries Sable were borne by Cristofano Moro, whom 
 Guicciardini named in the eighth book of his Storia d^Italia 
 as besieging Padua in 1509 — "Per occultare piu questi 
 
 258
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 pensieri, Crlstofano Moro, I'altro provveditore, dimostrasse 
 di andare a campo alia terra di Citadella." It is said that 
 Cristofano Moro's wife died while he was Lieutenant of 
 Cyprus in 1508, but beyond this we have no ground for 
 connecting him with Cinthio's story. He was not a Moor ; 
 neither was Lodovico il Moro, who seems to have taken his 
 name from his complexion or from the badge he assumed. 
 But if Cinthio based his story on one about Cristofano Moro 
 or some one else bearing that surname, the double meaning 
 might have suggested changing the husband into a Moor. 
 Sir Israel Gollancz writes : " Cinthio's Novel may have been 
 of Oriental origin, and in its general character it somewhat 
 resembles the Tale of the Three Apples in the Thousand and 
 One Nights y If Cinthio used that tale the husband's com- 
 plexion may have been suggested to him by the fact that in 
 it the slave who wrought the mischief was black. 
 Desdemona's words : 
 
 My mother had a maid called Barbara : 
 She was in love ; and he she loved proved mad 
 And did forsake her : she had a song of " Willow " ; 
 An old thing 'twas, but it expressed her fortune, 
 And she died singing it, 
 
 may have suggested Ophelia's sorrow and death instead of 
 echoing them. And if so, that song may have suggested the 
 willow on which Ophelia leant. The singing which is a sign 
 of distraction in Desdemona and is echoed extravagantly 
 when Emilia says, 
 
 I will play the swan. 
 And die in music, " Willow, Willow, Willow," 
 
 becomes natural when it is a token of Ophelia's Insanity. 
 
 There are traces of early work in this Play, as, for instance, 
 when the Duke says : 
 
 When remedies are past, the griefs are ended 
 
 By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended. 
 
 To mourn a mischief that is past and gone 
 
 Is the next way to draw new mischief on, 
 
 beginning a rhyming passage of eighteen lines which is stopped 
 when Brabantio, after saying 
 
 259
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 But words arc words ; I never yet did hear 
 
 That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear, 
 
 adds, " I humbly beseech you, proceed to the affairs of State." 
 And the Blank Verse is written in four different manners. 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare first wrote Othello as a 
 Tragical Play in the days when he wrote the first form of 
 Titus Andronicus, and rewrote it as The Moor of Venice after 
 he wrote The Merchant of Venice, giving it a fortunate ending 
 In which Desdemona survived and was reconciled to Othello, 
 for this would help to explain why she speaks after he believes 
 she is dead and why so much of this Tragedy has a Comical 
 mood. The Theatre-goers may have preferred the Tragical 
 close, and this may have been restored in a form which was 
 written before 1600 and revised in 1604 and again when he 
 was not working for the Stage of his time. 
 
 This would explain the singular construction. The first 
 Act is a prelude, and the Tragedy begins with the second in a 
 storm, like Macbeth and The T em-pest. This first Act extenuates 
 Othello's behaviour in a way contradicted in the rest of the 
 Tragedy ; for instance, it shows that he did not woo Des- 
 demona till her love was made plain, but in the third Act 
 he says that Cassio had acted as a go-between — " went 
 between us very oft " and 
 
 He was of my counsel 
 In my whole course of wooing, 
 
 and Desdemona says. 
 
 What ! Michael Cassio, 
 That came awooing with you, and so many a time 
 When I have spoke of you dispraisingly 
 Hath ta'en your part ? 
 
 This change in the first Act deprives Othello of an obvious 
 reason for being jealous of Cassio who might have played the 
 old part of the treacherous friend the more easily since 
 Othello was black, and it absolves Cassio from the doom which 
 complicity would have made him incur. The first Act seems 
 written to ennoble Othello, and to give a new reason for 
 lago's behaviour. lago still says in his soliloquy, 
 
 260
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 I hate the Moor ; 
 And it is thought abroad that 'twixt my sheets 
 He has done my office : I know not if it be true, 
 But I for mere suspicion in that kind 
 Will do as if for surety. 
 
 This impossible wickedness is subordinate here to the motive 
 explained in the beginning when he tells Roderigo that he 
 only follows the Moor to serve his turn upon him because 
 Cassio was promoted instead. After that explanation he said, 
 
 Call up her father ; 
 Rouse him : make after him, poison his delight. 
 Proclaim him in the streets. 
 
 This is the first we hear of the marriage, and so far Roderigo's 
 only reason for poisoning Othello's delight is the fact that 
 lago was not made the Lieutenant. This feeble beginning is 
 in the Tragi-comical method of The Merchant of Venice. 
 All the rest of the Tragedies open tragically with the story 
 appearing, but there is nothing in this to indicate the mood of 
 Othello. 
 
 In the second Act in another soliloquy lago announces 
 that he loves Desdemona : 
 
 Now, I do love her too. 
 Not out of absolute lust, though peradventure 
 I stand accountant for as great a sin. 
 But partly led to diet my revenge, 
 For that I do suspect the lusty Moor 
 Hath leaped into my seat : the thought whereof 
 Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards ; 
 And nothing can or shall content my soul 
 Till I am evened with him, wife for wife. 
 Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor 
 At least into a jealousy so strong 
 That judgment cannot cure. Which thing to do. 
 If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash 
 For his quick hunting, stand the putting on, 
 I'll have our Michael Cassio on the hip, 
 Abuse him to the Moor in the rank garb, 
 For I fear Cassio with my nightcap, too ; 
 
 261
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Make the Moor thank me, love me and reward me, 
 
 For making him egregiously an ass 
 
 And practising upon his peace and quiet 
 
 Even to madness. 'Tis here, but yet confused : 
 
 Knavery's plain face is never seen till used. 
 
 This is still Tragi-comical. lago's intention is to make the 
 Moor a cuckold, " egregiously an ass," in the mood of The 
 Merry Wives of Wifidsor, and he forgets that he has already 
 said at the end of the first Act in the right vein for a traditional 
 villain, 
 
 I have it. It is engendered. Hell and night 
 
 Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light. 
 
 There are at least two lagos, a Tragi-comical one and 
 another whose deliberate wickedness was tempered by Hamlet's 
 introspection and doubts. His praise of his victims may have 
 been first meant as signs of his devilish detestation of goodness. 
 He says of Othello in the first Act, 
 
 The Moor is of a free and open nature, 
 
 That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, 
 
 and in the second Act, 
 
 The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not. 
 Is of a constant, loving, noble nature, 
 
 forgetting that he has just said, " Mark me with what violence 
 she first loved the Moor, but for bragging and telling her 
 fantastical lies," and even of Cassio he says. 
 
 He hath a daily beauty in his life 
 That makes me ugly, 
 
 though in the Play, as we have it, Cassio's life is not beautiful. 
 The effect now is that this testimony carries more weight 
 because it comes from a foe. But another effect is that lago 
 keeps contradicting himself. These things are not meant to 
 deceive, for they are said in soliloquies, and if he was sure that 
 Othello was of a constant, loving, noble nature he could not 
 have thought that he had dishonoured him by seducing Emilia. 
 That motive is thrown into the background in the Play, as 
 we have it, like the similar suspicion of Cassio, because 
 
 262
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 Shakespeare decided to ennoble Othello, and the result is 
 that lago is left like Leontes of whom Paulina says in 7he 
 Winter'' s Tale, 
 
 These dangerous unsafe lunes in the King, beshrew them ! 
 
 or Ford of whom Mistress Page says in The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor : " Why, Woman, your husband is in his old lunes 
 again : he takes on so yonder that any madness I ever yet 
 beheld seemed but tameness, civility and patience to this his 
 distemper." And the Play, as we have it, leaves him 
 without justification for his atrocious revenge. 
 
 lago gives a clue to the meaning of the Play when he says 
 in the first Act, " If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an 
 erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian be not too hard 
 for my wits and all the tribe of Hell, thou shalt enjoy her." 
 He sees his own nature in the innocent girl Desdemona who 
 is as simple as Imogen or as her companion in misfortune, 
 Ophelia. He is the supersubtle Venetian and he shares the 
 calamity of the erring barbarian, for the same irrational 
 jealousy devastates both. 
 
 lago and Othello employ the word "jealousy " as meaning 
 " suspicion," as Malcolm did in the fourth Act of Macbeth 
 when he said, 
 
 Let not my jealousies be your dishonours, 
 
 for instance, when in the third Act lago says, 
 
 As, I confess, it is my nature's plague 
 To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy 
 Shapes faults that are not, 
 
 and Othello says 
 
 Thinkest thou. Fid make a life of jealousy, 
 To follow still the changes of the Moon 
 With fresh suspicions ? 
 
 This was why Othello could say that he was not easily jealous ; 
 he was trusting by nature and therefore the more easily 
 fooled. But they were both wrecked by jealousy in our sense 
 of the word. 
 
 Desdemona is only a victim of this jealousy now, though as 
 
 263
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the Play was first planned she had, I think, incurred her 
 calamity by deceiving her father and yielding to an unnatural 
 love. Her love is not unnatural now^, for Othello's nobility 
 and greatness account for it in spite of his colour ; but I think 
 that in the first form of this Tragedy it was meant to be 
 horrible and because it was horrible it ended in horrors. 
 And even these horrors were modified in the Play as we have it. 
 
 It is probable that in the first form lago was a conventional 
 villain as childishly wicked as King Richard the Third, and 
 Othello was a repetition of Aaron, the ghastly Moor in Titus 
 A7idro7iicus. lago has now more in common with Shakespeare's 
 only natural villain, Edmund in King Lear, and with Hamlet 
 than with King Richard the Third, and Othello resembles 
 the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice. This may 
 be one of the signs that this Play was rewritten when that 
 Prince was made noble and romantic though black. 
 
 Coleridge (according to the Extracts from his Table Talk) 
 said : " Othello must not be conceived as a Negro, but as a 
 high and chivalrous Moorish Chief. Shakespeare learned the 
 spirit of the Character from the Spanish Poetry, which was 
 prevalent in England in his time. Jealousy does not strike 
 me as the point in his passion. ... It was a moral indignation 
 and regret that virtue should so fall — ' But yet the pity of it, 
 lago, O lago, the pity of it.' In addition to this, his honour 
 was concerned : lago would not have succeeded but by hinting 
 that his honour was compromised. There is no ferocity in 
 Othello ; his mind is majestic and composed." This criticism 
 has only been rivalled by Gervinus' belief that lago's words 
 
 She that in wisdom never was so frail 
 
 To change the cod's head for the salmon's tail 
 
 asserted that Desdemona was too wise to exchange an evident 
 advantage for a disadvantage, " einen oifenbaren Vortheil nicht 
 fiir einen Nachtheil, einen Lecterbissen nicht fiir einen 
 Speizerest hinzugcben." And Gervinus had the excuse that 
 he was a foreigner and did not understand Elizabethan 
 vulgarity. Othello is an erring barbarian : he is not a high 
 and chivalrous Moorish Chief, but a Blackamoor, a Negro, 
 and he kills Desdemona with a barbaric ferocity, not with a 
 majestic composure. 
 
 264
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 No one has ever thought that Aaron the Moor was 
 intended to be a chivalrous Chief. He describes himself when 
 he says, 
 
 What signifies my deadly-standing eye, 
 My silence, and my cloudy melancholy. 
 My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls 
 Even as the adder when she doth unroll 
 To do some fatal execution ? 
 
 His colour is shown when Bassianus says, 
 
 Believe me, Queen, your swarth Cimmerian 
 Doth make your honour of his body's hue, 
 Spotted, detested and abominable, 
 
 and when Lavinia says. 
 
 Let her enjoy her raven-coloured love. 
 
 His child and Tamora's is plainly a Negro : the Stage- 
 direction says, " Enter nurse with a Blackamoor child " ; 
 and Aaron says, 
 
 Look, look, how the black slave smiles upon his father. . . . 
 Come on, you thick-lipped slave, I'll bear you hence. 
 
 Lucius says to Aaron, 
 
 Say, wall-eyed slave, whither wouldst thou convey 
 This growing image of thy fiendlike face ? 
 
 and Aaron says, 
 
 Coal black is better than another hue 
 In that it scorns to bear another hue. . . . 
 Let fools do good and fair men call for grace, 
 Aaron will have his soul black like his face. 
 
 Othello is drawn in the same way : Roderigo says. 
 
 What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe 
 If he can carry it thus ? 
 
 lago says to Brabantio, 
 
 An old black ram 
 Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise . . . 
 265
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, 
 
 Or else the Devil will make a grandsire of you. 
 
 Othello says : 
 
 Haply for I am black 
 And have not those soft parts of conversation 
 That chamberers have, or for I am dcchned 
 Into the vale of years, yet that's not much, 
 She is gone. . . . Her name that was as fresh 
 As Dian's visage. Is now begrimed and black 
 As mine own face. 
 
 Desdemona says to him, 
 
 And yet I fear you, for you are fatal then 
 When your eyes roll so. 
 
 Brabantio says of her : 
 
 To fall in love with what she feared to look on ! 
 It is a judgment maimed and most imperfect. 
 That will confess perfection so could err 
 Against all rules of nature ; and must be driven 
 To find out practices of cunning hell, 
 Why this should be. 
 
 And lago says to Othello in the third Act, 
 
 And when she seemed to shake and fear your looks 
 She loved them most . . . 
 Foh ! one may smell in such a will most rank, 
 Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. 
 
 In all this there is the same view of blackness as the King takes 
 in Lovers Labour's Lost, when he says, " Black is the badge of 
 Hell." All this makes Othello more like Aaron than the 
 Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice. The Prince is 
 a high and chivalrous Moorish, Chief. He begins, 
 
 Mislike me not for my complexion, 
 The shadowed livery of the burnished Sun, 
 To whom I am a neighbour and near bred. 
 
 266
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 Portia, though she says of him before he appears, " If he have 
 the condition of a Saint and the complexion of a Devil, I 
 had rather he should shrive me than wive me," says to him. 
 
 If my father had not scanted me 
 And hedged me by his wit, to yield myself 
 His wife who wins me by that means I told you, 
 Yourself, renowned Prince, then stood as fair 
 As any comer I have looked on yet 
 For my affection. 
 
 He is as martial as Othello : he says to her, 
 
 By this scimitar 
 That slew the Sophy and a Persian Prince, 
 That won three fields of Sultan Solyman, 
 I would outstare the sternest eyes that look. 
 Outbrave the heart most daring on the earth. 
 
 None the less Portia, after he has failed and departed, says, 
 
 A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go. 
 Let all of his complexion choose me so. 
 
 She shared the reluctance of Claribel in The Temfest, who, 
 when she married the King of Tunis, was " weighed between 
 loathness and obedience " ; and that marriage was considered 
 unnatural, for all the Courtiers knelt to Alonzo and importuned 
 otherwise. Still, such marriages as this had been common 
 in Mediaeval Romances, and they were known in Spanish 
 History too, as when in 712 King Roderick's widow, Egilona, 
 married his Arab conqueror's son, Abd-el-Aziz. And Antony's 
 love for Cleopatra was natural, though she said that she was 
 " through Phoebus' amorous pinches black." Shakespeare 
 may not have known that Cleopatra was probably less swarthy 
 than Antony, or he may have meant her darkness to be a part 
 of her charm. 
 
 Perhaps he meant the Prince of Morocco to have a dusky 
 complexion. In Edmond Howe's Annals there is an account 
 of a pageant which " the gentlemen of the Middle Temple 
 and Lincoln's Inn acted on Shrove Monday Night, 161 3, in 
 honour of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage," and it tells how 
 
 267
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 they marched from Chancery Lane to Whitehall by the 
 Strand, some of them " in an antic or mock-masque of 
 baboons," and others " the chief Masquers, with great state 
 in white Indian habit or like the great Princes of Barbary . . . 
 their vizards were of olive colour ; their hair long and black 
 down to their shoulders." 
 
 In the Play, as we have it, Othello is a Barbary Moor, 
 and thinks of returning to Mauritania (according to lago) 
 and boasts a Royal descent. This may have been a change 
 made when he was altered to resemble the Prince ; but he still 
 has a sooty bosom, like Aaron, as Brabantio says. The people 
 of Mauritania were then supposed to be black. For instance, 
 Ben Jonson wrote in the Masque of Blackness, 
 
 Black Mauritania first and secondly 
 Swarth Lusitania, next we did descry 
 Rich Aquitania. 
 
 In that Masque, which was " personated at the Court at 
 Whitehall on Twelfth Night, 1605," blackness was praised : 
 Niger, who is seen " in form and colour of an yEthiop," said 
 of his daughters. 
 
 In their black the perfectest beauty grows, 
 
 and Queen Anne of Denmark and eleven of her ladies appeared 
 as Negro Nymphs. In this they were imitating the ladies of 
 King Henry the Eighth's Court who (according to Edward 
 Hall's Chronicle of England) took part in a Masque in 1509, 
 " their faces, necks, arms and hands covered with fine 
 pleasaunce black ; some call it Lumbardynes, which is 
 marvellous thin, so that the same ladies seem to be nigrost or 
 Black-moors." In those days there would have been nothing 
 contemptible in a Negro Othello, any more than there was 
 anything absurd in the grant of two Demi-Moors or Demi- 
 Negroes as Supporters in Heraldry. 
 
 Othello is left childishly credulous and suddenly savage, 
 every inch a Negro, in spite of the statcliness borrowed from 
 the Prince of Morocco. Indeed, he became a true Negro 
 instead of an impossible one like Aaron, in the same way as 
 Shylock became a real Jew instead of the bugbear of the 
 Traditional Stage. He could have said with Aaron, 
 
 268
 
 OTHELLO 
 
 I am a lamb : but if you brave the Moor, 
 The chafed boar, the mountain lioness, 
 The Ocean swells not so as Aaron storms, 
 
 but even this national savagery in him is extenuated when he 
 is made an epileptic, like Caesar. When he falls in a trance in 
 the fourth Act lago says, 
 
 My lord is fallen into an epilepsy : 
 
 This is the second fit ; he had one yesterday, 
 
 though there has been nothing said before about this. When 
 Cassio says, " Rub him about the temples," he replies, 
 
 No, forbear. 
 The lethargy must have his quiet course : 
 If not, he foams at the mouth, and by and by 
 Breaks out to savage madness. 
 
 Immediately after this he rouses Othello, using this means to 
 make him savagely mad. 
 
 A similar extenuation is visible In the method of murder 
 if those students who think that Othello smothered his wife 
 are right, but this may be a mistake. In the Play, as we have 
 it, the Stage-direction says only " he stifles her." After this 
 he says, 
 
 Not dead ? not yet quite dead ? 
 I that am cruel am yet merciful ; 
 I would not have thee linger in thy pain : 
 So, so. 
 
 It may be that the Stage-direction is wrong or misinterpreted, 
 and that he had tried to strangle her and then stabbed her, 
 for this would account for her speaking afterwards, which she 
 could not have done if she had been smothered or strangled. 
 The Elegy on Burbage says that the Moor " slew himself upon 
 the bloody bed." Othello says in the third Act, " I will tear 
 her all to pieces," and " O blood, blood, blood ! " and 
 
 Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace 
 Shall ne'er look back, 
 
 and in the fourth Act, 
 
 269
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 I will be found most cunning in my patience ; 
 But — dost thou hear ? — most bloody. 
 
 When lago says to him 
 
 Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed, 
 
 he replies " Good, good, the justice of it pleases." In the 
 fifth Act, he says, 
 
 Forth of my heart, those charms, thine eyes are blotted : 
 Thy bed lust-stained shall with lust's blood be spotted. 
 
 Afterwards he says, 
 
 Yet I'll not shed her blood 
 Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, 
 
 but this cannot prove that he does not stab her after failing 
 to strangle her, and apart from the Stage-direction there is 
 nothing to show that he did not strangle her as he had 
 intended to do. He says at the end. 
 
 There lies your niece, 
 Whose breath indeed these hands have newly stopped : 
 I know this act shows horrible and grim. 
 
 This may have been the core of the Tragedy, white Desdemona 
 strangled by an elderly Negro's huge black hands. 
 
 Even this horror is softened in the Play, as we have it, 
 for if the bed was in a curtained recess it must have been at 
 the back of the Stage and Desdemona must have been hidden 
 while Othello was strangling her, instead of being killed 
 openly as in Cinthio's version, according to which she was 
 beaten to death. This would have made her death like 
 Agamemnon's (in the Agamemnon of ^Eschylus), where he 
 calls out, " Woe's me ! I am stricken a mortal blow within " ; 
 and the Chorus says, " Hush ! who is it that cries out * a 
 blow,' mortally wounded ? " 
 
 The miracle in this Play is the fact that the sympathy is 
 all with Othello. This triumph is increased by the fact that 
 he is a Negro and a horrible one, rolling his eyes and gnawing 
 his lips. Young Desdemona is a victim destroyed by his 
 Tragedy and not a protagonist, and lago, who is aged twenty- 
 eight, about the same age as Edmund in King Lear or a little 
 
 270
 
 THE THEME OF THE TRAGEDIES 
 
 older, is a tempter controlled by envy, malice and hatred. 
 The Tragedy is entirely Othello's, and he towers over all the 
 everyday World. He is like the Negro of whom Words- 
 worth wrote afterwards : 
 
 Thy friends are exultations, agonies. 
 
 And love, and man's unconquerable mind. 
 
 Five of the Tragedies, Julius Ccssar, Macbeth, Hamlet, 
 King Lear and Othello, are Revenge-Plays of the kind which 
 was popular when Shakespeare was young. In all of these, 
 except Julius Ccssar, which was founded on Plutarch, there 
 is a strain of fantastic humour and a foundation of cruelty 
 in a story of crime. It would have seemed a sign of perversity 
 if Shakespeare had chosen the extenuation of Murder as his 
 Tragical theme when he was strongest ; but that would be 
 explained if he turned to rewrite stories of horror which had 
 been congenial to him when he had the mind of a boy. In 
 the same way as he had made Lavinia exclaim in Titus 
 Andronicus, 
 
 Do this and be a charitable murderer, 
 
 he made Othello describe himself as " an honourable mur- 
 derer," 
 
 For naught I did in hate, but all in honour. 
 
 Brutus, too, was an honourable murderer, 
 
 He only in a general honest thought 
 
 And common good to all, made one of them ; 
 
 so was Hamlet, who only slaughters Polonius by mistake and 
 is justified in killing the King in retaliation apart from the 
 duty of avenging his father. And though this cannot be 
 said of Macbeth his crimes are extenuated because the Weird 
 Sisters or Witches had encouraged his purpose. 
 
 Even the callous villains were given an excuse for their 
 crimes : Edmund avenges his mother's wrongs and his own 
 when he punishes his father's adultery in King Lear, and lago 
 was either avenging his own dishonour or demented enough to 
 suspect the Moor without cause. It does not follow from 
 this that Shakespeare believed that every crime could be 
 
 271
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 palliated : this was merely his method in constructing these 
 Plays ; it was his aim to secure some sympathy for each of his 
 Characters. This separates them from the young ignorance 
 of Titus Andronicus as well as from the true picture of Crime 
 by the forgotten master of the Drama who wrote Arden of 
 T ever sham. 
 
 In three of these Plays, Macbeth^ King Lear and Othello, 
 a Tragedy in the manner of iEschylus soars above pedestrian 
 work. I do not infer from this that Shakespeare was copying 
 iEschylus, for I take it that the resemblance is due only to the 
 fact that they both reached the greatest heights of the Drama. 
 So, too, I do not infer that he borrowed the last Scene of 
 The Winter's Tale from the Alcestis, or that when he wrote, 
 for instance, 
 
 Unhouseled, disappointed, unanealed, 
 
 he remembered that there were many similar lines in the 
 Greek Poets, such as, 
 
 dxXavTOQ^ acpLXoQ, dvv/iivaiOQ, 
 
 in the Antigone : he wrote in this way because it was the best 
 way to write. Besides, in this instance (as in " cabined, 
 cribbed, confined," in Macbeth) the three words all meant 
 the same thing. 
 
 These Plays were successful on the Stage of his time 
 because the pedestrian work in them enabled the audience to 
 tolerate the flaming emotion. Even in English the Agamemnon 
 would have been Greek to people who could delight in 
 Macbeth. Though the most popular of his Tragedies, Hamlet^ 
 resembled the Greek Tragedies most in its theme (which 
 was an accident since the legend was Danish), it resembled 
 them least in its nature, partly because the Prince had no 
 trace of the Greek severity and partly because his varying 
 moods were in unison with the shifts of a Pantomime. The 
 Play which had least in common with them in its original 
 theme, the atrocity of a horrible Negro, resembled them most 
 when it was finished : Othello is seen like a Laocoon, he is 
 crushed by a snake and Desdemona is dwarfed as Laocoon's 
 sons are in the group which (though it is later work) is a Greek 
 Tragedy repeated in stone. This resemblance is increased 
 
 272
 
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 
 
 by the changes which left Othello governed by Chance. The 
 culminating chances in it have the effect of an implacable 
 Destiny. Othello could have said at the end as did Gloucester 
 in King Lear, 
 
 As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods, 
 They kill us for their sport, 
 
 or as Florizel did in 7he Winter^s Tale, 
 
 But as the unthought-on accident is guilty 
 To what we wildly do, so we profess 
 Ourselves to be the slaves of Chance, and flies 
 Of every wind that blows. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, the Tragedy printed next by 
 Heminge and Condell, is separated from these, and so are 
 two others, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens : these three are 
 not Murder Plays or Revenge Plays, they are not governed 
 by Mischance or by Destiny, and they are massively Roman. 
 This contrast may show that they were divided from the rest 
 by an interval. It may be that Shakespeare was exhausted 
 for a time by the agonies of Lear and Othello and turned to 
 quieter work, including a revision of Troilus and Cressida 
 which inspired him to write the Tragedy of the Emperor 
 Antony. 
 
 Though Antony and Cleopatra does not seem to have been 
 printed before 1623, the Stationers' Register shows that 
 Edward Blunt obtained a Licence to print a Play of that 
 name in 1608. If we can take this as proving that a version 
 of Antony and Cleopatra was acted in 1607 or 1608 this would 
 agree with an interval of three or four years between a form 
 of Othello and the completion of a form of this Tragedy. 
 This seems to me the only Play written slowly with deliberate 
 labour : I think that after Shakespeare had turned to other 
 work he attempted to make this Tragedy his greatest and 
 wrote it in seclusion and peace. This would help to account 
 for the dignity and calm in the telling of this story of Passion. 
 
 The subject had been famihar to him for many years, 
 for besides its treatment by Plutarch it had been used in 
 the Countess of Pembroke's translation of Garnier's Marc 
 
 273 s
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Antoine in 1592 and Samuel Daniel's Play, Cleopatra, in 
 1594 and Samuel Brandon's Tragi-comedy of the Virtuous 
 Octavia in 1598. And it came to his mind in other Plays, 
 as, for instance, when he made Macbeth say : 
 
 There is none but he 
 Whose being I do fear, and under him 
 My genius is rebuked ; as, it is said, 
 Mark Antony's was by Caesar, 
 
 and when in Cymbeline he made lachimo say of Imogen's 
 room : 
 
 It was hanged 
 With tapestry of silk and silver ; the story 
 Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman, 
 And Cydnus swelled above the banks, or for 
 The press of boats or pride : a piece of work 
 So bravely done, so rich, that it did strive 
 In workmanship and value ; which I wondered 
 Could be so rarely and exactly wrought. 
 Since the true life on it was. 
 
 In the same way as he had crowned the happy Plays of his 
 Youth with Romeo and Juliet, a sorrowful poem of the innocent 
 love of children, he made this Tragedy of elderly Passion 
 the climax of the work of his manhood. And he changed 
 Plutarch's story to make his last Tragical lovers elderly. 
 
 North's version of Plutarch's Life of Antonius, says of 
 Cleopatra : " Caesar and Pompey knew her when she was 
 but a young thing, and knew not then what the World meant ; 
 but now she went to Antonius at the age when a woman's 
 beauty is at the prime, and she also of the best judgment." 
 And her age is stated afterwards, " Cleopatra died, being 
 eight-and-thirty years old, after she had reigned two-and- 
 twenty years, and governed about fourteen of them with 
 Antonius. And for Antonius, some say that he lived three- 
 and-fifty years and others say six-and-fifty." According 
 to this, Cleopatra was about twenty-four when Antony's 
 enslavement began. In the Play she says of herself in the 
 first Act that she is " wrinkled deep in time," and in the 
 second Act Pompey says of her, 
 
 274
 
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 
 
 But all the charms of love, 
 Salt Cleopatra, soften thy waned lip ! 
 
 and Enobarbus says of her. 
 
 Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale 
 Her infinite variety. 
 
 This increase of her age rendered the survival of charm 
 part of her witchcraft, and left all the story one of 
 lovers embracing at a time when they knew Love must be 
 brief. 
 
 This was a deliberate change, and so was the omission 
 of Antony's solitude in a house in the Sea. Plutarch tells 
 how after the Battle of Actium Antonius " forsook the city 
 and company of his friends, and built him a house in the 
 Sea, by the Isle of Pharos, upon certain forced mounts which 
 he caused to be cast into the Sea, and dwelt there, as a man 
 who had banished himself from all men's company, saying 
 that he would lead Timon's life, because he had the like 
 wrong offered him that was before offered unto Timon, 
 and that for the unthankfulness of those he had done good 
 unto and whom he took to be his friends, he was angry with 
 all men and would trust no man." This was left out because 
 it would have hampered the Tragedy and because Antony 
 trusted others still to the end. 
 
 Some other changes are incidents developed from hints. 
 Plutarch only says, " With Antonius in Italy there was a 
 Soothsayer or Astronomer of Egypt, who warned him that 
 his fortune would be always obscured by Caesar's, * for thy 
 Demonj' said he, ' (that is to say, the good angel and spirit 
 that keepeth thee) is afraid of his ; and being courageous 
 and high when he is alone, becometh fearful and timorous 
 when he cometh near unto the other.' " Out of this Shake- 
 speare made the Scene in which the Soothsayer warns Char- 
 mian and Iras while they are jesting together : 
 
 You shall be more beloving than beloved . . . 
 You shall outlive the lady whom you serve. 
 
 His warnings sound like a knell, and their young laughter 
 passes out of the Play when Cleopatra says of Antony, 
 
 ^7S
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 He was disposed to mirth ; but on the sudden 
 A Roman thought hath struck him. 
 
 These jests in the first Act and the Scene in the second 
 in which the fuddled solemnity of Lepidus echoes a like 
 Scene in Othello, and the talk of the Clown who brings the 
 figs in the fifth Act are the only approaches to a Comic 
 relief and, with the Porter's speech in Macbeth, they are 
 dominated by the mood of the Tragedy. This distinguishes 
 this Play and Macbeth from Hamlet and King Lear and Othello 
 in which Comedy broke the tension with laughter. Here 
 the Roman thoughts govern the merriment. 
 
 There is only one change which may have been a mis- 
 take, and that is when the soldier has heard the music at 
 night and says, 
 
 'Tis the God Hercules, whom Antony loved, 
 Now leaves him. 
 
 It is possible that Shakespeare remembered that Antonius 
 had been devoted to Hercules and had wished to resemble 
 him and so misunderstood the words, " Now such as in 
 reason sought the depth of the interpretation of this wonder, 
 thought that it was the god unto whom Antonius bore 
 singular devotion to counterfeit and resemble him, that did 
 forsake them." But it may be that he knew that this god 
 was Bacchus and found the other more fit for such a Tragical 
 moment. If so, this change would be significant, for Plu- 
 tarch had shown Antonius turning to the worship of Bacchus 
 but Shakespeare drew him a Hercules subdued by a woman. 
 And he may have remembered the Hercules ^taeus of Seneca 
 and the words, 
 
 In astra missus fertur et nubes vago 
 Spargit cruore 
 
 when he made Antony say, 
 
 The shirt of Nessus is upon me : teach me, 
 Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage : 
 Let me lodge Lichas on the horns of the Moon, 
 And with those hands that grasped the heaviest club 
 Subdue my worthiest self. 
 
 276
 
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 
 
 It so happened that Plutarch was Hfted by a Poetical 
 impulse in his Life of Antonius. At other times he wrote 
 of him coldly. Still, he remembered that Antonius boasted 
 himself a friend of the Greeks, and besides, the tale was 
 vivid to him because his home, Chaeronea, had known 
 Antonius' kindness and his tyranny after it and because 
 his grandfather Lampryas remembered those things and 
 had heard the revels described. And he wrote the story 
 dramatically, as he showed when he heralded it in his Life 
 of Demetrius, " Now that the Macedonian hath played his 
 part, give the Roman also leave to come upon the Stage." 
 
 Cleopatra's Macedonian descent attracted him also, 
 and he dealt with her story in the same way. For instance, 
 when he described her behaviour at the Battle of Actium 
 he wrote : " Howbeit the battle was yet of even hand, and 
 the victory doubtful, being indifferent to both, when sud- 
 denly they saw the three-score ships of Cleopatra busily 
 about their yard-masts and hoisting sail to fly. So they 
 fled through the midst of them that were in fight, for they 
 had been placed behind the great ships and did marvellously 
 disorder the other ships." And he added, quoting a saying 
 which he had ascribed to Marcus Cato the Censor in his 
 Life of him, " Then Antonius showed plainly that he had 
 not only lost the courage and heart of an Emperor, but also 
 of a valiant man ; and that he was not his own man (prov- 
 ing that true which an old man spake in mirth, ' that the 
 soul of a lover lived in another's body and not in his own '), 
 he was so carried away with the vain love of this woman, 
 as if he had been glued unto her, and that she could not 
 have removed without moving of him also. For when he 
 saw Cleopatra's ships under sail, he forgot, forsook and 
 betrayed them that fought for him." Horace seemed to 
 agree with Plutarch's view of her flight when he wrote, 
 
 Mentemque lymphatam Mareotico 
 Redegit in veros timores 
 Caesar. 
 
 But Dio in the fortieth Book of his Roman History said 
 that on the eve of the battle she had persuaded Antonius 
 to join her in flight because she was dismayed by the omens 
 
 277
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and that Octavius was aware of their purpose. On other 
 points Dio treated Cleopatra more harshly than Plutarch 
 did. For instance, he wrote in the next Book of his History 
 that her greed and her desire were insatiable (cm?.r]arog fiev 
 " AcpQodkriQ ojiXrioTOQ de XQrjjudrcov yevofiEvrj) and that she 
 sent Antonius news of her death, hoping that he would kill 
 himself when he heard it, and that she tried to enthrall 
 Octavius Caesar in turn. 
 
 Plutarch wrote : " Antonius being thus inclined, the 
 last and extremest mischief of all other (to wit, the love of 
 Cleopatra) lighted on him, who did waken and stir up many 
 vices yet hidden in him, and were never seen to any, and 
 if any goodness and hope of rising were left with him, Cleo- 
 patra quenched it straight and made it worse than before." 
 But he said that she sent Antonius the news of her death 
 because she was afraid of his fury and that when she received 
 Octavius she had been lying " upon a little low bed in poor 
 estate," and " suddenly rose up naked in her smock, and 
 fell down at his feet, marvellously disfigured : both for that 
 she had plucked the hair from her head, as for also that she 
 had martyred all her face with her nails, and, besides, her 
 voice was small and trembling, her eyes sunk into her head 
 with continual blubbering." 
 
 Shakespeare ennobled Plutarch's haughty Antonius and 
 made his wild Cleopatra the greatest picture of a passionate 
 woman. Unlike Plutarch, ^Je made Antony's disastrous 
 surrender to Cleopatra exalt him to a greater nobilit^ 
 
 The note of disgust which had been morbid in Hamlet and 
 frenzied in Lear is to be found in this Play, though most of 
 the Editors have partly disguised it by following Warburton 
 in altering the First FoHo's word *' dung " into " dug " 
 in the passage in the fifth Act in which Cleopatra says, 
 
 It is great 
 To do that thing that ends all other deeds ; 
 Which shackles accidents and bolts up change ; 
 Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung, 
 The beggar's nurse and Caesar's. 
 
 There is no excuse for this alteration, for in the first Act 
 Antony says to her, 
 
 278
 
 ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 
 
 Kingdoms are clay : our dungy earth alike 
 Feeds beast as man, 
 
 and in The Winter^s Tale Antigonus says, 
 
 We need no grave to bury honesty : 
 
 There is not a grain of it the face to sweeten 
 
 Of the whole dungy earth, 
 
 and in the fourth Act of Timon of Athens Timon says of the 
 Earth : 
 
 Common mother, thou. 
 Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast 
 Teems and feeds all. 
 
 And this has been recognized by some of the German 
 students, for instance Baudissin, who wrote in his Antonius 
 und Cleofatra, 
 
 Was Schlaf ist und nicht nach dem Kot mehr hungert 
 Der Bettler und Casaren grossgenahrt. 
 
 This Play begins, 
 
 Nay but this dotage of our General's 
 O'er flows the measure . . . 
 
 You shall see in him 
 The triple pillar of the World transformed 
 Into a strumpet's fool. 
 
 But Antony answers this. 
 
 Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch 
 Of the ranged Empire fall ! Here is my space. 
 Kingdoms are clay : our dungy earth alike 
 Feeds beast as man : the nobleness of Life 
 Is to do thus ; when such a mutual pair, 
 And such a twain can do it. 
 
 When in the dotage of Love he " kisses away Kingdoms and 
 Provinces," he cannot stoop to be the King of the World. 
 Crowns are " immoment toys " to him then, and he turns 
 from his victories to conquer himself in the high Roman 
 fashion. And Cleopatra is an Empress no more, 
 
 279
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 No more, but even a woman, and commanded 
 By such poor passion as the maid that milks 
 And does the meanest chares. 
 
 This noble Play is the World's greatest Poem of Love, 
 
 A piece of work 
 So bravely done, so rich, that it did strive 
 In workmanship and value ; which I wondered 
 Could be so rarely and exactly wrought. 
 Since the true life on it was. 
 
 This Play is the last Tragedy in the Folio Order, for 
 the Play printed after it, Cymbeline, was left Tragi-comical ; 
 but I think that two others which are Roman in build (though 
 one of them is Greek in its scene), Coriolanus and Timon 
 of Athe7iSy as we have them, were written several years after 
 this triumph. There is a bleak light in these Plays and 
 the mood of a man who has begun to be old. Perhaps 
 Shakespeare could have said of himself as Timon did of the 
 Senators, 
 
 These old fellows . . . 
 'Tis lack of kindly warmth, they are not kind : 
 And Nature as it grows again toward Earth 
 Is fashioned for the journey, dull and heavy. 
 
 Coriolanus is austere in his love : even his mother says to 
 him. 
 
 Thou hast never in thy life 
 Showed thy dear mother any courtesy ; 
 When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood. 
 Has clucked thee to the wars, and safely home, 
 
 giving new life to Plutarch's words, " besides thou hast not 
 hitherto showed thy poor mother any courtesy." And 
 Timon is austere in his rage. Though he echoes Lear when 
 he says. 
 
 Strike me the counterfeit matron : 
 It is her habit only that is honest ; 
 Herself's a bawd, 
 
 280
 
 CORIOLANUS 
 
 his savage indignation is Roman. He is a Roman Lear and 
 resembles Coriolanus more than the King. 
 
 Coriolanus does not seem to have been printed before 
 the Folio of 1623. Its title page said of it, " the whole 
 history exactly followed, and many of the principal speeches 
 copied from the life of Coriolanus in Plutarch," but there 
 are two changes in this accurate copy. 
 
 Coriolanus brought his doom on himself in Plutarch's 
 version : " He was so choleric and impatient, that he would 
 yield to no living creature, which made him churlish, uncivil, 
 and altogether unfit for any man's conversation. Yet men 
 marvelling much at his constancy, that he was never over- 
 come with pleasure nor money, and how he would endure 
 easily all manner of pains and travails : therefore they well 
 liked and commended his stoutness and temperancy. But 
 for all that, they could not be acquainted with him as one 
 citizen useth to be with another in the city : his behaviour 
 was so unpleasant to them by reason of a certain insolent 
 and stern manner he had, which because he was too lordly 
 was disliked. . . . And as for other, the only respect that 
 made them valiant was that they hoped to have honour : 
 but touching Martins, the only thing that made him to love 
 honour was the joy he saw his mother did take of him. For 
 he thought nothing made him so happy and honourable, 
 as that his mother might hear everybody praise and com- 
 mend him, that she might always see him return with a 
 crown upon his head and that she might still embrace him 
 with tears running down her cheeks for joy." According 
 to Plutarch, he only married to please her, " did not only 
 content himself to rejoice and honour her, but at her desire, 
 took a wife also, by whom he had two children and yet never 
 left his mother's house therefore." This love for his mother, 
 the only gentle quality in a man who was stern and insolent 
 to every one else and so proud that he only valued fame 
 for her sake, is the root of his tragedy, according to Plutarch ; 
 but Shakespeare lays little stress on this preparation for the 
 culminating Scene when that love conquers his rage. In 
 Plutarch's version the People honoured him in spite of his 
 pride and only refused him the Consulship when they saw 
 him surrounded by the Senate and Nobility, " fearing to 
 
 281
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 put this office of sovereign authority into his hands . . . 
 as one they might doubt would take away altogether the 
 liberty from the People." In Shakespeare's version all this 
 is changed, and Coriolanus is justified by the ingratitude of 
 the cowardly Mob, " the mutable and rank -scented many." 
 
 He can hardly have thought that Menenius Agrippa's 
 speech (which he imitated from Plutarch) was a logical 
 argument, for there would have been as much sense in calling 
 the People the belly and the Senate the head, and in any 
 case the conclusion should be that the whole body should be 
 equally treated. So his use of it seems one of the signs of 
 a deliberate attitude. In this Play as in Julius Ccesar the 
 Mob (Seneca's Fluctu magis mobile vulgus) is the " com- 
 mon cry of curs." He may have remembered Essex (who 
 had intended to march against London till he was dissuaded 
 from that by his second stepfather Christopher Blunt and 
 by Southampton), when he still wrote in the mood of Mar- 
 ullus' speech to the Mob. This is one of the three Tragedies 
 without magical charm, and this may be a sign that he wrote 
 a version of it when forms of the two others, 'Julius Ccesar 
 and Hamlet, were written under the shadow of the Essex 
 Revolt, for this would explain why it keeps the structure 
 of the Chronicle Pageant. That form may have been the 
 second, for the Folio Order suggests that he had written 
 another when he was young, perhaps about 1593 before he 
 revised Titus Andronicus, 
 
 If we could be certain that he wrote Coriolanus first in 
 the time suggested by its manner which links it with the 
 last Tragi-comedies we could infer that the difference in 
 his treatment of Plutarch indicates a waning of interest or 
 a failure of health. But if he merely rewrote a Play which 
 had been written in imitation of Marlowe that difference 
 may be due to this fact. 
 
 I think that after he wrote Antony and Cleopatra he 
 rested because he had attained his ambition and knew that 
 he could never surpass or equal that Tragedy and that he 
 revised other work from time to time afterwards but never 
 toiled with that passionate emotion again. This may be 
 enough to account for the coldness which sets Coriolanus 
 apart. 
 
 282
 
 TIMON OF ATHENS 
 
 Ttmon of Athens does not seem to have been printed 
 before the Folio of 1623 ; but it is patently founded on a 
 juvenile Play. The story was familiar to Shakespeare when 
 he was young, as he showed when he wrote in Love's Labour^ s 
 Lost, 
 
 To sec great Hercules whipping a gig, 
 And critic Timon laugh at idle toys, 
 
 and he could have found it in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, 
 or in Matteo Boiardo's // Timofie or in Lucian's Dialogue 
 on Timon the Man-hater, as well as in North's version of 
 Plutarch. 
 
 The introduction of Alcibiades seems to show that this 
 Play was suggested by the Life of Antonius. Plutarch wrote 
 in that Life : " This Timon was a citizen of Athens that 
 lived about the War of Peloponnesus, as appeareth by Plato 
 and Aristophanes' Comedies, in which they mocked him, 
 calling him a viper and malicious man unto mankind, to 
 shun all other men's companies, but the company of young 
 Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth, whom he would greatly 
 feast and make much of and kissed him very gladly. Ape- 
 mantus, wondering at it, asked him the cause what he meant 
 to make much of that young man alone, and to hate all others. 
 Timon answered him, ' I do it,' said he, * because I know 
 that one day he shall do great mischief to the Athenians.' " 
 
 Alcibiades appears to be the first sketch of Coriolanus. 
 Plutarch bracketed their Lives and compared them, so 
 Shakespeare may have been led to the Roman when he wrote 
 of the Greek. But he made little use of Plutarch's Alcibiades 
 (who was " undoubtedly always too licentious and loosely 
 given," and was banished from Athens for deriding the 
 Gods), when he drew the hero who says, 
 
 Sound to this coward and lascivious town 
 Our terrible approach. . . . 
 Till now you have gone on and filled the time 
 With all licentious measure. 
 
 It may be that the first form of Timon of Athens suggested 
 a form of Coriolanus written in Youth. These Plays are 
 now linked by a contrast, for, as Mr. Masefield has said, 
 
 283
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 " Timon of Athens is betrayed by an excessive generosity. 
 Coriolanus is betrayed by an excessive contempt for the 
 multitude." And this excess Unks these Plays with the 
 other Tragedies of the dotage of Strength. 
 
 The fact that Heminge and Condell printed Timon of 
 Athens before Julius Casar is discounted because the arrange- 
 ment of the Folio proves that they only put it there as an 
 afterthought. Still, they might have been partly guided 
 by knowing that a form of this Play had been written about 
 1600. It would have been timely when Essex was behaving 
 like Timon, raging alone and deserted by many who had 
 flattered him once. Mr. Simpson contended that Satiro- 
 mastix referred to a recent form of this Play. Satiromastix 
 may have referred to a farcical Play called Timon which 
 seems to have been written about 1600 and was printed in 
 1842. That Play seems to have been one of the onslaughts 
 in the War of the Poets. Some students have thought that 
 it was a travesty of Cynthia's Revels, which was acted in 
 1600, because two of its Characters resembled Ben Jonson's 
 Amorphus and Asotus, but this may only show that these 
 Comedies caricatured the same men. This farce may have 
 been intended to travesty Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, 
 and if so, this may indicate that a form of that Tragedy 
 had been recently acted by the Chamberlain's Servants. 
 But if a version of Timon of Athens was performed in those 
 days it could not have been the Play as we have it, for the 
 manner and mood of the noble parts of it prove that they 
 were written after Shakespeare had reached the height of 
 his power. 
 
 The last form, or the beginning of one, seems suggested 
 by the account of the solitude of a house in the Sea which 
 Shakespeare omitted when he transformed Plutarch's Life 
 of Antonius. He explained this last form when he made the 
 Poet assert, 
 
 I have, in this rough work, shaped out a man, 
 Whom this beneath world doth embrace and hug 
 With amplest entertainment. . . . 
 When Fortune in her shift and change of mood 
 Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants 
 
 284
 
 TIMON OF ATHENS 
 
 Which laboured after him to the mountain's top 
 Even on their knees and hands, let him slip down, 
 Not one accompanying his declining foot. 
 
 This sketch remains rough and the present form of the Play 
 suggests that Heminge and Condell found the new fragment 
 written over the old one or interleaved with it and retained 
 passages which would have been altered if the task had been 
 finished. 
 
 Timofi of Athens seems a noble fragment erected on a 
 juvenile Play which had been already revised. The fact that 
 this fragment is only roughly begun in Shakespeare's last 
 manner may indicate that Death cut it short. Even as we 
 have it, Mr. Dowden has called it the climax of Shakespeare's 
 Tragical work. 
 
 Heminge and Condell did not perceive that Timon had 
 recited his Epitaph, and so when they did not find it repeated 
 in the last Scene, they inserted the two given by Plutarch. 
 The Epitaph which Timon had written for his tomb by the 
 Sea was : 
 
 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. 
 
 285
 
 THE LAST TRAGI-COMEDIES 
 
 Heminge and Condell printed seven of the Plays as His- 
 tories, and Shakespeare left seven as mature Tragedies, 
 not counting the fragment of Timon of Athens. If these 
 Tragedies alone had survived he would have been known 
 to us as ^schylus and Sophocles are, since each can only be 
 studied in seven plays out of many. And the metrical tests 
 seem to show that after 1603 he wrote or rewrote seven 
 other Plays, Measure for Measure, Pericles, Troilus and Cres- 
 sida, J IPs Well that Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, The 
 Tempest and Cymbeline. These Plays are under the shadow 
 of his Tragical mood, and only one of them. The Tempest, 
 was left really finished. In the same way as he wrote his 
 Chronicle Pageant halfheartedly while his true bent was 
 to his Midsummer Dreams he worked on all the rest of these 
 Plays with a flagging hand and an early failure of interest. 
 
 Only two of these Plays, Pericles and Troilus and Cres- 
 sida, seem to have been printed during his life. Simon 
 Forman's Diary proves that The Winter's Tale was per- 
 formed at the Globe in 161 1 and mentions Cymbeline also, 
 and the Treasurer's Accounts show that The Tempest was 
 acted at Court in 161 3. If the Revels Books of 1605 are 
 genuine they furnish a proof that Measure for Measure was 
 acted at Court in 1604, and there are several allusions to 
 Pericles about this time, but we know nothing of AlVs Well 
 that Ends Well. 
 
 Four of these Plays, Pericles, Measure for Measure, AlVs 
 Well that Ends Well and The Tempest, almost agree with the 
 definition which Fletcher took from Guarini in his Address 
 to the Reader prefixed to the Faithful Shepherdess : " A 
 Tragi-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and kill- 
 ing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make 
 it no Tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to 
 make it no Comedy, which must be a representation of familiar 
 people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned, 
 so that a God is lawful in them as in a Tragedy and mean 
 
 287
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 people as in a Comedy." Two of the others, Cymbeline 
 and The Winter''s Tale, have bloodshed in them and are 
 fantastic Romances which can only be called Tragi-comedies 
 because they have the chief note of that kind of Play in the 
 fact that they have a right to the name AlVs Well that Ends 
 Well. One of them, Troilus and Cressida, is a Tragedy 
 told satirically or a Comical Tragedy, and can only be called 
 a Tragi-comedy because the two kinds of Play are blended 
 in it. 
 
 The rules which Fletcher had imported from Italy were 
 alien to Shakespeare, and so was the distinction perceived by 
 Aristotle's definite mind. If he had read Aristotle in a 
 translation he could have defended his use of contradictory 
 Episodes by citing, " Bad Poets compose such pieces by their 
 own fault ; good Poets to please the Players." But in that 
 case he would have admitted that he was pleasing himself 
 since he had learnt how to employ contrasted Scenes on the 
 Stage. His Tragi-comedies were English and sprang from 
 the Traditional Stage, as was shown, for instance, when 
 Sidney wrote in 1581 in the Apology for Poesy : " But, 
 besides these gross absurdities, how all their Plays be neither 
 right Tragedies nor right Comedies, mingling Kings and 
 Clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in 
 the Clowns by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical 
 matters, with neither decency nor discretion ; so as neither 
 the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportful- 
 ness, is by their mongrel Tragi-comedy obtained. I know 
 Apuleius did somewhat so, but that is a thing recounted with 
 space of time, not represented in one moment : and I know 
 the Ancients have one or two examples of Tragi-comedies, 
 as Plautus hath Amphytrio. But if we mark them well, we 
 shall find that they never, or very daintily, match horn- 
 pipes and funerals." When Shakespeare matched hornpipes 
 with funerals, as the Players did when they dissipated the 
 gloom of a Tragedy by dancing a jig when it was over, he 
 followed the old ways which were natural to him because 
 he was English. These Tragi-comedies were a fitting 
 conclusion to the work of his life since a Tragi-comical vein 
 ran through it all. 
 
 It is probable that one of his reasons for turning to them 
 
 288
 
 MASQUES 
 
 was the fact that he still had to be guided by the popular 
 taste. The new Court had set an old fashion by reviving 
 the Masques which had fallen into disfavour in Queen Eliza- 
 beth's time because she was too proud to take part in them, 
 and new dramatists had established a foreign Tragi-comical 
 mode. 
 
 The Court Masques or Mummeries seem to have been 
 imported from France where light-hearted Kings and their 
 Courtiers acted in them as little children pretend to be savages 
 or dangerous animals. According to Froissart they were 
 brought to the French Court in 1393 from Orthez when 
 Yvain de Foix planned the fatal Dance of the Satyrs. And 
 in England this pastime was enthroned in the golden days 
 of King Henry the Eighth, when that Merry Monarch 
 delighted in Wine and Women and Song. For instance, 
 George Cavendish, in his Life of Cardinal Wolsey, wrote 
 of the Revels at Hampton Court : " I have seen the King 
 come in a Masque, with a dozen of other Masquers, all in 
 garments like Shepherds, made of fine cloth of gold and fine 
 Crimson satin paned and caps of the same, with vizors of 
 good proportion of visnomy : their hairs and beards either 
 of fine gold wire or else of silver and some being of black 
 silk." 
 
 The Court Masques of King James' time were founded 
 on these and on the popular Pageants which were acted, for 
 instance, by the Londoners when Katharine of Aragon 
 and Anne Bullcn and King Henry the Eighth's daughters 
 passed through the City on their way to be Crowned. Ben 
 Jonson wrote a Pageant described as " Part of the King's 
 Entertainment in passing to his Coronation, with Scenes 
 to be acted at Fcnchurch, Temple Bar and in the Strand" 
 and a Masque called " a Particular Entertainment of the 
 Queen and Prince their Highness at Althorpe, which was 
 performed on the twenty-fifth of June 1603 as they came 
 first into the Kingdom," and another called " a Private 
 Entertainment of the King and Queen on Mayday in the 
 Morning in 1604." The new Queen liked these so well 
 that she employed him to write others for her, for instance, 
 the Queen's Masque of Blackness^ " presented at the Court 
 at Whitehall on the Twelfth Night, 1605," in which she 
 
 289 T
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 took the part of Euphoris, one of the Masquers, " which were 
 twelve Nymphs, Negros and the daughters of Niger." 
 
 Four of Shakespeare's last Tragi-comedies, PericleSy 
 Cymbelifie, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, have Masques 
 (as Love'^s Labour's Lost had), and so has Timon of Athens, 
 These may have been more important than they seem to 
 us now, for the Masques of that time were settings for dumb- 
 shows ; the words spoken or sung introduced the dancers 
 or pageants. For instance, the Masque of the Amazons 
 in Timon of Athens could have lasted as long as the audience 
 wanted to see the Amazons dance. We cannot be certain 
 that he wrote any of these Masques or the similar introduction 
 of Hymen in As Ton Like It, since the Masques and dumb- 
 shows in Pericles may be a survival from an earlier form and 
 the other Plays do not seem to have been printed before 1623. 
 Still, even if they were added by other hands because they 
 were popular, they show that these Plays, as we have them, 
 were influenced by the taste of this time. And the revival 
 of the Masques at the Court helped to establish the similar 
 falsity of Beaumont and Fletcher's Tragi-comical Plays. 
 
 Fletcher's first Play, The Faithful Shepherdess, imitated 
 Battista Guarini's II Pastor Fido, which was written about 
 1586 in rivalry with Torquato Tasso's Aminta, written about 
 1572 and printed in 1581. These Pastorals were Itahan 
 in mood and seem to have sprung from Poliziano's Favola 
 d'Orfeo, written about 1471, and Agostino Beccari's Sacrifizio, 
 written about 1554. Though the Pastor Fido was printed 
 in ItaHan in 1590 and theAminta in EngHsh in the following 
 year, when it was translated as the Countess of Pembroke's 
 Ivychurch by Abraham Fraunce, they do not seem to have 
 been copied in England before George Daniel wrote his 
 Queen's Arcadia, printed in 1605. This may have been due 
 to the fact that Sidney's Arcadia had followed the French 
 Pastoral convention derived through Montemayor's Diana 
 from Boccaccio's Ameto. 
 
 This Italian Pastoral mood was even more alien to England 
 than the French one had been, and The Faithful Shepherdess 
 failed. But when Fletcher began working with Beaumont 
 about 1607 he turned from Guarini to imitate the fashion 
 begun by the Tragi-comcsdia de Calisto y Melibea, afterwards 
 
 290
 
 LAST TRAGI-COMEDIES 
 
 called La Celestina, a long Play or Novel in dialogue which 
 seems to have been written by Fernando de Rojas and was 
 printed in 1499. The Plays ascribed to Beaumont and 
 Fletcher in the Folio of 1647 were written under Ben Jon- 
 son's influence, and several copied his treatment of Roman 
 History in Sejanus ; for instance, Bonduca was founded on 
 the Annals of Tacitus. While they honoured his strict rules 
 of the Drama they imitated Calderon and Lope de Vega. 
 And their foreign success ended the immemorial develop- 
 ment of the Drama of England. Dryden wrote of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, printed in 1668, 
 " These Plays are now the most pleasant and frequent enter- 
 tainment ; two of them being acted through the year for 
 one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." 
 
 While the success of these Plays may have guided Shake- 
 speare when he turned to his last Tragi-comedies his choice 
 may have been also due to the fact that he was exhausted 
 by his Tragical agonies and too weary for laughter. I think 
 that he rewrote Measure for Measure about 1604 and then 
 wrote a revision of Pericles suggested by it, and then devoted 
 himself to his Tragedies till he had rewritten Othello, and 
 then began to rewrite Troilus and Cressida darkly but cast 
 it aside when Antony and Cleopatra arose from it, and then 
 turned to revise his Sonnets, and then began to ennoble 
 Measure for Measure and AWs Well that Ends Well, but 
 abandoned these tasks, retouched the Tragical part of The 
 Winter^s Tale, made The Tempest an Epilogue to the whole 
 of his work and began to change Cymbeline from a fantastic 
 Romance to a Tragi-comedy ending in impossible happiness. 
 During this time, I think, he retold Coriolanus, perhaps 
 before he turned to The Tempest, and began to rewrite Timon 
 of Athens. 
 
 Two of these last Tragi-comedies, Measure for Measure 
 and Troilus and Cressida, deal with the perpetual tragedy of 
 human affairs. Coriolanus has the same theme, and in it, 
 as in Timon of Athens, the mutable and rank-scented many 
 are shown as crows or daws pecking an eagle. Coriolanus 
 says, 
 
 291
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Thus we debase 
 The nature of our seats, and make the rabble 
 Call our cares fears ; which will in time 
 Break ope the locks of the Senate, and bring in 
 The crows to peck the eagles, 
 
 and he says afterwards, 
 
 like an eagle in a dove-cot, I 
 Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli. 
 
 But Measure for Measure and Troilus a?id Cressida comment 
 on the faults of the Great. Angelo falls through the tempta- 
 tions of Power and Isabella says, 
 
 Man, proud man, 
 Drest in a little brief authority . . . 
 Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven 
 As make the Angels weep. 
 
 The beneath world in Measure for Measure is as vile as it is 
 in Timon of Athefis. And when the common Soldiers appear 
 in Troilus and Cressida Pandarus says, " asses, fools, dolts, 
 chaff and bran, chaff and bran, porridge after meat ! . . . 
 Ne'er look, ne'er look, the eagles are gone, crows and daws ! " 
 This Play is all concerned with the eagles and it shows most 
 of them as carrion birds. Thersites, whose brothers are 
 Apemantus and Caliban, speaks for the rabble : he is a scur- 
 rilous Clown and his railing is justified because all the Princes 
 except Hector are base. There was reason enough why 
 Shakespeare's mind should have dwelt on Government in 
 these days when he saw the English Monarchy falling. And 
 I think that the theme involved in the tale of Measure for 
 Measure guided him to rewrite Troilus and Cressida next as 
 a picture of the Kings of the World. Instead of rivalling 
 iEschylus, as he did in the heights of his Tragedies, he came 
 near Aristophanes in Troilus and Cressida^ but he was mocking 
 himself instead of Euripides. 
 
 Mr. Masefield writes : " Troilus and Cressida is the dialogue 
 scenario of a Play that was never finished. . . . Two or 
 three scenes are finished. The rest is indicated in the crudest 
 
 292
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 
 
 dialogue, written so hastily that it is often undramatic and 
 nearly always without art or beauty. The finished Scenes 
 are among the grandest ever conceived by Shakespeare, but 
 the grandeur is that of thought not of action." This over- 
 looks the fact which Mr. Saintsbury recognized when he 
 wrote : " It is impossible that Troilus and Cressida, in part 
 at least, should not be early." And while the crude work 
 (which Mr. Masefield perceives) should, I think, be ascribed 
 to the days when Shakespeare's writing was crude, the fact 
 that (as he says) the grandeur is that of thought not of action 
 suggests a doubt whether the last form of this Play was 
 intended to be seen on the Stage. Some students have argued 
 that this Play is a satire on the Great of the time, and this 
 would explain why it was printed when (according to the 
 Address to the Reader prefixed to the Second Quarto edition 
 of 1609) it was " never staled with the Stage, never clapper- 
 clawed with the palms of the vulgar " and " not sullied with 
 the smoky breath of the multitude." 
 
 The First Quarto edition of 1609 had on its title page 
 " The History of Troilus and Cressida as it was acted by the 
 King's Majesty's Servants at the Globe." In the same year 
 this was issued with a new Preface as " The Famous History 
 of Troilus and Cresseid, excellently expressing the beginning 
 of their loves, with the conceited wooing of Pandarus Prince 
 of Lycia." This change in the title would be explained 
 if His Majesty's Servants had acted another Play of this 
 name but not this one. If, for instance, the sententious 
 Ulysses was taken to be a picture of the Solicitor-General, 
 Sir Francis Bacon, whose manner in his Essays seems echoed 
 in the verses beginning. 
 
 Time hath, my Lord, a wallet at his back 
 Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, 
 
 this would explain why the Players had not acted this ver- 
 sion. 
 
 The second title page may have meant that this Play 
 was a First Part " excellently expressing the beginning of 
 the loves," and to be followed by one which would give the 
 end of the story. As it ends now, only Hector has fallen, 
 Troilus is left seeking revenge and Cressida still faithful to 
 
 293
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Diomed. The fifth Act holds three conventional endings, 
 one in the eighth Scene where Achilles says, 
 
 Come tic his body to my horse's tail. 
 Along the field I will the Trojan trail, 
 [Exeunt, a retreat sounded] 
 
 and another in the ninth Scene where Agamemnon says, 
 
 If in his death the Gods have us befriended. 
 Great Troy is ours and our sharp wars are ended, 
 [Exeunt, marching] 
 
 and a third in the tenth Scene where Troilus says, 
 
 Strike a free march to Troy ! with comfort go : 
 Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe. 
 [Exeunt iEneas and Trojans]. 
 
 Then Pandarus speaks an Epilogue to all these and the Play. 
 It may be that he promised a Second Part which would give 
 the tangled story an end when he said. 
 
 Some two months hence my will shall here be made : . . . 
 Till then I'll sweat and seek about for cases. 
 And at that time bequeath you my diseases. 
 
 The Story of Hector seems to have been the first of the 
 parts combined in this Play. It was written, I think, as a 
 short Tragical Play when Shakespeare began. The first 
 twenty-one lines of the Prologue are in his juvenile manner, 
 and so are many others, for instance the lines in the fifth Act 
 spoken by Troilus and beginning " Hector has gone." These 
 verses, I think, were written in the days when Shakespeare 
 wrote the speech given to the First Player in Hamlet, begin- 
 ning " The rugged Pyrrhus." In this Play Agamemnon 
 speaks often in imitation of Marlowe, for instance. 
 
 The fierce Polydamas 
 Hath beat down Menon : bastard Margarelon 
 Hath Dorcus prisoner, 
 
 And stands. Colossus-wise, waving his beam 
 Upon the pashed corses of the Kings, 
 
 294
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 
 
 and he uses many words as remarkable as the epithet 
 " mobled " which Polonius admired. 
 
 When Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice said, 
 
 In such a night 
 Troilus, methinks, mounted the Troyan Walls, 
 And sighed his soul towards the Grecian tents, 
 Where Cressid lay that night, 
 
 he was thinking of the sorrowful love-story told by Chaucer ; 
 but when Pistol said in Kmg Henry the Fifth, 
 
 Fetch forth the lazar kite of Cressid's kind, 
 Doll Tearsheet she by name, 
 
 and the Clown said in Twelfth Night, " I would play Lord 
 Pandarus of Phrygia, Sir, to bring a Cressida to this Troilus," 
 they were remembering the cynical version. 
 
 Chaucer drew all the Characters gently in TroyUis and 
 Creseyde : he made Pandare or Pandarus a faithful friend 
 and showed Creseyde (whom he also called Creseida) a 
 victim of Love, too tender to be faithful : 
 
 But truly the story telleth us 
 There made never women more woe 
 Than she when that she falsed Troilus, 
 She said " Alas ! for now is clean ago 
 My name in truth of love for ever mo, 
 For I have falsed one, the gentillest 
 That ever was, and one the worthiest. 
 
 " Alas ! of me unto the World's end 
 
 Shall neither ben y-written or y-song 
 
 No good word, for these books will me shend : 
 
 Y-rolled shall I been on many a tongue. 
 
 Throughout the world my bell shall be rung. 
 
 And women most will hate me of all, 
 
 Alas ! that such a case me should befall ! " 
 
 And she says. 
 
 But since I see there is no better way. 
 And that too late is now for me to rue, 
 To Diomede I will algate be true. 
 295
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Chaucer's debt to Boccaccio was too great to be owned. 
 He might have been prepared to admit that he had used 
 Boccaccio's Teseide in his Knight's Tale and that the Reeve's 
 Tale and the Shipman's and the Franklin^s were all in the 
 Decameron ; but he did not choose to avow that this Poem 
 was based on the Filostrato and so he proclaimed that he 
 found the story In LoUius. 
 
 Boccaccio wrote his Filostrato as a Lover''s Complaint^ 
 and sent it to his false love Fiammetta. He seems to have 
 got his story, as Mr. Edward Hutton says in his Giovanni 
 Boccaccio^ " partly from Bcnoit de Sainte-More, whose 
 Roman de Froie had been composed from the uncertainly 
 dated works of Dictys Crete?isis and Dares Phrygius, and 
 partly from the prose Latin Hystoria Troiana of Guido 
 delle Colonne." But he changed it because he loved Fiam- 
 metta, though he knew her too well to have any trust in her 
 constancy. His Griseida is a girl who loves Love as much 
 as Romeo or Juliet did and forgets all about Troilo as quickly 
 as Romeo forgot all about Rosaline when she sees Diomede : 
 
 Egli era grande, e bel della persona, 
 Giovane fresco e piaccvole assai, 
 E forte e fier siccome si ragiona, 
 
 and she tells him (quite honestly because she has forgotten 
 all about Troilo), 
 
 Amore io non conobbi, poi morio 
 Colui al qual lealmente il scrvai ; 
 Si come a marito e signor mio. 
 
 Chaucer remembered this when he wrote. 
 
 Oh young fresh folks, he or she, 
 
 In which that love up groweth with your age, 
 
 but he drew his Creseyde less subtly and with English good- 
 nature instead of the French tolerance which was shown by 
 Boccaccio. 
 
 Some students have thought that Chaucer's Creseyde 
 was derived through Boccaccio's Griseida from Briseida, 
 which was Bcnoit de Sainte-More's version of Briseis. But 
 
 296
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 
 
 John Gower wrote in the Second Book of his Confessio 
 Amaiitis : 
 
 At Troie how that Agamemnon 
 Supplanted hath the worthy Knight 
 Achilles, for that sweet wight 
 Which named was Brisseida ; 
 And also of Criseida, 
 Whom Troilus to love ches 
 Supplanted hath Diomedes. 
 
 Since we do not know when Gower wrote this (for the 
 date given by Mr. Hales, 1483, is only a guess), we cannot 
 be certain that he had Chaucer's Poem in mind. 
 
 Shakespeare's Cressida had nothing in common with 
 Boccaccio's Griseida or with Chaucer's Creseyde apart from 
 her betrayal of Troilus. I think that he wrote his first 
 version of the Story of Troilus in the ignorant mood of his 
 young Italianate Comedies. He may have based it on Guido 
 delle Colonne's Hystoria 'Troiana, which he could have 
 read in John Lydgate's Troy-Book, written before 1420 and 
 printed in 15 13, or on the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy 
 (a translation of Le Recueil des Histoires de Troye), written 
 by William Caxton about 1470 and printed by him about 
 1474. He may have thought that the version of the story 
 of Troy ascribed to Dares Phrygius was true, as Philip Sidney 
 seems to have done when he wrote in his Afology for Poesy 
 of " the feigned ^neas in Virgil " and " the right ^Eneas 
 in Dares Phrygius." 
 
 Dares Phrygius was said to have been a priest of Vulcan 
 who was living in Troy during the Siege, and the account 
 of it ascribed to him was said to have been put into Latin 
 by Cornelius Nepos. The account of the Trojan War 
 ascribed to Dictys of Crete was said to have been found in 
 his tomb in the First Century and to have been translated 
 from Phoenician to Greek and then to Latin. If Quintus 
 Smyrnaeus, who seems to have lived in the Fourth Century, 
 knew these books he treated them as idle Romances. He 
 based his story on Homer's and probably on the lost Cyclic 
 Poems of Aretinus and Lesches. In the First Book of his 
 Fall of Troy he adopted the account of Thersites given in 
 
 297
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the Second Book of the Iliad and expanded it by recording 
 how he was slain by Achilles. And Thersitcs is the only 
 character drawn in the same way by him and Homer and 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 In this Play, as we have it, Cressida discourses with 
 Pandarus with the merriment of Lovers Labour^s Lost or 
 Much Ado About Nothing and Troilus avows his devotion 
 in the usual vein of the Italianate youths. Shakespeare, 
 I think, combined two juvenile Plays, the Story of Hector 
 and the Story of Troilus, about l6oi, adding the Story of 
 Thersites and Ajax. This form, I think, became the founda- 
 tion of this dark Tragi-comedy in which these Stories are 
 episodes in a picture of life worthy of Timon. He may 
 have meant this to be tangled, like King Lear, and unfinished 
 because then it would be more life-like, or this effect may be 
 due to a distaste for this task which made him throw it aside. 
 I think that while he was working on it he saw his way to 
 a task which would be a completion of his Tragical work. 
 He seems to have planned this last form as an ironical Tragedy 
 which would have been a travesty of his Chronicle Pageant, 
 a tale of Fool and Fight showing the chief heroes as fools. 
 He did not plan this as an attempt to surpass Homer (as 
 Gervinus suggested) or to mock him, for he knew little of 
 him. This Play is a proof that he did not know Greek, 
 for if he had read the Iliad in Greek he could not have 
 degraded its heroes. But he may have read part of the Iliad 
 in Arthur Hall's " satirical " version of the first two Books, 
 printed in 1581. And the publication of Chapman's seven 
 Books of the Iliad in 1598 may have helped him to choose 
 the Story of Ajax. 
 
 The last form may have been written in a time of 
 exhaustion, and this may have been why it has the grandeur 
 of thought not of action. In it Achilles and Ulysses debate 
 Philosophy in similar language, and many of the speeches 
 appear as if they came from a note-book and were assigned 
 to the Characters at random instead of springing from them. 
 This seems one of the signs that the last form of this Play 
 is only a sketch. In the Play, as we have it, the first Achilles 
 survives clashing with the last, the first Cressida, the humor- 
 ous girl of the early Plays, with the last, a false woman 
 
 298
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 
 
 intrinsically worthless and evil, and the first Troilus, a lover 
 like Romeo, with the last who is elderly and noble like Antony. 
 It is the first Troilus who says in the fourth Scene of the 
 fourth Act when he is parting from Cressida : 
 
 Come, to the Port, I'll tell thee Diomed, 
 This brave shall oft make thee to hide thy head. 
 Lady, give me your hand ; and, as we walk. 
 To our own selves bend we our needful talk. 
 
 It is the last Troilus who says before this in a speech which 
 has nothing in common with the rest of that Scene, 
 
 And suddenly ; where injury of chance 
 Puts back leave-taking, justles roughly by 
 All time of pause, rudely beguiles our lips 
 Of all rejoindure, forcibly prevents 
 Our locked embrasures, strangles our dear vows 
 Even in the birth of our own labouring breath : 
 We two, that with so many thousand sighs 
 Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves 
 With the rude brevity and discharge of one. 
 
 This speech must have been either an echo from Antony 
 and Cleopatra or else the origin of the music in it. And I 
 think that this noble lament was the source of the parting 
 Scene when Antony said, 
 
 I am dying, Egypt, dying ; only 
 I here importune Death awhile, until 
 Of many thousand kisses the poor last 
 I lay upon thy lips. 
 
 Sir Walter Raleigh writes of this Play in his Shakesfeare, 
 " It is hard to believe that the love-passages of the third Act, 
 which are untouched by the spirit of Satire and show Cres- 
 sida pure and simple, were written after Romeo and Juliet^ 
 a mere repetition," and he surmises that Shakespeare, finding 
 the love-story of Troilus unfit for a Tragedy, wrote Romeo 
 and Juliet instead. I think that Antony and Cleopatra 
 arose from the last form of this love-story in the same way 
 as Romeo and Juliet was based on the first. The last form 
 of Troilus a?id Cressida was intended, I think, to be a com- 
 
 299
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 ment on Romeo and Juliet^ a bitter Tragedy of a man and 
 woman to be compared with the sweet one of a boy and a 
 girl, and Shakespeare threw it aside and left it only a sketch 
 because a more splendid vision soared from its ashes. Cres- 
 sida became Cleopatra, whose falsity was part of her charm, 
 and instead of attempting to ennoble the boy Troilus (as 
 he did in that speech), he dreamt there was an Emperor 
 Antony. 
 
 In May, 1609, Thomas Thorpe obtained a licence to 
 print a book called Shakespeare^s Sonnets^ and it must have 
 been published at once, for Edward Alleyn's Diary shows 
 that he bought a copy in June for fivepence. This little 
 book seems to have been printed without Shakespeare's 
 consent or opposition from him, and this would be explained 
 if he was living at Stratford. I think that he collected the 
 Sonnets of many years after Antony and Cleopatra was written 
 and revised several of the juvenile ones, and I infer that he 
 wanted them to be printed, though the fact that the book 
 vanished from notice may indicate that he had some reason 
 for postponing it then. 
 
 Thomas Nashe wrote in his Terrors of the Night, printed 
 in 1594 : " A long time since hath it lain surpressed by me 
 until the urgent importunity of a kind friend of mine (to 
 whom I am sundry ways beholding) wrested a copy from me. 
 That copy progressed from one scrivener's shop to another, 
 and at length grew so common that it was ready to be hung 
 out for one of their signs, like a pair of Indentures." Shake- 
 speare may have employed a scrivener to copy his Sonnets 
 for himself or a friend, and Thorpe may have secured another 
 copy of them. This book resembled the other one printed 
 about the same time, Troilus and Cressida, for there was 
 the same story of betrayal in each and the same blending of 
 a boy's idle love with a man's heart-breaking passion. 
 
 Troilus and Cressida remains Tragi-comical because it 
 is governed by Thersites and Pandarus, but its later Tragical 
 drift sets it apart from the other six Tragi-comedies. I 
 think that all these, except Pericles, were rewritten later, 
 when he had devoted himself mainly to Tragi-comical work, 
 
 300
 
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 
 
 and that the last form of Measure for Measure was the first 
 of these five. 
 
 Measure for Measure, which seems to have been first 
 printed in 1623, is a noble Tragi-comedy blended with a 
 juvenile Comedy already revised. If we looked on it as 
 first written after 1603 it would be better described as a 
 Comedy written in a Tragical mood, for in spite of its mirth 
 and the conventional happiness at the end of the tale the 
 inner meaning is dark. But this is prevented by the patent 
 survival of a juvenile version which made Mr. Saintsbury 
 cite this Play in The Cambridge History of Literature as " the 
 strongest instance of the suggested earliness, in a more or 
 less complete form, of many more Plays than are contained 
 in Mercs' list " and write of it in his History of English Prosody ; 
 " Measure for Measure, however, is in prosodic as in other 
 respects, something of a puzzle. It is generally taken as 
 a rather late Play ; but I have always felt sure, for reasons 
 by no means wholly prosodic, that it is in part an early one." 
 
 The solemnity of the Tragical mood in it seems to belong 
 to Shakespeare's last Tragical work. The Duke's speech 
 beginning, 
 
 Be absolute for death ; either death or life 
 Shall thereby be the sweeter 
 
 must have been written several years after Hamlet's soliloquy, 
 
 To be or not to be, that is the question. 
 
 The Duke's speech is a man's last meditation. All the 
 thoughts in it were familiar to Shakespeare as they had been 
 to many before. When he wrote " Thy best of rest is sleep " 
 he did not pause to reflect that Seneca had written, 
 
 O domitor 
 Somne malorum, requies animi, 
 Pars humanae melior vitae. 
 
 When he wrote. 
 
 If thou art rich, thou art poor ; 
 For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows. 
 Thou bearest thy heavy riches but a journey. 
 And death unloads thee 
 301
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 he echoed the verses in Julius CcBsar : 
 
 And though we lay these honours on this man . . . 
 He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold. 
 
 And when he wrote, 
 
 When thou art old and rich, 
 Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb nor beauty, 
 To make thy riches pleasant, 
 
 he could have turned back to The Rafe of Lucrece^ 
 
 The aged man that coffers up his gold 
 
 Is plagued with cramps, and gouts and painful fits. 
 
 And scarce hath eyes his treasure to behold. 
 
 These familiar reflections are expressed in this speech with 
 the gravity of a man who has learnt to prepare himself for 
 the coming of Death. He wrote in these days as if he had 
 reached the Apathy of the Stoic Philosophers — and at times 
 as if he had come to accept the darker Creed of the 
 Cynics. 
 
 This meditation is an answer to Hamlet's puerile state- 
 ment that but for the fear of other ills after death a man 
 would rather die than endure such things as 
 
 The pangs of despised love, the Law's delay, 
 The insolence of Office, and the spurns 
 That patient merit of the unworthy takes. 
 
 Young Claudio shares Hamlet's alarm (though he expresses 
 it more nobly than Hamlet), but he only avows it to Isabella. 
 The Duke would have looked on it as the younger Seneca 
 did on the similar wish ascribed to Maecenas which he called 
 " turpissimum votum," adding " contemptissimum putarem, 
 si vivere vellet usque ad crucem." 
 
 Seneca wrote in another Epistle : " Non videmus, quam 
 multa nos incommoda exagitant, quam male nobis conveniat 
 hoc corpus ? Nunc de ventre, nunc de capite, nunc de 
 pectore ac faucibus querimur : alias nervi nos alias pedes 
 vexant." And in his twenty-fourth Epistle he wrote': 
 " Nemo tam pucr est, ut Ccrberum timeat et tenebras, et 
 larvalem habitum nudis ossibus cohaerentium. Mors nos 
 
 302
 
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 
 
 aut consumit aut emittit. Emissis meliora restant, onere 
 detracto : consumptis nihil restat." 
 
 Such meditations were natural to an elderly man ; but 
 they would have been false if they had been uttered by 
 Claudio. The division by which the fear of Life is told by 
 the man and the fear of Death by the boy is one of the signs 
 that this Play is later than Hamlet. And the Roman mood 
 given to the Catholic Duke is one of the signs that this 
 revision belongs to the Roman group of the Plays. 
 
 The Duke's speech has little meaning in it because we 
 are certain that he intends to save Claudio. It belongs 
 to a Tragi-comedy which was only begun ; a noble comment 
 on Life. That Play is a fragment, like the masterly part 
 of limon of Athe?is. It is to be found in the first Scene of 
 the first Act, but the second (which was, I think, the original 
 beginning) seems to survive from a young Play in the mood 
 of Lovers Labour^s Lost, and the third, though it is partly 
 retouched, ends with lines which explained the intention 
 of the first shallow Comedy, 
 
 hence shall we see. 
 If power change purpose, what our seemers be, 
 
 and the fourth Scene is mainly juvenile. The first thirty- 
 one lines of the first Scene of the second Act are mature ; 
 but then the young Play survives with the old humour 
 condemned by Ben Jonson in his Induction to Bartholomew 
 Fair. The rest of this Act is little retouched and ends with 
 lines which belong to the first version : 
 
 Then, Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die : 
 
 More than our brother is our chastity. 
 
 I'll tell him yet of Angelo's request. 
 
 And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest. 
 
 Then comes the Duke's speech to Claudio and Claudio's 
 temptation and fall, and this Scene, the first in the third 
 Act, is the chief episode of the last Tragi-comedy. And 
 the rest of the Play is only lightly retouched. 
 
 Measure for Measure is confused by the blending of incom- 
 patible Plays. The first form had the gaiety and the juvenile 
 heartlessness of Love'^s Labour^s Lost and Much Ado About 
 
 303
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Nothing : Lucio in it was one of the Gentlemen of the 
 Itahanate Plays and as entertaining as the talk of the brothels. 
 In the Play, as we have it, he is detestable, and he and the 
 humour of the brothels explain Angelo's abhorrence of Vice. 
 One radical fault in Measure for Measure is the fact that 
 there are two Angelos. The first, the mere hypocrite of 
 a juvenile Comedy, is confused with the second, a man who 
 loved holiness and justice and fell tempted by holiness : 
 
 Oh cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint. 
 With saints dost bait thy hook ! Most dangerous 
 Is that temptation that doth goad us on 
 To sin in loving virtue. 
 
 There are two Isabellas also, and the heartlessness of the 
 first still survives when she denounces her brother. So does 
 the old careless end when, forgetting her dream of a con- 
 ventual chastity, she marries the Duke and Mariana is 
 rewarded with Angelo. But this end has a new meaning 
 when Angelo survives like Parolles. The first Angelo would 
 have welcomed his pardon : the second would have chosen 
 to die. When Claudio says, " Death is a fearful thing," 
 Isabella replies, " and shamed Life a hateful," and Angelo 
 is condemned to shamed life. 
 
 Shakespeare may have founded this Play on a version of 
 Pericles and on George Whetstone's Right Excellent and 
 Famous History of Promos and Cassandra, printed in 1578. 
 Whetstone took the story from one of Cinthio's Novelle 
 in the Hecatommithi and from a Tragedy of Cinthio's called 
 Epitia. And Cinthio may have copied some Oriental tale, 
 for the Duke behaves like Haroun Al-Raschid and the heart- 
 lessness and humour would suit The Arabian Nights^ Enter- 
 tainments, or he may have founded it on a story recorded 
 of Charles the Bold. According to this, one of Charles 
 the Bold's favourites, Claudius Rhynsault, betrayed 
 Sapphira Danvelt in 1468, offering to pardon her husband 
 and executing him when she had yielded, and the Duke 
 punished this by forcing him to marry the widow and endow 
 her with all his wealth and beheading him. In Whetstone's 
 and Cinthio's versions, as in that story, the lady yielded in 
 vain. Shakespeare changed this (perhaps guided by Helena's
 
 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 
 
 device in the story which he used when he wrote AWs Well 
 that Ends Well) because Isabella was to marry the Duke. 
 He did this in the first form of this Play, for some of the 
 manner of the fourth Act is juvenile, for instance, when 
 Mariana says, 
 
 Let me excuse me, and believe me so. 
 
 My mirth it much displeased, but pleased my woe, 
 
 and the Duke answers, 
 
 'Tis good ; though music oft hath such a charm. 
 To make bad good, and good provoke to harm. 
 
 These lines belong to a Comedy which must have been a 
 companion to Lovers Labour's Lost. 
 The song beginning 
 
 Take, Oh, take thy lips away, 
 That so sweetly were forsworn ; 
 
 is the first verse of one printed in The Bloody Brother or Rollo 
 Duke of Normandy, which seems to have been mainly written 
 by Fletcher wdth some help from Ben Jonson. The whole 
 song was printed as Shakespeare's by Benson in 1640, and 
 some students have argued that the first verse is his because 
 it is charming. We have either to think that Fletcher or 
 Ben Jonson annexed the verse written by Shakespeare and 
 added another less admirable (which does not seem likely 
 since their attitude towards him in those days would not 
 have allowed such a compliment), or that Shakespeare 
 borrowed this verse because it was charming, or that the 
 Players inserted it because it was popular. Shakespeare 
 did not write that song for this Play since it is addressed 
 to a woman and since the verse sung by the boy would be 
 absurd if Mariana had applied it to Angelo. But in the 
 second Scene of the fifth Act of The Bloody Brother the boy 
 is told by Edith to sing it for the entertainment of Rollo. 
 It may be that the Players put the song instead of another 
 when it was popular (perhaps after Shakespeare's death), 
 for its inappropriate nature would have been nothing to 
 them, and this seems the more probable since The Bloody 
 Brother appears to have been first acted about 1616. 
 
 305 u
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 This cannot be disproved by the fact that this verse is 
 more charming than anything else written by Fletcher. 
 Thomas Campion, for instance, wrote, 
 
 When thou must home to shades of underground. 
 And there arrived, a new admired guest. 
 The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round. 
 White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest, 
 
 and George Peele wrote his Farewell to Arms, beginning. 
 
 His golden locks Time hath to silver turned, 
 
 and Michael Drayton wrote with a wilderness of second-rate 
 Verse one noble Sonnet, 
 
 Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part, 
 
 and in this they surpassed their usual work more than Fletcher 
 did if he wrote the whole of this song. 
 
 Shakespeare may have turned from Measure for Measure 
 to AWs Well that Ends Well, which does not seem to have 
 been printed before 1623, guided to it by Helena's device. 
 It may be that this Play had been C2i\\Q.d. Love'' s Labour^ s Won 
 and that he gave the new name with an ironical meaning, 
 or the change may have been made in the second form of 
 this Play and intended to show that it was no longer bracketed 
 with Love'^s Labour^s Lost. He worked on it now half- 
 heartedly, partly because he had to deal with the intractable 
 stuff of boyish invention : he was too old to find Comedy 
 or charm in this story, and he saw that while Helena's 
 behaviour and Bertram's were pardonable if the tale was 
 fantastic and not meant to be true, they would be merely 
 repulsive if it acquired the veracity of Measure for Measure. 
 
 The last Helena is subtle and wise. She can say of 
 Parolles : 
 
 And yet I know him a notorious liar. 
 Think him a great way fool, solely a coward ; 
 Yet these fixed evils sit so fit in him. 
 That they take place, when virtue's steely bones 
 Look bleak in the cold wind : withal, full oft we see 
 Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly. 
 
 306
 
 THE WINTER'S TALE 
 
 This is Shakespeare's cold wisdom waiting on the sur- 
 viving or superfluous folly of the original Play as when the 
 First Lord says, " The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, 
 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," and " Now, 
 God delay our rebellion ! as we are ourselves, what things 
 we are ! " and the Second Lord answers, " Merely our own 
 traitors," and Parolles says after he has been fooled. 
 
 Yet am I thankful : if my heart were great 
 Twould burst at this. Captain I'll be no more ; 
 But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft 
 As Captain shall : simply the thing I am 
 Shall make me live. 
 
 The bleak light of Troilus and Cressida conquers the glow 
 of an Italianate Comedy, and the Play is left desolate with 
 an impossible Helena degrading herself to overcome the 
 reluctance of an impossible Bertram. 
 
 This did not happen to the three Tragi-comedies which 
 are commonly taken as the end of his work, Cymbeline, The 
 Winter's Tale and The Temfest. AWs Well that Ends Well 
 was left dark because it had no irradiating Scenes like the 
 fourth Act of The Winter's Tale or Imogen's adventure in 
 Cymbeline. It may be that seeing this he retained the 
 younger work in those Plays : he may have valued it more 
 because he knew that his days of delightful imagination 
 were over. 
 
 I think that the first three Acts of The Winter's Tale 
 are a juvenile Tragedy or fantastic Romance revised or 
 rewritten in his elderly manner half-heartedly and that the 
 fourth is a separate Comedy written in the days when he 
 wrote As Tou Like It, and that the fifth was added now to 
 unite this with the rest and ennoble the Play by the passion 
 and dignity of the second Leontes. 
 
 Cymbeline is plainly unfinished. Mr. Masefield says, 
 " Though the writing is so careless and the construction so 
 loose that no one can think of it as a finished Play, it has 
 dramatic Scenes, one faultless lyric, and many marks of 
 
 307
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 beauty." And Sir Israel Gollancz says, " The text of the 
 Play is certainly unsatisfactory, and possibly represents 
 in many cases the Poet's rough-cast notes rather than his 
 finished work." But instead of looking on it as unfinished 
 elderly work, as they do, I follow Coleridge in thinking it a 
 juvenile Play partly recast. 
 
 Even the first words of this Play must have been either 
 illegible to Heminge and Condcll or a mere note for an 
 intended beginning. The First Folio printed them as, 
 
 You do not meet a man but frowns 
 Our bloods no more obey the Heavens 
 Then our Courtiers : 
 Still seem as do's the Kings. 
 
 The modern Editors have altered them thus. 
 
 You do not meet a man but frowns : our bloods 
 No more obey the Heavens than our Courtiers 
 Still seem as does the King. 
 
 And even this guess remains a curious beginning for a happy 
 Romance. Shakespeare could not have intended to leave 
 the opening words either illegible or roughly suggested. 
 
 If these lines and many similar ones show that the manu- 
 script of this Play was illegible, this (like the look of his last 
 signature to his Will) may denote that he was shattered 
 by sickness, perhaps by some form of stroke, during the last 
 years of his life. It may be that the last revision of Cym- 
 beline was in hand when he died as well as the last Timon 
 of Atheiis. 
 
 lachimo still says in Cymbeline, 
 
 Our Tarquin thus 
 Did softly press the rushes, ere he wakened 
 The chastity he wounded ; 
 
 and he still notes that Imogen had been reading the story 
 from Ovid which suggested the horrors of Titus Androyiicus. 
 And Cloten still echoes the criminals of Titus Andronicus : 
 he says, " Posthumus, thy head, which is now growing 
 upon thy shoulders, shall within this hour be off ; thy 
 
 308
 
 CYMBELINE 
 
 mistress enforced." But lachimo has learnt Shakespeare's 
 cold wisdom : he can say, 
 
 The cloyed will, 
 That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub 
 Both filled and running, ravening first the lamb. 
 Longs after for the garbage. 
 
 And Cloten has begun to be changed. The braggart and 
 fool of the first Act and the second, of whom the Second 
 Lord says. 
 
 That such a crafty devil as is his mother. 
 Should yield the world this Ass ! 
 
 can say to himself : 
 
 I love and hate her, for she is fair and royal, . . . 
 Disdaining me and throwing favours on 
 The low Posthumus slanders so her judgment 
 That what's else rare is choked, and in that point 
 I will conclude to hate her, nay, indeed. 
 To be revenged upon her. 
 
 The two Princes still speak as young boys and the younger 
 of them, Arviragus, says, 
 
 I had rather 
 Have skipped from sixteen years of age to sixty. 
 To have turned my leaping time into a crutch. 
 Than have seen this. 
 
 But in spite of this Belarius says in the third Act, 
 
 At three and two years old I stole these boys, 
 
 and in the fifth Act he says. 
 
 These gentle Princes, 
 For such and so they are, these twenty years 
 Have I trained up, 
 
 and the First Gentleman says in the first Act that the theft 
 was *' some twenty years ago." The boys to whom Belarius 
 says, 
 
 309
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Stoop, boys, this gate 
 Instructs you how to adore the Heavens, and bows you 
 To a morning's holy office 
 
 are now aged twenty-two and twenty-three. 
 
 When Guiderius sees Imogen (whom he has taken for a 
 boy) carried in as dead he still says, 
 
 Oh sweetest, fairest lily ! 
 My brother wears thee not the one half so well 
 As when thou grewest thyself. 
 
 Shakespeare must have been young when this was his 
 expression of grief. The dirge was a new one, for Arviragus 
 says. 
 
 Use like note and words 
 Save that " Euriphile " must be " Fidele." 
 
 Neither of these names is now sung in it, and a couple of 
 boys making a dirge for their mother would not have sung. 
 
 Golden lads and girls all must 
 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 
 
 The last version is seen when Guiderius breaks in, 
 
 Prithee, have done, 
 And do not play in wcnch-like words with that 
 Which is so serious. 
 
 But his own words have been wench-like with the rest of the 
 Episode. 
 
 The wicked Queen, who is as cruel as Tamora in Titus 
 Andronicus, must be elderly since she is the mother of Cloten, 
 who was at least thirty-five and probably older, for Belarius 
 (who has not seen him for twenty years) says. 
 
 Long is it since I saw him, 
 But time hath nothing blurred those lines of favour 
 Which then he wore ; the snatches in his voice. 
 And burst of speaking, were as his : I am absolute 
 'Twas very Cloten. 
 
 And even Imogen is mature when she is resisting lachimo : 
 she says, for instance, 
 
 310
 
 THE TEMPEST 
 
 Since doubting things go 111 often hurts more 
 Than to be sure they do ; for certainties 
 Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing, 
 The remedy then born. 
 
 This contorted manner belongs to an attempt to reshape 
 this Play as a mature Tragi-comedy, but Shakespeare aban- 
 doned that or could not continue it. Imogen Is left a 
 girl still, though some of her talk Is Imitated from elderly 
 people, and her brothers are still innocent boys, and lachimo, 
 instead of acquiring the subtlety of his rival, lago, has a 
 wisdom which renders his behaviour impossible. The 
 innocent sweetness of the adventure in Wales gives a young 
 glamour to the rest of the Play. And though some of the 
 Characters in Cymbeline speak with an inappropriate wisdom, 
 there is an early morning light in it still. 
 
 The light In The Tem.'pest is an afternoon glow, fit to 
 transform the cloudy end of a day. This is such a Play as a 
 man tired of imagining sorrows and agonies might have 
 written in an endeavour to find happiness at the end of his 
 time. But the links which unite It with Plays openly founded 
 on early forms or written in Youth suggest that it is a juvenile 
 Comedy ripened and softened, and this seems supported 
 by the apparent transformation of Ariel from a Spirit belong- 
 ing to a story of Magic to a humorous Fairy. 
 
 The evidence that this Play was performed at Court 
 in 1613 (and perhaps two years earlier) may help to show that 
 it was not Shakespeare's last work, unless we are prepared 
 to conclude that he abandoned his dreams for ever before 
 he was aged fifty and three years at least (or perhaps five) 
 before his death and to do this merely because we believe 
 that he was speaking as Prospero. Still, since this Play, 
 like Cymbeline and The Wiiiter^s Tale^ does not seem to have 
 been printed before 1623, he may have revised it after 1613 
 at a time when he knew that his health was failing, and may 
 have meant it to be an Epilogue to the rest of his work though 
 he may have continued to write till the pen dropped from 
 his failing hand. If so, and if Heminge and Condell were 
 right when they printed It as the first of his Plays, the wheel 
 
 311
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 had come full circle at last, and he was ending his dreams 
 where he began. In that case he resembled Christopher 
 Marlowe if (as I think) Marlowe ended his brief triumph 
 as Faustus. But even in that case the fact that it was care- 
 fully finished seems to show that it was not the end of his 
 work. Perhaps we ought to conclude that two Plays at least 
 were written after it — the last version of Cymbeline which 
 was unfinished, and the last form of Timon of Athens which 
 was only begun. 
 
 This Play is a symbol of the whole of his work, which is 
 a musical and magical Island. And, like most of his work, 
 it has a Tragi-comical mood. It is a comedy with a Tragical 
 meaning : indeed, though it ends in happiness for all except 
 Prospero, it is Prospcro's Tragedy, for he is robbed of his 
 child and has forsaken his Magic and his beautiful Island 
 and abandoned his vain dreams of reforming Caliban and 
 he has only to live waiting for Death, " every third thought 
 shall be my grave." Death has neither terror nor hope for 
 him, for, like his brother-Duke in Measure for Measure y he 
 holds that this little life is rounded with sleep. Though his 
 story is set in Catholic times he is no more of a Catholic 
 than Miranda, who says, 
 
 Had I been any god of power, I would 
 Have sunk the Sea within the earth. 
 
 He leaves repentance to Caliban, who says at the end, 
 
 I'll be wise hereafter, 
 And seek for grace. 
 
 This form of The Temfest is a Parable-play like Every-man 
 or the old Spanish Apologues ; but Shakespeare did not 
 hark back to the antiquated ways of the Drama, and it is 
 only a Parable because it is wise. Like many other Plays 
 {Measure for Measure and Julius Ccesar and most of the 
 Scenes of the Chronicle Pageant, for instance), it deals with 
 the Tragedy of the Ruled and the Rulers. If this was his 
 last comment on Life, liberty had its old meaning to him 
 (it was still connected with " libertine ") when he was ending 
 and in his eyes men were animals in need of restraint and 
 Freedom only a dream. The drunken Caliban shouts, 
 
 312
 
 THE TEMPEST 
 
 " Freedom ! heyday ! Freedom," when he Is only exchanging 
 one wise master for many ignorant ones, and the drunken 
 Stephano sings, " Thought is free ! " They echo Cinna, 
 who said in the third Act of Julius Ccesaty 
 
 Liberty ! freedom ! Tyranny is dead. 
 
 Run hence, proclaim it, cry it about the streets, 
 
 and Casca, who said with him, 
 
 Some to the common pulpits and cry out, 
 " Liberty, freedom and enfranchisement ! " 
 
 when the Conspirators had killed Julius Caesar. And Caliban 
 showed his interpretation of Freedom when he announced that 
 he would get a new man. 
 
 Gonzalo agrees with this when he quotes Montaigne's 
 Essay, Des Cannibales. This passage might have been written 
 in 1603, the year in which John Florio's version of that 
 Essay was printed or some years before that, for Florio had 
 been engaged on his task for several years, and since he served 
 Lord Southampton the odds are that Shakespeare was 
 acquainted with him. Or it may have been part of the last 
 drift of this Play. Even the light-hearted Sebastian and 
 Antonio deride it and Gonzalo admits that he only quoted it 
 in " a kind of merry fooling." 
 
 Montaigne wrote that Essay ironically, mocking his times, 
 but with the belief that there was a good deal to be said for 
 his Savages, as is showed in his Advertissement de VAutheur, 
 " Que si j'eusse este parmy ces Nations qu'on dit vivre encore 
 sous la douce liberte des premieres loix de Nature, je t'asseure 
 quejem'y fusse tres volontiers peint tout entier et tout nud," 
 and at the end of this Essay, " Tout ccla ne va pas trop mal : 
 mais quoy ? lis ne portent point de haut de chausses." He 
 was thinking of Plato's Republic, and the fragment of Critias 
 and the Life of Lycurgus in his favourite Plutarch. Thomas 
 More had shown him the way in his Utopia, written about 
 15 1 5 with a similar intention, and Francis Bacon was to 
 imitate Critias in his New Atlantis, first written in Latin and 
 printed in English in 1629 after his death, and Campanella 
 was to write his Civitas Solis in a Neapolitan prison about the 
 same time. 
 
 313
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare answered such dreams when he drew Cahban's 
 behaviour to Prospero. When he derided Montaigne he 
 echoed the Scene in the fourth Act of the Second Part of 
 King Henry the Sixth, which was founded on the Book of 
 St. Alban's through the Chronicles, when Jack Cade says, 
 " There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for 
 a penny : the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops ; and 
 I will make it felony to drink small beer : all the Realm shall 
 be in common ; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to 
 grass : and when I am King, as King I will be," and continues 
 after the Mob shouts, " God save your Majesty ! " : " I thank 
 you, good people : there shall be no money : all shall eat and 
 drink on my score, and I will apparel all in one livery, that they 
 may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord." 
 
 There are few signs of early work in The Temfest though 
 some of the phrases are juvenile, as when Prospero says, 
 
 The fringed curtains of thine eyes advance. 
 And say what thou seest yond. 
 
 His long tale to Miranda, which is only broken by pauses when 
 she interrupts him to let him take breath, in the second 
 Scene may survive from a form written before Shakespeare 
 had learnt that a Drama should be written in dialogue. And 
 in the second Act, for instance, Sebastian and Antonio indulge 
 in the tedious jocosity of Lovers Labour'' s Zoi/when they talk 
 of the Widow Dido. 
 
 In this Play, as we have it, all the principal men, except 
 Prospero and Ferdinand and Gonzalo, are infamous. King 
 Alonzo has forced his daughter to marry the heathen King 
 of Tunis ; his brother, the light-hearted Sebastian, proposes 
 to murder him in his sleep, helped in this by Antonio, who 
 has betrayed and deposed his own brother, and Trinculo and 
 Stephano join Caliban in a plot to kill Prospero. So Gonzalo 
 is justified when he says of the strange shapes who bring in 
 the banquet in the third Act, 
 
 Though they are of monstrous shape, yet, note, 
 Their manners are yet more gentle-kind than of 
 Our human generation you shall find 
 Many, nay, almost any. 
 
 314
 
 THE TEMPEST 
 
 And so is Prospero when he adds, 
 
 Honest lord, 
 Thou hast said well, for some of you there present 
 Are worse than devils. 
 
 The Fortunate Island has been peopled with Calibans ; but 
 all this iniquity ends in virtue as suddenly as when the two 
 Wicked Brothers in As Tou Like It reformed. Even Caliban 
 is a humorous monster, eager to repay kindness with love, 
 and though he is degraded by a human brutality his revolt 
 is excused because Prospero had taken his Island and had 
 made him a slave. 
 
 The old themes, first Love and the clash of Age and 
 Youth and the treachery of those who are trusted and the 
 laughter of fools, are all in The Temfest, but now they are 
 treated with an elderly tolerance : the old sweetness is there, 
 but it is saddened by a knowledge of truth. All the wickedness 
 is forgiven in it because everything in Life is Illusion, 
 
 We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made on. 
 
 And when the Revels are over Prospero repents after all in 
 verses which Shakespeare may have meant as an Epilogue 
 to the whole of his work : 
 
 Now my charms are all o'erthrown. 
 And what strength I have's mine own. 
 Which is most faint : now, 'tis true, 
 I must be here confined by you. 
 Or sent to Naples. Let me not. 
 Since I have my dukedom got. 
 And pardoned the deceiver, dwell 
 In this bare Island by your spell ; 
 But release me from my bands 
 With the help of your good hands : 
 Gentle breath of yours my sails 
 Must fill, or else my project fails. 
 Which was to please. Now I want 
 Spirits to enforce, art to enchant ; 
 
 315
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 And my ending is despair. 
 
 Unless I be relieved by prayer, 
 
 Which pierces so, that it assaults 
 
 Mercy itself, and frees all faults. 
 
 As you from crimes would pardoned be, 
 
 Let your indulgence set me free. 
 
 316
 
 BEN JONSON'S OPINION 
 
 IN the Laudatory Verses prefixed to the FoHo of 1623 and 
 entitled, " To the Memory of my beloved, the author, 
 Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us," Ben 
 Jonson wrote : 
 
 To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name. 
 
 Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ; 
 
 While I confess thy writings to be such, 
 
 As neither man nor Muse can praise too much. . . . 
 
 And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 
 
 From thence to honour thee I would not seek 
 
 For names, but call forth thundering ^schylus, 
 
 Euripides and Sophocles to us ; 
 
 Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead. 
 
 To life again, to hear thy buskin tread 
 
 And shake a stage, or when thy socks were on 
 
 Leave thee alone for the comparison 
 
 Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
 
 These were conventional praises rivalled by the Verses 
 prefixed to the First Folio of Ben Jonson's Works, printed 
 in 1 61 6, and by the Address to the Reader in the First Folio 
 of Beaumont and Fletcher's Plays, printed in 1647, in which 
 it was said that all transcendent abilities " met in Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, whom but to mention is to throw a cloud upon 
 all former names, and benight posterity ; this book being, 
 without flattery, the greatest monument of the Scene that 
 Time and Humanity have produced." Ben Jonson was apt 
 to feign admiration ; for instance, when he wrote to Mount- 
 eagle, 
 
 My Country's parents I have many known, 
 But saver of my Country thee alone, 
 
 and to King James, 
 
 How, best of Kings, dost thou a sceptre bear. 
 How, best of Poets, dost the laurel wear ; 
 
 317
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and there were times when he contradicted his verses by his 
 sayings in Prose ; for instance, he wrote to Francis Beaumont, 
 
 How do I love thee, Beaumont and thy Muse 
 That unto me dost such rehgion use ! 
 
 but when he spoke of him to Drummond of Hawthornden all 
 he said was, " Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and 
 his own verses," and though he praised Michael Drayton in 
 Verse he told Drummond that he did not esteem Drayton 
 and that Drayton feared him. 
 
 While Shakespeare was living Ben Jonson never wrote 
 in his praise, except perhaps in a friendly picture of him as 
 Cordatus in Every Man Out of His Humour^ and since that 
 Play was written for His Majesty's Servants and Shakespeare 
 may have acted the part of Cordatus the friendliness of the 
 picture was natural. 
 
 All this throws some doubt on the truthfulness of that 
 eloquent praise, and so does the different note struck in 
 Discoveries, Drummond wrote of Ben Jonson : " He is a 
 great lover and praiser of himself ; a contemner and scorner of 
 others ; given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of 
 every word and action of those about him, especially after 
 drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth." And 
 Ben Jonson described himself in the person of Horace in 
 Poetaster, when he made Captain Tucca say of him, " a sharp 
 thorny-toothed satirical rascal ! fly him ; he carries hay in 
 his horn ; he will sooner lose his best friend than his least 
 jest." It would have been a remarkable thing if he, who was 
 so famous for quarrels and angry jesting, had always treated 
 his most dangerous rival with a friendly respect. 
 
 Nicholas Rowe did not believe that he did. After stating 
 in his Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare, printed 
 in 1709, that Shakespeare had helped Jonson by recommending 
 one of his Plays he wrote, " After this they were professed 
 friends ; though I don't know whether the other ever made 
 him an equal return of gentleness and sincerity. Ben was 
 naturally proud and insolent, and in the days of his reputation 
 did so far take upon him the supremacy of wit that he could 
 not but look with an evil eye upon anyone that seemed to 
 stand in competition with him. And if at times he has 
 
 318
 
 BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE 
 
 affected to commend him, it has always been with some 
 reserve, insinuating his incorrectness, a careless manner of 
 writing and want of judgment ; the praise of seldom uttering 
 or blotting out what he writ, which was given him by the 
 Players who were the first publishers of his works after his 
 death, was what Jonson could not bear. He thought it 
 impossible, perhaps, for another man to strike out the greatest 
 thoughts in the finest expression and to reach those excellencies 
 of Poetry with the ease of the first imagination, which himself 
 with infinite labour and study could but hardly attain to. 
 Jonson was certainly a very good scholar, and in that had the 
 advantage of Shakespeare ; though at the same time I 
 believe it must be allowed that what nature gave the latter 
 was more than a balance for what books had given the former ; 
 and the judgment of a great man upon the occasion was, I 
 think, very just and proper. In a conversation between Sir 
 John Suckling, Sir William Davenant, Endymion Porter, Mr. 
 Hales of Eton and Ben Jonson, Sir John Suckling, who was a 
 professed admirer of Shakespeare, had undertaken his defence 
 against Ben Jonson with some warmth ; Mr. Hales, who had 
 sat still for some time hearing Ben reproaching him with 
 want of learning and ignorance of the Ancients, told him at 
 last that if Mr. Shakespeare had not read the Ancients he 
 had likewise not stolen anything from them (a fault the other 
 made no conscience of)." And he added, after saying that 
 Shakespeare's character is best seen in his Writings, " But 
 since Ben Jonson has made a sort of an essay towards it in his 
 Discoveries^ though, as I have before hinted, he was not very 
 cordial in his friendship, I will venture to give it in his words." 
 Rowe's view seems supported even by the Laudatory Verses, 
 for Jonson thought it well to begin them by repudiating a 
 wish to draw " envy " (or ill-will) on Shakespeare's name 
 and asserted that he had small Latin and less Greek while he 
 praised him. It may be that the conventional praise was 
 meant to be inappropriate, as when he wrote of Shakespeare's 
 
 Well-turned and true-filed lines. 
 
 In each of which he seems to shake a lance, 
 
 As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance, 
 
 for this contradicts the opinion of him expressed in Discoveries
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and recorded by Rowe. And Dryden, in his Essay on 
 Satire, called it " an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric." 
 
 It is probable that Ben Jonson was born in Westminster 
 about 1572, and worked for his stepfather, a bricklayer, 
 (when he was a boy, and perhaps afterwards), and was taught 
 at Westminster School. When he grew up he went to the 
 Wars, fighting in Flanders, where (according to his own 
 account) he won glory in single combat, killing a champion 
 and taking his spoils. He seems to have begun his work for 
 the Stage, acting and writing for Henslowe's Men, the 
 Admiral's Servants, about 1592, the year in which Greene 
 attacked Shake-scene in the Groaf sworth of Wit. And he won 
 some success in Tragical work, for Meres named him among 
 the best writers of Tragedies in 1598. 
 
 That year was important to him, for the Chamberlain's 
 Servants acted his first Comedy, the Italianate version of 
 Every Man In His Humour, on the twentieth of September 
 (according to one of Toby Mathew's letters), and on the twenty- 
 second of September he fought and killed one of Henslowe's 
 Men, Gabriel Spencer. We do not know why they quarrelled, 
 but it is possible that Jonson had given some ground of 
 offence to Henslowe or Spencer in the same way as he seems 
 to have caricatured Samuel Daniel as Mateo, afterwards 
 called Mr. Matthew, a Town Gull. Jonson was then arrested 
 for murder and only escaped the gallows by confessing his 
 guilt and pleading Benefit of Clergy. The Middlesex Session 
 Rolls for September, 1598, which describe him as Ben Jonson, 
 Yeoman, say, " he confesses the indictment, asks for the book, 
 reads like a clerk, is marked with the letter T., and is delivered, 
 according to the Statute." 
 
 This duel or murder alienated Henslowe, who wrote in 
 one of his letters, dated the twenty-sixth of September, 1598, 
 " Since you were with me I have lost one of my Company, 
 which hurteth me greatly, that is Gabriel, for he is slain in 
 Hogden Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." 
 But some Player came to Jonson's help then, according to the 
 statement addressed to him in Satiromastix, " Thou art the 
 true arraigned Poet, and shouldst have been hanged, but for 
 one of these part-takers, these charitable copper-laced 
 Christians, that fetched thee out of Purgatory, Players I 
 
 320
 
 BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE 
 
 mean." We do not know who this Player was, but (according 
 to Rowe) Shakespeare had helped him by introducing his 
 Comedy to the Chamberlain's Servants, and if this is true he 
 may also have been the charitable copper-laced Christian. 
 Shakespeare's name was first in the list of the Principal 
 Comedians in it. They acted Every Man Out of His Humour in 
 1599, and these two years seem to have been the time of the 
 friendship between Jonson and Shakespeare. 
 
 It is probable that the story about the Christening, told 
 by Sir Nicholas L'Estrange on John Donne's authority among 
 his Anecdotes and Traditions, printed in 1839, belongs to this 
 time. L'Estrange wrote : " Shakespeare was godfather to one 
 of Ben Jonson's children, and after the Christening, being in 
 a deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up and asked him 
 why he was so melancholy. ' No, faith, Ben,' says he, ' not I ; 
 but I have been considering a great while what should be the 
 fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and I have 
 resolved at last.' ' I prythee what ? ' say he. ' V faith, Ben, 
 I'll e'en give him a dozen good latten spoons and thou shalt 
 translate them.' " 
 
 If that story belongs to this time the Christening may 
 have been a Catholic one, for Donne was a Catholic then and 
 so was Ben Jonson, who had adopted that Creed while he 
 was in prison and professed it for twelve years, but forsook it 
 in 1610, about the time when the third Earl of Southampton 
 and many other Catholics changed. According to Drummond, 
 after Jonson was reconciled to the Anglican Church and "left 
 off to be a Recusant, at his first Communion, in token of his 
 reconciliation, he drank out all the full cup of wine," and he 
 was accustomed to say that " he was for any Religion, as 
 being versed in both." 
 
 Jonson's first change of Religion in 1598 may have helped 
 to inspire the attacks made on him by Marston and Dekker, 
 who were conspicuous for their hearty dislike of Catholics : 
 Marston, for instance, wrote in the Scourge of Villainy of 
 " Peevish Papists, crouching and kneeling to dumb idols," 
 and Dekker afterwards wrote The Double P. P., a. satire on the 
 Gunpowder Plot, and The Whore of Babylon. In any case, 
 his change of employment when he began working for the 
 Chamberlain's Servants would have helped to cause these, 
 
 321 X
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 for Marston and Dekker were both writing for Henslowe, 
 and so would have been glad to please him and avenge Gabriel 
 Spencer. And they may have been caricatured in Every 
 Man In His Hu^noiir. 
 
 John Marston, who was about twenty-three in 1598, first 
 became prominent in that year as the author of Pygmalio?i^s 
 Image and J Scourge for Villainy. In one of these, or in his 
 share of Histriomastix, he accused Jonson (as Jonson told 
 Drummond) of having been " addicted to Venery when he was 
 young." This charge must have dealt with recent affairs, 
 for Jonson was only about twenty-five at this time. Jonson's 
 natural indignation was shown with his pen as well as his 
 cudgel, and both were ponderous weapons. He told Drum- 
 mond that he had many quarrels with Marston and beat 
 him and took his pistol from him ; and one of his Epigrams, 
 On Playwright, was written to commemorate this : 
 
 Playwright, convict of public wrongs to men, 
 Takes private beatings and begins again ; 
 Two kinds of valour he doth show at once. 
 Active in his brain and passive in his bones. 
 
 We know very little of Marston, except that he was 
 described in The Return from Parnassus, 
 
 Methinks he is a rufHan in his style, 
 
 Withouten bands or garter's ornament ; 
 
 He quaffs a cup of Frenchman's Helicon, 
 
 Then roister-doister in his oily terms. 
 
 Cuts, thrusts, and foins at whomsoe'er he meets, 
 
 and that he was in Holy Orders and held the living of Christ- 
 church in Hampshire from 1616 to 163 1 and died in London 
 in 1634. 
 
 We know still less about Thomas Dekker : he seems to 
 have been about twenty-eight and only beginning his admir- 
 able Plays at this time. So we can only guess which of Jonson's 
 insults were intended for them. 
 
 Marston's attack on Jonson and the Chamberlain's Servants 
 in Histriomastix, or the Player Whipped, written with Dekker 
 in 1598 or early in 1599 '^^'^ perhaps founded on an obsolete 
 Play, began the open War of the Poets, in which these writers, 
 
 322
 
 THE RETURN FROM PARNASSUS 
 
 all young and struggling for fame, dealt random blows : it 
 was a Stage-fight and the insults in it were meant to be 
 humorous. Jonson was working with Dekker in the midst 
 of the fray and was praised in a fulsome dedication by Marston 
 in 1604. After his first reply, Every Man Out of His Humour^ 
 had been acted by the Chamberlain's Servants in 1599 another 
 battle began, in which the Boy-Players mocked the adults. 
 These two Stage-fights were combined, and he sided with the 
 Children against his former employers : his three next Plays 
 were performed by the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel — 
 The Case is Altered in 1599, Cynthia^ s Revels in 1600, and 
 Poetaster in 1601. The Children of Paul's, a rival Company, 
 acted Jack Drum's Entertainment (in which he and his mock 
 enemies were equally blamed) late in 1600 or early in 1 601, 
 and then Satiromastix, or the Untrussing of the Humorous 
 Poety which seems to have been written or rewritten by 
 Dekker with the assistance of Marston and others. 
 
 We cannot be certain what part (if any) Shakespeare bore 
 in all this, but we know that his Company acted Satiromastix 
 in 1 60 1. We have no reason to think that he kept out of the 
 fray or escaped his share of the blows. And in the Second 
 Part of the Return from Parnassus, which seems to have been 
 acted at Cambridge in 1601 and was printed in 1606, Kemp 
 was introduced saying, " Few of the University pen Play 
 well : they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and of that 
 writer Metamorphoses, and talk too much of Proserpina and 
 Jupiter. . . . Why, here is our fellow Shakespeare puts 
 them all down, aye, and Ben Jonson, too. Oh, that Ben 
 Jonson is a pestilent fellow ! He brought up Horace, giving 
 the poets a pill ; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him 
 a purge that made him bewray his credit." In the same Play 
 Judicio calls Ben Jonson, " The wittiest fellow of a bricklayer 
 in England," and Ingenioso replies, " A mere empiric : one 
 that gets what he hath by observation, and makes only nature 
 privy to what he indites : so slow an inventor that he were 
 better betake himself to his old trade of bricklaying." 
 
 Shakespeare's name does not appear in the list of the six 
 principal Comedians who acted Every Man Out of His Humour 
 in 1599, and this would be explained if he took the part of 
 Cordatus. Mitis and Cordatus and Asper had no share in
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 the Play : their names were put apart from the rest in the 
 Hst of the Characters (called the list of the Actors), and in 
 the explanatory descriptions of them it was said that " Mitis 
 is a person of no action, and therefore we have reason to afford 
 him no character," and that Cordatus was " the author's 
 friend, a man inly acquainted with the scope and drift of 
 his plot ; of a discreet and understanding judgment, and has 
 the place of a moderator." Jonson himself may have taken 
 the part of Asper, who is described thus : " He is of an 
 ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproof, 
 without fear controlling the World's abuses. One whom no 
 servile hope of gain or frosty apprehension of danger can make 
 to be a parasite either to time, place or opinion." 
 In his first speech Asper says. 
 
 My soul 
 Was never ground into such oily colours. 
 To flatter vice and daub iniquity. 
 But (with an armed and resolved hand) 
 I'll strip the ragged follies of the time, 
 Naked, as at their birth, 
 
 and Cordatus breaks in. 
 
 Be not too bold ! 
 You trouble me. 
 
 Cordatus, the judicious or prudent, and Mitis, the gentle 
 or mild, try to restrain Asper, the harsh or exasperated. 
 
 If Jonson was Asper he took another part too, Macilente, 
 who is described as " a man well-parted, a sufficient scholar, 
 and travailed ; who (wanting that place in the World's 
 account, which he thinks his merit capable of) falls into such an 
 envious apoplexy, with which his judgment is so dazzled 
 and distasted, that he grows violently impatient of any 
 opposite happiness in another." 
 
 Cordatus defends Shakespeare's neglect of the ancient 
 laws of the Drama, and the Play ends with a speech in which 
 Macilente says : " Well, gentlemen, I should have gone in and 
 returned to you, as I was Asper at the first : but (by reason 
 the shift would have been somewhat long, and we arc loth 
 
 324
 
 BEN JONSON AND FALSTAFF 
 
 to draw your patience further) we'll entreat you to imagine 
 it. . . . Marry, I will not do as Plautus in his Amphytruo 
 for all this (Summi Jovis causa, Plaudite) beg a Plaudite for 
 God's sake ; but if you (out of the bounty of your good 
 liking) will bestow it ; why, you may (in time) make lean 
 Macilente as fat as Sir John Fal-Staffe." And it may be that 
 Jonson-Macilente retired with a bow to Shakespeare- 
 Cordatus. 
 
 The version of Falstaff's name in this speech in the Folio 
 of 1616 may refer to the fact that Shakespeare's name was 
 sometimes spelt with a hyphen. This allusion may mean 
 that Shakespeare was sometimes called by the name of his 
 most popular Character. This seems supported by one of 
 Sir Toby Mathew's letters, in which he wrote after Shake- 
 speare's death, " as that excellent author, Sir John Falstaff, 
 says, ' what for your business, news, device, foolery and liberty, 
 I never dealt better since I was a man.' " And it may be 
 also shown by Lady Southampton's letter in which she wrote 
 to her husband while he was in Ireland with Essex in 1599 : 
 " All the news I can send you that I think will make you 
 merry is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John 
 Falstaff is by his mistress. Dame Pintpot, made father of a 
 goodly miller's thumb, a boy that's all head and very little 
 body, but this is a secret." 
 
 Otherwise this allusion may indicate that Jonson was 
 said to be depicted as Falstaff and repudiated this on the 
 ground that he did not resemble the fat Knight in his girth. 
 He seems to have been lean at this time, for Satiromastix 
 said, " Horace was a goodly corpulent gentleman, and not 
 so lean a hollow-cheekt scrag as thou art," and in Every 
 Man Out of His Humour Carlo Buffone calls Macilente " a 
 raw-boned anatomy " ; but Kemp called him fat in his 
 Nine Days'' Wonder, printed in April, 1600, if he described 
 him as the " fat filthy ballet-maker." Even if he was lean then, 
 he may have resembled Falstaff in his manner of life, as it is 
 certain that he did in his boasting. And he could not have 
 pleaded that difference in the days when he wrote in the 
 Epistle to Mr. Arthur Squib, printed in Underwoods, in 1640, 
 that his weight was twenty stone lacking two pounds, and in 
 the Poet to the Painter, 
 
 325
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Why, though I seem of a prodigious waist, 
 
 I am not so voluminous and vast, 
 
 But there are Hncs wherewith I might be embraced. 
 
 ' Tis true, as my womb swells, so my back stoops, 
 And the whole lump grows round, deformed, and droops. 
 And yet the Tun at Heidelberg had hoops. 
 
 Falstaff might have written the verses called My 
 Picture Left in Scotland which Jonson wrote after his visit 
 to Drummond : 
 
 Oh, but my conscious fears 
 
 That fly my thoughts between, 
 
 Tell me that she hath seen 
 
 My hundreds of grey hairs. 
 
 Told seven and forty years, 
 
 Read so much waste as she cannot embrace 
 
 My mountain belly and my rocky face. 
 
 And all these through her eyes have stopped her ears. 
 
 Falstaff might have been treated by Prince Hal as Ben 
 Jonson was by young Ralegh in Paris in i6i2or 1613, according 
 to the story he told to Drummond : " This youth, being 
 knavishly inclined, amongst other pastimes caused him to 
 be drunken and dead drunk, so that he knew not where he 
 was ; hereafter laid him on a car which he made to be drawn 
 by pioneers through the streets, at every corner showing his 
 governor stretched out." And Jonson as he was seen in his 
 later days revelling at the Dog or the Triple Tun with the 
 boys whom he sealed of the Tribe of Ben, when (according to 
 Aubrey) " he would many times exceed in drink — canary 
 was his beloved liquor," must have resembled the merry 
 Knight of the Plays. If Pistol was drawn from Marston (as 
 was suggested by Mr. George Wyndham in his Essay on the 
 Poems of Shakespeare, and by Mr. Seccombe and Mr. Allen 
 in their Jge of Shakespeare) this would support the theory 
 that Jonson was recognized as caricatured in Shakespeare's 
 transformed version of the traditional Knight. 
 
 The picture of Cordatus remains the only thing in Ben 
 Jonson's Works which can be taken as indicating a liking for 
 Shakespeare, except the two tributes paid when Shakespeare 
 
 326
 
 POET-APE 
 
 was dead. And the Folio of 1616 also contains an Epigram 
 called On Poet-Ape : 
 
 Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief, 
 
 Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit, 
 
 From brocage is become so bold a thief. 
 
 As we, the robbed, leave rage, and pity it. 
 
 At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean, 
 
 Buy the reversion of old Plays ; now grown 
 
 To a little wealth, and credit in the Scene, 
 
 He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own. 
 
 And, told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes 
 
 The sluggish gaping auditor devours ; 
 
 He marks not whose 'twas first : and after-times 
 
 May judge it to be his, as well as ours. 
 
 Fool ! as if half eyes will not know a fleece 
 
 From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece ! 
 
 This Epigram resembles the passage in the Groafsworth of 
 Wit, printed in 1592, in which Greene wrote, "There is an 
 upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his 
 Tiger^s heart wrapped, in a Player^ 5 hide supposes he is as well 
 able to bombast out a Blank Verse as the best of you ; and 
 being an absolute Johannes fac totum is in his own conceit 
 the only Shake-scene in a country. . . . Let these apes 
 emulate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them 
 with your admired inventions." 
 
 Jonson may have borrowed the name Poet-Ape from 
 Sidney's Apology for Poesy, in which it was said that the cause 
 why Poetry is not esteemed in England is the fault of Poet- 
 Apes not Poets. But he may have intended the name Poet- 
 Ape to mean Poet-Player, for he was accustomed to call the 
 Players " apes " as in the song in Poetaster, in which he referred 
 to the clothes worn by some of them in Royal processions, 
 
 Detraction is but baseness, varlet. 
 
 And apes are apes though clothed in scarlet, 
 
 and in the Apologetical Dialogue to that Play, 
 
 The crimes these whippers reprehend. 
 Or what their servile apes gesticulate, 
 
 327
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and in the Prologue to it, 
 
 The conjuring means 
 Of base detractors and ilhtcrate apes. 
 
 Donald Lupton, for instance, gave them this name in his 
 London and the Country Carbonadoedy printed in 1632 ; he 
 wrote of them, " All their care is to be like Apes to imitate 
 and express other men's actions in their own persons." And 
 the Retur?i from Parfiassus called a Player " a mimic Ape." 
 If we could be sure that Ben Jonson used Poet-Ape to mean 
 Poet-Player there would be the more reason to think that 
 this Epigram was an insult to Shakespeare. 
 
 He may have written it either when he was working for 
 Henslowe or about 1601, developing it from the Verses in 
 Poetaster^ 
 
 Are there no Players here .? no Poet-Apes 
 
 That come with basilisk eyes ? whose forked tongues 
 
 Are steeped in venom as their hearts in gall ? 
 
 in the same way as he expanded the Author's last words in the 
 Apologetical Dialogue printed with that Comical Satire, 
 
 There is something comes into my thought. 
 
 That must, and shall, be sung, high and aloof. 
 
 Safe from the Wolves black jaw, and the dull Asses hoof, 
 
 when he wrote in the Ode to Himself, printed in Underwoods 
 in the Folio of 1641, 
 
 And since our dainty age, 
 
 Cannot endure reproof, 
 
 Make not thyself a page. 
 
 To that strumpet the Stage, 
 
 But sing, high and aloof, 
 
 Safe from the Wolves black jaw and the dull Asses hoof. 
 
 The charge that Poet-Ape's Works were the frippery of 
 wit seems a sign that he was mainly successful as a writer of 
 Comedies, and this would have been true of Shakespeare 
 before Julius Ccesar, as we have it, was written. But Jonson 
 never praised Shakespeare's Tragedies : even in his Laudatory 
 Verses prefixed to the Folio of 1623 he only professed to 
 
 328
 
 CYNTHIA'S REVELS 
 
 think that he could be compared with the Romans and Greeks 
 when he wrote Comedies, " when thy socks were on," and he 
 expressed his opinion of the Chronicle Pageant in the Prologue 
 to Every Man In His Humour : 
 
 With three rusty swords 
 
 And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words 
 
 Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars. 
 
 We do not know when the Prologue to Every Man In His 
 Humour was written, for that Play was printed without it in 
 1600 and revised later, perhaps in 1601. The Prologue may 
 have been written during the War of the Poets, and this 
 would explain why, as Mr. George Wyndham has said, 
 " the whole tirade is an attack in set terms on the kind of 
 Play which Shakespeare wrote and which the Public preferred 
 before Jonson's." 
 
 In the Induction to Cynthia^s Revels the Third Child 
 says, " It is in the general behaviour of this fair society here, 
 that I am to speak, at least the more judicious part of it, 
 which seems much distasted with the immodest and obscene 
 writing of many, in their Plays. Besides, they could wish 
 your Poets would leave to be Promoters of other men's jests, 
 and to waylay all the stale Afophthegms or old books they can 
 hear of (in print or otherwise) to farce their Scenes withal. 
 That they would not so penuriously glean wit, from every 
 laundress or hackney-man, or derive their best grace (with 
 servile imitation) from Common Stages, or observation of the 
 company they converse with, as if their invention lived wholly 
 upon another man's trencher. Again, that feeding their 
 friends with nothing of their own, but what they have twice 
 or thrice cooked, they should not wantonly give out how soon 
 they had drest it ; nor how many coaches came to carry 
 away the broken-meat, besides hobbyhorses and footcloth 
 nags. . . . They say the umhrce, or ghosts of some three or 
 four Plays, departed a dozen years since, have been seen 
 walking on your Stage here : take heed, boy, if your house be 
 haunted by such hobgoblins, 'twill fright away all your specta- 
 tors quickly." 
 
 This may be another humorous description of Shakespeare, 
 who was prone to repeat stale apophthegms and imitated the 
 
 329
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Common Stages, the Players, and observed his companions 
 and produced three or four twice- or thrice-cooked Plays at 
 this time, the ghosts of others departed a " dozen years 
 since," when he was beginning to write. 
 
 One Play commonly dated about this time, 1600, The 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, could be accused of gleaning wit 
 from laundresses, and it is said to have been written in a 
 very short time. John Dennis wrote of it in the dedication 
 of the Comical Galla?it, printed in 1702 : 
 
 But Shakespeare's Play in fourteen days was writ, 
 And in that space to make all just and fit 
 Were an attempt surpassing human wit. 
 
 This Play seems to refer to Jonson's Humours ; for instance, 
 Nym says in the third Scene of the first Act, " the good 
 humour is to steal at a minute's rest," and " the anchor is 
 deep : will that humour pass ? " and " the humour rises ; 
 it is good : humour me the angels," and " I thank thee for 
 that humour," and " I will run no base humour : here take 
 the humour-letter," and " I have operations which be humours 
 of revenge," and " I will discuss the humours of this love to 
 Page," and " my humour shall not cool." And one of Pistol's 
 remarks in the same Scene, " he hath studied her will, and 
 translated her will, out of honesty into English," seems like 
 one of the usual jests about Jonson's frequent translations. 
 Jonson was always amorous : he wrote long afterwards, 
 
 Let it not your wonder move. 
 Less your laughter, that I love. 
 Though I now write fifty years — 
 I have had and have my peers. 
 Poets, though divine, are men. 
 Some have loved as old again. 
 
 If he had been taken to be depicted as Falstaff this Comedy 
 might have been hastily revived and reshaped with an intent 
 to annoy him after he quarrelled with the Chamberlain's 
 Servants. 
 
 In the third Act of Cynthia's Revelsy Crites-Jonson says 
 that he has been 
 
 330
 
 POETASTER 
 
 Where I have seen (most honoured Arete) 
 The strangest pageant fashioned like a Court, 
 
 and describes the men he has seen there, beginning with a 
 Tragical Player, probably Burbage, and including one of whom 
 he says, 
 
 Another swears 
 His Scene of courtship over ; bids, believe him. 
 Twenty times, ere they will ; anon, doth seem 
 As he would kiss his hand away in kindness ; 
 Then walks off melancholic and stands wreathed 
 As he were pinned up to the Arras thus. 
 
 The Player who often talks of retiring from the Stage and 
 is apt to be effusively friendly and then stands apart with his 
 arms folded and his back to the wall and lost in melancholy, 
 may have been meant for Shakespeare, who was shown in the 
 only description by name which has survived (L'Estrange's 
 story of his jest at the Christening) in a deep study and 
 apparently mournful on a festive occasion. 
 
 Ben Jonson's elephantine jocosity leaves his Stage enemies 
 vague and different in his different onslaughts. It may be 
 that he was not able to draw the Characters truthfully in 
 these Comedies or that he had no such intention. 
 
 Though he told Drummond some twenty years afterwards 
 that he had written Poetaster against Marston, it does not 
 follow from this that he had intended to draw Marston as 
 the chief Poetaster, who is named Rufus Laberius Crispinus 
 or Crispinas. The name Crispinus might be taken as showing 
 that this Character was meant to be Dckker, who is said to 
 have been the son of a cobbler and had written the Shoemaker''s 
 Holiday in 1599, for St. Crispin was the patron of shoemakers. 
 And this seems supported when Crispinus is shown to be 
 afraid of his creditors, for Henslowe's Diary proves that 
 Dekker had been imprisoned for debt in 1598. But Dekker 
 seems to have recognized that he had been drawn as Demetrius 
 Fannius, Playdresser and Plagiary, and the name Crispinus 
 was found in Horace's Satires. 
 
 Laberius was the Equestrian Roman who wrote vulgar 
 farces or Mimes, and complained that he had been degraded 
 
 331
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 when Caesar forced him to appear on the Stage. Horace 
 wrote of him in the tenth Satire : 
 
 Et Laberi mimos, ut pulchra poemata, mirer. 
 
 This name has no link with either Dckkcr or Marston. 
 
 The name Rufus suggests that the Poetaster had auburn 
 or tawny hair. This has not been recorded of either Marston 
 or Dekker. The Poetaster's hair was conspicuous, for Chloe 
 says to him, " and shall your looks change ? and your hair 
 change ? " and when he replies, " Why, a man may be a poet 
 and yet not change his hair," she answers : " Well, we shall see 
 your cunning : yet if you can change your hair, do." The 
 Poetaster was forced to vomit new-fangled words, and this 
 appears a possible link with Marston who was addicted to 
 them. But he was above all things effeminate, while Marston 
 must have been a brave man, since he was willing to court 
 repeated thrashings from one of Jonson's size and ferocity. 
 
 In the first scene of the second Act Chloe says to Crispinus, 
 " Are you a gentleman born ? " and he replies, " That I am, 
 lady, you shall see mine Arms, if it please you." She says 
 then, " No, your legs do sufficiently show you are a gentleman 
 born, sir ; for a man borne upon little legs is always a gentle- 
 man borne." And he rejoins, " Yet, I pray you, vouchsafe 
 the sight of my Arms, Mistress ; for I bear them about me, 
 to have them seen : my name is Crispinus or Cri-spinas, 
 indeed ; which is well expressed in my Arms (a Face crying 
 in chief, and beneath it a bloody Toe, between three Thorns 
 ■pufigefit).''^ Neither Marston nor Dekker spelt his name with 
 a hyphen. Dekker had no claim to bear Arms, and Marston 
 had no need to assert a gentle descent, for he was known to 
 be one of the Marstons of Shropshire who bore as their crests 
 a Demi-eagle and a Demi-greyhound. 
 
 Crispinus begins in the second Act with the words, " I 
 am very well, sir. Ne'er trust me, but you are most excellently 
 seated here, full of sweet delight and blandishment ! An 
 excellent air. ... I am most strenuously well, I thank you, 
 sir." He speaks throughout with this affectation, which 
 resembles the tone of Shakespeare's young men in his Italianate 
 Comedies, and, like Cordatus, in Every Man Out of His 
 HumouTy and the writer attacked in Cynthia's Revels he 
 
 332
 
 POETASTER 
 
 observes everything. When Chloe says to him, " Is that the 
 fashion of courtiers ? " he repHes, " I assure you it is, lady, I 
 have observed it," and w^hen she says, " Good master Crispinus, 
 you can observe, you say," he answers, " I warrant you, sweet 
 lady, let me alone to observe till I turn myself to nothing 
 but observation." In the third Act he sees Horace (who is 
 meant to be Jonson) and says to himself, " Yonder's Horace : 
 they say he is an excellent Poet : Maecenas loves him. I'll fall 
 into his acquaintance if I can. I think he be composing as 
 he goes in the street ! ha ? 'tis a good humour, and he be : 
 I'll compose too," and accosts him, saying, " Sweet Horace, 
 Minerva and the Muses stand auspicious to thy designs. 
 How far est thou, sweet man, frolic ? rich ? gallant ? ha ? " 
 He says afterwards : " We are a gentleman, besides, our name 
 is Rufus Laberius Crispinus : we are a pretty Stoic too," and 
 Horace answers, " to the proportion of your beard, I think it, 
 sir." Later in the same Scene Crispinus says, " I protest to 
 thee, Horace (do but taste me once), if I do know myself and 
 mine own virtues truly, thou wilt not make that esteem of 
 Varius or Virgil or Tibullus, or any of them indeed, as now in 
 thy ignorance thou dost ; which I am content to forgive : 
 I would fain see which of these could pen more verses in a 
 day, or with more facility, than I." And he asks Horace to 
 make him known to Maecenas and says, " I'll bribe his porter 
 and the grooms of his chamber ; and make his doors open to 
 me that way, first : and then I'll observe my times." He is 
 shown to be transparently vain, but he tries to hide this with 
 an affectation of modesty. 
 
 Crispinus bears a curious resemblance to the account of 
 Boyet in the fifth Act of Lovers Labour^ s Lost, oi whom it was 
 said that he kissed away his hand in courtesy (like the Player 
 described in Cynthia's Revels) : 
 
 The ladies call him sweet. . . . 
 And consciences that will not die in debt 
 Pay him the due of honey-tongued Boyet. 
 
 Since Shakespeare's name was sometimes spelt with a 
 hyphen (Shake-speare), as in the Sofinets of 1609, he may 
 have been exposed to the taunt that he did this in support of 
 his claim to the Arms which he had obtained recently, in 1599 ; 
 
 333
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 " Gold on a bend sable, a spear of the first " with as a crest 
 " a falcon holding a spear." The Bust at Stratford-on-Avon 
 seems to show that his hair was tawny or auburn, and all the 
 alleged portraits of him agree that he wore it long : and the 
 name Rufus suggested his also because it was linked with 
 King William Rufus. He wrote Mimes like Laberius, and 
 (like him) the Poet in his Sonnets complained that he was 
 degraded by the life of the Stage. The Droeshout Engraving 
 suggests that he had a scanty beard like Crispinus and, like 
 him, a frail body and little legs. Like Crispinus he was 
 compared to Mercury, as when Freeman wrote in Rubbe and 
 a Great Cast, which was printed in 1614, 
 
 Shakespeare, that nimble Mercury thy brain. 
 Lulls many hundred Argus eyes asleep. 
 
 He seems to have been taunted with vanity when Greene 
 wrote in the Groafsworth of Wit of an upstart who " is in 
 his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." His 
 facility in writing was famous, and his way of observing 
 everything was commonly recognized, as when John Aubrey 
 wrote of him in the Lives of Emi?tent Men, " Ben Jonson and 
 he did gather humours of men daily wherever they came." 
 And ten, at least, of the thirty " crudities " (such as reciprocal, 
 retrograde and defunct), which are ascribed to Crispinus 
 can be found in his Plays. 
 
 It may be that Crispinus was partly intended as a caricature 
 of Shakespeare (of whom Rowe recorded that he was " of too 
 great sweetness in his manners "), as he was in the days when 
 he may still have resembled the youths in his Italianate 
 Comedies. 
 
 In that case the clumsy caricature was drawn without 
 venom. Ben Jonson's Maecenas in those days was Esme Stuart, 
 Seigneur D'Aubigny, commonly called Lord D'Aubigny. 
 If Shakespeare wished to make his acquaintance, as Crispinus 
 did, it was only (as this version admits) because he wished to 
 observe the lives of such men. 
 
 Some of the Parodies in the third Act are plainly imitations 
 of Shakespeare. For instance, " Why, then, lament therefore : 
 damned be thy guts unto King Pluto's hell and princely 
 Erebus, for sparrows must have food," seems meant to 
 
 334
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 
 
 reproduce Pistol, who says in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 
 *' young ravens must have food." 
 
 Ben Jonson wrote in the Prologue to this Play, 
 
 If any muse why I salute the Stage 
 
 An armed Prologue ; know, 'tis a dangerous age : 
 
 Wherein, who writes, had need present his Scenes 
 
 Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means 
 
 Of base detractors, and illiterate apes, 
 
 That fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes. 
 
 And Shakespeare wrote in the Prologue to Troilus and Cressida, 
 
 Hither am I come 
 A Prologue armed, but not in confidence 
 Of author's pen, or actor's voice, but suited 
 In like conditions as our argument. 
 
 This apparent allusion seems to support the belief that a form 
 of Troilus and Cressida produced at this time was the purge 
 mentioned in the Return from Parnassus. If this was the 
 purge which repaid the pill, we can infer that Poetaster had 
 given Shakespeare some particular ground for taking offence. 
 Such a ground would be visible if we could conclude that he 
 had been drawn as Crispinus, but he had no call to avenge 
 Marston or Dekker. 
 
 If (as I think) Mr. George Wyndham was right in identi- 
 fying Ajax with Jonson and Thersites with Marston, this 
 makes it certain that Marston was not drawn as Crispinus. 
 The account of Carlo Buffone prefixed to Every Man Out of 
 His Humour, " a public scurrilous and profane jester, that 
 (more swift than Circe) with absurd similes will transform 
 any person into deformity. . . . His religion is railing, and 
 his discourse ribaldry," could have described Shakespeare's 
 Thersites. And so could Cordatus' description of him in 
 the Prologue : " He is one, the Author calls him Carlo 
 Buffone, an impudent common jester, a violent railler and 
 an incomprehensible Epicure. . . . He will sooner lose his 
 soul than a jest, and profane even the most holy things to 
 excite laughter : no honourable or reverend personage whatso- 
 ever can come within the reach of his eye, but is turned into 
 all manner of variety by his adulterate similes." The same 
 
 335
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Character is drawn as an Anaides, the shameless, in Cynthia's 
 Revels, where, for instance, Crites says of Hedon and Anaides, 
 
 The one, a light voluptuous reveller, 
 
 The other a strange arrogating puff, 
 
 Both impudent and arrogant enough : 
 
 They talk (as they are wont) not as I merit : 
 
 Traduce by custom, as most dogs do bark. 
 
 Do nothing out of judgment but disease. 
 
 If Carlo Buffone and Anaides were intended for Marston, so 
 was Thersites. He may have been also drawn as Captain 
 Bobadil in Every Man i7i His Humour, and as Captain Tucca 
 in Poetaster, and as Pistol by Shakespeare, and none of these 
 Characters bears any resemblance to the effeminate Poetaster 
 Crispinus. They all resemble Ralph Roister Doister, and this 
 seems to support the description of him in the Return from 
 Parnassus. 
 
 The Interlude of Thersites and Ajax in Troilus and Cressida 
 seems a savage attack on Marston combined with a humorous 
 description of Jonson. This seems a sign that Shakespeare 
 resented something written by Marston much more than 
 Jonson's jocosity, but even if we could be sure what it was, 
 it would be of no value because Marston was impartially 
 scurrilous. His reason for coupling them may be explained 
 by Nestor's statement that Ajax — 
 
 Makes factious feasts ; rails on our state of war 
 Bold as an Oracle, and sets Thersites, 
 A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint, 
 To match us in comparisons with dirt. 
 
 It may be that Jonson was suspected of acting in this way 
 in the War of the Poets, fighting a sham battle with Marston 
 while encouraging him to hurl his insults at others. But 
 Ajax does not do this in the Play. Thersites haunts him with 
 insults and is rewarded with beatings, and he says in the third 
 Scene of the second Act : " Shall the elephant Ajax carry 
 it thus ? He beats me, and I rail at him. Oh, worthy satis- 
 faction ! Would it were otherwise ; that I could beat him 
 whilst he railed at me." This seems an allusion to the beatings 
 which Jonson had inflicted on Marston. Thersites' part in
 
 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA 
 
 this Play is to insult the rest and provoke discord between 
 them, as Marston did in the War of the Poets and as Captain 
 Tucca did in Poetaster, and he says in the fifth Act, " Now 
 they are clapper-clawing one another, I'll go look on." He 
 hates and despises himself and everyone else : he says, '' I am 
 a rascal ; a scurvy railing knave ; a very filthy rogue." And 
 Hector spares him for that reason and answers, " I do believe 
 thee. Live." All this may well show that Thersites is a 
 picture of Marston, and this is made the more probable when 
 he is introduced with the words — 
 
 When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws, 
 
 for this may be an allusion to Histriomastix, or to the fact that 
 he signed himself Theriomastix in the Scourge of Fillainy. 
 
 Ajax seems a picture of Jonson. Alexander says of him 
 in the first Act : " This man, lady, hath robbed many beasts 
 of their particular additions ; he is as valiant as the lion, 
 churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant : a man into whom 
 nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is crushed into 
 folly, his folly sauced with discretion : there is no man hath 
 a virtue that he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaint 
 but he carries some stain of it : he is melancholy without 
 cause and merry against the hair : he hath the joints of 
 everything ; but everything so out of joint that he is a gouty 
 Briareus, many hands and no use, or purblind Argus, all eyes 
 and no sight." And Cressida answers, " But how should this 
 man, that makes me smile, make Hector angry ? " Thersites 
 says of him in the third Scene of the third Act : " Why a' 
 stalks up and down like a peacock — a stride and a stand : 
 ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her 
 brain to set down her reckoning : bites his lips with a politic 
 regard, as who should say, ' There were wdt in this head an' 
 'twould out ' : and so there is ; but it lies as coldly in him as 
 fire in a flint, which will not show without knocking. The 
 man's undone for ever ; for if Hector break not his neck in 
 the combat, he'll break it himself in vainglory. He knows 
 not me : I said ' Good morrow, Ajax,' and he replies, ' Thanks, 
 Agamemnon.' " 
 
 Thersites' account resembles Jonson's picture of Horace 
 in Poetaster, and it may be that Ajax' failure to recognize 
 
 337 Y
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Thersites refers to Horace's attitude when he was addressed 
 hy Crispinus. The picture of Ajax in these passages and in 
 the rest of the Play may be a retort to the attack on Crispinus, 
 for while the Poetaster was depicted as garrulous and child- 
 ishly vain and excessively friendly and given to boasting his 
 facility and his skill in observing all the ways of the World, 
 Ajax is shown melancholy and full of vainglory and as churlish 
 as the bear and as slow as the elephant, a purblind Argus, 
 all eyes and no sight. This picture is by no means unfriendly, 
 and it agrees with Hector's words after their battle, 
 
 Let me embrace thee, Ajax : 
 By him that thunders, thou hast lusty arms ; 
 Hector would have them fall upon him thus. 
 
 The reconciliation between Hector and Ajax after these 
 words may have led to another between Shakespeare and 
 Jonson, for the Chamberlain's Servants performed Jonson's 
 next Play, Sejanus, in 1603, and Shakespeare acted in it. 
 But if they were reconciled this did not prevent Jonson from 
 helping Marston and Chapman to write Eastward Ho (in 
 which Shakespeare was parodied) in 1605. 
 
 There may be a side-light on Jonson's attitude to Shake- 
 speare in Kemfs Humble Request. William Kemp, who had 
 been greatly admired as Peter in Romeo and Juliet and as 
 Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothings quarrelled with the 
 Chamberlain's Servants in 1599 ^^^ published his Nine Days'* 
 Wonder in April, 1600. He added to it Kevifs Humble 
 Request to the impudent generation of Ballet-makers and their 
 adherents : 
 
 " My notable Shake-rags, — 
 
 " I have made a privy search what private Jig-monger of 
 your jolly number hath been the author of those abominable 
 Ballets written of me. . . . 
 
 " Still, the search continuing, I met a proper upright 
 youth, only for a little stooping in the shoulder, all heart to 
 the heel, a penny Poet whose first making was a miserable 
 stolen story of Mac-Docl or Mac-Dobcth or Mac-Somewhat, 
 for I am sure a Mac it was, though I never had the maw to 
 see it : and he told me there was a fat filthy ballet-maker 
 
 338
 
 NINE DAYS' WONDER 
 
 that should have once been his journey-man to his trade, 
 who lived about the town, and ten to one ! but he had thus 
 terribly abused me and my Tabourer for that he was able to 
 do such a thing in print. A shrewd presumption ! 
 
 " I found him about the Bankside sitting at a Play. I 
 desired to speak with him, had him to a tavern, charged a 
 pipe of tobacco, and then laid this terrible accusation to his 
 charge. He swells presently like one of the four Winds. 
 The violence of his breath blew the tobacco out of his pipe, 
 and the heat of his wrath drank dry two bowls of Rhenish 
 Wine. At length, having power to speak, ' Name my accuser,' 
 saith he, ' or I defy thee, Kemp, at the quart-staff.' 
 
 " I told him and all his anger turned to laughter, swearing 
 it did him good to have ill-words of a hoddy-doddy, a 
 habber-de-hoy, a chicken, a squib, a squall ! one that hath 
 not wit enough to make a ballet, but by Pol and ^dipol ! 
 would Pol his father, Derick his dad, do anything, how ill 
 so-ever, to serve his apish humour. 
 
 " I hardly believed this youth, that I took to be gracious, 
 had been so graceless ; but I heard afterwards his mother-in- 
 law was eye and ear-witness to his father's abuse by this 
 blessed child, on a public Stage, in a Merry Host of an Inn's 
 part. 
 
 " Yet, all this while could not I find the true Ballad- 
 maker, till, by chance a friend of mine pulled out of his 
 pocket a book in Latin called Mundus Furiosus, printed at 
 Cullen, written by one of the vilest and arrantest cullians 
 that ever wrote a book, his name Jansonus, . . . This 
 beggarly lying busybody's name brought out the Ballad- 
 maker's, and it was generally confirmed it was his kins- 
 man." 
 
 This Ballad-maker may have been Richard Johnson, as 
 Mr. Andrew Lang has suggested in his Social History of 
 England in the Seventeenth Century. If so, it is probable that 
 the fat filthy Ballet-maker who was taken for him was one 
 who had a similar name, Ben Jonson, whose habitual drinking 
 feats and violence suit the scene in the tavern. And in that 
 case the Shake-rag whose apish humour led him to send the 
 dancing Clown to accuse his former journeyman, may well 
 have been Shakespeare. Mr. Andrew Lang inclined to that 
 
 339
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 view, saying, " Kemp's Shake-rag is much in the style of 
 Greene's Shake-scene." For all we know, Kemp may have 
 been much older than Shakespeare, and this would help to 
 explain why he stopped acting in 1599. If so, he might have 
 called him a youth, or this may have referred to his looks, 
 for if the Ely House Portrait is genuine Shakespeare looked 
 young in 1603. 
 
 If Shakespeare was that Poet the charge that he had 
 abused his father as the Merry Host of an Inn may mean 
 that the Host in The Merry Wives of Windsor was said to have 
 been drawn from his father. If so, the statement that his 
 mother-in-law witnessed the Comedy may have been a 
 mistake, since mother-in-law commonly meant stepmother 
 then. About 1656 Archdeacon Thomas Plume, who was born 
 in 1630, wrote that Shakespeare was the son of a glover and 
 that " Sir John Mennes saw once his old father in a shop, a 
 merry-cheeked old man." This statement is open to doubt, 
 since the only Sir John Mennes of whom we have record was 
 born in 1599, but Plume may have blundered in repeating 
 the anecdote. If John Shakespeare was a merry old man he 
 may have been drawn as the Merry Host of the Garter. If 
 Shakespeare drew a humorous sketch of his father in a form 
 of this Comedy, which may have been meant for the amuse- 
 ment of Stratford, he did no more than Charles Dickens 
 did when he described Mr. Micawber, who (according to 
 Mr. George Wyndham) probably resembled John Shakespeare. 
 
 If Kemp meant that Shakespeare set him to plague Ben 
 Jonson they are seen in this anecdote as they are in L'Estrange's 
 tale of the Christening : Jonson is a good-humoured butt 
 in both stories since (according to Kemp) his anger ended in 
 laughter. And Shakespeare's attitude in both is the same as it 
 is in the only other anecdote told of his London days, the 
 tale written in John Manningham's Diary in the year after 
 Kernes Humble Request was published according to which he 
 overheard his friend Burbage promising to visit a lady and 
 forestalled him, and told him that William the Conqueror 
 was before Richard the Third. 
 
 The two first of these three stories are the only possible 
 traces of wit-combats between Shakespeare and Jonson. Fuller 
 wrote about Shakespeare in his Worthies of Warwickshire, 
 
 340
 
 WIT-COMBATS 
 
 printed in 1662 : " Indeed, his learning was very little, so 
 that as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, 
 but are pointed and smooth, even as they are taken out of the 
 earth, so Nature itself was all the art that was used upon him. 
 Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson, 
 which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an 
 English man-of-war, Master Jonson (like the former) wa3 
 built far higher in Learning, solid but slow in his performance : 
 Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but 
 lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and 
 take advantage of all the winds by the quickness of his wit 
 and invention." Of course, Fuller did not see such wit- 
 combats since he was born in 1608 ; and nobody else recorded 
 them. Beaumont's Verses to Jonson, 
 
 What things have we seen 
 Done at the Mermaid ! 
 
 refer to days when (I think) Shakespeare was at Stratford-on- 
 Avon, for Beaumont began to write for the Stage in 1607, 
 and Herrick's Ode for Ben JonsoUy 
 
 Ah, Ben ! 
 
 Say how or when 
 
 Shall we, thy guests, 
 
 Meet at those lyric feasts 
 
 Made at the Sun, 
 
 The Dog, the Triple Tun, 
 
 refers to still later days, for Herrick was born in 1591. 
 
 The only trace of a merry-meeting is found in the note 
 written between 1661 and 1663, by John Ward, who was 
 Vicar of Stratford from 1662 to 1668 : " Shakespeare, Drayton 
 and Ben Jonson had a merry-meeting, and it seems drank too 
 hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted. 
 Remember to peruse Shakespeare's Plays and be versed in 
 them, that I may not be found ignorant in that matter." If 
 John Ward had perused Drayton's Poems and the Return 
 from Parnassus into the bargain, he might have changed his 
 account of a meeting which happened (if he was right) some 
 thirteen years before he was born. 
 
 Michael Drayton was notoriously sober : the Return from 
 
 341
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Parnassus said of him, " He wants one true note of a Poet 
 of our times : and that is this ; he cannot swagger it well 
 in a tavern nor domineer in a hothouse." And he never 
 called Shakespeare a friend. In his Elegy of Poets arid Poesie, 
 printed in 1627, he claimed five Poets as friends, Sir William 
 Alexander of Menstries (afterwards the first Earl of Stirling) 
 and William Drummond and the two Beaumonts and William 
 Browne, 
 
 Then the two Beaumonts and my Browne arose. 
 My dear companions, whom I freely chose 
 My bosom friends ; and in their several ways 
 Rightly born Poets, and in these last days, 
 Men of much note and no less nobler parts, 
 Such as have freely told to me their hearts, 
 As I have mine to them. 
 
 But he only praised Shakespeare tepidly in conjunction with 
 Nashe's skill in taking revenge by Satire, — 
 
 And, be it said of thee, 
 Shakespeare, thou hadst as smooth a Comic vein 
 Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain 
 As strong conception and as clear a rage 
 As anyone that trafficked with the Stage. 
 
 He admired Jonson more, though he did not assert friendship 
 with him, — 
 
 Learned Jonson in this list I bring, 
 WTio had drunk deep of the Pierian Spring, 
 Whose knowledge did him worthily prefer. 
 And long was Lord here of the Theatre, 
 Who in opinion made out learnedest to stick 
 Whether in poems rightly dramatic. 
 Strong Seneca or Plautus, he or they 
 Should bear the buskin or the sock away. 
 
 Drayton was born in Warwickshire a year before Shake- 
 speare, and was accustomed to sing the praises of the Forest 
 of Arden, 
 
 Fair Arden, thou my Tempe art alone, 
 342
 
 DRAYTON AND SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and spent his manhood mainly in London among the writers 
 till 1603, and used to spend his Summers at Clifford Chambers, 
 the home of his life-long friend, Lady Rainsford, about four 
 miles from Stratford-on-Avon. Since this might have helped 
 to miake him intimate with Shakespeare his reticence is all 
 the more notable. There may have been some old quarrel 
 between them or, perhaps, he was too proud to consort with 
 a mere townsman of Stratford, for the five friends he named 
 were his superiors by birth. 
 
 We do not know when his Elegy of Poets was written, but 
 this was probably after 1614. The Elegy printed first in the 
 same volume was probably written in 1614, for he wrote of 
 the hard winter. 
 
 The Thames was not so frozen yet this year 
 As is my bosom, 
 
 and that was a year famous for cold. Ben Jonson never 
 recorded any visit to Stratford, though it is possible that he 
 passed through that town on the way to the short visit to Sir 
 Henry Goodyere commemorated in one of his Epigrams : 
 
 Goodyere, I am glad, and grateful to report 
 Myself a witness of thy few days' sport : 
 Where I both learnt why wise men hawking follow 
 And why that bird was sacred to Apollo. 
 
 Since he knew Drayton and since Lady Rainsford was Good- 
 yere's sister he may have broken the journey at Clifford 
 Chambers. But this was probably written before 161 2, the 
 year in which he obtained a licence to publish the Epigrams 
 printed in the Folio of 161 6. 
 
 The odds are that John Ward, or the person who told him 
 this tale, made the mistake which others have shared when 
 they have concluded that Jonson and Drayton and Shakespeare 
 must have been friends because they were rivals. Nicholas 
 Rowe had never heard of any such friendship, for he wrote 
 of Shakespeare, " What particular habitude or friendship, he 
 contracted with private men I have not been able to learn." 
 And when Shakespeare made his last Will he left the usual 
 legacies to be spent in the purchase of memorial-rings, but 
 
 343
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 he did not select Jonson or Drayton or any other Hterary 
 rival of his. 
 
 When Drayton wrote that Ben Jonson 
 
 Long was Lord here of the Theatre 
 
 he recorded a view which Jonson certainly shared. Jon- 
 son's great days began in 1603, for the new King was a 
 pedant and therefore the courtiers were compelled to admire 
 the ponderous Tragedies which began with Sejanus. He 
 won renown too with his Masques, and the young writers 
 looked on him as their chief, attracted by the fame of his 
 learning and by the more amiable mood which came with 
 success ; but most of the spectators preferred Shakespeare's 
 Tragedies, as Leonard Digges wrote in his Verses printed 
 with Shakespeare's Poems in 1640, 
 
 When some new day they would not brook a line 
 Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline ; 
 Sejanus too was irksome. 
 
 This must have been the more bitter to Jonson because 
 he looked on himself as the champion of the Laws of Drama, 
 and he spoke his mind in Volfone and Bartholomew Fair. 
 
 Folpone was acted by his Majesty's Servants in 1605, 
 but the dedication to the Two Universities was probably 
 written later, perhaps in 161 6. In it he wrote, " It is 
 certain, nor can it with any forehead be opposed, that the 
 too-much licence of Poetasters, in this time, hath much 
 deformed their mistress, that every day their manifold and 
 manifest ignorance doth stick unnatural reproaches upon 
 her. . . . The increase of which lust in liberty, together 
 with the present trade of the Stage, in all their misc'line 
 Enterludes, what learned or liberal soul doth not already 
 abhor ? where nothing but the filth of the time is uttered, 
 and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of 
 solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold frole-pses, such racked 
 metaphors, with Brothelry, able to violate the ears of a pagan, 
 and blasphemy to turn the blood of a Christian to water. 
 ... If my Muses be true to me, I shall raise the despised 
 head of Poetry again, and stripping her out of those rotten 
 and base rags wherewith the Times have adulterated her 
 
 344
 
 VOLPONE 
 
 forra, restore her to her primitive habit, feature and majesty." 
 The Prologue to Volpone repeats the protest made in 
 Cynthia^s Revels, and it begins : 
 
 Now, luck yet send us, and a little wit 
 
 Will serve, to make our Play hit, 
 
 (According to the palates of the season) 
 
 Here is rhyme, not empty of reason : 
 
 This you were bid to credit, from our Poet, 
 
 Whose true scope, if you would know it. 
 
 In all his Poems, still, hath been this measure. 
 
 To mix profit, with your pleasure ; 
 
 And not as some (whose throats their envy failing) 
 
 Cry hoarsely, all he writes is railing : 
 
 And, when his Plays come forth, think they can flout them, 
 
 With saying, he was a year about them. . . . 
 
 Yet, thus much I can give you, as a token 
 
 Of his Plays' worth. No eggs are broken ; 
 
 Nor quaking custards with fierce teeth affrighted ; 
 
 Wherewith your rout are so delighted ; 
 
 Nor hales he in a gull, old ends reciting, 
 
 To stop gaps in his loose writing ; 
 
 With such a deal of monstrous and forced action : 
 
 As might make Bethlehem a faction : 
 
 Nor made he his Play, for jests stolen from each table, 
 
 But makes jests, to fit his fable, 
 
 And so presents quick Comedy, refined 
 
 As best Critics have designed. 
 
 The laws of time, place, persons, he observeth. 
 
 From no needful rule he swerveth. 
 
 Bartholomew Fair was acted in 1614 by the Lady Eliza- 
 beth's Servants, but it does not seem to have been printed 
 before 163 1, which is the date it bears in the Folio of 1641. 
 In the Induction to it he tilted against some Master-Poet : 
 Stage-keeper says, " And some writer (that I know) had had 
 but the penning o' this matter, he would have made you 
 such a jig-a-jogging in the booths, you should have thought 
 an earthquake had been in the Fair ! But these Master- 
 Poets, they will have their own absurd courses ; they will 
 be informed of nothing ! He has (sir -reverence) kicked 
 
 345
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 me three or four times about the Tyring-house, I thank 
 him, for but offering to put in, with my experience. . . . 
 I am an Ass ! I, and yet I kept the Stage in Master Tarle- 
 ton's time, I thank my stars. Ho ! and that man had lived 
 to have played in Bartholomew Fair, you should have seen 
 him have come in, and have been cosened in the Cloth-quarter, 
 so finely. And Adams, the Rogue, had leaped and capered 
 upon him. . . . And then a substantial Watch to have 
 stolen in upon them, and taken them away, with mistaking 
 words, as the fashion is, in the Stage-practice." And in 
 the agreement which follows it is said : " He that will swear 
 Jeronimo or Androiiicus are the best Plays yet, shall pass 
 unexcepted at here as a man whose judgment shows it is 
 constant, and hath stood still these five and twenty or thirty 
 years. Though it be an Ignorance, it is a virtuous and stayed 
 Ignorance, and next to truth, a confirmed error does well ; 
 such a one the Author knows where to find him. It is further 
 covenanted, concluded and agreed, that however great 
 the expectation be, no person here is to expect more than 
 he knows, or better ware than a Fair will afford : neither 
 to look back to the sword-and-buckler age of Smithfield, 
 but content himself with the present. Instead of a little 
 Davy, to take toll of the bawds, the Author doth promise 
 a strutting Horse-courser, with a leer-drunkard, two or 
 three to attend him, in as good equipage as you could wish. 
 A wise Justice of the Peace meditant. ... A sweet singer 
 of new Ballads allurant : and as fresh an Hy-pocrite as ever 
 was broached rampant. If there be never a Servant Monster 
 in the Fair, who can help it ? he says ; nor a nest of 
 Antiques P He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Plays, 
 like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries, 
 to mix his head with other men's heels ; let his concupis- 
 cence of Jigs and Dances reign as strong as it will amongst 
 you : yet if the Puppets will please anybody, they shall be 
 entreated to come in. In consideration of which, it is finally 
 agreed, by the foresaid hearers and spectators that they 
 neither in themself conceal, nor suffer by them to be con- 
 cealed, any State-decipherer, or politic Picklock of the Scene, 
 so solemnly ridiculous as to search out who was meant by 
 the Ginger-bread Woman, who by the Hobby-horseman, 
 
 346
 
 BARTHOLOMEW FAIR 
 
 who by the Costard-monger, nay, who by their wares. Or 
 that will pretend to affirm (on his own inspired ignorance) 
 what Mirror of Magistrates is meant by the Justice, what 
 great lady by the Pig-woman, what concealed Statesman 
 by the Seller of Mousetraps, and so of the rest." 
 
 This Master-Poet who had kicked Jonson about the 
 Tyring-house three or four times for offering to criticize 
 him was not Marston or Dekker. Neither claimed to be 
 a Master-Poet, and Marston had probably desisted from 
 writing : the last Play known to be his, tVhat Tou Will, 
 was printed in 1607, for the Insatiate Countess, printed in 
 161 3, may have been written by Barkstead. And neither 
 of them clung to the antiquated ways of the Stage. It seems 
 plain that the Master-Poet was 
 
 Poor Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief, 
 
 and the description of him suits Shakespeare alone. If 
 this Master-Poet who was still faithful to the ways of Jeronimo 
 and Titus Andronicus and to the sword-and-buckler Drama 
 of Smithfield (instead of obeying Jonson's Classical rules), 
 and to the old Jigs and Dances and to the Stage-practice of 
 the Watch with mistaking words was meant to be Shake- 
 speare, this was probably Ben Jonson's last criticism of him 
 while he was living. He may have meant to assert that 
 nearly all Shakespeare's Tragedies sprang from The Spanish 
 Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, which seems to be true. 
 
 This attack on the writer of Tales, Tempests and such- 
 like Drolleries may be taken as showing that Jonson was 
 said to have been depicted as Falstaff, for the three Plays 
 in which Falstaff appeared and Troilus and Cressida seem 
 the only ones in which he could have been kicked about 
 the Tyring-house. The Treasurer's Accounts for May, 
 1 61 3, prove that Heminge was paid for entertaining the 
 Court with eighteen Plays, including iSzV John Falsta-ff, 
 The Winter^s Tale and The Tempest. Sir John Falstaff may 
 have been either the Comedy from King Henry the Fourth 
 or The Merry Wives of Witidsor, Perhaps the revival of it 
 in 161 3 led Jonson to quarrel with His Majesty's Servants 
 and give Bartholomew Fair to the Lady Elizabeth's Servants. 
 Such a quarrel seems indicated by the praise of the puppets 
 
 347
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 in the fifth Act of the Play : " Well, they are a civil Com- 
 pany. I like them for that ; they offer not to fleer or jeer 
 or break jests, as the great Players do ; and then there goes 
 not so much charge to the feasting of them or making them 
 drunk as to the other." And a renewal of his quarrel with 
 them might have led him to repeat the attack he made in 
 Cynthia's Revels. 
 
 This was about the time of his adventure in Paris when 
 young Ralegh exhibited him drunk in the streets, and he 
 was aged about forty and had attained the huge size of 
 which he was accustomed to boast ; so the resemblance 
 between him and the Knight must have been evident. This 
 would help to explain why he protested that the spectators 
 should not try to discover who was meant by the Ginger- 
 bread Woman or the rest of the Characters. 
 
 When Shakespeare was dead Jonson wrote a second tribute 
 to him (or a judgment of him) in a tone of patronage fitting 
 to the Lord of the Theatre. Its condescension is enough 
 to suggest that these two were not friends. We cannot be 
 certain when this judgment was written, for Jonson's limber 
 or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter as they have flowed 
 out of his daily Readings or had their reflux to his -peculiar 
 Notio7i of the Times was merely (as its title explains) a col- 
 lection of passages translated or borrowed from old books 
 and applied to current aftairs, and he may have compiled 
 it from time to time during his leisure. But since he wrote 
 of " the late Lord St. Albane " a few pages after he gave 
 his peculiar Notion of Shakespeare, this was probably written 
 after 1626. If he wrote this when his too-popular rival 
 had been dead for ten years, and three years after paying 
 a tardy homage to him in the Folio of 1623, it was natural 
 that he should have tempered his blame with a profession 
 of love which may have expressed a failing man's kinder 
 memory of a former companion who had shown kindness 
 to him when he was young. 
 
 In this little book, which was printed in 1 641, after his 
 death, he applied the elder Seneca's praise of Severus Cassius 
 in his Controversia to " the late Lord St. Albane " and his 
 judgment or censure of Quintus Haterius to Shakespeare, 
 expanding both to point their effect, and this discounts 
 
 348
 
 DISCOVERIES 
 
 the worth of his testimony, for he may have been tempted 
 to support his quotations. Of course, he remembered that 
 Tacitus agreed with this judgment of Haterius and that 
 the younger Seneca wrote in his fortieth Epistle : " nam 
 Q. Haterii cursum, suis temporibus oratoris celeberrimi, 
 longe abesse ab homine sano volo. . . . Summa ergo 
 summarum hsec erit ; tardiloquium te esse jubeo." The 
 different censures of Haterius agreed that his profligate 
 facihty robbed him of his chance of renown, and this was 
 the drift of Ben Jonson's final judgment of Shakespeare. 
 In it he translated some of the elder Seneca's words ; for 
 instance, " In sua potestate habebat ingenium " and " soepe 
 incidebat in ea quae derisum effugere non possent," and 
 " Redimebat tamen vitia virtutibus, et persoepe plus habebat 
 quod laudarcs quam cui ignosceres." 
 
 If his brief censure of Shakespeare is read with its con- 
 text its meaning is evident. While he was judging his rival 
 he was praising himself, as he did in his account of the True 
 Artificer, and it may be that he had in his mind the passage 
 in the A7inal5 of Tacitus : " Eloquentise quoad vixit cele- 
 bratse : monumenta ingenii ejus haud perinde retinentur. 
 Scilicet impetu magis quam cura vigebat. Utque aliorum 
 meditatio et labor in posterum valescit ; sic Haterii canorum 
 illud et profluens, cum ipso simul extinctum est." 
 
 In the section he called Censura de Poetis he wrote : 
 " Nothing in our age, I have observed, is more preposterous 
 than the running judgments upon Poetry and Poets ; when 
 we shall hear those things commended, and cried up for the 
 best writings, which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap 
 any wholesome drug in ; he would never light his Tobacco 
 with them. And those men almost named for Miracles, 
 who are yet so vile, that if a man should go about to examine 
 and correct them, he must make all they have done but one 
 blot. Their good is so entangled with their bad, as forcibly 
 one must draw on the other's death with it. A Sponge 
 dipped in Ink will do all : 
 
 Comitetur punica librum 
 Spongia 
 Et paulo post 
 
 Non possunt multa, una litura potest. 
 
 349
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Yet their vices have not hurt them : nay, a great many they 
 have profited, for they have been loved for nothing else. 
 And this false opinion grows strong against the best men : 
 if once it take root w^ith the Ignorant. Cestius in his time 
 was preferred to Cicero ; so far as the Ignorant durst. They 
 learned him without book, and had him often in their mouths : 
 but a man cannot imagine that thing so foolish or rude but 
 will find and enjoy an Admirer, at least a Reader, or Spec- 
 tator. The Puppets are seen now in despite of the Players : 
 Heath's Epigrams and the Skuller^s Poems have their applause. 
 There are never wanting that dare prefer the worst Preachers, 
 the worst Pleaders, the worst Poets : not that the better 
 have left to write or speak better, but that they that hear 
 'them judge worse ; ?i07i illi pejus dicunt, sed hi corruptius 
 judicant. Nay, if it were put to the question of the Water 
 Rimer's works against Spenser's, I doubt not but they would 
 find more suffrages ; because they most favour common 
 vices, out of a prerogative the Vulgar have to lose their 
 judgments and like that which is naught. . . . 
 
 " Indeed the Multitude commend Writers as they do 
 Fencers or Wrestlers, who if they come in robustiously, and 
 put for it with a deal of violence, are received for the braver 
 fellows : when many times their own rudeness is the cause 
 of their disgrace, and a slight touch of their Adversary gives 
 all that boisterous force the foil. But in these things the 
 unskilful are naturally deceived, and judging wholly by the 
 bulk, think rude things greater than polished, and scattered 
 more numerous than composed : Nor think this only to be 
 true in the sordid Multitude but the neater sort of our 
 Gallants : for all are the Multitude ; only they differ in 
 clothes, not in judgment or understanding." 
 
 Then he continued with a marginal note De Shakespeare 
 nostrat : 
 
 " I remember the Players have often mentioned it as 
 an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever 
 he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath 
 been, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought 
 a malevolent speech. I had not told Posterity this, but for 
 their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend 
 their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justify
 
 DISCOVERIE S 
 
 mine own candour (for I loved the man, and do honour his 
 memory, (on this side Idolatry) as much as any). He was 
 (indeed) honest and of an open and free nature : had an excel- 
 lent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions : wherein 
 he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary 
 he should be stopped : Sufflafnifia?idus erat ; as Augustus 
 said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power ; would 
 the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into 
 those things, could not escape laughter : As when he said 
 in the person of Ccesar, one speaking to him, Ccesar, thou 
 dost me wrong. He replied : Ccesar did never wrongs hut 
 with just cause : and such-like, which were ridiculous. But 
 he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever 
 more in him to be praised, than to be pardoned." 
 
 Ben Jonson may not have known that in the Folio of 1623 
 the reply which he condemned in Discoveries and echoed in 
 the Staple of News, acted in 1625, was changed to 
 
 Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause 
 Will he be satisfied. 
 
 His last opinion of Shakespeare has much more In common 
 with the rebukes he administered to an ignorant rival in 
 Cynthia^s Revels, the Poetaster, Vol-pone and Bartholomew 
 Fair than with the Verses prefixed to the Folio of 1623. 
 There is a personal note in it and perhaps he was thinking 
 of other faults when he translated the elder Seneca's account 
 of Haterius in the final words, " But he redeemed his vices 
 with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised, 
 than to be pardoned." 
 
 351
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 I HAVE now given you a clear mirror of my mind : use 
 it therefore like a mirror — and take heed how you let 
 it fall or how you soil it with your breath. 
 
 — King James the First (in Bacon's Apophthegms). 
 
 Ben Jonson wrote of the only authenticated portrait 
 of Shakespeare, the Droeshout Engraving in the Folio of 
 1623 : 
 
 This Figure, that thou here seest put, 
 It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; 
 Wherein the Graver had a strife 
 With Nature, to outdo the life : 
 O, could he but have drawn his wit 
 As well in brass, as he hath hit 
 His face, the Print would then surpass 
 All that was ever writ in brass. 
 But, since he cannot. Reader, look 
 Not on his Picture, but his Book. 
 
 Though this praise is conventional it is backed by the cer- 
 tainty that Heminge and Condell, who had known Shake- 
 speare intimately so many years, would not have disfigured 
 their Folio of 1623 with a portrait which could not claim 
 resemblance to him. 
 
 If the Droeshout Engraving was like him, this cannot 
 be said of the Bust on his Monument at Stratford-on-Avon. 
 The man drawn in the Droeshout Engraving watches Life 
 wanly with a rueful attention, he has an exhausted face 
 and sensual lips and a doomed look as if he is conscious of a 
 mortal disease. This man lived apart and looked on and 
 showed the World a face like a mask. The other shown 
 in the Bust at Stratford-on-Avon seems stolid and pros- 
 perous ; his nose is much shorter, his mouth is not sensual 
 and it is twisted as if he had suffered a stroke. This man 
 might have lived a bustling life and amassed money in trade. 
 
 353 z
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The Bust was made by the tombmakers, Garret or Gerard 
 Johnson the younger and his brother Nicholas (sons of Gheer- 
 aart Jannsen of Amsterdam, who settled in Southwark in 
 1567 and was known there as Garret Johnson and died in 
 161 1), and the elhgies produced in their trade were often 
 inaccurate. Still, wc could suppose that Shakespeare's 
 widow and children accepted it as a likeness of him if we 
 could be sure that it had not suffered a change ; but this is 
 open to doubt. 
 
 Sir William Dugdale visited Stratford in 1634 and sketched 
 it then or from memory, and the Engraving of it published 
 in his Antiquities of Warwickshire in 1656 bears little 
 resemblance to the Bust as we have it. Sir Sidney Lee 
 says of it : " The countenance is emaciated instead of plump, 
 and, while the forehead is bald, the face is bearded with 
 drooping moustache." If Dugdale sketched it from memory 
 he may have been wrong, but Nicholas Rowe reproduced 
 his version of it in 1709 and it is probable that Thomas 
 Betterton, who had visited Stratford for him, would have 
 warned him if there had been a mistake. And William Ful- 
 man seems to have approved Dugdale's Engraving in a note 
 written before 1688 : " William Shakespeare was born 
 at Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire about 1563-4. 
 From an actor of Plays he became a composer. He died 
 April, twenty-third, 1616, setat 53, probably at Stratford, 
 for there he is buried and hath a monument (Dugdale, p. 
 520)." And Richard Davies, who was Vicar of the neigh- 
 bouring parish of Sapperton, did not disagree with this 
 when he added some statements before 1708. 
 
 Thirty-seven years after Rowe published his Engraving 
 the Monument was said to be much decayed, and a Strat- 
 ford limner named Hall was employed to " beautify " and 
 repair it. We have no means of knowing how much he did ; 
 but the length of the upper lip and the shortness of the nose 
 have been cited as proving that the nose was repaired by 
 shortening it. And Hall may have changed the former 
 emaciation to plumpness in an attempt to "beautify" this 
 likeness of Shakespeare. In 1793 Malone persuaded a Vicar 
 of Stratford to have the Bust whitewashed ; but there was 
 an attempt to restore its first colours in 1861. 
 
 354
 
 THE ELY HOUSE PORTRAIT 
 
 Some sculptors believe that the Bust was made from 
 a death-mask, and this would account for the flatness of the 
 back of the head which is not in accordance with the face 
 and forehead. Shakespeare's children may have procured 
 a mask for this purpose, and this would have been the more 
 likely if there had been no recent portrait of him. And it 
 may be that this death-mask was employed as a model for 
 the Droeshout Engraving. That Engraving shows a face 
 like a mask, and the rest of it is carelessly sketched ; the hair 
 looks like a wig, the left ear is impossible and so is the body. 
 The face has a ghostly look, and if its eyes were shut it would 
 be dead. Only the part of it which might have been drawn 
 from a mask is skilful, and even this has the fault that the 
 sensual mouth contradicts the rest of the face. It may be 
 that Martin Droeshout (who was only fifteen when Shake- 
 speare died and may not have known him) wished to replace 
 the twisted mouth of the death-mask, which may have been 
 deformed by paralysis or the rigour of death, and had recourse 
 to an early portrait of him. It so happens that the mouth, 
 as he drew it, resembles the one shown in the painting called 
 the Ely House Portrait. 
 
 There is no proof that the Ely House Portrait is a genuine 
 one, for all we know of it is that it was bought in 1846 by 
 Thomas Turton, who was a Bishop of Ely. Still, if it is 
 fraudulent, the artist who painted it from the Droeshout 
 Engraving was able to guess what the tired face might have 
 been like before it was ravaged, and he was eccentric enough 
 to jeopardy his chances of profit by contradicting all the 
 usual notions. My impression is that the Ely House Portrait 
 is either genuine or a copy of one painted about the date 
 which it bears, 1603. Mr. Spielmann, who in the Ency- 
 clo'pcedia Britannica ranked the Droeshout Engraving as 
 the only portrait certainly genuine, wrote of this one that 
 " it is very far from being a proved fraud." If Shakespeare 
 left his work for the Stage in 1603 a portrait of him might 
 have been painted for his Company then. In that case, 
 and if the painting now called " the Droeshout Original 
 Portrait " (of which we know nothing before 1892) is genuine 
 and truthfully dated 1609, we would have portraits of him 
 as he was before he turned to his Tragedies, and in the 
 
 355
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 year in which the Sonnets were printed. But the so-called 
 Original Portrait is one which a painter who knew nothing 
 of Shakespeare as he is seen in his Works might have copied 
 from the Droeshout Engraving. It is painted over another 
 and appears to resemble the Fourth Folio's version of the 
 Droeshout Engraving : it is more skilfully painted than the 
 admitted frauds by Holder and Zinckc, but Holder, when 
 he confessed one of his forgeries, said, " I afterwards made 
 another Shakespeare worth a score such as above," and this 
 may be the one he admired. 
 
 If Martin Droeshout relied partly on the Ely House 
 Portrait, this would explain why the collar or ruff drawn by 
 him resembles the one shown in it and is of a kind which 
 was already old-fashioned in England in 1603. It is a plain 
 ruff of the kind worn in France by the Huguenots. The 
 Bust shows a collar which might have been worn in 161 6 
 without eccentricity, but no man in his senses could have 
 worn its rich scarlet doublet in everyday life in Stratford- 
 on-Avon. The costume of the Bust may represent the 
 scarlet one worn by the Players when they were summoned 
 to walk among other servants in the Royal processions. The 
 importance of such details was proved, for instance, when 
 Mr. Mabie produced in his Life of William Shakespeare 
 a portrait of the third Earl of Essex as one of the second 
 Earl though the collar in it could have warned him of his 
 mistake. 
 
 The Droeshout Engraving has the effect of representing 
 a mask and a wig and a tabard instead of a man in everyday 
 clothes, and though this may have been unintentional it 
 happens to be appropriate in depicting a Player. The 
 man shown in it could be described as the child was in Lady 
 Southampton's gossiping letter about some one called Fal- 
 staff as " all head and very little body," and this too is appro- 
 priate in a picture of Shakespeare whose writings were often 
 as unsubstantial as dreams. In the Ely House Portrait, too, 
 the shoulders are sloping, though this has been disguised 
 by the doublet, and while the man seems to be of average 
 height or over it he appears to be fragile. 
 
 The man shown in the Ely House Portrait has the quiet 
 attention of the Droeshout Engraving and the same baldness.
 
 THE ELY HOUSE PORTRAIT 
 
 but his face is still smooth and he has a gentle and effeminate 
 look. In it the mouth which seems sensual in the Droe- 
 shout Engraving is only sensuous because it is governed by 
 the placidity which dwells in the eyes. This is a man con- 
 scious of weakness, standing apart. This man, whose grave 
 comeliness is only the sunset of the charm of his Youth, 
 could have said with Lyly's Endimion, " Am I that Endimion 
 who was wont in Court to lead my life ? " and with him 
 when Eumenides answered, " Thou art that Endimion, and 
 I Eumenides : wilt thou not yet call me to remembrance ? " 
 could have replied, " Ah, sweet Eumenides, I now perceive 
 that thou art he and that myself have the name of Endimion, 
 but that this should be my body I doubt : for how could my 
 curled locks be turned to grey hairs and my strong body to 
 a dying weakness, having waxed old and not knowing it ? " 
 If we could be certain that the Ely House Portrait is 
 genuine we would need no other proof that some of the 
 tales recorded of Shakespeare on the authority of gossip 
 are false. The Droeshout Engraving would go far to prove 
 this, if it was not made from a death-mask ; but if it was, 
 the argument fails, because a man's face may be ennobled 
 by Death, and he may be, like Polonius, 
 
 Most still, most secret and most grave. 
 Who was in life a foolish prating knave. 
 
 If the Ely House Portrait is genuine it proves that the secrecy 
 and stillness and gravity of the Droeshout Engraving were 
 all to be seen in Shakespeare's face while it retained the 
 fading light of his Youth. And because that light lingers 
 in it this likeness is made more valuable (if it is true), for it 
 enables us to imagine how he had looked when he was younger. 
 We could infer from it that he had an effeminate charm when 
 he was young, 
 
 A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted. 
 
 Such a man might have drawn his own character in the 
 Poems of Love and in the fantastic youths of the Italianate 
 Comedies and would have attracted the effeminate young 
 Earl of Southampton. This might have been a picture of 
 Jaques remembering the time when he shared the mirth of 
 
 357
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Mercutio. The man shown in it could have said with 
 Lorenzo de' Medici, 
 
 Quant' e bella giovinezza 
 Che si fugge tuttavia : 
 Chi vuol' csser Heto sia ; 
 Di doman' non c'e certezza. 
 
 Shakespeare's countrymen began by accepting a foreign 
 notion of him, since the Droeshout Engraving and the Bust 
 were the work of Dutchmen who may never have seen him. 
 The most trustworthy Portrait of him is an Enghsh one to 
 be found in his own Poems and Plays. He did not attempt 
 to draw himself as Hamlet or Caliban ; but he showed us his 
 nature because a man is known by his dreams and by the 
 way in which he understands others. All the Characters 
 he drew were his children and we know him from them. 
 We can say of him as Ben Jonson did in the Verses prefixed 
 to the FoHo of 1623, 
 
 Look how the father's face 
 
 Lives in his issue ; even so, the race 
 
 Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines 
 
 In his well-turned and true-filed lines. 
 
 While he was writing he acted every part in his Plays, and so 
 he is visible as if he had been tempted by many kinds of 
 temptation, and we can know him better by this than if we 
 knew his behaviour in the ordinary chances of life. 
 
 Of course, in looking for him as he is drawn in his Plays 
 we have to remember that the path of Imagination is con- 
 trary to the everyday one : the crippled child dreams of 
 heroic triumphs in War and the kitchen-maid sighs for the 
 impossible Prince. Still, the crippled child's dreams may tell 
 us more than his doings. 
 
 We can know Shakespeare because nobody ever drew 
 himself in so many disguises. Indeed, it may be that his 
 real nature is shown more plainly because our understanding 
 of it is not confused by a fragmentary knowledge of his private 
 affairs. This understanding should assist us to judge the 
 truth of the tales told of him long after his time by people 
 
 358
 
 THE PORTRAIT IN THE PLAYS 
 
 who had not read his Plays or his Poems. He spent his Hfe 
 playing with fire, and no one could simulate so many passions 
 without exciting his own : exhaustion may have made him 
 weak-willed, and perhaps he had errors of his own to repent 
 and sufferings of his own to remember ; but we know nothing 
 of this, and there is no obligation to defame him by guesses. 
 
 If we knew what Characters he took in his Plays this 
 would help us to know him since he would have written them 
 to suit his own nature. But we have only the legends that 
 he acted Mercutio and the Ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam 
 in As Tou Like It, and Davies' assertion that he played some 
 kingly parts — which may have been King Richard the Second 
 in the second half of that Play and King Henry the Sixth 
 and King Henry the Fourth, for this would help to explain 
 why those dissimilar Kings were drawn so much alike. 
 
 One of these legends may help us to see him as he was 
 in his Youth. One young man appears with different 
 names in several Plays, as Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona and as the honey-tongued Boyet in Love''s Labour'' s 
 Lost and as Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice and as Mer- 
 cutio in Romeo and 'Juliet and as Sebastian in The Tem-pest, 
 for instance ; he is always a youth with a shining face, eager 
 and friendly, high-spirited and exceedingly talkative, " suf- 
 flaminandus," and he is frequently snubbed, as when Romeo 
 says to Mercutio, 
 
 Peace ! peace ! Mercutio, peace ! 
 Thou talkest of nothing, 
 
 and Bassanio says, " Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of 
 nothing, more than any man in all Venice," and Alonzo says 
 to Sebastian, " Prithee no more : thou dost talk nothing to 
 me." In one of these Plays, Romeo and Juliet, this young 
 man was the only important Character added to those in 
 the original story. Since Shakespeare was writing for a 
 particular Company it is safe to conclude that he had a par- 
 ticular Player in mind when he provided those parts. And 
 if we accept Dryden's statement as proving that he acted 
 Mercutio we can infer that he wrote them all for himself. 
 
 Dryden wrote in an Essay printed in 1672 that Shake- 
 speare " showed the best of his skill as a delineator of gentle- 
 
 359
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 men in his Mercutio," and that he said that he was forced 
 to kill him in the third Act to prevent being killed by him. 
 He added, " But for my part, I cannot find he was so dangerous 
 a person : I see nothing in him but what was so exceedingly 
 harmless, that he might have lived to the end of the Play, 
 and died in his bed, without offence to any man." This 
 alleged saying of Shakespeare's would be explained only if 
 he had acted Mercutio and had killed him because he found 
 the effort exhausting. It so happens that the other varieties 
 of Proteus-Mercutio demand less exertion ; they are all 
 minor parts, even Proteus, for he is drawn without passion. 
 And this is true also of the two other parts ascribed to him 
 by legends, the Ghost in Hamlet and the Servant Old Adam 
 in As Ton Like It, while the three Kings, whose parts he may 
 have taken, were pathetic spectators. 
 
 It is natural that a young man beginning to write Fiction 
 of any kind should draw himself often (even if he has no 
 such intention) because he knows less about others than 
 his elders have learnt and because his own nature is still the 
 most important to him. So Shakespeare may have drawn 
 himself oftenest when he was beginning to write, and above 
 all in his Comedies, since he was too young to know how he 
 would bear himself in a Tragical moment. I think that he 
 drew himself as Mercutio, though with the difference that 
 Mercutio would not have been easily tired. If he did, he 
 was content with his singing (as Crispinus was), for Mercutio 
 sings the only song in the Play. 
 
 This picture seems the more likely since this Character 
 governs the Italianate Comedies : Mercutio might have 
 written them all. 
 
 If, like Mercutio, Shakespeare exhibited a gay affectation 
 when he was young, he imitated the prevalent mode : for 
 instance, Philip Sidney surpassed the other courtiers in this, 
 and Richard Topchffc, the Priest-hunter, in a letter which 
 seems to have been written about 1597 (though the Calmdar 
 of State Papers sets it in 1583) wrote of Father John Gerard 
 that he was " Kcwyroos in Spcctchc, if he do now continue 
 his custom, and in his Speetche he fiowerethe and smyles 
 much and a faltering and lisping and doubling his Tonge 
 in his Speetche." This affectation did not imply that a 
 
 360
 
 LOCAL TRADITIONS 
 
 man's heart was unmanly : Sidney died gallantly and Gerard 
 endured Torture heroically and Southampton and many 
 more who had affected an eft'eminate grace when they were 
 young ended as soldiers. Even if Shakespeare shared 
 Mercutio's grace when he was young, we know from his 
 Tragedies that he was great-hearted (as Mercutio was) 
 for no one can write nobly if his life is ignoble. 
 
 If we can conclude that he resembled Mercutio we have 
 the more reason to trust the Ely House Portrait and the less 
 to believe the stories which seem to have been current at 
 Stratford after his time. These may have been invented 
 when strangers began to show curiosity. John Dowdall's 
 visit to Stratford, the first of which we have any record, 
 was paid a hundred years after Shakespeare became promi- 
 nent as a poet in London. 
 
 In any case few of these stories have any claim to be 
 trusted. They are all based on gossip recorded by Aubrey 
 in his Lives of Eftiinent Men, completed in 1680, and by 
 Nicholas Rowe in his Account of the Life of Mr. William 
 Shakespeare^ printed in 1709, and in some notes written by 
 men of whom so little is known that it is impossible to judge 
 their veracity. John Aubrey's account has most weight, 
 though this is not saying much, for he was often wildly 
 inaccurate. He professed to rely on some old men who may 
 have seen Shakespeare and on two Actors, one of whom, 
 William Beeston, was the son of a man who must have known 
 him when he worked on the Stage. 
 
 John Aubrey wrote : " Mr. William Shakespeare was 
 born at Stratford-on-Avon in the County of Warwick : 
 his father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore 
 by some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he exer- 
 cised his father's trade, but when he killed a calf he would 
 do it in a high style and make a speech. . . . This William, 
 being naturally inclined to Poetry and Acting, came to 
 London, I guess about eighteen, and was an Actor at one 
 of the Playhouses and did act exceedingly well. . . . He began 
 early to make essays at Dramatic Poetry, which at that time 
 was very low, and his Plays took well. He was a handsome, 
 well-shaped man, very good company and of a very ready 
 
 361
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and pleasant smooth wit. . . . He was wont to go to his 
 native country once a year. . . . Though Ben Jonson 
 says of him, that he had Httle Latin and less Greek, he under- 
 stood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger days 
 a school-master in the country. From Mr. Beeston." 
 
 About thirty years later Nicholas Rowe published his 
 Account, which was compiled mainly from gossip collected 
 by Thomas Betterton, of whom he wrote, " I must own a 
 particular obligation to him for the most considerable part 
 of the passages relating to the life, which I have transmitted 
 to the Public ; his veneration for the memory of Shakespeare 
 having engaged him to make a journey into Warwickshire, 
 on purpose to gather up what remains he could of a name 
 for which he had so great a veneration." Thomas Betterton, 
 who seems to have been aged seventy-four in 1709, showed 
 his veneration by trusting all the gossip he heard. 
 
 Nicholas Rowe recorded of Shakespeare : " He had by 
 a misfortune, common enough to young fellows, fallen into 
 ill company ; and, amongst them, some that made a frequent 
 practice of deer-stealing engaged him more than once in 
 robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charl- 
 cote near Stratford." And Richard Davies, who was Vicar 
 of Sapperton in Gloucestershire and therefore in touch with 
 local traditions, added some notes before 1708 to others 
 written by William Fulman before 1688, " much given to 
 
 all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits from Sir 
 
 Lucy, who had him oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned, 
 and at last made him fly his native county to his great 
 advancement, but his revenge was so great that he is his 
 Justice Clodpate and calls him a great man and that in 
 allusion to his name bore three louces rampant for his Arms. 
 . . . He died a Papist." The Vicar of Sapperton seems to 
 have known as little of Shakespeare's Works as did John Ward, 
 the Vicar of Stratford from 1662 to 1668, who added to his 
 gossip the note : " Remember to peruse Shakespeare's 
 Plays, and be versed in them, that I may not be found 
 ignorant in that matter." 
 
 John Dowdall did not mention the poaching when he 
 wrote of his visit to Stratford in 1693 : " The Clerk that 
 showed me over this church is over eighty years old ; he 
 
 362
 
 SIR THOMAS LUCY AND SHALLOW 
 
 says that this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound 
 apprentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master 
 to London and there was received into the Playhouse as a 
 servitor, and by this means had an opportunity to be what 
 he afterwards proved." If this old Clerk was Wilham 
 Castle, who died in 1701, the tale of the poaching cannot 
 be traced to him unless Thomas Betterton visited Stratford 
 eight years at least before Nicholas Rowe published it. In 
 any case Castle would have been speaking of things which 
 happened long before he was born in 1614, according to Sir 
 Sidney Lee, or in 1628, according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillips. 
 This would account for his forgetting the fact that there 
 was no park at Charlcote House in those days. 
 
 This story may have been founded on the notion that 
 Shakespeare caricatured the Sir Thomas Lucy who died in 
 1600 as Shallow. A note probably written by William 
 Towers in 1657 says of him and Ben Jonson, "They wrote 
 in their neighbours' dialect and brought their birth-place 
 on the Stage. They gathered humours from all kinds of 
 people. Dogberry was a constable at Hendon. Shallow 
 was Lucy with additions and variations." This note does 
 not seem accurate, for the statement that Dogberry was 
 drawn from a Constable at Hendon near London may be a 
 hazy remembrance of the tradition that the Constable lived 
 at Grendon in Buckinghamshire. And that story is doubtful 
 since Ben Jonson's assertion in Bartholomew Fair that the 
 Watch with mistaking words was a Stage-practice seems to 
 show that the Watchman was a traditional Butt, like the 
 Policeman in the Harlequinade of a modern Pantomime. 
 The Watchmen were constantly derided in books, for instance 
 in William Bullein's account of them in a Dialogue against 
 the Pestilence, printed in 1564, and in Dekker's GuWs Horn 
 Book, printed in 1609. 
 
 During Shakespeare's life Charlcote House near Strat- 
 ford-on-Avon was owned by three Justices named Sir Thomas 
 Lucy : the first of them died in 1600, aged sixty-eight ; 
 the second died in 1605, aged fifty-four ; and the third was 
 nineteen years younger than Shakespeare. The third bought 
 the park at Fulbrooke in Gloucestershire in which (according 
 to the local tradition) Shakespeare went poaching. And the 
 
 363
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 third made a Star-chamber matter of steaHng deer from 
 this Park in 1608. 
 
 The only possible link between the first of these three 
 Lucys and Shallow is the stale jest about the dozen white 
 louces. According to Femes' Blazon of Ge?itry, printed 
 in 1586, the Arms of the Lucys were " Gules, three Lucies 
 hauriant, argent." If this jest referred to him it must 
 have been meant to amuse the people of Stratford in a local 
 performance, for the Londoners could not have known a 
 country Justice's Arms and might have thought that this 
 mocked some better-known man, such as the Earl of North- 
 umberland, who bore the White Luces, if they had given 
 any meaning to it. This jest is not to be found in the Quarto 
 of 1602 which was reprinted in 1619 though that form begins 
 with the words, " Ne'er tell me. I'll make a Star-chamber 
 matter of it. The Council shall hear of it." This would 
 be explained if it was omitted in London because it had no 
 point there. Or it may show that this jest was added after 
 the third Sir Thomas Lucy had followed Shallow's example 
 about the Star-chamber matter. 
 
 None of the stories explains which Sir Thomas Lucy 
 was meant. Perhaps the men who had recorded them thought 
 (like some modern students) that there had only been one 
 Knight of this name. The first Sir Thomas was mainly 
 renowned in Warwickshire, where he busied himself in perse- 
 cuting his neighbours ; the second did little and only owned 
 Charlcote for five years ; the third was well known in London 
 and was a Member of Parliament for Warwickshire for seven 
 years, including the one in which he died, 1640. The note 
 ascribed to William Towers was written about seventeen 
 years after the third Sir Thomas had died, and the man who 
 wrote it may have only known him by name and may have 
 referred to him, not to his forgotten grandfather. And this 
 may have been right if the jest about the Luces was added 
 after 1608, or if the Quarto ought to be dated 161 9. 
 
 There may be a clue in the fact that Shallow's young 
 cousin Slender had " a little yellow beard — a cane-coloured 
 beard." The third Sir Thomas is shown in his two portraits 
 at Charlcote with a peaked yellow beard, and Slender 
 resembles the other Falstaff 's account of the other old Justice 
 
 364
 
 SIR THOMAS LUCY AND SHALLOW 
 
 Shallow as he had been in his Youth. It might be argued 
 from this that the Lucys resembled Slender in Youth and 
 Shallow when they were old, but their effigies arc not like 
 Justice Shallow. The first Sir Thomas is shown in Charlcote 
 Church resembling the Justice described in yis Ton Like It, 
 
 With eyes severe and beard of formal cut. 
 
 If it shows him as he was when he died, he had no resem- 
 blance to Shallow when Th^ Merry Wives of Windsor was 
 written. 
 
 Even if Shakespeare had meant to depict this Sir Thomas 
 Lucy with a good-humoured ridicule (not of the kind which 
 would have been inspired by old beatings) there might have 
 been other reasons for this, for instance, the fact that this 
 Sir Thomas had prosecuted Arden of Parkhall in 1583 and 
 had been one of the Justices who presented John Shake- 
 speare in the Recusant List of 1592. If this Sir Thomas 
 drove Shakespeare from Stratford it might have been for 
 rash words in defence of Arden of Parkhall in 1583, and a 
 vague remembrance of this (combined with the jest about 
 the White Luces and the Star-chamber matter) might have 
 led to the tradition about the poaching recorded by visitors 
 a century afterwards. 
 
 The amount of the value which we ought to attach to 
 family traditions is shown by the story recorded in Lock- 
 hart's Life of Sir Walter Scott as related by the owners of 
 Charlcote and by a recent version of this, according to which 
 Shakespeare was imprisoned at Charlcote for poaching in 
 1593 and delivered by Leicester. In 1593 Shakespeare was 
 aged twenty-nine and was successful in London as a play- 
 wright and poet and Leicester had been dead for five years. 
 And local traditions must be even less trustworthy than 
 family ones. 
 
 I think that the first Justice Shallow (who may have been 
 called Clodpate when the Play was first written) was the 
 silly old man of the Traditional Stage who survives as the 
 Pantaloon with the Policeman and the Clown and the Harle- 
 quin in Pantomimes still. This was the old Justice described 
 in Js Tou Like It : 
 
 365
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The sixth age shifts 
 Into the lean and sHppered pantaloon, 
 With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, 
 His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide 
 For his shrunk shank ; and his big manly voice, 
 Turning again towards childish treble, pipes 
 And whistles in his sound. 
 
 And no one has suggested that Jaques was jeering at Lucy. 
 
 Our Harlequinades are the oldest form of the Drama 
 to be seen in our time. The Harlequin, whose name has 
 been traced through the jesting Arlecchino of Italy to the 
 French Hierlechin (who seems to have begun as a demon, 
 Harlequinus) resembles the humorous Devils of the Mummers 
 and the Morality Plays. Our comic Policeman is the tra- 
 ditional Constable and our Pantaloon the silly old man 
 who were always natural butts. Our Clown is (as his name 
 shows) the Rustic who began as a butt, like Falstaff's recruits, 
 and then grew facetious ; and he still wears the clothes 
 described by Ben Jonson in his Particular Entertainment of 
 the Queen and the Prince, acted at Althorp in 1603 and printed 
 in 1 61 6. In that Entertainment Ben Jonson wrote : " There 
 was a speech suddenly thought on to induce a Morrice of 
 the clowns thereabout, who most officiously presented them- 
 selves, but by reason of the throng of the country that came 
 in, their speaker could not be heard, who was in the person 
 of Nobody, to deliver the following speech, and attired 
 in a pair of breeches which were made to come to his neck 
 with his arms out at his pockets and a cap drowning his face." 
 
 The Harlequinades seem to have sprung from the Fabulae 
 Atellanae of Rome in which there were four conventional 
 Characters, Pappus, the old father, Maccus, the fool, Bucco, 
 the fat man, and Dossenus, the glutton. And whether our 
 Harlequinade came from Italy or not it combines four of 
 England's Comical figures. Shakespeare used at least three 
 of them, the Pantaloon, the Clown and the Constable, making 
 them living men in the same way as (I think) he took the fat 
 old man of usual Comedies and transformed him to Falstaff, 
 and he may have employed another, the Harlequin, in a 
 form of Othello if it is true that lago was acted by a Comedian, 
 
 366
 
 LOCAL TRADITIONS 
 
 for in that case lago must have resembled the old mocking 
 Devils of the Morality Plays. But v^^e cannot infer that he 
 drew Dogberry because he w^as arrested for some crime in 
 his Youth. He may have drawn him and Shallow to suit 
 Kemp, who succeeded as Dogberry and was represented in 
 the Return from Parnassus, offering to teach Studioso how to 
 act '' a foolish Mayor or a foolish Justice of the Peace." 
 
 The question whether he drew the first Sir Thomas 
 Lucy as Shallow is only of interest because it denotes the 
 worth of local traditions. Another story (which may have 
 been invented in London long after his time and then 
 adopted as a local tradition) is a still better instance of them. 
 According to this one, which was first told in 1762 in the 
 British Magazine and appears to have been developed by 
 Ireland, whose Confessions were printed in 1805, "Our 
 Poet " (according to Ireland's version) " was extremely fond 
 of drinking hearty draughts of English Ale and gloried in 
 being thought a person of superior eminence in that pro- 
 fession," and the topers of Bidford, " hearing the fame of 
 our Bard, challenged him and his companions to drink, 
 ... in little time our Bard and his companions got so intoler- 
 ably intoxicated that they were not able to contend any 
 longer, and accordingly set out on their return to Stratford, 
 but had not got above half a mile on the road e'er they 
 found themselves unable to proceed any farther and were 
 obliged to lie under a Crab-tree, which is still growing by 
 the side of the road, where they took up their repose till 
 morning, when some of the Company roused the Poet and 
 entreated him to return to Bidford and renew the contest, 
 he declined it, saying I have drank with Piping Pebworth, 
 Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton, 
 Dadging Exhill, Papist Wicksford, Beggarly Broom and 
 Drunken Bidford." When this story was published, one 
 hundred and forty-two years after Shakespeare's death, 
 there was an old Crab-tree by the side of the road near 
 Bidford. And though there were Crab-trees by every road 
 in the neighbourhood in that county of orchards, Malone 
 and many other students accepted that as suf^cient ground 
 for believing this ridiculous lie. 
 
 If there had been any truth in this tale it is probable 
 
 367
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 that others resembling it would have been told of Shake- 
 speare's doings in London ; but neither Greene nor anyone 
 else accused him of drunkenness or rioting there, and if we 
 could be certain that he was caricatured as Crispinus this 
 would prove that his faults were of a different kind. 
 
 The students who have accepted these stories may have 
 been misled by the Bust at Stratford-on-Avon. The man 
 shown in the Bust might have fallen into ill company when 
 he was young (as Rowe says that Shakespeare did " by a 
 misfortune common enough to young fellows "), he might 
 have begun life as a butcher and, indeed, might have ended 
 it prospering in that useful employment, and he might have 
 indulged in drinking-bouts with his equals, though not with 
 the Rustics, in his elderly days. 
 
 The man shown in the Ely House Portrait and the Droe- 
 shout Engraving could have been guilty of many faults 
 in his time, but not of vulgar offences. He could have left 
 Stratford-on-Avon (as Aubrey recorded that Shakespeare 
 did) because he was naturally inclined to Poetry and Acting 
 and also because that quiet place appeared too dull in his 
 Youth and because the Stage afforded a scope for his young 
 vanity, but not because he had been often beaten for poach- 
 ing. He could have begun as a schoolmaster (as Aubrey 
 recorded that Shakespeare did), but he could not have 
 enjoyed killing a calf. And all this can be said of the 
 man visible in the Poems and Plays. 
 
 A boy who had the makings of Mcrcutio in him would 
 have been unfit for the stolid life of Stratford-on-Avon, 
 and if he had been accustomed to find pleasure in thinking 
 that he had a right to assert a fallen gentility, he would have 
 been the more eager to escape from the prospect of earning 
 a livelihood by shopkeeping there. Shakespeare wrote in 
 his Sonnets as a man who had been lamed by misfortune and 
 condemned to a trade which was humiliating to him : 
 
 Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there 
 
 And made myself a motley to the view, 
 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear. . . . 
 
 O, for my sake, do you with Fortune chide. 
 The guilty Goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 
 368
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S CLAIM TO GENTILITY 
 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 
 Than pubHc means which pubHc manners breeds. 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 
 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand : 
 
 Pity me then and wish I were renewed. 
 
 This recognition that his employment degraded him is 
 supported by the Verses inscribed To Our English Terence^ 
 Mr. Will Shakespeare, which John Da vies printed in l6io 
 in his Scourge of Folly : 
 
 Some say, good Will, which I in sport do sing, 
 Hadst thou not played some kingly parts in sport. 
 Thou hadst been a companion for a King 
 And been a King among the meaner sort ; 
 Some others rail, but rail as they think fit. 
 Thou hadst no railing but a reigning wit. 
 
 Ben Jonson was one of those who railed if he mocked 
 Shakespeare when he wrote his description of the Arms of 
 Crispinus. Such mockery would have been natural to 
 Londoners who remembered that Shakespeare was a son 
 of a yeoman, but if they had known more about Warwick- 
 shire they would have discovered that this could not dis- 
 prove a claim to Knightly descent. 
 
 In those days the yeomen of England kept their old rank. 
 Sir Thomas Smith wrote in De Republica Afiglorum, printed 
 in 1583 but written in 1565 : " Those whom we call yeomen, 
 next under the nobility, knights and squires have the greatest 
 charge and doings in the Commonwealth, or rather are 
 more travailed to serve it than all the rest ; as shall appear 
 hereafter. I call him a yeoman whom our Laws do call 
 legalem hominem, a word familiar in Writs and Inquests, 
 which is a freeman born English and may dispend of his own 
 free land in yearly revenue to the sum of forty Shillings 
 sterling : this maketh (if the just value were taken now to 
 the proportion of monies) six Pounds of our current money 
 at this present." He adds that these yeomen " confess 
 themselves to be no gentlemen," but often " come to such 
 wealth that they are able and daily do buy the lands of 
 
 369 A A
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE "^ 
 
 unthrifty gentlemen, and after setting their sons to the 
 school at the Universities, to the Laws of the Realm, or 
 otherwise leaving them sufficient lands whereon they may- 
 live without labour, do make their said sons by those means 
 gentlemen." And he ranks them above the fourth sort or 
 class, which included " day-labourers, poor husbandmen, 
 yea, merchants and retailers which have no free land." 
 
 A Grant of Arms by the Heralds was merely a recognition 
 of rank ; and all who studied (or pretended to study) at Oxford 
 or Cambridge or the Inns of Court could call themselves 
 gentlemen without paying for one. Sir Thomas Smith wrote : 
 " As for gentlemen they be made good cheap in England. 
 For whosoever studieth the Laws of the Realm, who studieth 
 in the Universities, who professeth liberal Sciences, and to 
 be short, who can live idly and without manual labour, and 
 will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman, 
 he shall be called Master, for that is the title which men 
 give to Esquires and other gentlemen, and shall be taken for 
 a gentleman, for true it is with us, as is said, Tanti eris aliis 
 quanti tibi feceris. And (if need be) a King of Heralds shall 
 also give him for money Arms newly-made and invented, 
 the title whereof shall pretend to have been found by the said 
 Herald in perusing and viewing of old Registers." 
 
 Sir Thomas Overbury wrote of a Franklin in his Characters, 
 printed in 1614: "His outside is an ancient yeoman of 
 England, though his inside may give Arms with the best 
 gentlemen and ne'er see the Herald." And John Stephens 
 wrote of a Farmer in his Essays and Characters, printed 
 in 1616 : " To purchase Arms (if he emulates gentry) sits 
 upon him like an ague ; it breaks his sleep, takes away his 
 stomach, and he can never be quiet till the Herald hath 
 given him the harrow, the cuckoo, or some ridiculous emblem 
 for his Armoury." 
 
 The Arms borne by the yeomen were not always new- 
 fangled, for several of these families claimed Knightly descent 
 though they had inherited a dwindled estate or a younger 
 son's portion. We know that several families of yeomen in 
 Warwickshire bore Arms in those days. Though we do not 
 know whether Robert Arden of Wilmcote, Shakespeare's 
 maternal grandfather, bore Arms, it is probable that he had
 
 STRATFORD-ON-AVON 
 
 a right to them, for he seems to have been descended from 
 a brother of Sir John Arden, the ancestor of the Ardens of 
 Parkhall. For all we know, the many Shakespeares who 
 lived as yeomen in Warwickshire may have sprung from a 
 family which had borne Arms, " non sans droict." In any 
 case Shakespeare may have thought that his descent from 
 the Ardens of the Forest of Arden gave him many proud 
 Ancestors, including the mythical Guy of Warwick. And it 
 may be that a claim to an illustrious Ancestry, or a belief In 
 one, did more to control his life than anything else. This 
 seems borne out If we recall our knowledge of his private 
 affairs apart from the tales which may have been invented 
 at random after his time. And it would go far to prove that 
 some of those talcs must have been false. 
 
 Stratford-on-Avon was then a little town in the fields 
 (emporiolum non Inelegans, according to Camden) beside the 
 I slow Avon, a narrow river winding In reeds. The people who 
 lived in it were woodlanders still, for their stock had been 
 moulded by the Forest of Arden, which had been a British 
 haven of refuge In the days of the Romans and a stronghold 
 of the Danes when these parts were in the Kingdom of Mercia. 
 In those days many who lived in the quiet places of England 
 never strayed more than a few miles from the houses In which 
 they had been born. Stratford-on-Avon was one of the 
 quietest of those quiet places and the home of a stock which 
 had been permanent there from time immemorial. There 
 may have been a Danish strain In It still, and this would 
 account for the use of the name Hamnet or Hamlet. Even 
 to-day the ancient strains can often be traced in England ; 
 for instance, In Beer, a seaside village in Devon which was 
 called Beor by the Danes, most of the fishermen still seem to 
 be Danish while in the neighbouring town of Lyme Regis 
 in Dorset the old stock is patently Celtic. If Shakespeare 
 had reddish hair and a high colour, as the Bust seems to show, 
 these may have been signs of a Scandinavian descent. His 
 martial name cannot help us to guess the source of his stock, 
 for It may have meant Hawkspur first, which would explain 
 why his crest was a Falcon holding a spear. 
 
 Stratford-on-Avon stood apart, as the other towns of
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 England did then : its inhabitants all knew one another and 
 cared little about anyone whose days were not spent within 
 sound of the chimes of Holy Trinity Church. That stately 
 Church standing in the elms by the Avon was a token of 
 Stratford's ancient renown for piety in the Catholic times. 
 And though that renown had passed away when the Guild of 
 the Holy Cross was broken, the townsmen were still proud of 
 their home. There a man who owned a prosperous shop or 
 a few acres of land was much more respected than any neigh- 
 bouring Squire and quite as aware of his own importance 
 and worth. 
 
 Nicholas Rowe recorded of Shakespeare : " He was the 
 son of Mr. John Shakespeare, and was born at Stratford-on- 
 Avon, in Warwickshire, in April, 1564. His family, as appears 
 by the Register and public writings relating to that town, 
 were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned as 
 gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in 
 wool, had so large a family, ten children in all, that though 
 he was his eldest son he could give him no better education 
 than his own employment. He had bred him, it is true, for 
 some time at a free-school, where it is probable he acquired 
 what Latin he was master of ; but the narrowness of his 
 circumstances and the want of his assistance at home forced 
 his father to withdraw him from thence, and unhappily 
 prevented his further proficiency in that language." 
 
 We do not know when Shakespeare was born, but his 
 baptism was registered at Stratford-on-Avon on April the 
 twenty-sixth, 1564. It is probable that he had his teaching at 
 the Grammar-School there, and this might have been short 
 if he was idle at lessons or was never robust. He seems to 
 have learnt little from books then or at any time : the ways 
 of the living were always much more to him than the thoughts 
 of the dead. Indeed, there is no sign that he ever paid 
 attention to books, except to Ovid's and Chaucer's Works 
 and some of the English Plays and Poems and Stories and 
 some Italian Novels when he was young, and some English 
 Chronicles later, and to Plutarch's Lives in North's version, 
 and perhaps to the younger Seneca's Tragedies and Philo- 
 sophical Works, when he was elderly. And all these happened 
 to be books which he used when he was writing his own. 
 
 372
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND BOOKS 
 
 He must have learnt some Latin in boyhood, and he may 
 have increased his knowledge of it afterwards because it was 
 still the International language and so commonly used that 
 some of the townsmen of Stratford corresponded in it. That 
 knowledge may have helped him to learn a smattering of 
 French and Italian. Though he had a weakness for using 
 legal phrases at random he had no knowledge of Law. (Since 
 some lawyers have held an opposite view I ought, perhaps, 
 to explain that I do not differ from them in ignorance, for 
 their trade has been mine.) He did not prove a profound 
 knowledge of Law when he wrote in a Sonnet, 
 
 And Summer's lease hath all too short a date. 
 
 When he needed any knowledge of History he copied the 
 Chronicles, and when he dealt with Geography he preferred 
 to invent it. Perhaps he could have said with Biron, 
 
 Study is like the Heaven's glorious Sun 
 That will not be deep searched with saucy looks : 
 Small have continual plodders ever won 
 Save base authority from others' books. 
 
 Dryden wrote of him in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, " He was 
 naturally learned : he needed not the spectacles of books to 
 read Nature : he looked inwards and found her there." 
 
 If Shakespeare had cared for books it is probable that he 
 would have gathered a few and that these would have been 
 treasured in remembrance of him after his time, but there 
 is no mention of any in his Will and no sign that any of his 
 were in the " study of books " left by his son-in-law. The 
 man seen in the Plays looked on the World with an insatiate 
 curiosity always — delighting most in the things which were 
 the most alien to him. Such a man might have begun as a 
 boy who was glad to escape from School as soon as he could. 
 
 There were times when the tranquillity of Stratford was 
 broken by glimpses of a different life. Kenilworth Castle 
 and Warwick Castle were near, and there was apt to be a 
 going and coming of strangers who were bound for their 
 Revels or returning from them. He was eleven when Queen 
 Elizabeth saw the famous Revels at Kenilworth in 1575, and 
 since most of the people of the neighbouring parts assembled 
 
 373
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 there it is probable that he, who was destined to attempt to 
 amuse her among the least of her servants, gaped at her then 
 as a little boy in the crowd. And he had glimpses, too, of the 
 Players and their similar world of sham glory and pretended 
 delight. He was about four when they were welcomed to 
 Stratford while John Shakespeare was Bailiff ; and after this 
 they performed there, for instance, in 1573, 1576, 1577, 1579, 
 and the four following years. 
 
 We can be certain that many little boys in such towns 
 were dazzled when the Players from London rode up the 
 narrow streets in the splendour of their second-hand finery, 
 breaking the habitual somnolence with their trumpets and 
 drums, and that they believed that there could not be a 
 happier lot than to travel thus, admired and applauded, and 
 with the power to excite laughter or tears. Many such boys 
 must have felt that this happiness was out of their reach, 
 for they could not emulate the wit of the Clowns or the 
 stateliness of the Lovers and Kings. If Shakespeare had been 
 a dull little boy and had known that his family had been 
 always content tilling the fields or plying homely trades 
 connected with farming, he too might have sighed and returned 
 to an inherited obscurity sadly. But he was never dull, 
 and if he believed (rightly or wrongly) that he was descended 
 from illustrious people he might have felt himself too fine 
 for the usual ambitions of Stratford : he would have valued 
 their former eminence more because he did not inherit it, 
 and it may be that when he dealt in his Plays with fallen 
 Dukes he was echoing that boyish belief. It may be that 
 when he sat in the Grammar-School he was haunted by 
 visions of the Plays witnessed there or in a neighbouring 
 room, which was the Guildhall, and of future ones when his 
 eloquence and wit would astonish the wisest men in Stratford- 
 on-Avon. And it may be that the Players were his teachers 
 of History. 
 
 If so, they were helped by other teachers, the venerable 
 persons who told talcs of the Past. When he was aged six, 
 people aged fifty could remember the days before the change 
 called the Reformation began, and others aged seventy or 
 more could describe the times when England was governed 
 by King Henry the Seventh, and there were many whose 
 
 374
 
 THE WOODLAND OF ARDEN 
 
 grandfathers had seen the Wars of the Roses. Perhaps the 
 old people talking of the days of their Youth taught him to 
 think of England's Catholic Past as a better and a happier 
 time. If they did, they could have cited the testimony of 
 King Henry the Eighth, who said when he opened his last 
 Parliament in 1545 : " Of this I am sure that Charity was never 
 so faint among you ; and God Himself, among Christians, 
 was never less reverenced, honoured and served " ; and of 
 Bishop Hugh Latimer, who said in 1548 in his Sermon of 
 the Plough : " In times past, men were full of pity and 
 compassion, but now there is no pity ; for in London their 
 brother shall die in the streets for cold, he shall lie sick at 
 the door, between stock and stock, I cannot tell what to call 
 it, and perish there for hunger : was there ever more unmerci- 
 fulness in Nebo ? . . . Now Charity is waxen cold, none 
 helpeth the scholar nor yet the poor." 
 
 Such lessons may have taught him to write as he did in the 
 Sonnets of " the holy antique days," and as he did when in 
 As Tou Like It he made Orlando say of Old Adam, 
 
 O good old man, how well in thee appears 
 The constant service of the antique world, 
 
 or when in the same Play he made Charles report that in the 
 Forest of Arden the Duke and his merry men " fleet the time 
 carelessly, as they did in the golden World." 
 
 The old Forest of Arden had dwindled to the Woodland 
 of Arden in a neighbouring parish. Camden wrote of it in 
 Britannia, printed in 1582 : " Sylvestrem regionem nunc 
 perlustremus, quae trans Avonam flumen ad Septentriones 
 expanditur spatio multi maiori, maximam partem nemoribus 
 infessa, nee tamen sine pascuis, arvis et variis ferri venis. 
 Haec ut hodie Woodland, id est, Regio Sylvestris, ita etiam 
 Arden antiquiori nomine olim diccbatur." 
 
 This Woodland of Arden must have been one of Shake- 
 speare's haunts in his boyhood. There he could have played 
 truant or devoted his holidays to delightful adventures in the 
 dusk of the trees. These imaginary adventures were echoed 
 in the terrible doings of Titus Andronicus and in the happiness 
 and merriment marked by the melancholy Jaques in the 
 
 375
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 pleasant Forest of Arden, a home of outlaws, *' nee tamen sine 
 pascuis, arvis." 
 
 Shakespeare must have been always of imagination all 
 compact, like the Lunatics and Lovers and Poets of whom he 
 wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and this would have 
 made him restless and excited by glimpses of the wonderful 
 World beyond the bounds of his home. He must have been 
 always given to dreams, and it may be that one of them was 
 inspired by the sight of an old ruinous house close to 
 the Grammar-School and built by Sir Hugh Clopton, who 
 had returned to these parts after he had been Lord Mayor 
 of London. If, when he should have been at work in the 
 School, he had a vision of escaping from Stratford and of 
 earning money and fame not to be found there and of buying 
 that house and of ending his days in it and of being com- 
 memorated by a tomb as admired as Hugh Clopton's, it was 
 a natural dream and one which was destined to come true. 
 And indeed it appears safe to infer that dream from his story. 
 He may have always held as he did when he wrote The Rape 
 of Lucre ce : 
 
 The aim of all is but to nurse this life 
 With honour, wealth and ease in waning age. 
 
 It might be well if students would agree to conclude that 
 like most other people he often did the natural thing. For 
 instance, his wish to secure the modest rank of a gentleman 
 was a natural one, particularly if he believed that he was 
 descended from Knights ; and if he took pride in it (as seems 
 to be shown by his bequest of his sword, the sign of that 
 rank) he behaved in this as everyone else would have done 
 then. And for a boy who was fond of Acting and Poetry (as 
 he must have been and as Aubrey wrote that he was), there 
 could have been nothing more natural than joining the Players. 
 He may have tried the part of an usher in a neighbouring 
 school first (as Aubrey recorded), but this could have brought 
 him neither money nor fame. A Player's life, transfigured 
 to him as it must have been in his happy glimpses of it, 
 offered him a chance of becoming rich and admired and of 
 meanwhile observing the strange ways of the Londoners 
 or riding at ease all over England in Summer-time, heralded 
 
 376
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE AS A PLAYER 
 
 by trumpets and drums. He had in his heart the stuff of 
 which Kings and heroes ought to be made, but he could 
 only wear the Crown of his dreams in the imaginary Realm 
 of the Theatre. 
 
 It would have been natural to begin this delightful life 
 as soon as he could. Dowdall's assertion that he had been a 
 butcher's apprentice and ran from his master to London 
 and there was received into the Play-House as a servitor seems 
 to indicate a local belief that he was very young when he 
 went. Such a belief would be supported by Rowe's statement, 
 that " he was received into the Company then in being in 
 a very mean rank," and by the tradition preserved by Edmund 
 Malone in 1780, according to which "his first ofhce in the 
 theatre was that of a prompter's attendant." 
 
 It would be supported, too, by the story recorded by 
 Johnson, according to which he began as a horse-boy at the 
 door of the theatre, if we could accept it, but this is plainly 
 untrue. The education received at the Grammar-School, 
 though it may have been scant, would have secured him 
 better-paid work in those illiterate days, and he could have 
 made friends with the Players when they visited Stratford, 
 and so have obtained employment more to his mind. Besides, 
 his claim to gentility would have turned him from this. If 
 the horse-boys were called " Shakespeare's boys," as Johnson 
 alleged, this may have been because he employed them when 
 he worked for the Stage, making money by this as Burbage 
 did when he provided the horses. It may be that he was 
 thinking of himself when he wrote in As Tou Like It, 
 
 At seventeen many their fortunes seek. 
 
 This would agree with Aubrey's account that " he came to 
 London, I guess, about eighteen." 
 
 The only other things known about him before 1592, when 
 Greene attacked Shake-scene in A Groafszuorth of Wit, are 
 that in May, 1583, the baptism of his daughter Susanna 
 was registered in Holy Trinity Church, and that the baptisms 
 of his two other children, the twins Hamnet and Judith, were 
 registered there in February, 1585, and that he joined his 
 father in a legal conveyance in 1587. We do not know when 
 or where he was married ; but if a marriage-bond, dated 
 
 377
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 November the twenty-fifth, 1582, is genuine and connected 
 with him, this may mean that he had been married illegally 
 (as, for instance, the Catholics often were), for his daughter 
 Susanna was probably born in May, 1583. 
 
 There is nothing to show that he did not begin to work 
 with the'Players before he was married. If he joined them 
 first he showed common sense in postponing his marriage till 
 he was earning a livelihood. In any case his age when he 
 married was the usual one for marriages then. And he showed 
 common sense, too, if he left his wife and children in Stratford, 
 where they could live cheaply among friends and relations, 
 instead of making them share his London life or his wanderings 
 when his Company travelled. We have no proof that he took 
 this natural course, and if he did we have no reason to doubt 
 that he often visited them. The journey was easy : a couple 
 of days' jogging ride through the open fields, with a rest in 
 the seclusion of Oxford, w^ould have brought him to Clopton's 
 low bridge over the Avon and the tall wooden spire of Holy 
 Trinity Church. A person so insignificant could have been 
 there constantly without any mention of the fact in the 
 Records, and Aubrey asserted that " he was wont to go to his 
 native country once a year." Such visits would have been 
 natural if he had shown an average fondness for his wife and 
 his children, and he is seen in his Plays as one who could 
 have said with Macduff, 
 
 I cannot but remember such things were 
 That were most precious to me. 
 
 When he joined the Players he may well have begun in 
 some mean employment, as a call-boy, for instance (as the 
 tradition recorded by Malone asserts), while he was learning 
 his trade, but there must have been scope for a youth who 
 was fit to act the part of a gentleman. And if the Ely House 
 Portrait is genuine he probably looked girlish enough to take 
 the feminine parts. Such a recruit must have been valuable, 
 for few of the Players had any claim to refinement. 
 
 He was about twenty-eight when Robert Greene attacked 
 Shake-scene in his Groafszvorth of Wit. Henry Chettlc wrote 
 in his Ki7id Hearfs Dream^ which was entered in the Stationers' 
 Register on the eighth of December, 1592 : "About three 
 
 378
 
 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON 
 
 months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers 
 in sundry booksellers' hands, among other his Groafszuorth of 
 Wit, in which a letter written to divers Playmakers is offensively 
 by one or two of them taken ; and because on the dead they 
 cannot be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceits a 
 living author ; and after tossing it to and fro, no remedy but 
 it must light on me. . . . With neither of them that take 
 offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if 
 I never be. The other, whom at that time I did not so much 
 spare as since I wish I had, for that, as I have moderated the 
 heat of living writers and might have used my own discretion — 
 especially in such a case, the author being dead — that I did 
 not I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, 
 because myself I have seen his demeanour no less civil, than he 
 excellent in the quality he professes, besides divers of worship 
 have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his 
 honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his 
 wit." Though Shakespeare was not one of the Play-makers 
 to whom the Groat' sworth of Wit was addressed this apology 
 may have been offered to him. 
 
 The insults to Shake-scene may prove that Shakespeare 
 succeeded first as a Player and afterwards as a writer of Plays 
 of every variety before 1592, and may assert that he considered 
 himself the best of the dramatists and the allusions to buckram 
 gentlemen and peasants may mean that the upstart crow was a 
 Rustic who affected gentility. If the apology was intended for 
 him it proves that he was apt to resent insults and punish them. 
 
 Apart from this we have no means of knowing what 
 anyone thought of Shakespeare while he was living in London. 
 The notion that he was considered unusually gentle and sweet 
 seems based on the fact that Ben Jonson wrote in the Verses 
 prefixed to the First Folio : 
 
 Thy art, 
 My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part, 
 
 and called him " Sweet Swan of Avon," and said in Discoveries 
 that he had " brave notions and gentle expressions." He may 
 have used the word " gentle " in its old meaning " courteous," 
 employed, for instance, by Chaucer in his account of his 
 Knight, and when he made his Host say to the Shipman, 
 
 379
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Now long may thou sail by the coast 
 Sir, gentil master, gentil mariner. 
 
 He seems to have used " brave " in a sense nearer its French 
 origin than it conveys to us now when he applied it to notions. 
 In any case, " gentle " and " sweet " were common terms of 
 address used with no particular meaning. When, for instance, 
 in the third Act of Poetaster Crispinus addressed Horace as 
 " Sweet Horace " and " Gentle Horace," he did not assert 
 that the obstreperous Jonson-Horace was either gentle or 
 sweet. Jonson would have been the last to apply these terms 
 to himself or to consider them praise. So, too, when Shake- 
 speare was called " sweet " in the Return from Parftassus the 
 epithet was not intended for praise, and it referred to his 
 Poems as when Weever called him " honey-tongued Shake- 
 speare," in 1597. If he had always been gentle, Greene would 
 not have called him a Tiger wrapped in a Player's hide, neither 
 would Chettle have made haste to apologize when offence 
 had been taken, nor would Thomas Heywood have written 
 in the Postcript to his Apology for Actors, printed in 161 2, 
 about some of the Poems in the Passionate Pilgrim, " the 
 author, I know, was much offended with Mr. Jaggard that 
 (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with 
 his name." 
 
 The only epithet which seems to be personal is the term 
 " friendly," applied to him when Anthony Scoloker wrote, with 
 some condescension, of " the vulgar's element, friendly 
 Shakespeare's Tragedies." Friendliness is not so uncommon 
 that there is any need to attach importance to this : it does 
 not tell us so much as we are told when we learn that Marlowe 
 was called haughty and kind. And even if we could take 
 this as a sign that Shakespeare showed a particular friendliness 
 we have no proof that he ever had a particular friend. In 
 those days devoted friendships were common, but no one 
 ever professed friendship with him except Heminge and 
 Condell, who were his partners for many years, and Ben 
 Jonson, whose tardy claim is open to doubt. No one seems 
 to' have called Fletcher friendly, but he lived on such terms 
 with Beaumont that they had all things in common, even 
 their clothes, and, after that beloved friend died, clung to 
 
 380
 
 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON 
 
 Massinger with so much affection that (according to Sir 
 Aston Cockayne) they were not divided in death, for they 
 share the same grave. The fact that Shakespeare left the 
 usual legacies to three of the Players and five of his townsmen 
 and one man, Thomas Russell (who may have been a merchant 
 in London), cannot be taken as showing that they were close 
 friends of his. And if it was interpreted in that way it would 
 prove that he did not count Jonson or any other author of 
 those days as a friend dear enough to deserve such remem- 
 brance. The only other man named as a friend of his was 
 John Davenant, a Vintner and Innkeeper at Oxford, of 
 whom Antony a Wood recorded that he " was an admirer 
 and lover of Plays and Play-makers," and was " of a melan- 
 choly disposition and was seldom or never seen to laugh." 
 Shakespeare seems to have stopped at Davenant's Inn on 
 his journeys between London and Stratford, and there is no 
 sign that they met anywhere else. 
 
 We know very little about his London abodes. He seems 
 to have lived for some years before 1596 in one of the houses 
 built from the ruins of a Priory in St. Helens in Bishopsgate, 
 and we only know this because he did his best to avoid paying 
 his taxes. In 1596 he moved to the sinful Suburb of South- 
 wark, near the Bear Garden. If he was living alone it is 
 probable that these homes were in lodgings. The first one 
 was not far from the Theatre in Shoreditch, and the other 
 was near the Swan and Rose theatres and the field which was 
 chosen for the site of the Globe in 1599. There is evidence 
 that in 1604 he " lay in the house " of a wigmaker named 
 Mount-joy, who had a shop in Silver Street in the City. 
 Since there is no sign that he lodged there at any other time 
 and no further evidence of his living in Southwark, this may 
 mean that he only visited London in 1604, perhaps to walk 
 in the King's Procession that year as one of his Servants. 
 
 It may be that while he was living in London he wrote 
 his Plays in the hours which he could snatch from the Stage 
 or from his chief pleasure, a delighted perusal of the ways of 
 Mankind. Most of the English lived then by daylight. 
 For instance, we read in William Harrison's Descrtptio?t of 
 England, printed in 1577, that most people rose at dawn, 
 dined about noon and had supper at five or six ; and 
 
 381
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 forty years later Nicholas Breton gave a similar account in 
 Fantastikes. We know from Shakespeare's Poems and Plays 
 that (like Dante) he was a lover of Dawn from the time when 
 he wrote the beginning of Venus and Adonis in Youth till 
 the night came when he could have echoed Antony's cry. 
 
 Oh Sun, thy uprise shall I see no more. 
 
 And he could have found no better time for his writing than 
 in the early hours of the morning before the street-cries and 
 interruptions began. 
 
 It is probable that he was described in one of Aubrey's 
 notes : " The more to be admired q. he was not a company- 
 keeper, lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched, and if 
 invited to writ he was in pain." Though this note is followed 
 by the name W. Shakespeare, Sir Sidney Lee argues that it 
 cannot refer to him, saying : " If Shakespeare were intended 
 the words would mean that he avoided social dissipation, 
 that he resided in Shoreditch and that the practice of writing 
 caused him pain. None of these statements have any co- 
 herence with better attested information." We have no 
 evidence that Shakespeare indulged in social dissipation in 
 London ; he seems to have lived near Shoreditch first, and the 
 words, " when invited to writ he was in pain," cannot mean 
 that this man did not write with facility — they only assert 
 that he was accustomed to write that he was in pain when he 
 was invited to take part in debauchery. 
 
 This answer may have been humorous like the others 
 recorded when he mocked Burbage, calling himself William 
 the Conqueror, and referred to Ben Jonson's many translations 
 from the writers of Rome, advising him to translate latten 
 spoons, and when (if he was the poet described in Nhie Days'' 
 Wonder) he sent Kemp to annoy him. And the vanity of which 
 he was accused if he was drawn as Crispinus or as the author 
 attacked in Cynthia's Revels or as Poet-Ape or as Shake- 
 scene may have been also humorous and intended to mock 
 duller companions, as Mcrcutio's was. It may have been like 
 the apish humour ascribed to the penny poet by Kemp and 
 equally apt to alienate its victims from him. Perhaps he 
 could have said of himself with Chaucer in the Rime of Sir 
 T hop as : 
 
 382
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S ATTITUDE 
 
 He seemeth elvish by his countenance. 
 
 But if he was painted in the Ely House Portrait the elfishness 
 which may have been visible in him when he was younger, 
 making him different from his stolid associates, and the 
 vanity which may have repelled them had been hidden by 
 weariness. 
 
 If he replied that he was in pain when he was invited to 
 be debauched, this may show that he was often ailing in 
 health and so could plead that excuse. This was probably 
 true if we can trust the Ely House Portrait or the Droeshout 
 Engraving, and it would help to account for the attitude to 
 be seen in his Plays. 
 
 He wrote in them as if he was standing apart. In the 
 Plays of his Youth and in his Midsummer Dreams he remem- 
 bered the lost glamour of boyhood and of Rustical wonder, 
 and in his darker Plays he looked on the World (as he confessed 
 in the Sonnets) askance and strangely. He wrote of battles 
 as if he had only seen them fought on the Stage, and of the 
 Chase as if he had watched it pass by. 
 
 Much marked by the melancholy Jaques, 
 
 not as one who had ever found happiness in killing a rabbit : 
 his heart went with the hunted hare and the wounded stag 
 and the calf dragged to the slaughter. He wrote of the Sea 
 with an instinctive alarm (natural enough in a woodlander 
 from the middle of England), and when his people ventured 
 on it they were almost sure to be wrecked. There is no sign 
 that he had rivalled their courage, for his pictures of France 
 and Italy are full of mistakes. He drew his sailors as rufhans 
 (like the billows they sailed), and frequently drunk, which they 
 probably were when he met them in the haunts of Iniquity 
 where the theatres stood or tried to amuse them while 
 they fought in the Pit. If he had known more of their life 
 he would not have thought that the ship-boys were accustomed 
 to sleep on the high and giddy masts (as he seems to do in the 
 Second Part of King Henry the Fourth) ^ or that the masts 
 were high and giddy in days when few ships were as big as the 
 Golden Hindy of a hundred tons. 
 
 He could not have observed everything, as we know that 
 
 383
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 he did, if he had been prominent in action himself. Perhaps 
 he could have said with Romeo, 
 
 I'll be a candle-holder and look on, 
 
 because the man who is looking on sees most of the game. 
 
 This aloof attitude may also denote that he bore himself 
 with an air of fallen gentility, for this was a thing which 
 would have kept him apart. And it may be that an outer 
 inactivity made his imagination more restless. Sidney's life 
 was adventurous, but in the Arcadia we find the inimitable note 
 of serenity. Shakespeare's Plays were only serene when he 
 rested in three quieter dreams, As Toti Like It, The Tempest, 
 and the fourth Act of The Wiiiter^s Tale : the others are 
 throbbing with an excited vitality. 
 
 Ill-health would also help to account for his retirement 
 to Stratford and for his death before he was old. In 1596 
 he suffered a blow which must have darkened his life when his 
 son Hamnct died, aged eleven. We know nothing of Hamnet, 
 but a boy prematurely wise (as sickly boys often are) and 
 doomed to premature death lives in some of the Plays ; for 
 instance, as a Prince in King John and in King Richard the 
 Third, and as Macduff's son in Macbeth, and as Mamilius in 
 The Winter'^s Tale. While the boy lived Shakespeare may 
 have wanted more money because it would enable him to 
 establish his stock in a position which Fortune had not granted 
 to him. Now he had only to obtain a provision for himself 
 and his wife and for the dowers of a couple of daughters, and 
 this change may have lessened his interest in his work on the 
 Stage. This seems to be indicated by the fact that he bought 
 the old house in Stratford-on-Avon in the following year. 
 
 We do not know when he returned to make his home in 
 Stratford-on-Avon. John Ward's statement that " he fre- 
 quented the Plays all his younger time, but in his elder days 
 lived in Stratford and supplied the Stage with two Plays 
 every year," does not support the common belief that he only 
 returned to his home when he had finished his Plays. And 
 that belief docs not account for the change seen in his Plays 
 after 1603. Gcrvinus, seeing that change, compromised by 
 suggesting that he forsook his trade as a Player in 1603 but 
 still lived in London till he had finished his Plays and then 
 
 384
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND STRATFORD 
 
 returned to Stratford to rest. Nicholas Rowe said that " the 
 latter part of his life was spent, as all men of good sense will 
 wish theirs may be, in ease and retirement and the conversation 
 of his friends." This is one of the questions which we can 
 only decide in accordance with our ideas of Shakespeare. I 
 think that he is shown in his Plays as a man who would have 
 valued the love of his family and the peace of his home. 
 It is recorded that his family loved him, for, according to 
 Dowdall, " his wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be 
 laid in the same grave with him," and we have no reason to 
 doubt that he returned their affection. 
 
 New Place, his last home at Stratford, seems to have been 
 a rambling house of dim rooms with a long garden running 
 down to the Avon. He bought stone for repairing it in 
 1598, and was described in that year in a local inventory as a 
 householder in Chapel Street, owning a large stock of corn and 
 malt, and in 1602 he bought about a hundred acres of arable 
 land near Stratford. Though a lawyer named Greene, alias 
 Shakespeare, who may have been a cousin of his, seems to 
 have lived in the house in 1609, this cannot prove that Shake- 
 speare had not made it his home, for the foundations show 
 that there was plenty of room for hospitality in it. 
 
 There is nothing to show that he preferred to live in 
 lodgings over a shop in London for many years after this 
 pleasant home was ready for him in the kind air of Warwick- 
 shire and in the quiet which his fathers had loved and among 
 men who had been children there when he was a child. 
 Perhaps he could have said with Camoens : 
 
 Mas se o sereno ceo me concedera 
 Quelquer quieto, humilde e dolce estado, 
 Onde com minhas Musas so vivera 
 Sem ver-me em terra alheia degradado. 
 
 And he may have returned to the country in 1603, like 
 Drayton, partly because the new King had brought changes 
 which were not to his mind. 
 
 It is certain that he could have devoted himself to Tragical 
 Work better if he was living away from the noises and interrup- 
 tions of London and all the petty feuds of the men who 
 jangled in the pot-houses there and delivered at last from the 
 
 385 BB
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 humiliating trade of the Stage. And it may be that the 
 dignity and the burning emotion of his Tragical Work after 
 1603 arc signs that he was living in peace. 
 
 We know little of Shakespeare's life at Stratford-on-Avon 
 in his elderly days. John Ward's account of it, written 
 between 1661 and 1663, must be inaccurate : he wrote : " He 
 supplied the Stage with two Plays every year, and for this 
 had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of a 
 thousand a year, as I have heard." We can be certain that 
 Plays were never bought at this price then, and though it is 
 probable that Shakespeare was drawing an income from his 
 share in his Company during " his elder days " and we know 
 that he had other investments, he could not have spent a 
 thousand a year in Stratford-on-Avon unless he had thrown 
 his money out of the window. 
 
 This sum would have been equal to six thousand Pounds, 
 at least, of our money, and we can be sure that Sir Thomas 
 Lucy of Charlcote did not live at this rate. If a townsman 
 with only a narrow garden behind his house had done it he 
 must have been exceedingly generous, and there is no trace 
 that Shakespeare made benefactions beyond his bequest of 
 ten Pounds to the Poor of Stratford-on-Avon. 
 
 We can infer from some lawsuits that when he lent money 
 (which was probably seldom) he took good care that it was 
 repaid, and we know that the Corporation of Stratford had 
 the pleasure of paying twenty pence for wine for a preacher 
 who was entertained in his house in 1614. These things do 
 not suggest a lavish manner of life. All we know of his invest- 
 ments appears to indicate a thriftiness natural in a man of 
 his class, and this is also suggested by the letter about a loan 
 from him, written by Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney 
 in 1598, and by Adrian Quiney's message to his son at that 
 time : " If you bargain with William Shakespeare or re- 
 ceive money therefor, bring your money home that you 
 may." 
 
 Shakespeare could not have worn rich clothes in Stratford, 
 a little town which looked like a straggling farm and mainly 
 consisted of two modest streets with streams running through 
 them. Food was cheap there because it was the produce of 
 
 386
 
 SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD 
 
 the neighbouring farms. Even wine was not dear, and the 
 bill for the preacher's entertainment may mean that no wine 
 was kept in New Place. A man living at Stratford in a natural 
 way could have spent little ; but Ward's legend may show that 
 Shakespeare was thought rich (as the little town reckoned 
 wealth), and we can infer from this that he was respected. 
 
 His trade and his father's must have debarred him from 
 any equality with the Warwickshire Squires ; but he seems 
 to have lived with the men of the highest rank in Stratford-on- 
 Avon, and we can be sure that in those days (as in these) 
 such men, who were shopkeepers in a prosperous way, did 
 not consort with their less fortunate neighbours. But he 
 may have been eccentric in this. He may have grown tired 
 of their talk and dignity sometimes and found it pleasant to 
 sit on a bench in front of an Inn in some woodland village, 
 when he needed repose, and hear the slow wisdom of the 
 neighbouring Rustics (what a relief after Ben Jonson's violent 
 scholarship !), and he may even have drunk some of the honest 
 Ale of those days in their delightful society. Such an outrage 
 against the rigid conventions of an English market-town 
 would explain the tales of drunken exploits with the rustical 
 topers, if they were current before they were recorded in 
 London in 1762. Stratford seems to have been as given to 
 gossip as such places commonly are, for in 1 61 3 his daughter 
 Susanna brought an action for slander against one of her 
 neighbours. While it is true that there is no smoke without 
 fire, it is also true that a little fire may cause a great smoke 
 when all the substance is rubbish. Apart from this eccen- 
 tricity, which cannot be proved, we have no reason to doubt 
 that he lived in the dignity which he always desired. 
 
 It may be that he turned more to books, such as the 
 younger Seneca's Philosophical Works, in these days because 
 there was so little to do when he was not writing, and that he 
 found a natural pleasure in the society of his wife and his 
 children and after February, 1 607-1 608, of his grandchild, 
 Elizabeth. 
 
 If he resembled Jaques more than Mercutio when he 
 began to be elderly, or if the Ely House Portrait is genuine, 
 he would have found the ancient tranquillity of Stratford 
 delightful and would have haunted the old Woodland of
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Ardcn, seeking quietness there instead of imagining adventures 
 in it, saying with Surrey, 
 
 And when I saw the World so pleasant all about. 
 Lord ! to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out. 
 
 Warwickshire must have been pleasant to an exile returning, 
 who had always remembered the dusk of the woody lanes by 
 his home and the light on the many orchards in Spring and 
 the scent of the bean-fields when the Summer was there. 
 We can be sure that he could have said in these years 
 with Abraham Cowley : 
 
 Ah ! wretched and most solitary he 
 Who loves not his own company, 
 
 for he could not have lived in his Plays unless he had been 
 often alone, and the talk of his neighbours would have been 
 wasted on him when (though they did not see any change) 
 he was Cleopatra, exclaiming, 
 
 I am again for Cydnus 
 To meet Mark Antony. 
 
 If he had no intimate friends this may have been partly 
 due to the fact that his imagination provided him with greater 
 companions. In that case his loss was our gain, and so was his 
 ill-health, if indeed he suffered from it, because it made him 
 live in his dreams, and so was the ill-luck which condemned 
 him to the trade of a mountebank. It may be that in the end 
 he owed most to the things which must have seemed dis- 
 advantages. Because his education was scant his mind was 
 not moulded by other men in his boyhood and his eyes were 
 not dimmed and he did not learn to look on the World 
 through the spectacles of the dead. Because he was debarred 
 from other ambitions he was led to become his Country's 
 proudest claim to remembrance, though this must have been 
 hidden from him when he made himself a motley in London 
 or in the Suburbs, or rode into country towns, heralded by 
 trumpets and drums, to sue to their proud Mayors for 
 permission to show Plays in the Town-halls. If he believed 
 himself entitled by birth to a more dignified life, this was 
 fortunate also, though it must have embittered his daily 
 
 388
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S RELIGION 
 
 paths, for it helped him to live loftily, disdaining the Mob, 
 without affectation, in the World of his Plays, and to speak 
 greatly when he was illustrious there. 
 
 He was fortunate in other things, too. He began to write 
 for the Stage when Lyly's and Peele's delightful Comedies 
 had opened one path for him and Marlowe and Kyd had 
 taught him how to write Tragedies, and in times when the 
 Drama was still the literature of the illiterate, thrilling with 
 England's national life. He was the last writer in touch with 
 Chaucer and dealing, as Chaucer did, mainly with tales of an 
 immemorial antiquity ; and his was the last voice of the 
 Strolling Players of England. He was fortunate, too, in 
 growing to manhood at England's proudest time and in 
 watching the coloured and vivid life of those days. England 
 was still musical then — even the Rustics had their part-songs 
 and Madrigals, and Peele could introduce Harvest-men in 
 his Old Wives^ Tale, singing, 
 
 All ye, that lovely lovers be, 
 
 Pray you for me, 
 
 Lo, here we come a sowing, a sowing, a sowing, 
 
 And sow sweet fruits of love. 
 
 But the musical and mirth-loving England which Chaucer 
 had known was passing away when Shakespeare turned to his 
 Tragedies in the beginning of a different time. And it may 
 be that in his last years at Stratford he had the more need to 
 take refuge in the World of his Plays because, though his own 
 lot was more pleasant, England was passing from the pride 
 he had known to shame and calamity. 
 
 In those days (as in these) many Englishmen were apt to 
 be neutral in Religious affairs or to be reticent about their 
 beliefs. It may be that this national reticence is enough to 
 explain why we cannot be sure whether he professed any 
 Religion. It was then very common because there were many 
 who had no wish to be martyrs. We cannot guess his Creed 
 by debating whether his father was a Catholic Recusant or 
 by concluding that his mother remained a Catholic because 
 she was an Arden, for he would have decided such a thing 
 for himself. Neither can we be guided by the fact that 
 
 389
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 his baptism was registered in Holy Trinity Church or by the 
 fact that he was buried in it, for these things could have 
 happened in any case. 
 
 The Catholics were accustomed to register baptisms in the 
 neighbouring Churches because it was compelled by the Law 
 and they had no other Register. And if no Priest could be had 
 in days when Priests were few and in hiding, Baptism there 
 was valid to them. They buried their dead in the old Churches 
 or Cemeteries (which were still consecrated ground in their 
 eyes), because they had no others. Indeed, after 1610 they 
 were liable to a fine if they buried their dead anywhere else. 
 No Catholic would have been reluctant to choose a grave in 
 Holy Trinity Church at the foot of the Altar where the Mass 
 had been said for hundreds of years. 
 
 Shakespeare had a right to a grave in the chancel of Holy 
 Trinity Church because in 1605 he bought a share in the 
 leasehold of the tithes. It is probable that this place was 
 renowned for a particular holiness, for it was the custom to 
 bury the dead there for a time and then remove their bones 
 to a Charnel-house, and this seems to have been only done 
 when a church had some unusual privilege, as when it was 
 believed that some of the earth in it had been brought from 
 Jerusalem. This custom may explain why he protected his 
 last rest with those Verses, 
 
 Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear 
 
 To dig the dust enclosed here : 
 
 Blest be the man that spares these stones. 
 
 And curst be he that moves my bones. 
 
 And it may be that the curse had more effect than he wished 
 when (according to Dowdall) it prevented the burial of his 
 widow and his two daughters with him, for the depth of the 
 grave, seventeen feet, suggests that room was left for them 
 there. 
 
 If we knew nothing about his private affairs it would be 
 easy to infer from his Plays that he began as a Catholic. He 
 wrote in them not merely with reverence for Friars and Nuns 
 in a time when they were banned by the Law, but also with 
 an intimate knowledge of the Catholic Church, which can 
 only be recognised by students who share it. Some of his 
 
 390
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S RELIGION 
 
 Catholic phrases have been misinterpreted, as, for instance, 
 when Schmidt in his Shakespeare Lexicon said that JuHa's 
 words in The Two Gentlemeri of Verona, " I see you have a 
 month's mind to them," referred to a woman's longing for 
 a particular food. The " month's mind " was merely the 
 name first used for the month of remembrance during which 
 daily Masses were offered for the souls of the dead, and now 
 applied to the Mass said for them a month after death. 
 Because the phrase meant a short remembrance it came to 
 mean a passing affection, as when (according to the State 
 Papers) John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton in 1 613 : 
 " There is whispered that Count Henry of Nassau hath a 
 month's mind for my lord of Northumberland's daughter." 
 
 Even when Shakespeare has been commonly taken as 
 showing ignorance of Catholic ways he was correct, as when 
 he wrote of Evening Mass in Verona, for Mass was some- 
 times said in the evening (as is recorded in Martene's De 
 Antiquis Ecclesiae Ritibus, printed in 1699), though this 
 custom had been disapproved by Pope Pius the Fifth, who 
 died in 1572. 
 
 This knowledge and attitude are all the more notable 
 because they are not seen in the writings of other men who 
 were Catholics during part of their lives, such as Lodge and 
 Donne and Ben Jonson. This knowledge may be partly 
 explained by the fact that his mind dwelt in the Past. Though 
 he mirrored his times he never set his stories in them, unless 
 we can take The Merry Wives of Windsor (in spite of its use 
 of Falstaff's name) and the Induction to The Taming of the 
 Shrew as intended to belong to his day. If nearly all his 
 Plays sprang from the Traditional Stage they were rooted 
 in the Catholic times. 
 
 Froude wrote in his History of England : " Shakespeare's 
 Plays were as much the offspring of the long generations who 
 had pioneered his road for him as the discoveries of Newton 
 were the offspring of those of Copernicus." And Carlyle 
 wrote in his Lectures on Heroes : " In some sense it may be 
 said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakespeare, 
 as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, 
 is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. 
 The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's song, 
 
 391
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 had produced the Practical Age which Shakespeare was to 
 sing. For ReHgion then, as it now and always is, was the 
 soul of Practice, the primary vital fact in men's life. And 
 remark here, as rather curious, that Middle Age Catholicism 
 was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, 
 before Shakespeare, the noblest product of it, made his 
 appearance." 
 
 It was easy then to dwell in the Past, since London was 
 little changed and Stratford was less. London Bridge was 
 still garnished with grinning heads, pecked by the crows, 
 prisoners still went to the Tower, and the gabled houses 
 stooping above the cobbled streets were the same ; while in 
 Stratford-on-Avon the people lived mainly as their fathers 
 had done for hundreds of years, spreading rushes on the floors 
 of their rooms and using no forks (according to Coryat) and 
 disliking all changes and very little affected by the invention 
 of printed books, which few ever opened. Thirty years before 
 Shakespeare was born the Pilgrims were still riding to Canter- 
 bury as they had done in Chaucer's Catholic days. So he 
 could have learnt all about the Catholic customs in his boyhood 
 at Stratford without adopting that Creed. 
 
 It is probable that Stratford, like many other country 
 places, remained Catholic for several years after Queen 
 Elizabeth ceased to profess that Religion in 1558. The 
 Vestments kept in Holy Trinity Church were not destroyed 
 till 1 571 ; John Brethgirdle, who succeeded a Marian Priest 
 as Vicar in 1560, had no licence to preach and was unmarried, 
 and after his death in 1565 there seems to have been no Vicar 
 till 1569. And Simon Hunt, who was the master at the 
 Grammar-School from 1571 to 1577, became a Jesuit in 1578. 
 Sir Sidney Lee thinks that Shakespeare " probably made his 
 entry in 1571," and probably left the Grammar-School in 
 1577, when he was thirteen. If this is right, Shakespeare was 
 taught only by Hunt. 
 
 Though we have no trace that he was named in any 
 Recusant List this can prove nothing, for a great many 
 Catholics escaped or avoided that unpleasant distinction. Ben 
 Jonson, for instance, though he professed the Catholic Creed 
 so publicly that he appointed himself to represent the rest 
 of the Catholics when he denounced the Gunpowder Plot in 
 
 392
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S RELIGION 
 
 Westminster Hall in 1605, does not seem to have figured in a 
 Recusant List or to have been troubled in any way except 
 when the Wicked Earl of Northampton (who died a Catholic) 
 threatened to prosecute him for Popery in revenge for a 
 thrashing administered to one of his servants. 
 
 We know that Shakespeare's two daughters had BibHcal 
 names which were not often used in Catholic families, and 
 that both married men who seem to have been inclined to be 
 Puritans. Susanna, the elder, married John Hall, a physician, 
 who if he was a Puritan was a tolerant one, for he had many 
 CathoHc patients ; and Judith married Thomas Quiney 
 without a licence in Lent, and was excommunicated for this 
 soon after Shakespeare's death. Still, his daughters' probable 
 Creed cannot prove Shakespeare's since, for instance, the 
 third Earl of Southampton brought his sons up as Protestants 
 though he did not become one till 1609. But it may show 
 that if he was a Catholic at all he was tepid, like the Earl of 
 Southampton. 
 
 When his daughter Susanna died in 1643 somebody wrote 
 in her epitaph, which is still to be seen in Holy Trinity Church, 
 
 Witty above her. sex, but that's not all. 
 Wise to Salvation, was good Mistress Hall : 
 Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this 
 Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss. 
 
 This seems to assert that Shakespeare had not been wise to 
 Salvation, and it probably means that he had not professed 
 his son-in-law's Creed. This may mean that he stood apart 
 from all the Religions or that the Vicar of Sapperton was 
 right when he recorded of him in a note written before 1708, 
 that " he died a Papist." It does not seem probable that the 
 Vicar of Sapperton would have asserted this unless he believed 
 it ; but we do not know what evidence would have satisfied 
 him. Even if this statement was true it would not prove that 
 Shakespeare lived as a Catholic, since in those days many 
 people (including some, such as Penelope Devereux and the 
 Earl of Northampton, who were never remarkably religious) 
 became Catholics at the end, when the risk of persecution 
 was over. 
 
 If his daughters both married men who were inclined to 
 
 393
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 be Puritans, we can infer that he was not hostile to the 
 Puritan Creed, and this seems borne out by the fact that a 
 preacher was entertained at his house in 1614. Since the 
 Corporation of Stratford was mainly Puritan then, this 
 preacher was probably a Puritan one. 
 
 Sir Sidney Lee writes, " Shakespeare's references to 
 Puritans in the Plays of his middle and later life are so uniformly 
 discourteous that they must be judged to reflect his personal 
 feelings " ; but this is a mistake. In the fourth Act of ^he 
 Winter''s Tale the Clown says that the shearers are " Three- 
 man song-men all, and very good ones ; but they are most of 
 them means and bases ; but one Puritan amongst them and 
 he sings psalms to a hornpipe." In the first Act of The Merry 
 Wives of Windsor Mrs. Quickly says of John Rugby, " An 
 honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever servant shall come in 
 house withal, and I warrant you no tell-tale nor no breed-bate ; 
 his worst fault is that he is given to prayer ; he is something 
 peevish that way : but nobody but has his fault ; but let 
 that pass." In the first Act of AlVs Well that Ends Well the 
 Clown says, " If men could be contented to be what they are, 
 there were no fear in marriage ; for young Charbon the Puritan 
 and old Poysam the Papist, howsome'er their hearts are 
 severed in Religion, their heads are both one." And in the 
 second Act of Twelfth Night Maria says of Malvolio, " Marry, 
 Sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan " ; Sir Andrew Ague- 
 cheek says, " Oh, if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog " ; 
 Sir Toby Belch says, " What, for being a Puritan ? Thy 
 exquisite reason, dear Knight " ; and Sir Andrew replies, 
 '' I have no exquisite reason for it ; but I have reason good 
 enough " ; and Maria rejoins, " The devil the Puritan that 
 he is, or anything constantly, but a timc-pleaser." 
 
 The details about John Rugby suggest that he was probably 
 drawn from some one at Stratford for a local performance 
 since they have no effect in the Play, and there is nothing to 
 show that he was a Puritan ; John Marston, for instance, 
 called the Catholics " Peevish Papists." The three allusions 
 to Puritans are put in the mouths of two Clowns and an idiot. 
 Even Sir Andrew cannot furnish a reason, and he says later, 
 " It must be with valour, for Policy I hate : I had as lief be a 
 Brownist as a Politician." 
 
 394
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND PURITANISM 
 
 The Brownists were Separatist Puritans called after Robert 
 Browne, who was imprisoned in England in 1581 and 1584 
 and in Scotland in 1583 and excommunicated in 1586 but 
 then submitted and became Rector of Achurch in 1591. The 
 Politicians were the time-pleasers who were indifferent in 
 Religious affairs. Their name was borrowed from France 
 (where it was first used about 1568, and applied to the men 
 who were neither Huguenots nor opposed to them), and they 
 were described hy Thomas Stapleton in his Sermo Contra 
 Politicos as " polite and civil, elegant and gentleman-like, 
 prudent and wise, turning Religion into Policy and making a 
 mock at zeal." Shakespeare may have been thinking of them 
 when in the fourth Act of King Lear he made the King say. 
 
 Get thee glass eyes. 
 
 And like a scurvy politician, seem 
 
 To see the thing thou dost not. 
 
 Elsewhere in his Plays, as when in the First Part of King Henry 
 the Fourth he made Hotspur say. 
 
 Never did bare and rotten policy 
 
 Colour her working with such deadly wounds, 
 
 and in the first Act of Troilus and Cressida he made Ulysses 
 say. 
 
 They tax our policy and call it cowardice. 
 
 Policy meant crafty discretion. If it was safe to deduce 
 his private opinions from the talk of his Characters we could 
 conclude that he liked the old zeal of the Catholics and the 
 young zeal of the Puritans, who suffered with them, better 
 than the time-serving indifference of the wise Politicians. 
 In those days the Catholic and the Puritan martyrs rivalled 
 one another in courage and the devout men of those Creeds 
 had a great deal in common ; for instance, no Puritan sur- 
 passed the austerity of the Monks of the Charter-House. 
 The Penal Laws which harried them both were mainly the 
 work of Politicians, such as Lord Burghley, who had pro- 
 fessed three Creeds, King Henry the Eighth's and King 
 Edward the Sixth's and Queen Mary's (with a particular 
 
 395
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 zeal because he was terrified) before he decided to establish 
 a Compromise. 
 
 If, as I think, the later Tragedies show that Shakespeare 
 was then attracted hy the Stoic Philosophy (which may be 
 why Ben Jonson's Crispinus proclaimed that he was a Stoic), 
 this would have brought him in touch with the Catholic 
 and Protestant Puritans. But there is no sign of this mood 
 in the Poems written by him when he was young. Susanna 
 Hall's Epitaph and the apparent note of doubt in his Tragedies 
 are the sole signs that he was not a Catholic first and a Puritan 
 afterwards, for Davies' tradition only dealt with his death- 
 bed. 
 
 There were many such changes then. The Recusant 
 Lists of 1592 (which included some Puritans) prove that 
 there were prominent Catholics in Warwickshire then, but 
 do not give us the number. All the Lists of this kind omit 
 many who were certainly Catholic : for instance, the English 
 Protestant's Plea stated that none of the leaders of the Gun- 
 powder Plot had ever been included in them. We know 
 that in 1596 Worcestershire was more notably Catholic and 
 the Puritans were increasing in Warwickshire. In that year 
 Thomas Bilson, who was Bishop of Worcester then, wrote 
 to Sir Robert Cecil : " I have viewed the state of Worcester 
 Diocese, and find it, as may somewhat appear by the par- 
 ticulars here enclosed, of the quantity as dangerous as any 
 place that I know. In that small circuit there are nine 
 score Recusants of note, besides retainers, wanderers and 
 secret lurkers dispersed in forty several parishes, and six 
 score and ten households. . . . Besides, Warwick and the 
 parts thereabout are freighted with a number of men 
 precisely conceited against Her Majesty's Government Eccle- 
 siastical." The Catholics had been increasing in Worcester- 
 shire because Father Edward Oldcorne (who was executed 
 in 1605 and was called by them the Apostle of Worcestershire) 
 had been living at Hindlip near Worcester since 1588 ; and 
 their numbers had grown in Warwickshire between 1588 
 and 1592 because Father Henry Garnet had been hidden 
 there then. In 1605 Warwickshire was a Catholic stronghold, 
 and was a centre of the Gunpowder Plot for that reason 
 and because it was near Catholic Wales. Father John 
 
 396
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND PURITANISM 
 
 Gerard said that Sir Everard Digby had retired into War- 
 wickshire " as into a place of most safety." And when 
 Shakespeare died Warwickshire was notoriously Puritan. 
 It may be that the independence which made the people 
 there cling to the old Creed or return to it made them prefer 
 Puritanism after the tragedy of the Gunpowder Plot in 
 the same way as the Welsh remained Catholic for a long time 
 and turned to Dissent. 
 
 In those days the bigotry which afterwards sundered 
 Englishmen had not become prevalent. For instance, about 
 1618 John Donne, who was then one of the King's Chaplains 
 though he had begun as a Catholic, wrote to Sir Toby 
 Mathew, who was one of the sons of a Welsh Archbishop 
 of York but had become a Catholic when he was aged thirty : 
 " That we differ in our ways, I hope we pardon one another. 
 Men go to China both by the Straits and by the Cape. I 
 never misinterpreted your way, nor suffered it to be so, 
 wheresoever I found it in discourse. . . . This letter doth 
 therefore only ask your safe-conduct for these others of mine, 
 which are to follow, as the most constant testimonies of my 
 love." And Toby Mathew remained Francis Bacon's dearest 
 friend and companion, his " alter ego," after his change. 
 Neither did his change keep him from being Strafford's 
 intimate friend, nor did it make him a bigot, for in the Preface 
 to his Collection of Letters, edited by Donne's son in 1660, 
 he wrote : " There are not to be seen in the whole World 
 either better Catholics or better Protestants than in England." 
 
 Shakespeare may have thought with John Donne that 
 men go to China both by the Straits and by the Cape, or 
 he may not have been concerned with such things because 
 he lived in his dreams till (if Davies was right) he called for 
 a hidden Priest on his death-bed. In either case he could 
 have lived amicably with Puritan neighbours. If he was 
 ever a Puritan or inclined to be one and yet ended a Catholic 
 he was imitated in this by John Milton, according to Milton's 
 brother Sir Christopher, whose word has been doubted by 
 Mr. Mark Pattison and others because he made the same 
 change though this does not seem a good reason for refusing 
 to trust a statement made by a Judge. If he was a Catholic 
 in the troubled days after the Gunpowder Plot, these would 
 
 397
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 have given him reasons for keeping his belief to himself, and 
 this may account for his later hesitation or reticence. But 
 there is no proof that he ever shared the Religion of Mon- 
 taigne and Cervantes. 
 
 If he was ever a Catholic, this would explain, for instance, 
 what caused the marriage-bond of 1582 (if it is genuine and 
 connected with him) and how he came in touch with the 
 young Earl of Southampton, and why he was godfather to 
 one of Ben Jonson's children in Jonson's Catholic days, and 
 why he incurred blame for his silence when other Poets 
 lamented Queen Elizabeth, as from Chettle, who wrote in 
 his England^ s Mourning Garment in 1603, 
 
 Shepherd, remember our Elizabeth 
 
 And mourn her Rape done by our Tarquin, Death, 
 
 and why he wrote in one of his Sonnets, 
 
 My body being dead. 
 The coward conquest of a wretch's knife, 
 
 for only Catholics and Rebels could see a chance of the execu- 
 tioner's knife, the penalty of Treason, and why he took the 
 Catholic view of Oldcastle, and why three Acts of King Henry 
 the Eighth were written from the Catholic standpoint, and 
 why he wrote the last lines of the Epilogue to The Tempest, 
 which may refer to the Catholic doctrine of Indulgences, 
 and if they mean anything must be a plea for prayers after 
 Death, — 
 
 And my ending is despair. 
 
 Unless I be relieved by prayer. 
 
 Which pierces so, that it assaults 
 
 Mercy itself, and frees all faults. 
 
 As you from crimes would pardoned be. 
 
 Let your indulgence set me free. 
 
 Also this would help to explain his darker mood in the 
 times after the Gunpowder Plot when so many Catholics 
 abandoned their Creed, some in shame, some in despair, 
 as is recorded for instance in a private report sent to Rome 
 in 1614 by Father Richard Blount, who was the Superior 
 of the Jesuits then, " I suppose you are informed of our
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S LAST DAYS 
 
 occurrents here : the state of CathoHcs most miserable : 
 many fall away ; those that stand ruined in their temporali- 
 ties." 
 
 He had other reasons for darkness at the end of his life 
 if he cared anything at all about England. Year by year 
 all the prospects of his Country were darkened. In 1614, 
 one of the years in which he visited London, the Addled 
 Parliament gave the signal for the contest which caused the 
 Great Civil War and in the next year, the last he was to 
 finish, Somerset and his wife were arrested for the murder of 
 Overbury. It may be that he could have written with Dray- 
 ton, 
 
 I find this age of ours marked with this fate 
 That honest men are still precipitate 
 Under base villains. . . . 
 To tell my Country's shame I not delight. 
 But do bemoan it I am no Democrite. 
 
 There were other things which may have prevented his 
 finding an unusual happiness at the close of his days. Life 
 had been dear and it was passing away, and he was about to 
 leave his wife and his children. Cervantes died on the same 
 date as he did, the twenty-third of April, 1616 (though not 
 on the same day since England kept the old style), and wrote 
 from his death-bed to the Conde de Lemos : " Ayer me 
 dieron la Extrema Uncion, y hoy escribo esta : el tiempo 
 es breve, las ansias crecen, las esperanzas menguan, y con 
 todo esto llevo la vida sobre el deseo que tengo de vivir." 
 And it may be that Shakespeare found no greater cause to 
 be glad in those April days when he knew that never again 
 would he watch the Spring come to the winding shores of 
 the Avon. 
 
 Besides, the work to which he had given his life seemed 
 to be fruitless, for much of it had not even been printed, 
 and in these altered times the' Stage was degraded and the 
 Puritans, who were rising to power, hoped to destroy it. 
 Even in Stratford the Corporation which met in the Guild- 
 hall close to his house declared that Plays were unlawful 
 and tried to discourage Players from visiting their respectable 
 town in February, i6n-i6i2. In the year of his death a 
 
 399
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 neighbouring town, Henley in Arden, disobeyed the King's 
 licence by forbidding the Players to perform in its Town- 
 hall. If Shakespeare was honoured in his home when he 
 died, it was in spite of the fact that he had been a writer of 
 Plays. It is improbable that he ever imagined what renown 
 he had earned or that he would have valued it much, for 
 what is the use of laurels when one is dead ? And if the 
 Droeshout Engraving resembles him he looked on the World 
 pallidly without consolation. 
 
 When Heminge and Condell dedicated the Folio of 1623 
 to their official patron, the third Earl of Pembroke, who was 
 then the Lord Chamberlain, and to his brother, the first 
 Earl of Montgomery (of whom Clarendon stated, " He 
 pretended to no other qualifications than to understand Horses 
 and Dogs very well") they wrote: "When we value the 
 places your Highnesses sustain we cannot but know their 
 dignity greater than to descend to the reading of these trifles ; 
 and while we have named them trifles we have deprived our- 
 selves of the defence of our Dedication." We have no reason 
 to doubt that this expressed their opinion of the Plays in the 
 Folio. 
 
 Except Francis Meres' tribute in Palladis Tamia, which 
 meant little for he was lavish in praise, we have no record 
 that anyone of any importance took Shakespeare's Tragedies 
 seriously while he was alive. And apart from the Laudatory 
 Verses prefixed to the Folio of 1623 or printed in John Ben- 
 son's edition of the Poems of 1640, which meant little because 
 they were usual, we have no record that anyone who knew 
 him imagined that they were more than entertainments 
 adapted to the taste of the Pit, " the vulgar's element " as 
 Scoloker called them. It is probable that Beaumont referred 
 to them when he wrote to Ben Jonson, 
 
 If thou hadst itched after the wild applause 
 Of common people, and hadst made thy laws 
 In writing such as catcht at present voice, 
 I should commend the thing, but not thy choice. 
 
 Coleridge wrote, " Beaumont and Fletcher sneer at 
 Shakespeare with a spite far more malignant than Jonson." 
 
 400
 
 CONTEMPORARY OPINION 
 
 John Webster in his Address to the Reader prefixed to 
 the White Divel, printed in 1612, named Shakespeare after 
 Chapman and Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher and merely 
 praised " the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake- 
 speare, M. Dckker and M. Heywood." Camden said nothing 
 of him in his Britamiia, and in his Remains concerning Britain 
 mentioned him at the end of a list of ten Authors. John 
 Ford never praised him, even w^hen he tried to revive the 
 Chronicle Histories in his Per kin Warbeck, printed in 1634, 
 and the Prologue to that Play seems to blame Shakespeare's 
 way in such Histories as King Henry the Fourth when it says, 
 
 nor is here 
 Unnecessary mirth forced to endear 
 A multitude. 
 
 John Davies, when he wanted to praise him, called him 
 " our English Terence." Even Milton, though he paid him a 
 tribute in a Sonnet in 1630, wrote two years later in U Allegro, 
 
 Then to the well-trod Stage anon, 
 If Jonson's learned Sock be on, 
 Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy's child, 
 Warble his native woodnotes wild. 
 
 Since the scantness of Drayton's praise and the arrogance 
 of Ben Jonson's opinion may be partly explained by quarrels 
 with Shakespeare, these other verdicts deserve greater atten- 
 tion and they help to explain why Heminge and Condell 
 called the Plays trifles. 
 
 We have no means of knowing whether Shakespeare 
 agreed with them. We might infer that he did if we could 
 conclude that he never thought of printing his Plays, for 
 this might show that he thought little of them or that he 
 left their publication to chance and could have said with 
 Macbeth, 
 
 If Chance will have me King, why. Chance may crown me 
 Without my stir. 
 
 The odds are that he did not think that there was any question 
 of Kingship. He alone knew how far the Plays he had written 
 were inferior to the Plays he had planned. He saw how the 
 
 401 cc
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Plays which had been admired in his Youth had been con- 
 signed to forgetfulness : Lyly's Comedies were buried with 
 Gorboduc ; Greene, Peele and Nashe were names ; Kyd was 
 only remembered because the Pit still enjoyed an altered 
 form of Jeronimo, and even Marlowe was rejected as bar- 
 barous. Though Ben Jonson wrote of " Marlowe's mighty 
 line " in the Verses prefixed to the Folio of 1623 he expressed 
 his real opinion when he wrote of himself in Discoveries, 
 " Though his language differ from the Vulgar somewhat, 
 it shall not fly from all Humanity, with the Tamer-lanes 
 and the Tamer-chams of the late age, who had nothing in 
 them but the Scenical strutting and furious vociferation 
 to warrant them to the ignorant gaper." 
 
 It may be that Shakespeare would have said of his Plays 
 with Theseus, " the best of this kind are but shadows ; and 
 the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them," or with 
 Mercutio, 
 
 I talk of dreams. 
 Which are the children of an idle brain. 
 Begot of nothing but vain fantasy. 
 Which is as thin of substance as the air. 
 
 If he did not try to keep them remembered we might think 
 that (like Prospero) he repented his witchcraft and that 
 instead of attaching importance to the fame of the Stage he 
 only asked for Oblivion (as Marston did when he was dying), 
 and that the Verses on his grave were a prayer to be let alone 
 in its silence, 
 
 Safe from the Wolf's black jaw and the dull Ass's hoof. 
 
 If so that prayer was partly vain. 
 
 The Wild Ass 
 Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep. 
 
 Heminge and Condell, however, wrote in their Address 
 to the Reader : " It had been, we confess, a thing worthy 
 to have been wished that the Author himself had lived to 
 have set forth and over-seen his own Writings : but, since 
 it hath been ordered otherwise, and he by death departed 
 from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office 
 
 402
 
 THE F IRST FOLIO 
 
 of their care and pain to have collected and published them." 
 This may mean that he had intended to publish the Plays 
 in the Folio or to leave them prepared. His bequest of 
 money for rings to Heminge and Condell and to Burbage 
 (who died in 1619) may be a sign that he had entrusted the 
 publication to them when he saw that it was out of his power. 
 In that case he resembled Gil Vicente in this, as in other 
 things, for Vicente (of whom Andres de Resende wrote, 
 
 Gillo, auctor et actor, 
 
 Gillo, jocis levibus doctus perstrlngere mores) 
 
 retired to his quiet home in the fields in 1536 and there 
 devoted himself to preparing his Works for publication but 
 died before his task was completed. 
 
 In the year of Shakespeare's death, 1616, Ben Jonson's 
 First Folio was published. Ben Jonson only printed the 
 ! Plays which satisfied him, and he omitted Bartholomew Fair, 
 r which had been acted in 1614, and rejected the early Tragical 
 ' Work which had won him a place in Francis Meres' list 
 : of Tragedians. And even Ben Jonson when he dedicated 
 ! Every Man Out of His Humour to " the Noblest Nurseries of 
 I Humanities and Liberty in the Kingdom, the Inns of Court " 
 i wrote, " Now that the Printer, by a doubled charge, thinks 
 it worthy a longer life than commonly the air of such things 
 ; doth promise, I am careful to put it a servant to their pleasures, 
 ' who are the inheritors of the first favour borne it. Yet I 
 • command it lie not in the way of your more noble and useful 
 ■ studies." He may have known that Shakespeare had planned 
 a Folio edition. 
 
 Heminge and Condell may have printed their Folio for 
 their Company's profit. We do not know whether Shake- 
 speare had sold his share in the Company, for the fact that 
 his Will makes no mention of it is not conclusive since Bur- 
 bage and Condell, for instance, did not bequeath the shares 
 which they possessed when they died. But even if he had 
 sold his share he might have expected some payment for 
 revising the Plays. 
 
 It seems to me that the many signs of revision in the 
 Folio indicate that he was preparing the Plays for it ; but 
 this is uncertain because we do not know how often they 
 
 403
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 were revised. And I think that the later signs of revision 
 suggest an attempt to cure faults which would not have 
 impeded the applause of the Pit. 
 
 Heminge and Condell wrote in their Address to the 
 Reader : " His mind and hand went together, and what he 
 thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce 
 received from him a blot in his papers." This may mean 
 that he took the trouble to make a clean copy of the Plays 
 which he furnished. Or it may mean that he wrote the 
 different forms of them fluently without harking back to 
 alter what he had written : he may have preferred to test 
 them by their effect on the Stage (instead of pausing to 
 search for faults), and to change them afterwards if he thought 
 it worth while. This, I think, was his method, and it would 
 help to account for many of the faults of his Plays and for 
 a few of their virtues. 
 
 This method would have kept him in touch with the eager 
 life of his days, and that effect would have been also produced 
 if he copied men of his time in his Characters, as was stated, 
 for instance, by Sir Charles Scroop when he wrote before 
 1686, 
 
 When Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher ruled the Stage, 
 They took so bold a freedom with the Age, 
 That there was scarce a knave or fool in town 
 Of any wit, but had his fashion shown. 
 
 Such a liberty taken with knaves and fools would have helped 
 his Plays to mirror the times. But it would also have degraded 
 the Plays with an ignoble vivacity. The vitality given to 
 base people in them, even in the Tragedies, is one of the 1 
 things which set him apart from his only competitors in 
 Tragical Plays, ^schylus, Sophocles and Euripides. And 
 this separation is radical. 
 
 The Greek Tragical Stage was an altar of Sacrifice : his 
 Stage was a Mummer's booth for ignorant crowds. The 
 Greek Tragical dramatist knew that his Players would wear 
 masks and recite in huge Amphitheatres and so was compelled 
 to enforce his story by grouping them, — he saw like a sculptor, 
 and his Characters shared the dignity and the final repose 
 of Statues. In the same way Michael Angelo made his faces 
 
 404
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES 
 
 immortal by studying the look of the dead. The Greek 
 Tragical Characters spoke as if there was nobody listening ; 
 they were aloof in a higher World of their own : Shakespeare's 
 Players talked in the Pit, they were breathing the rank breath 
 of the Crowd and they were jostled by the men who had 
 paid to have their stools on the Stage ; they spoke either to 
 their hearers or for them. A Greek Tragedy had the calm 
 of a whirlpool, for it dealt with a climax, the end of a tale 
 already known to the hearers : Shakespeare was unfolding 
 a tale, and he did this with a deliberate falsity, making his 
 Characters tell their secret thoughts and explain all their 
 emotions. Besides, the Greek language has a carven precision 
 and a quietness which may be in part due to the fact that 
 in reading it we remember how long ago it was written ; 
 the Greeks may have found the Works of Egypt as quiet and 
 all that lost Literature a Book of the Dead : in Shakespeare's 
 time England was young and his language was only reaching 
 maturity. 
 
 It was his aim to write a Book of the Living. Still, he 
 did not draw his times as they were, but as he saw them in the 
 Kingdom of Dreams, and this alteration made his work 
 universal. Calderon is too Spanish to appeal to the World 
 and Moliere is too French ; but there are no limits to the 
 Kingdom of Dreams. And this is why his Tragical Characters 
 are all unsubstantial : they soar above everyday Life as flame 
 rises from coal or as his Poetry sprang from his prosaic Blank 
 Verses. 
 
 It may be that his juvenile Tragedies and his Chronicle 
 Pageant and all his Comedies except the last form of ^he 
 Tern-pest were written to please himself and his patrons, 
 without any effort, and that he would have reckoned them 
 ephemeral things. These were his " native woodnotes wild " 
 and they are full of the happy repetitions of birds. He is 
 seen in these Comedies like one of his Jesters, commenting 
 on the ways of the World with snatches of song. It was 
 his lot to earn his bread as a Jester, spending his wit to win 
 the laughter of fools, and he did this as naturally and lightly 
 as Touchstone. This set him apart from Ben Jonson, who 
 when he wrote Comedies resembled the Elephant imagined 
 by Milton in the garden of Eden, 
 
 405
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The unwieldy Elephant 
 To make them mirth used all his might, and wreathed 
 His lithe proboscis. 
 
 Heminge and Condell's boast of the easiness with which 
 he wrote Plays is supported by his visible fluency. The fact 
 that he wrote so few seems to show that he did not give 
 much time to this pleasure. Even if we add Pericles to the 
 Folio list he only left thirty-four Plays, many of them written 
 as trifles and some, for instance, nearly all the Chronicle 
 Pageant, openly founded on Plays written by others, and if 
 he began writing about 1588 these are the fruit of twenty- 
 eight years. In those days Lope de Vega Carpio, who was 
 born in 1562 and died in 1635, wrote according to Montalban 
 four hundred Autos and eighteen hundred Plays (not count- 
 ing Entermeses), of which about four hundred Plays and forty 
 Autos survive. Shakespeare seems to have been equally 
 fluent, so the smallness of his output may show that while 
 he was in London he only wrote Plays when they happened 
 to be required by his Company. This may explain why he 
 seems to have written many of them with the carelessness of 
 natural talk. 
 
 He used all his might in his last Tragedies, or in portions 
 of them, and he lived in them not as a Jester but as a man 
 who endured the worst of their agonies ; so they must have 
 been more to him and he may have wished to give them a 
 chance of being remembered and may have revised them 
 for a Folio edition. But it is improbable that he would 
 have presumed to differ from all the learned men of his day 
 by attaching much importance to them or that he could 
 have guessed that for three hundred years there would be 
 nobody to share his renown. And it is impossible that he 
 could have imagined Samuel Coleridge's hysterical shout, 
 " Merciful, wonder-making Heaven ! What a man was 
 this Shakespeare ! " Perhaps he would have preferred 
 Samuel Johnson's English sobriety. 
 
 He must have known how much he was indebted to others 
 though he may not have thought that anyone would trouble 
 to ask from what medley of dead branches he made his Ever- 
 lasting Bonfire. Because he knew this he would have been 
 
 406
 
 AN IMPRESSION OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 less prone to imagine that he would be singled out as a Miracle. 
 The fate of Marlowe's Plays may have taught him not only 
 that noble work could be slighted in a different time but 
 also that it could be botched and degraded by ignoble addi- 
 tions, and if he wished his Plays to be printed it may have 
 been because he preferred that they should survive as they 
 had been written by him if they should chance to be remem- 
 bered at all. 
 
 My impression is that he began as a fragile and effeminate 
 youth, with auburn hair and grey eyes and a bright colour 
 and an excited and over-confident way, superfluously friendly 
 to all and obviously pleased with himself and eager to ape the 
 behaviour of Queen Elizabeth's Court, and that as the years 
 went on he grew quiet and was subdued to the faded elegance 
 of the Ely House Portrait, and that he ended wan and 
 emaciated and quieter still, exhausted by his passionate 
 dreams and in the silence of a man who remembers that he 
 has spoken too much. I think that he was one of the men 
 who live in this World as if they did not belong to it, friendly 
 but not caring much for those they meet and indifferently 
 liked in return, who seem to have something intangible 
 and remote in their nature and to retain youthfulness as if 
 they were exiles from some Country beyond the ravage of Time. 
 
 If his ghost haunted this World I would look for it in the 
 Woodland of Arden : there, I think, it would wander in 
 the dusk of the twilight, weary and frail with desolate eyes 
 and a blank face and hair turning grey, soberly dressed, 
 cloaked from the cold and exposing the rich hilt of a sword 
 with some ostentation and keeping a dignity acquired on 
 the Stage, if the dead leaves were falling ; but if the branches 
 were green, it would come swift and rejoicing, a youth 
 poorly clad, rich in hope, with a shining face like a girl's, 
 singing under the trees in the early hours of the morning. 
 
 This impression seems to me to agree with the image of 
 him shown in his Plays. If we can take Timon of Athens 
 to be the last of them all because it is the least finished of 
 them, it may be that the pen dropped from his hand when 
 he had written, 
 
 Come not to me again : but say to Athens 
 Timon hath made his everlasting mansion, 
 407
 
 AN IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and the comment on those words of farewell, 
 
 These well express in thee thy latter spirits : ^ 
 Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs, 
 Scorn'dst our brain's flow and those our droplets which 
 From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit 
 Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye 
 On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. 
 
 408
 
 INDEX 
 
 jEschylus ^iTidi the Tragedies 
 jEthiopica and Twelfth Night . 
 Agamemnon and Othello . 
 Alchemist and Ariel's name 
 Alcibiades and Timon of Athens 
 Airs Well that Ends Well 
 
 PAGE 
 272 
 
 47 
 270 
 
 55 
 283 
 
 74, 145, 146, 306, 307 
 
 and Decameron ... 74 
 
 Love'^s Labour^s Won 145, 306 
 
 • 74 
 
 • 74 
 146 
 
 145, 147 
 H5 
 
 175 
 
 Palace of Pleasure 
 Periander of Corinth 
 Rosalynde . 
 Twelfth Night 
 Coleridge on 
 earliest edition of 
 GoUancz on 
 Parolles in 
 AUeyn, Edward, and the Sonnets 
 Amadis de Gaula and Chivalry 
 Amends for Ladies and Oldcastle 
 Ameto and Pastorals 
 Aminta and Pastorals 
 
 Anatomy of Melancholy and the Tragedies 
 Anglorum Ferice and third Earl of Southampton 
 Antiquities of Warwickshire and Bust 
 Antony and Cleopatra 
 
 and Romeo and Juliet 75, jG, 80, 274, 
 
 299, 300 
 „ Troilus and Cressida 75, 76, 291, 
 
 299, 300 
 409 
 
 306 
 
 HS 
 146 
 
 300 
 
 176 
 
 . 188 
 
 134.135 
 . 290 
 
 229, 230 
 
 • 237 
 
 • 354 
 273-80
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra Dio on Cleopatra and . 277, 278 
 
 earliest edition of . . . 273 
 
 Plutarch and . . . 274-8 
 
 Apollonius of Tyre and Pericles .... 44 
 
 Chaucer on .... 44 
 
 Gower on . . . . 44, 45 
 
 Apology for Actors and Shakespeare . . . .380 
 
 Apology for Poesy and Dares Phrygius . . . 297 
 
 „ King Henry the Fifth . 178, 179 
 
 ,, Tragi-comedies . . . 288 
 
 on Poet-Apes .... 327 
 
 Arabian Nights'' Entertainments and Decameron . . 27 
 
 „ Measure for 
 
 Measure . .304 
 „ Midsummer Night's 
 
 Dream . .124 
 
 „ Novelle . . 27 
 
 „ Othello . . 259 
 „ Teaming of the 
 
 Shrew . .143 
 
 „ Tempest . . 56 
 
 „ Twelfth Night . 148 
 
 sources of . . 27 
 
 Arcadia (Lope de Vega's) and Pastorals . . -136 
 
 Arcadia (Sannazaro's) and Pastorals . . . • 135 
 
 Arcadia (Sidney's) and Euphuism . . . -14 
 
 „ King Lear . . . 250,251 
 
 „ Pastorals . . . -135 
 
 „ Two Gentlemen of Verona . 62 
 
 chief sources of . . . -135 
 
 Arden of Feversham and the Tragedies . . . 272 
 
 Arden, Edward, of Parkhall and first Sir Thomas Lucy 365 
 
 „ third Earl of 
 
 Southampton . 86 
 
 Arden, Forest of, and As Tou Like It . . -138 
 
 Woodland of, Camden on . . . -375 
 
 Arden, Robert, his descent . . . . 37°' 37^ 
 Ariodante and Ginevra and Much Ado about Nothing . 6"] 
 
 Ariosto, Lodovico, and Blank Verse . . . • ^5 
 
 410
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ariosto, Lodovico, his Orlando Furioso and Chivalry 
 „ „ „ „ Much Ado 
 
 about Nothing 
 „ Satire (third) and the Sonnets 
 „ Sufpositi and Carnival Plays 
 Aristophanes and Troilus and Cressida 
 Aristotle and Episodes 
 As Tou Like It . . . 
 and Gamelyn . 
 „ Rosalynde 
 „ Tempest 
 
 „ Tzvo Gentlemen of Verona 
 Arden, Forest of 
 Celia's height in 
 Coleridge on 
 Court-Jester in 
 " Ducdame " in 
 earliest edition of 
 Jaques and Lodge 
 pastoral convention and 
 possible juvenile form of . 
 Raleigh on . . . 
 
 Touchstone and Whetstone 
 Attic Comedy and Pantomime 
 Aubrey, John, on Shakespeare . 
 
 possible note on Shakespeare . 
 Aucassin et Nicolete and Pastorals 
 
 PAGE 
 
 175 
 
 108 
 60 
 
 292 
 . 288 
 131-42 
 
 132,133,137 
 132,133,136,137 
 
 58,60 
 
 . 62 
 
 . 138 
 
 • 136 
 
 • 132 
 140, 141 
 
 137,138 
 . 132 
 138-40 
 
 • 135 
 63,138 
 
 142 
 
 139,140 
 
 28 
 
 361,362 
 
 . 382 
 
 • 134 
 
 B 
 
 Babington's Complaint and Theatres . 
 Babington Plot and Southampton House 
 Bacon, Francis, and Ulysses .... 
 his friendship with Toby Mathew 
 „ New Atlantis 
 on Essex Revolt 
 „ Lopez .... 
 
 „ Richard the Second 
 „ Queen Elizabeth's Fool 
 411 
 
 212 
 
 85 
 
 293 
 
 397 
 
 313 
 211 
 
 129 
 
 199, 200 
 
 . 141
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 28 
 
 ,182 
 156 
 248 
 
 ^1 
 76 
 
 Baker, George, on English Drama in 1590 . 
 
 Bale, John, and King Johan . . . . 181 
 
 Bame (or Baine), Richard, on Marlowe 
 Bancroft, Richard, and Popish Impostures . 
 Bandello and Much Ado About Nothing 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet .... 
 
 Barkstead, William, his Mirrha and third Earl of 
 Southampton ....... 105 
 
 Barnes, Barnabe, and third Earl of Southampton . 97 
 Barnfield, Richard, and the Sonnets . . . .110 
 
 on the Narrative Poems . . 81 
 
 Bartholomew Fair and Shakespeare .... 345-8 
 
 Beard, Benjamin, on Southampton House ... 85 
 Beaumont, Francis, and Drayton .... 342 
 
 „ Fletcher .... 380 
 
 „ Jonson . .291,318,341,400 
 
 „ Shakespeare . . . 400 
 
 Plays ascribed to him and Fletcher. 291 
 
 praise of, in Folio of 1647 . .317 
 
 Beccari, Agostino, and Italian Pastorals . . . 290 
 
 Bedford, third Earl of, and Midsummer Nighfs Dream 122 
 
 Beeston, William, and Aubrey .... 361, 362 
 
 BGUcioiest^s Histoires Tragiques SLud Hamlet . 35,204 
 
 „ Julius Ccesar . 208 
 
 „ Much Ado About 
 
 Nothing . . 6j 
 
 Romeo and Juliet . 76 
 
 Benson, John, and Shakespeare's Poems 
 Bermuda and The Tempest 
 Bestrajte Brudermord and Hamlet 
 Betterton, Thomas, and Hamlet 
 
 „ Shakespeare 
 Bevis of Hampton and Hamlet . 
 
 „ Southampton 
 Amaury Duval on 
 Bilson, Thomas, on Recusants . 
 Blazon of Gentry and Lucy 
 Bloody Brother and Measure for Measure 
 Blount, Richard, and state of Catholics in 1614 
 
 412 
 
 112,113 
 
 52,53.57 
 . 246 
 
 • 244 
 . 362 
 . 236 
 
 236, 237 
 
 • 237 
 
 • 396 
 
 • 364 
 
 • 305 
 
 • 398
 
 INDEX 
 
 Well 
 
 Blunt, Edward, and A^itony and Cleopatra . 
 
 „ Marlowe .... 
 Boccaccio, Giovanni, and Chaucer 
 
 his Ameto and Pastorals 
 „ Decameron and AWs 
 that Ends Well . 
 Decameron and Cymbeline 
 „ „ Sonnets 
 
 „ sources of 
 „ translations of 
 Filicopo and Pastorals 
 Filostrato and Troilus and 
 Cressida . 
 „ Rime and the Sonnets 
 Boiardo, Matteo, his Orlando Innamorato and Chivalry 
 
 „ Timone and Timon of Athens 
 Book of St. Albans and King Henry the Sixth 
 Boy-Players and Hamlet .... 
 
 „ War of the Poets 
 Bradley, A. C, on Brutus 
 
 „ Elizabethan Drama 
 Brandon, Samuel, and Antony and Cleopatra 
 Breton, Nicholas, on Pistol 
 Britai?i^s Ida and third Earl of Southampton 
 
 „ Spenser. 
 Britannia on Stratford-on-Avon 
 
 „ Woodland of Arden 
 Broke, Arthur, and Romeo and Juliet . 
 Brooke, Tucker, on Heroic Plays 
 „ Interludes . 
 „ King Henry the Fourth . 
 „ Spanish Tragedy . 
 „ Tamburlaine 
 Brownists and Twelfth Night 
 Bucolics and Pastorals .... 
 BuUein, William, on Watchmen 
 Burbage, James, and the Players 
 Burbage, Richard, and Hamlet . 
 „ Othello . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 156 
 
 296 
 
 135 
 
 74 
 
 38,39 
 107 
 
 27 
 
 27 
 
 134 
 
 296 
 
 108 
 
 175 
 283 
 
 314 
 
 233 
 323 
 208 
 
 6 
 
 274 
 179 
 
 89,90 
 
 96 
 
 371 
 
 375 
 
 75 
 
 19 
 
 25 
 
 183 
 
 36 
 
 155 
 
 395 
 
 133 
 
 363 
 
 23 
 
 237, 245 
 
 256, 269 
 
 394. 
 
 413
 
 INDEX 
 
 Burbage, Richard, and Shylock , . . . 
 
 Burgundy, Philip Duke of, and Taming of the Shrew 
 Burton, Robert, and Hamlet .... 
 
 „ Much Ado About Nothing 
 Bust on Shakespeare's Monument . . • 353- 
 
 page 
 128 
 
 143 
 
 229 
 
 68 
 ,368 
 
 Calisto y Melihea and Tragi-comedies 
 Camden, William, on Richard the Second 
 
 „ Stratford-on-Avon 
 
 „ Woodland of Arden 
 Camoens on choice of a home . 
 Campion, Edmund, and Anthony Munday 
 
 his account of Cardinal Wolsey 
 Carlyle, Thomas, on Shakespeare and Catholicism 
 Carnivals and Italianate Comedies .... 
 Castehinos y Monteses and Romeo and Juliet 
 Castle, William, and Shakespeare .... 
 Catiline and Gun-powder Plot ..... 
 Cavendish, George, description of a Masque 
 Life of Cardinal Wolsey 
 on Wolsey's Fool 
 Caxton, William, his Recuyell and Troilus and Cressida 
 Cervantes, Miguel, his death ..... 
 „ Don Quixote and Falstaff . 
 „ „ „ „ the Sofmets 
 Chapman, George, his Iliad and Troilus and Cressida 
 Charles the Bold, story of, and Measure for Measure 
 Chaucer, Geoffry, and Apollonius of Tyre 
 
 „ Brutus 
 
 „ Fairyland 
 
 „ Jugglers . 
 
 „ Lover''s Complaint 
 
 „ Oberon . 
 
 ,, Pyramus and T hi she 
 
 „ Seneca 
 
 ,, T ale of Gamelyn 
 
 „ Tempest . 
 414 
 
 290, 291 
 200 
 
 • 371 
 
 • 375 
 . 385 
 . 187 
 
 192 
 
 • 391 
 . 60 
 
 . 78 
 
 • 363 
 . 206 
 
 . 289 
 
 192 
 
 141 
 
 297 
 
 399 
 
 109 
 . 298 
 
 • 304 
 . 44 
 
 209, 210 
 
 119, 120 
 
 18 
 
 105 
 
 119 
 
 126 
 
 241 
 
 132 
 
 S7 
 
 175, 
 
 104: 
 
 62,
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chaucer, Geoffry, and Troilus and Cressida. . 295, 296 
 
 his debt to Boccaccio . . . 296 
 
 „ influence on Shakespeare . 16, 38, 127 
 
 Chettle, Henry, his apology for Groafsworth of Wit 378-80 
 complaint of Shakespeare's silence 398 
 
 Choice of Falentifies and Southampton 
 
 Chronicle Histories, origin of 
 
 Chronicle Pageant (Shakespeare's) 
 
 Church Pageants and Clownage. 
 
 Cinthio, Giraldi, and Measure for Measure 
 „ Othello 
 his Hecatommithi 
 
 Clarendon, Lord, on first Earl of Montgomery 
 ,, third Earl of Pembroke 
 ,, fourth Earl of Southampton 
 
 Clopton, Sir Hugh, and Stratford-on-Avon. 
 
 Cobham, seventh Baron, and Oldcastle 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel, on All' s Well that Ends Well . 
 ,, As Tou Like It 
 ,, Beaumont and Shakespeare 
 
 Cymbeline 
 ,, juvenile Comedies . 
 ,, King Henry the Eighth 
 „ Macbeth 
 „ Othello . 
 ,, Pericles . 
 „ Pistol . 
 ,, Shakespeare 
 „ Taming of the Shrew 
 „ T em-pest 
 „ Titus Andronicus 
 „ Two Gentlemen of Verona 
 „ W inter'' s T ale . 
 Colonne, Guido delle, and Troilus and Cressida 
 Comedies (Shakespeare's), Raleigh on recasting 
 Comedy of Errors ..... 
 and Pericles 
 ,, Supposes 
 „ Twelfth Night . 
 
 415 
 
 . 98 
 18,19 
 
 151-98 
 28 
 
 304 
 256 
 
 27 
 400 
 197 
 
 84 
 
 376 
 186 
 
 145 
 
 132 
 
 400 
 
 7,41,42,450 
 9,60 
 192 
 219 
 264 
 41,42 
 180 
 406 
 142 
 58 
 37.39 
 37 
 39' 42 
 296, 297 
 
 7 
 66,67 
 
 47.66 
 
 66 
 
 147
 
 INDEX 
 
 66. 
 
 Comedy of Errors^ earliest edition of . 
 
 Gervinus on . 
 Comical Gallant and Merry Wives of Windsor 
 Conde Lucanor (El) and Taming of the Shrew 
 
 „ „ „ sources of . 
 
 Condell, Henry, and Shakespeare 7-10,49,60, 198, 
 
 Confessio Amantis and Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 „ Pericles 
 
 „ Pyramus and Thisbe 
 „ Romeo and Juliet 
 „ Titus Andronicus 
 „ Troilus and Cressida 
 Contention, The, and King Henry the Sixth 
 Cope, Sir Walter, his letter about Players 
 Coriolanus . . . . . -33 
 
 and Timon of Athens 
 changes from Plutarch's version 
 earliest edition of 
 Essex Revolt and 
 place in the First Folio 
 possible juvenile form of 
 „ second form of 
 „ time of last form of 
 Coryat, Thomas, on Women-Players . 
 Court-Jesters and the Plays 
 Cradle of Security and Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 Cuckold'' s Haven and Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 Cymbeline .... 
 
 and Antony and Cleopatra 
 „ Pericles 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet 
 „ Titus Andronicus . . 30 
 
 Coleridge on 
 earliest edition of 
 Gollancz on 
 Johnson on 
 Masefield on 
 place in the first Folio 
 possible juvenile forms of 
 
 416 
 
 PAGE 
 
 66 
 66 
 
 330 
 144 
 
 27 
 
 400-6 
 
 126 
 
 43-'^ 
 75,126 
 
 75 
 
 31 
 
 297 
 
 161-3 
 
 18 
 
 34, 280-282 
 
 34,280,291 
 
 280, 281 
 
 . 281 
 
 33, 
 
 282 
 
 32 
 
 34.79 
 . 282 
 
 291 
 
 • 23 
 140, 141 
 
 124 
 
 • 125 
 
 37-42,307-11 
 
 • 274 
 . 48 
 
 73, 74, 77 
 40,308,310 
 
 7,39,41,42 
 
 311 
 
 308 
 
 37 
 
 307 
 
 38 
 
 37,38,73
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 . 41 
 
 329. 330 
 
 Cymbeline, Seccombe on . 
 Cynthia's Revels and Shakespeare 
 
 D 
 
 Daiphantus and Hamlet .... 
 
 „ Shakespeare 
 Daphnis and Chloe and Pastorals 
 Dares Phrygius and Troilus and Cressida 
 Davenant, John, and Shakespeare 
 Davies, John, on Shakespeare 
 Davles, Richard, on Shakespeare 
 De Antiquis Ecclesice Ritihus and Evening Mass 
 De Republica Anglorum and Gentlemen 
 
 „ Yeomen 
 Decameron and All's Well that Ends Well 
 
 „ Cyfnbeline .... 
 „ the Sonnets 
 sources of .... 
 
 translations of ... 
 
 Declaration of Popish Impostures and King Lear 
 Dekker, Thom'as, and Doctor Faustus . 
 
 „ Jonson . . .321,322,331,332 
 
 his GulPs Horn Book and Watchmen . 363 
 
 „ Lanthorn and Candle-light and Hamlet 244 
 
 „ Seven Deadly Sins and Hamlet . 232 
 
 Dennis, John, on Merry Wives of Windsor . . 64, 330 
 
 Diana Enamorada and Pastorals 
 
 Dictys Cretensis and Troilus and Cressida . 
 
 Dido, Queen of Carthage and Hamlet . 
 
 „ Marlowe 
 Dlgges, Leonard, and lago 
 
 ,, Julius Ccesar 
 „ Much Ado About Nothing 
 „ Shakespeare 
 Dio on Cleopatra ..... 
 Discoveries (Ben Jonson's) and Shakespeare . 
 Discovery of Witchcraft and Ghosts 
 
 5, Midsummer Nigh fs Dream . 124 
 58,152,153,156 
 
 244, 245 
 380,400 
 
 <^2, 133.134 
 
 • 297 
 . 381 
 
 • 369 
 
 362, 395 
 
 • 391 
 3% 370 
 
 • 369 
 
 • 74 
 
 • 39 
 
 107 
 
 . 27 
 . 27 
 
 • 247-9 
 
 • 153 
 
 62,135 
 297 
 
 234 
 152 
 
 257 
 207 
 
 68 
 
 344 
 
 277, 278 
 
 348-51 
 238 
 
 Doctor Faustus. 
 
 417 
 
 D D
 
 INDEX 
 
 Don Quixote and Falstaff .... 
 Donne, John, and the Phccnix and the Turtle 
 
 his letter to Toby Mathew 
 Dowdall, John, on Shakespeare . 
 Dowden, Edward, on Julius CcBsar 
 „ Pericles . 
 „ Taming of the Shrew 
 „ Tempest . 
 „ Timon of Athens 
 Drama, English, origin of Religious . 
 „ „ „ Secular 
 
 French, origin of . 
 Greek Tragical, and Shakespeare 
 Roman, and English 
 Spanish, origin of 
 Drayton, Michael, and Beaumont 
 „ Jonson . 
 Shakespeare 
 
 II 
 
 PAGE 
 
 . IIS 
 
 • 397 
 . 362 
 
 . 213 
 
 • 51 
 66, 145 
 
 • 51 
 
 . 285 
 
 19,20,25 
 
 18, 20, 25 
 
 20 
 
 272, 404, 405 
 26 
 20 
 
 343 
 318,342,343 
 
 341-3 
 
 his Nymphidia and Midsummer Nigh t^s 
 
 Dream 
 
 „ „ „ Tempest 
 
 on state of England 
 Droeshout Engraving .... 
 
 " Original " Portrait. 
 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, on Ben J 
 Dryden, John, on Beaumont and Fletcher . 
 „ dedications 
 
 ,, Jonson's Verses in First Folio 
 „ Mercutio 
 „ Pericles. 
 
 „ purpose of the Drama 
 „ Shakespeare . 
 Dugdale, Sir William, and Bust at Stratford 
 Duval, Amaury, and Bevis of Hampton 
 
 onson. 
 
 118, 119 
 
 • 55 
 
 • 399 
 .353-8 
 
 355.356 
 318 
 291 
 
 97 
 320 
 
 359 
 49 
 5 
 373 
 354 
 237 
 
 Eclogues (Virgil's) and dedication of Rape of Lucrece . 99 
 
 „ Pastorals . . . . -133 
 
 „ Sonnets . . . . .110 
 
 418
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Eden, Richard, his History of Travels and The Tempest . 54 
 Edward the Second . . . . .151, 15 2, 156-8 
 
 and King Henry the Sixth 
 „ King Henry the Eighth 
 „ Ki?ig Richard the Second 
 Elegy on Burbage and Merchant of Venice . 
 
 „ Othello 
 Ellis, Havelock, on Marlowe 
 EI7 House Portrait and Shakespeare . 
 Elze on King Henry the Eighth . 
 Encomion of Lady Pecunia and Narrative Poems . 
 Endimion and Lovers Labour^s Lost 
 England^ s Mourning Garment and Shakespeare 
 Ephesiaca and Romeo and Juliet 
 Epistolce Morales (Seneca's) and Hamlet 
 
 „ Measure for Measure 
 Equivocation and Macbeth .... 
 
 Espejo de Principes and Much Ado About Nothing 
 
 „ Tempest 
 Esquimaux and Caliban ..... 
 Essex, second Earl of, and Brutus 
 
 Coriolanus 
 
 Hamlet 
 
 King Henry the Fifth . 
 
 Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 Southampton, third Earl of 
 
 Timon of Athens 
 
 Essex Revolt and Shakespeare . 
 Euphues and Euphuism 
 „ Euripides 
 „ Rosalynde 
 Euphuism and Love'^s Labour^ s Lost 
 
 „ Shakespeare 
 Every Man In His Humour and Shakespeare 
 Every Man Out of His Humour and Marston 
 
 „ Shakespeare 
 
 Exorcisms and King Lear 
 
 „ Tempest . 
 dedication of 
 
 . . 158 
 
 • 197 
 
 . 172 
 
 . 128 
 256,257,269 
 
 • 157 
 
 • 355-7,368 
 . 194 
 . 81 
 
 • 73 
 . 398 
 
 • 75 
 . 240 
 
 . 302 
 
 217,218 
 
 . 68 
 
 •56,57 
 
 •53,54 
 210-12 
 
 . 282 
 
 214,237 
 
 • 179 
 202,212 
 
 199 
 
 . 284 
 
 199, 200,211,212 
 
 •13,14 
 . 136 
 
 • 135 
 .71,72 
 
 • 13-15,72 
 320, 329 
 
 • 335 
 •323-5 
 
 • 59 
 
 • 403 
 247-9 
 
 419
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Fabulce Atellante and Harlequinades .... 366 
 
 Fabulce Togatce and English Drama .... 28 
 
 Fairyland and Cymbeline ...... 39 
 
 „ Midsummer Night's Dream . . 118,121 
 
 „ Tempest . . . . . -55? 56 
 
 Faithful Shepherdess and Pastorals .... 29 
 
 Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth . 151, 175, 177, 178 
 „ „ „ „ „ andOldcastle. 189 
 
 Fastolfe (or Falstaff), Sir John, and Falstaff 
 Favola d^Orfeo and Pastorals 
 Felix and Philiomena and Fwo Gentlemen of Verona 
 Feltham, Owen, and Pericles 
 Fidele and Fortunio and Two Gentlemen of V erona 
 Field, Nathaniel, and Oldcastle 
 Filostrato and Troilus and Cressida 
 Finding of Truth and Interludes 
 First Folio and Order of the Plays 
 Address to the Reader 
 dedication of . 
 
 inclusion of King Henry the Eighth 
 rejection of Pericles . 
 value of Quartos 
 Fletcher, J ohn, and Ki^ig Henry the Eighth 
 „ Measure for Measure 
 „ Bloody Brother 
 definition of Tragi-comedies 
 Faithful Shepherdess . 
 friendship with Beaumont . 
 „ „ Massinger . 
 
 Plays ascribed to him and 
 mont .... 
 Florio, John, his Montaigne and Tempest 
 Flowers, lists of, in the Plays 
 Ford, John, and Shakespeare 
 
 his Per kin Warbeck 
 Forest of Fancy and English Drama 
 Forman, Simon, and Macbeth . 
 
 „ weather In 1594 
 420 
 
 402, 
 
 189 
 
 290 
 
 61 
 
 46 
 
 61 
 
 188 
 
 296 
 
 24 
 7-10 
 
 404 
 
 . 400 
 
 . 198 
 
 . 49 
 
 230, 231 
 
 192, 195-8 
 
 305^ 306 
 
 305 
 287 
 
 290 
 
 380 
 
 381 
 
 Beau- 
 290 
 
 220,221 
 
 291 
 
 313 
 48,49 
 
 401 
 
 195 
 27 
 
 228 
 
 121
 
 INDEX 
 
 Forman, Simon, and Witchcraft . 
 Foxe, John, and King Henry the Eighth 
 
 ,, Oldcastle 
 Freeman, Thomas, and Narrative Poems 
 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Tempest 
 Froissart on French Masques 
 Froude, James Anthony, on Shakespeare 
 Fuller, Thomas, on Falstaflf 
 
 „ Oldcastle . 
 
 „ Shakespeare 
 Fulman, William, and Bust at Stratford 
 
 PAGE 
 220 
 
 193 
 186 
 
 82 
 
 58,59 
 
 289 
 
 391 
 189 
 
 186, 189 
 
 34O' 341 
 • 354 
 
 Gairdner, J., on Fastolfe . . . . • .189 
 Gamely n, 7 ale of, and Rosalynde . . . 132, 133 
 „ Two Gentlemen of Verona . . 62 
 Gardiner, Samuel, on Queen Anne of Denmark's Re- 
 ligion 193 
 
 Garnet, Henry, and Equivocation . . . 217,218 
 
 in Warwickshire . . . -39^ 
 
 Garrick, David, and Hamlet ..... 245 
 
 Gascoigne, George, his Supposes and Comedy of Errors . 66 
 
 „ Taming of the Shrew 144 
 Gaselee, S., on Greek Romances .... 44 
 
 Gayley, Charles, on date of Friar Bacon . . • 5^ 
 
 Gerard, John, and Equivocation . . . .217 
 
 described by Topcliffe .... 360 
 Gervinus, on JlPs Well that Ends Well ... 74 
 „ Comedy of Errors . .... 66 
 
 „ Othello 264 
 
 „ Shakespeare leaving Stage . . • 384 
 
 „ Taming of the Shrew . ... 66 
 
 Gesta Romanorum and Decameron .... 27 
 
 „ Merchant of Venice . . • 13^ 
 
 Gildon, Charles, on lago ...... 257 
 
 Giovanni Fiorentino, and Merchant of Venice . • 131 
 
 Giulietta and Romeo and "Juliet ..... 7^ 
 
 Globe Theatre and Drama 22, 23 
 
 421
 
 INDEX 
 
 i 
 
 Godfrey of Viterbo and Pericles. 
 Golden Hind and Marlowe 
 
 GoUancz, Sir Israel, on AlVs Well That Ends Well 
 
 Ariel's name . 
 Brutus' speech 
 Cymbeline 
 
 King Henry the Fourth 
 King Lear 
 King Leir 
 
 Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 Othello 
 Pericles . 
 Gosson, Stephen, and Julius Ccesar . 
 
 ,, Merchant of Venice 
 Gower, John, and Pericles 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet . 
 „ Tlitus Andronicus . 
 „ Troilus arid Cressida 
 Gray's Inn and Comedy of Errors 
 
 „ Southampton, third Earl of 
 Greek Romances, Gaselee on 
 
 Nicetas Eugenianus on 
 Pastorals and . 
 sources of 
 Greek Tragedies and Shakespeare 
 Greene, Robert, and Chronicle Histories 
 „ Marlowe . 
 
 ,, Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 „ Shake-scene . 17,73,161-3,378-80 
 „ True Tragedy of Richard Duke of 
 
 Tork .... 161, 162 
 
 his Friar Bacon and Tempest . . 58 
 
 „ Pandosto and Winter^s Tale . . 40 
 
 Greg, W. W., on date of Quarto of Merchant of Venice 128 
 
 Greville, Fulke, on Sidney and Queen Elizabeth . . 83 
 
 Groafsworth of Wit and King Henry the Sixth . .161-2 
 
 „ Marlowe . . . -155 
 
 „ Poet-Ape .... 327 
 
 ,, Shake-scene . 17,73,161-3,378-80 
 
 422 
 
 PAGE 
 
 . 14 
 . 156 
 
 • 145 
 
 • 55 
 . 208 
 
 39> 308 
 
 • 174 
 
 247, 248 
 
 • 249 
 . 117 
 . 259 
 
 •47.50 
 . 206 
 
 • 131 
 
 • 43-5 
 
 • 7S 
 
 ■ 31 
 . 297 
 
 . 67 
 
 .85,86 
 
 •44.45 
 . 44 
 
 133,134 
 
 •44,45 
 
 272, 404, 405 
 
 151 
 155 
 
 73,119
 
 INDEX 
 
 Guarlni, Battista, and Tragi-comedies 
 
 his Pastor Fido 
 Guicciardini, Francesco, on Cristofano Moro 
 Guild of the Holy Cross, objects of . 
 Guilds, Pageants performed by . 
 Gun-powder Plot and Catiline . 
 „ Shakespeare 
 
 PAGE 
 
 287 
 290 
 258 
 26 
 25, 26 
 206 
 201 
 
 H 
 
 Hadriana 
 
 I and Romeo and Juliet 
 
 . 
 
 
 • 75 
 
 Hakluyt on Bermuda 
 
 . 
 
 .52,53 
 
 Hall, Arthur, his Iliad and Troilus and Cressida 
 
 . 298 
 
 Hall, Edward, and Ki7ig Henry the E 
 
 ighth . 
 
 • 193, 194 
 
 on Masques 
 
 . 
 
 26, 268 
 
 Hamlet ..... 
 
 .35,36,214, 
 
 215,229-46 
 
 and Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques 
 
 35, 204 
 
 „ Bestrafte Brudermord 
 
 
 . 246 
 
 
 „ Bevis of Hampton . 
 
 
 
 • 236, 237 
 
 
 „ Dido Queen of Carthage 
 
 
 
 . 234 
 
 
 „ Discovery of Witchcraft 
 
 
 
 . 238 
 
 
 , Julius CcBsar . 
 
 
 
 . 214 
 
 
 „ Manger^s Narrative 
 
 
 
 . 238 
 
 
 , Measure for Measure 
 
 
 
 241,302,303 
 
 
 , Saxo Grammaticus . 
 
 
 • 35,^ 
 
 J04, 236, 243 
 
 
 , Spanish Tragedy 
 
 
 
 35, 36, 243 
 
 ) 
 
 , Titus Andro7iicus 
 
 
 
 35, 243 
 
 Betterton and 
 
 
 
 244, 245 
 
 Burbage and 
 
 
 
 • 245 
 
 earliest edition of . 
 
 
 
 . 230 
 
 Essex and 
 
 
 
 214,237 
 
 First and Second Quartos of 
 
 
 
 230-9, 242 
 
 Garrick and 
 
 
 
 . 245 
 
 Hamlet's age in 
 
 
 
 •235-7 
 
 Hamlet's frenzy in 
 
 
 
 .242-5 
 
 Johnson on . 
 
 
 
 • 244 
 
 Masefield on 
 
 
 
 • 235 
 
 Plutarch on Ghosts and 
 
 
 
 . 241 
 
 P 
 
 Dssible early form of . 
 
 
 
 • 35 
 
 423
 
 INDEX 
 
 Hamlet Seneca (Lucius Annaeus) and . 
 
 Southampton, third Earl of, and 
 Tarleton and 
 Harington, Sir John, on Essex . 
 
 „ Queen Elizabeth 
 „ year 1588 
 Harlequinades and Roman Drama 
 Harsnett, Samuel, his Popish Impostures and Kh 
 
 PAGE 
 . 240 
 
 .236-7 
 
 • 236 
 202 
 
 202, 205 
 
 • 94 
 . 366 
 
 Lear 
 248, 249 
 . 248 
 348-51 
 
 \ 
 
 Harvey, John, and King Lear .... 
 
 Haterius, Quintus, and Ben Jonson 
 
 Hazlitt, William, on Falstaff in the Merry Wives of 
 
 Windsor ..... 64 
 
 „ Lyly's Prose . . . -14 
 
 Hecatommithi and Measure for Measure . . . 304 
 
 „ Othello ...... 256 
 
 Heliodorus, his /Ethiopica and Twelfth Night . . 47 
 
 Heminge (or Hemminges), John, and Shakespeare 7, 10, 49, 
 
 60, 198, 400-6 
 
 Henslowe, Philip, and Dekker .... 
 
 • 331 
 
 „ Hamlet .... 
 
 . 232 
 
 „ Julius Ccesar . 
 
 . 213 
 
 „ Ki7ig Henry the Sixth 
 
 160, 161 
 
 „ King Lear 
 
 . 251 
 
 „ Oldcastle 
 
 . 187 
 
 „ Spencer (Gabriel) 
 
 • 320 
 
 „ Venetian Comedy 
 
 . 128 
 
 Hentzner, Paul, on English Theatres . 
 
 .21,23 
 
 ,, Golden Hind 
 
 . 156 
 
 Hercules JEtceus and Antony and Cleopatra . 
 
 . 276 
 
 Hercules Furens and Macbeth .... 
 
 . 216 
 
 „ Madness .... 
 
 • 203 
 
 Hero and Leander and third Earl of Southampton 
 
 91 
 
 Heroic Plays and Chronicle Histories . 
 
 19 
 
 Herrick, Robert, and Ben Jonson 
 
 • 341 
 
 „ Fairyland .... 
 
 . 119 
 
 Heywood, Thomas, and Ariel's name . 
 
 • 55 
 
 „ Shakespeare . 
 
 . 380 
 
 Histoires Tragiques and Hamlet .... 
 
 35, 204 
 
 424 

 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Histoires Tragiques and Julius Ccesar .... 208 
 „ Much Ado About Nothi?ig . 6^ 
 
 ,, Romeo and Juliet ... 76 
 Historia Danica and Hamlet . . 35, 204, 236, 243, 285 
 
 Historia Troiana and Troilus and Cressida . 
 Histories (Shakespeare's) ..... 
 Histriomastix and War of the Poets . 
 Hohnshed, Raphael, and Cymbeline . 
 
 King Henry the Eighth 
 
 King Lear . 
 
 King Richard the Third 
 
 Macbeth 
 
 Munday 
 Holy Trinity Church and Shakespeare 
 Honour in his Perfection and second Earl of Southampton 
 Horace, his Sapphics and Fletcher 
 
 on Cleopatra .... 
 Hortop, Job, and Caliban 
 Howe, Edmund, and Othello 
 
 Hunsdon, second Baron, and Oldcastle . . 186, 188 
 
 Hunt, Simon, and Shakespeare ..... 392 
 
 Hutton, Edward, on Decameron .... 27 
 
 „ Filostrato ..... 296 
 
 296 
 
 15 
 
 297 
 1-98 
 
 
 322 
 38 
 
 192 
 
 193 
 
 • 
 
 250 
 
 167 
 
 34.35 
 
 , 220 
 
 187 
 
 pton 
 
 390 
 83 
 
 196 
 
 . 
 
 277 
 
 • 
 
 53 
 267 
 
 I 
 
 Ingannati and Twelfth Night 
 Interludes and English Drama 
 „ Shakespeare 
 
 148 
 
 24-6 
 
 28 
 
 J 
 
 Jack Wilton and third Earl of Southampton 
 Jew of Malta and Marlowe 
 
 „ Merchant of Venice 
 Johnson, Garret, and Bust 
 Johnson, Richard, and Nine Days' Wonder 
 Johnson, Samuel, on Cymbeline . 
 „ Hamlet 
 
 425 
 
 • 97 
 .152-4 
 
 37^130 
 
 • 354 
 
 • 339 
 
 •38,39 
 . 244
 
 
 INDEX 
 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, on Histories . 
 
 
 • 151,164 
 
 „ Horse-boys 
 
 
 • 377 
 
 Jonson, Ben, and Beaumont 
 
 .291 
 
 ,318,341,400 
 
 „ dedications 
 
 
 .98,99 
 
 „ Drayton 
 
 
 318,342,343 
 
 „ Droeshout Engraving 
 
 
 • 353 
 
 „ Falstaff . 
 
 •325 
 
 . 326, 347, 348 
 
 ,, Golden Hind . 
 
 
 . . 156 
 
 „ Gun-powder Plot . 
 
 
 206, 392 
 
 „ Henslowe 
 
 
 • 320 
 
 ,, Herrick . 
 
 
 • 341 
 
 ,, Interludes 
 
 
 . 24 
 
 „ Mab 
 
 
 . 119 
 
 „ Macbeth 
 
 
 . 224-7 
 
 „ Magical names 
 
 
 • 55 
 
 „ Marston . 179,322, 
 
 331' 
 
 332,335,336 
 
 ,, Masques 
 
 
 . 289 
 
 ,, Oberon . 
 
 
 . 119 
 
 „ Pericles . 
 
 
 • 44 
 
 „ Shakespeare . -31/ 
 
 7~Sh 
 
 353,358,379 
 
 „ Stage-watchmen 
 
 
 • 363 
 
 „ Troilus and Cressida 
 
 
 .335-8 
 
 his adventure in Paris 
 
 
 326, 348 
 
 „ alleged wit-combats . 
 
 
 • 340, 341 
 
 
 „ Bartholomew Fair 
 
 
 .345-8 
 
 
 „ changes of Religion . 
 
 
 • 321 
 
 
 „ Comedies 
 
 
 405, 406 
 
 
 „ Cynthia's Revels 
 
 
 . 329 
 
 
 ,, description of Clown 
 
 
 . 366 
 
 
 » . » Johphiel 
 
 
 • 55 
 
 
 , Discoveries 
 
 
 348-51 
 
 
 „ early history 
 
 
 • 320 
 
 
 , Epigram on Playwright 
 
 
 • 322 
 
 
 , „ „ Poet-Ape 
 
 
 •327-8 
 
 
 , Every Man In His Humour 
 
 
 320, 329 
 
 
 , Every Man Out of His Hun 
 
 tour 
 
 • 54, 323-5 
 
 
 , Folio of 1616 . 
 
 
 • 403 
 
 , 
 
 , Poetaster 
 
 
 • 331-4, 336 
 
 3 
 
 , Verses in First Folio 
 
 
 317,353,358 
 
 
 426 
 

 
 INDEX 
 
 Jonson, Ben, his Volpone . 
 
 Juan Manuel, Don, and Conde Lucanor 
 
 Jugglers and Players. 
 
 Julius Ccesar ..... 
 
 and Hamlet . 
 
 Bradley on Brutus in 
 
 Digges on . 
 
 Dowden on . 
 
 earliest edition of . 
 
 Essex Revolt and . 
 
 GoUancz on Brutus' speech in 
 
 Lee on . . . 
 
 Plutarch on Brutus' vision 
 „ Caesar 
 
 possible juvenile form of 
 
 Queen Elizabeth and 
 
 rhetorical contests in 
 
 Schlegel on Brutus in 
 
 two parts in 
 
 Weever on . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 344, 345 
 27, 144 
 
 18 
 
 205-14 
 
 . 214 
 
 . 208 
 
 . 207 
 
 • 213 
 
 . 205 
 
 211, 212 
 . 208 
 . 207 
 . 203 
 214 
 34, 206 
 . 212 
 
 207, 208 
 . 208 
 34, 207 
 
 205, 206 
 
 K 
 
 Kemp, William, and Dogberry .... 68, 69, 367 
 his Nine Days'' Wonder and Ben Jonson 
 
 338-40 
 „ „ „ „ „ Macbeth 34,217 
 
 „ „ „ „ „ Shakespeare 
 
 338-40 
 „ „ „ „ Andrew Lang 
 
 on . 217, 339 
 
 Kett, Francis, and Marlowe . . . . • 115 
 
 King Charles the First and Midsummer Nighfs Dream . 68 
 
 „ Much Ado About Nothing . 68 
 
 King Duarte of Portugal on Prose . . . • I4> 15 
 
 King Henry the Fourth .... 173-7,183-91 
 
 First Part and Don Quixote . 175-7 
 
 „ „ „ Famous Victories 
 
 427
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 King Henry the Fourth First Part, Brooke (Tucker) on. 183 
 
 „ „ earliest edition of . 173 
 „ „ Falstaflf, Comedy of. 149, 174 
 „ „ GoUancz on . -174 
 
 „ „ Mathew (Toby) and. 174 
 „ „ Meres and . -174 
 
 Second Part . . . 183-91 
 
 Brooke (Tucker) on 183 
 
 „ „ earliest 
 
 edition of . 171 
 
 „ Epilogue 
 
 180, 184 
 
 „ „ Falstaff in 
 
 184-91 
 
 „ „ Oldcastle and 
 
 1 84-90 
 
 „ „ Pistol in 
 
 179,180 
 
 King Henry the Fifth ..... 
 
 177-80 
 
 and Famous Victories 
 
 
 177,178 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 
 . 180 
 
 Pistol in . 
 
 
 179-80 
 
 King Henry the Sixth 
 
 
 . 160-4 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 
 . 161 
 
 First Part 
 
 
 . 160-3 
 
 „ „ Henslowe and . 
 
 160, 161 
 
 „ „ Masefield on 
 
 . 160 
 
 „ „ Nashe and 
 
 160, 161 
 
 Second Part 
 
 .161-3 
 
 „ „ and Contention 
 
 .161-3 
 
 „ „ „ Tempest . 
 
 • 314 
 
 Third Part 
 
 . 161-4 
 
 „ „ and Edward the Second 158 
 
 „ „ ,, Groafszvorth 
 
 of 
 
 Wit 
 
 . 161-2 
 
 „ „ „ King Richard 
 
 the 
 
 Second . 
 
 . 164 
 
 „ „ „ King Richard 
 
 the 
 
 Third . 
 
 . 166 
 
 „ „ „ True Tragedy 
 
 . 161-3 
 
 King Henry the Eighth and decay of Charity 
 
 • 375 
 
 „ Masques 
 
 . 289 
 
 King Henry the Eighth ..... 
 
 .191-8 
 
 and Edward the Second . 
 
 . 197 
 
 428 
 

 
 INDEX 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 King Henry the Eighth Catholic version ir 
 
 I . .192-5 
 
 Coleridge on 
 
 . 192 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 . 192 
 
 Elze on 
 
 . 194 
 
 Fletcher and 
 
 . 192-8 
 
 Massinger and 
 
 . 192,195-8 
 
 Protestant version 
 
 in . .192-4 
 
 Wotton on . 
 
 191, 192 
 
 King James the First and King Lear 
 
 
 . 251 
 
 „ Macbeth 
 
 
 . 220 
 
 „ Shakespeare 
 
 
 . 219 
 
 „ Witchcraft 
 
 
 . 221 
 
 King John .... 
 
 
 .180-3 
 
 and King Henry the Eighth 
 
 
 . 151 
 
 „ King Johan 
 
 
 181,182 
 
 „ Lusfs Dominion . 
 
 
 • 183 
 
 „ Troublesome Reign 
 
 
 182,183 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 
 . 181 
 
 Meres on 
 
 
 . 181 
 
 King Lear .... 
 
 
 247-55 
 
 and Arcadia (Sidney's) 
 
 
 . 250 
 
 „ Faery Queen 
 
 
 . 250,251 
 
 „ Holinshed's Chronicles 
 
 
 • 250 
 
 „ King Leir . 
 
 
 . 249 
 
 „ Popish Impostures 
 
 
 . 248, 249 
 
 „ Titus Andronicus 
 
 
 34>36,3A25i 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 
 . 247 
 
 Fool in . 
 
 
 • 253,254 
 
 Gollancz on . 
 
 
 247, 249, 361 
 
 Henslowe and . 
 
 
 . 251 
 
 juvenile manner in . 
 
 
 . 250 
 
 possible juvenile form of . 
 
 
 • 34 
 
 storm in ... 
 
 
 . 254 
 
 King Richard the Second . 
 
 
 168-73 
 
 and Edward the Sec 
 
 ond . . 172 
 
 „ Henry the Sixt) 
 
 ? . . 164 
 
 „ Jack Straw, Lij 
 
 h of . . 169 
 
 „ Massacre at Pa 
 
 ris . .172 
 
 earliest editio 
 
 n of . 
 
 . 168 
 
 429
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 King Richard the Second, Essex Revolt and . . 199-200 
 
 Queen Elizabeth and . . 200 
 
 two Plays in . . . 169-72 
 
 King Richard the Third ...... 164-8 
 
 and Holinshed's Chronicles . .167 
 
 „ King Henry the Sixth . .164 
 
 „ More's Life of King Richard 167, 168 
 
 Clarence's death in . . .167 
 
 earliest edition of . . .166 
 
 possible juvenile form of . -34 
 
 „ Seneca . . . . 
 „ Spanish influence . 
 
 • 35 
 
 • 32 
 
 his arrest . . . . . 
 „ Spanish Tragedy . . 3 c 
 
 155.157 
 '. 36, 77y 243 
 
 L 
 
 Lambarde, William, on King Richard the Second . 
 
 . 200 
 
 ,, Theatres 
 Lang, Andrew, on Nine Days'* Wo7ider 
 Lanthorn and Candle-Light and Hamlet 
 
 . 24 
 
 217.339 
 . 244 
 
 Last Tragi-comedies (Shakespeare's) , 
 possible order of. 
 Latimer, Hugh, on decay of Charity . 
 Law against Lovers and Measure for Measure 
 
 287-316 
 . 291 
 
 • 375 
 . 67 
 
 Leal Conselheiro on Prose .... 
 
 14 
 
 Lee, Sir Sidney, debt to his research . 
 
 10 
 
 
 
 n Aubrey's note 
 
 , Hamlet and Spanish Tragedy 
 
 , Julius Ccesar 
 
 , Oldcastle 
 
 . 382 
 
 • 35 
 . 206 
 
 . 184 
 
 
 , Puritans and Shakespeare 
 
 , Shakespeare's schooling 
 
 , Southampton, third Earl of 
 
 , Spanish Tragedy . 
 
 , Tempest 
 
 , Troilus and Cressida 
 
 • 394 
 . 392 
 
 •91.93 
 
 • 35 
 .51,52 
 
 •32,33 
 
 
 , Twelfth Night 
 
 . 147 
 
 430 
 
 i
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Leicester, Earl of, and Shakespeare (tradition of) . 365 
 L'Estrange, Sir Nicholas, story of Shakespeare . 321, 340 
 Lives of Eminent Men and Shakespeare . . . 361 
 
 Local Traditions (alleged) about Shakespeare . . 361-8 
 
 Lodge, Thomas, his life . . . . . 138,139 
 
 „ Rosalynde and As Tou Like It 132, 135-9 
 „ „ „ ^tuo Gentlemen of 
 
 Verona . . 62 
 
 „ Scilla's Metamorphoses . . -139 
 
 „ Wifs Misery and Hamlet . -231 
 
 possible picture of, as Jaques • 138, 139 
 
 London, Corporation of, and Theatres . . .21, 22 
 
 „ population of . . . . . .21 
 
 London and the Country Carbonadoed on Dancing in 
 
 Theatres . 21 
 
 „ Fools in Plays . 141 
 
 „ Players . . 328 
 
 Longus, his Daphnis and Chloe and Pastorals .62, 133, 134 
 
 Lope de Vega, his Arcadia . . . . -136 
 
 „ Castelvinos y Monteses ... 78 
 „ fluency. ..... 406 
 
 Lopez, Roderigo, and Shylock .... 128, 129 
 
 Lovers Labour^s Lost ...... 70-3 
 
 and Endimion .... 73 
 
 „ Rabelais .... 71 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet . . . 76, JJ 
 
 „ Sonnets ..... 72 
 
 earliest edition of ... 71 
 
 Euphuism and . . . .71,72 
 
 Masefield on .... 71 
 
 Lovers Labour^ s JVon and AlPs Well that Ends Well . 70 
 Loz^/f'j M<2r^yr and Shakespeare . . . . 114,115 
 
 Lover'* s Complaint and Chaucer (Squire^ s Tale) . 1047^^5 
 
 „ Rape of Liicrece . . 101,103 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet . . . ^92r 
 
 „ Ruins of Time ... 95 
 
 earliest edition of . . . .ill 
 
 possible picture of Southampton in 91-4, 
 
 102, 103
 
 INDEX 
 
 Luclan, his Timon and Timon of Athens 
 Lucy, Sir Thomas, the first and Shallow 
 
 the second and Shallow 
 the third and Shallow 
 Lupton, Donald, on dancing at Theatres 
 „ Fools in Plays 
 „ Players 
 Lust's Dominion and Ki7ig John . 
 „ Marlowe . 
 „ Titus Andronicus 
 Lydgate, John, and Troilus and Cressida 
 Lyly, John, and Euphuism 
 
 ,, Italianate Comedies . 
 „ Lovers Labour's Lost . 
 „ Tzvo Gentlemen of Verona 
 his Endimion . 
 „ Euphues . 
 
 M 
 
 Mabie, Hamilton, on discovery of Bermuda 
 „ portrait of Essex 
 
 Macbeth 
 
 and Hercules Furens 
 
 Holinshed's Chronicles 
 Masque of the Queens 
 Nine Days'' Wonder 
 Titus A ndronicus . 
 Witch (Middleton's) 
 
 Coleridge on 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 Equivocation and 
 
 Forman on. 
 
 Jonson and. 
 
 Middleton and . 
 
 Porter's speech in 
 
 possible juvenile form of 
 
 Saintsbury on 
 
 Swinburne on 
 
 Weird Sisters and Witches in 
 
 432 
 
 PAGE 
 
 • 283 
 
 363,365 M 
 
 • 363 1 
 
 363, 365 
 121 
 
 . 328 
 
 . 183 
 . 152 
 
 • 31 
 
 . 297 
 
 •13-15 
 23,61,62 
 
 • 73 
 . 62 
 
 73,357 
 •13-15 
 
 . 52 
 
 • 356 
 215-29 
 
 203, 204, 216 
 
 34' 35, 220 
 
 . 224-6 
 
 34,217 
 . 215 
 
 223, 224 
 
 . 219 
 
 • 215 
 217-18 
 
 220, 221, 228 
 .224-7 
 223, 224, 226, 227 
 217-19 
 
 • 34, 35 
 . 217 
 
 • 223 
 . 220-7
 
 INDEX 
 
 Macbeth, Witchcraft and . 
 Machyri's Diary and Julius Ccesar 
 Malone, Edmund, and Bust 
 
 Shakespeare's beginning on Stage 377 
 
 Manningham, John, and Twelfth Night 
 
 story of Shakespeare and Burbage 
 Map, Walter, and Falstaff .... 
 
 Markham, Gervase, his Verses to Southampton . 
 Marlowe, Christopher ..... 
 
 and Chronicle Histories 
 „ Contention 
 „ Coriolanus 
 
 „ Dido Queen of Carthage 
 „ Jew of Malta . 37, 130-1 
 „ Lusfs Dominion . 
 „ Pericles 
 „ Troublesome Reign 
 his Doctor Faustus and Tempest 
 „ Hero and Leander (part of) 
 
 and Southampton . -90,91 
 
 Tamburlaine and Heroic Plays 155 
 
 PAGE 
 221 
 206 
 
 534 
 
 H7 
 
 340 
 190 
 
 97,98 
 151-8 
 
 151 
 163 
 
 33,282 
 
 152 
 
 152-4 
 
 152 
 
 50 
 181 
 
 58 
 
 Marston, John, and Carlo Buffone 
 Crispinus 
 Jonson 
 
 179 
 
 Pistol. 
 
 Playwright . 
 
 Return from Parnassus 
 
 Thersites 
 on printing Plays 
 Martorell, Johannot, and Tirant Lo Blanch 
 Masefield, John, on Coriolanus . 
 
 Cymbeline . 
 
 Hamlet 
 
 King Henry the Sixth (First Part) 
 
 Lovers Labour'' s Lost 
 
 Othello 
 
 Romeo and Juliet 
 
 Timon of Athens . 
 
 Troilus and Cressida 
 
 433 
 
 • 335,336 
 
 • 332,336 
 322,331,335,336 
 179,180,326,336 
 
 ■ 322 
 322 
 
 •335-7 
 23 
 
 68, 175, 
 
 176 
 
 284 
 
 307 
 
 235 
 160 
 
 •■ 71 
 • 255 
 . 76 
 16,283 
 292, 293 
 
 E E
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Masefield, John, on Two Gentlemen of Verona . . 62, 63 
 
 Masondi on sources of Arabian Nights^ Entertainments . 27 
 
 Masque of Blackness and Othello 
 
 „ The Queens and Macbeth 
 Masques and Mummers' Plays . 
 „ Pageants (Secular) 
 in the Plays 
 revival of . 
 Massinger, Philip, and King Henry the Eighth 
 
 192, 195, 197 
 Masuccio and Romeo and Juliet .... 
 
 Mathew^, Sir Toby, and Every Man in His Humour 
 
 „ "Falstaff" . . . . 
 
 „ Ki7ig Henry the Fourth . 
 his friendship with Donne and 
 
 Bacon .... 
 
 Measure for Measure 
 
 . 268 
 . 224-6 
 26, 289 
 . 289 
 . 290 
 . 289 
 
 198 
 
 320 
 325 
 174 
 
 397 
 66, 301-6 
 
 and Arabian Nights^ Entertainments 304 
 
 Bloody Brother 
 Hamlet 
 Hecatommithi 
 Pericles 
 
 Promos and Cassandra 
 Seneca 
 earliest edition of 
 possible juvenile form of 
 Saintsbury on 
 Medici, Lorenzo de', and Pastorals 
 Medwall, Henry, and Interludes 
 Meeting of Gallants and Oldcastle 
 Mencechmi and Twelfth Night . 
 Menina et Mo (a and Pastorals . 
 Merchant of Venice . 
 
 and Gesta Romanorum 
 
 305. 306 
 
 241.302,303 
 
 ■ 304 
 
 47» 304 
 66, 304 
 
 302, 303 
 
 • 301 
 . 66 
 
 •6,7,73,301 
 
 • 134 
 
 • 24 
 . 188 
 
 • 147 
 
 • 135 
 
 128-31 
 
 131 
 
 „ Giovanni Fiorentino's Novelle . 131 
 „ Jew of Malta . . 130, 131 
 
 „ Othello ..... 260 
 „ Titus Andronicus . . 35,37,129 
 
 earliest edition of . . .128 
 
 434
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Merchant of F^nice, possible iuvemhiormoi 34,37,60,63, 129 
 Saintsbury on 
 two parts of 
 Meres, Francis, and King John . 
 
 „ Marlowe's death 
 his hst of the Plays 
 Saintsbury on . 
 Merry Conceited Humours and Midsummer 
 Dream ...... 
 
 Merry Wives of Windsor . . . 64-6, 
 
 and Nine Days'' Wonder 
 „ T ami fig of the Shrew 
 Dennis on 
 earliest edition of. 
 Falstaff in 
 Pistol in 
 Shallow in 
 Middle Temple and Twelfth Nigh t 
 Middleton, Thomas, and Macbeth 
 Midsummer Dreams (Shakespeare's) 
 Midsummer Night's Dream 
 
 and Arabian Nights'* 
 tainments 
 
 „ Cradle of Security 
 
 „ Cuckold'' s Haven 
 
 „ Discovery of Witch 
 
 „ Endimion 
 
 „ New Shreds of old 
 
 „ Nymphidia . 
 
 „ Peter Squentz 
 
 „ Py ramus and Thishe 
 
 „ Taming of the Shrew 
 
 „ Tempest 
 
 „ Titus Andronicus 
 earliest edition of 
 Oberon in 
 Puck and Ariel . 
 Queen Elizabeth and 
 three parts of 
 
 435 
 
 37^129, 131 
 . 181 
 . 156 
 . 8,9 
 
 7 
 Night's 
 
 . 125 
 
 45, 330, 364 
 
 145, 340 
 
 • 145 
 
 64, 330 
 
 65 
 64,65 
 
 180 
 
 363-5 
 
 147 
 223, 224, 226, 227 
 
 117-50 
 117-28 
 Enter- 
 al 
 124 
 125 
 craft . 124 
 
 73 
 Snare. 125 
 
 118 
 
 126 
 
 126 
 
 143 
 
 55,56,58 
 
 118, 127 
 
 126 
 
 . 119 
 
 •55,56 
 122 
 
 63,123 
 
 EE
 
 INDEX 
 
 Milton, John, on Shakespeare .... 
 
 his alleged change of Religion 
 Minstrels and English Drama .... 
 Mirrha, the Mother of Adonis, and Southampton . 
 Mirror for Magistrates and King Lear. 
 Mirror of Knighthood and Ki^ig Henry the Fourth . 
 
 „ Much Ado About Nothing 
 
 „ Tempest 
 Mirror of Martyrs and Julius Ccesar 
 Mo?ik^s Tale and Julius Ca?sar . 
 Montaigne and Seneca 
 
 „ Tempest . 
 Montalban and Lope de Vega . 
 Montalvo, Garci (or Garcia), and Amadis de Gaula 
 Montemayor (or Montemor), Jorge de, and Diana 
 Montgomery, first Earl of, and First Folio . 
 " Month's mind," meaning of . 
 Moral Plays and Interludes .... 
 More, Henry, and Phcenipc and Turtle 
 More, Sir Thomas, his Life of King Richard the Third 
 
 „ Utopia .... 
 Moro, Cristofano, and Othello . . . .258 
 
 Morton, Cardinal, and Ki?ig Richard the Third 
 Moulton, R. J., on Old Attic Comedy 
 Much Ado About Nothing .... 67-70, 148 
 
 and Ariodante and Ginevra 
 Bandello's Novelle . 
 
 PAGE 
 401 
 
 397 
 19, 20 
 
 105 
 
 250 
 
 56 
 
 68 
 
 56,57 
 205, 206 
 
 240 
 54 
 
 62 
 
 Law Against Lovers 
 Lovers Labour'' s Won 
 Mirror of Knighthood 
 Orlando Furioso 
 Romeo and Juliet . 
 Tirant lo Blanch 
 Digges on . 
 earliest edition of. 
 possible juvenile form of 
 Mummers' Plays and English Drama . 
 Munday, Anthony, and Oldcastle 
 
 his Fidele afid Fortunio . 
 
 209 
 241 
 
 313 
 406 
 
 170 
 
 135 
 400 
 
 391 
 
 25 
 114 
 
 168 
 
 313 
 259 
 
 168 
 
 28 
 
 149 
 
 67 
 
 67 
 67 
 
 67 
 
 68 
 
 67 
 
 77 
 68 
 
 68 
 
 67 
 
 67-70 
 26 
 
 187-8 
 6i
 
 34= 
 
 INDEX 
 
 N 
 
 Nashc, Thomas, his Verses to Southampton 
 on Chronicle Histories 
 „ dedications 
 „ Enghsh Seneca 
 „ Play about Talbot 
 „ thefts of Manuscripts . 
 New Shreds of an Old Snare and Midsummer Night'. 
 Dream ....... 
 
 Nicetas Eugenianus on Greek Romances 
 Nine Days'* Wonder and Macbeth 
 
 „ Merry Wives of Windsor . 
 „ Shakespeare . 
 Andrew Lang on . 
 Norton, Thomas, as Rack-Master 
 Nouradj -al-Zehel and Arabian Nights^ Entertainments 
 Nugce Antiques and Essex .... 
 
 „ Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 „ year 1588 .... 
 
 Nymphidia and Midsummer Night's Dream . 
 
 „ Tempest ..... 
 
 O 
 
 Oldcastle, Sir John, and Falstaff . . . 184-90 
 
 Oldcorne, Edward, his work in Worcestershire . . 396 
 
 Omar Khayyam and Falstaff . . . . .190 
 
 Order of the Plays in the First Folio .... 8 
 
 Othello ........ 255-71 
 
 and Agamemnon . . . . . .270 
 
 5, Arabian Nights'' Entertainments . . . 259 
 
 „ Hecatommithi ...... 256 
 
 „ Merchant of Venice ..... 260 
 
 „ Titus Andronicus . . . . 35, 265 
 
 Coleridge on ...... 264 
 
 Desdemona's death in . . . . 269, 270 
 
 earliest edition of . . . . . . 256 
 
 Gollancz on . . . . . . . 259 
 
 lago perhaps at first a slave in . . . 357 
 
 Jealousy in . . . . . . . 263 
 
 437 
 
 PAGE 
 98 
 
 97 
 
 35 
 160 
 
 300 
 
 125 
 
 44 
 
 217 
 
 340 
 
 338-40 
 
 217.339 
 . 187 
 
 . 27 
 
 . 202 
 
 202, 205 
 
 . 94 
 
 . 118 
 
 • 55
 
 INDEX 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Othello, juvenile manner in ... . 
 
 259, 260 
 
 Laocoon and . . . . . 
 
 . 272 
 
 Othello's colour in . . . . 
 
 . 264-8 
 
 „ epilepsy in ... . 
 
 . 269 
 
 possible juvenile form of . . . 
 
 • 34 
 
 „ Tragi-comical form of 
 
 132, 260 
 
 Prince of Morocco and . 
 
 266, 267 
 
 Overbury, Sir Thomas, and Franklins. 
 
 • 370 
 
 Ovid and the Poems of Love 
 
 81,115 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet 
 
 • 75 
 
 „ Titus Andronicus 
 
 . 30-2 
 
 Oxford, seventeenth Earl of, and Euphues . 
 
 13 
 
 „ Sidney 
 
 . 83 
 
 P 
 
 Packet of Mad Letters and Pistol 
 
 • 179 
 
 Pageants (Church) ..... 
 
 19,20,25 
 
 (Secular) ..... 
 
 . 289 
 
 Palace of Pleasure and All's Well that Ends Well 
 
 • 74 
 
 „ English Plays . 
 
 . 27 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet 
 
 . 76 
 
 „ Timon of Athens 
 
 . 283 
 
 Palladis Tamia and King Henry the Fourth . 
 
 . 174 
 
 „ King John . 
 
 . 181 
 
 list of Plays in . 
 
 . 8,9 
 
 on Marlowe's death . 
 
 . 156 
 
 „ Poems of Love 
 
 81 
 
 Pahnerin de Inglaterra and Chivalry . 
 
 . 175.176 
 
 Pandosto and The Winter's Tale 
 
 . 40 
 
 Panecia and Much Ado About Nothing 
 
 . . 67 
 
 Pantomime and EngHsh Drama 
 
 . 28 
 
 „ Harlequinades . 
 
 . 366 
 
 Parsons, Robert, and Oldcastle . 
 
 . 189 
 
 Partenay, Romance of, and Fairies 
 
 . 119 
 
 Parthenius, his Periander of Corinth . 
 
 • 74 
 
 Particular Entertainment and Masques 
 
 . 289 
 
 Paston Letters and Fastolfe 
 
 . 189 
 
 Pastoral Convention, EngHsh 
 
 •133-5 
 
 438 

 
 INDEX 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Pastoral Convention, French .... 
 
 •133-5 
 
 „ Italian .... 
 
 . 290 
 
 Pattern of Paiiiful Adventures and Pericles . 
 
 . 46 
 
 Paynter, William, his Palace of Pleasure . 27, 7 
 
 4, y6, 283 
 
 Peele, George, and Chronicle Histories 
 
 . 151 
 
 „ Southampton 
 
 • 237 
 
 his reward for a dedication . 
 
 . 88 
 
 Pembroke, Countess of, her Marc Antoine . 
 
 • 273 
 
 Pembroke, third Earl of, and Massinger 
 
 • 197 
 
 dedication of First Folio to 
 
 400 
 
 Perambulation of Kent 2ir].diThQ2itiQS . 
 
 . 24 
 
 Periander of Corinth and All's Well that Ends Well 
 
 • 74 
 
 Pericles ........ 
 
 .41-50 
 
 and Apollonius of Tyre 
 
 . 
 
 • 44 
 
 „ Comedy of Errors 
 
 . 
 
 .47,66 
 
 „ Confessio Afnantis 
 
 . 
 
 • 43-5 
 
 „ Cymbeline 
 
 . 
 
 41,47,48 
 
 „ Pattern of Painful Adventures . 
 
 . 46 
 
 „ Measure for Measure . . .4 
 
 7i 66, 304 
 
 „ Tempest ..... 
 
 •47,51 
 
 „ Winter's Tale. 
 
 
 42, 47, 48 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 
 . 42 
 
 Coleridge on 
 
 
 .41,42 
 
 Dowden on 
 
 
 • 51 
 
 Dryden on . 
 
 
 . 49 
 
 Feltham on 
 
 
 . 46 
 
 GoUancz on . 
 
 
 •47,50 
 
 Jonson on 
 
 
 . 46 
 
 Marlowe and 
 
 
 . 50 
 
 Saintsbury on 
 
 
 • 45 
 
 Wilkins and 
 
 
 .45,46 
 
 Perimedes the Blacksmith and Marlowe 
 
 • 155 
 
 Perkin Warbeck and Chronicle Histories 
 
 . 195 
 
 „ Shakespeare 
 
 . 401 
 
 Peter Sque?itz and Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 
 126 
 
 Petrarch, his Sonetti and the Sonnets . 
 
 . 108 
 
 Petronius Arbiter and the Sonnets 
 
 109 
 
 Phoenix and Turtle and Donne 
 
 . 115 
 
 „ Poems oi 
 
 " Love 
 
 .114-5 
 
 439
 
 INDEX 
 
 Phasnix and Turtle, earliest edition of . 
 Pierce Penniless on Chronicle Histories 
 „ dedications . 
 „ imitation of Seneca 
 „ Play about Talbot 
 Piers Plowman and Seneca 
 Plautus and Comedy of Errors 
 „ English Drama 
 „ Italian Comedies 
 „ Twelfth Night 
 Plays of Youth (Shakespeare's) 
 Playwright, Ben Jonson's Epigram on 
 Plume, Thomas, and story of Shakespeare's 
 Plutarch (North's version) on Alcibiades 
 
 ,, Antonius 
 
 father 
 
 274. 275, 
 „ „ and Brutus 
 
 „ Brutus' vision 
 „ Cassius and Ghosts. 
 „ Caesar . 
 
 „ Cleopatra . 274, 
 „ Coriolanus 
 „ Timon . 
 Poems of Love (Shakespeare's) .... 
 
 „ „ „ and Romeo and Juliet 
 
 Poet-Ape, Ben Jonson's Epigram on . 
 Poetaster and Othello 
 Crispinus in 
 Parodies in 
 Prologue to 
 " Politicians," meaning of. 
 Pollard, Alfred, on Interludes 
 
 „ value of Quartos . 
 Pooler, Knox, on dedication of the Sonnets 
 Porto, Luigi da, and Romeo and Juliet 
 Primaleon and Greek Romances 
 Promos and Cassandra and Measure for Measure . 
 Prose, King Duartc on .... . 
 
 Puritan or the Widow of Watling Street and Macbeth 
 Puritanism and Shakespeare .... 
 
 440 
 
 PAGE 
 114 
 
 97 
 
 35 
 160 
 
 241 
 
 60,67 
 
 26 
 
 60 
 
 147 
 13-80 
 
 322 
 
 340 
 
 283 
 
 277, 278 
 207, 208 
 
 . 203 
 
 . 241 
 
 214 
 
 277, 278 
 
 . 281 
 275,283 
 
 81-115 
 78 
 
 327 
 258 
 
 331-4 
 
 334 
 
 335 
 
 395 
 
 25 
 231 
 
 III 
 
 76 
 
 176 
 66, 304 
 
 14 
 
 218 
 
 393-7
 
 INDEX 
 
 Pyramus and Thishe and Midsummer Nigh fs Dream 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet . 
 
 PAGE 
 126 
 
 75 
 
 Q 
 
 Quartos, value of . . . . . . •231 
 
 Queen Anne of Denmark and Masque of Blackness . 268 
 
 „ Revival of Masques. . 289 
 
 Queen Elizabeth and Essex . . . 200,202,212 
 
 • 13 
 . 212 
 
 . 122 
 
 20 
 
 . 83 
 
 . 386 
 
 297, 298 
 
 Euphuism. 
 
 Julius Ccesar 
 
 Oberon's compliment 
 
 Players 
 
 Sidney 
 
 Quiney, Adrian, his letter about Shakespeare 
 Quintus Smyrnaeus and Troilus and Cressida 
 
 190 
 
 71 
 157 
 326 
 
 142 
 
 7 
 
 7 
 
 R 
 
 Rabelais and Falstaif ..... 
 
 „ Lovers Lahour^s Lost 
 Ralegh, Sir Walter, and Marlowe 
 
 his son in Paris with Ben Jonson 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, on As Tou Like It 
 
 „ Comedies, revision of 
 
 „ First Folio Order . 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet and Troilus 
 
 and Cressida . . 61,75,299 
 
 Rape of Lucre ce and Cymheline . . . . ,39 
 
 „ King John . . . . -183 
 
 „ Lover'' s Complaint . . loi, 102 
 
 dedication of . . . . 99, 100 
 
 earliest edition of . . . .82 
 
 Sinon in . . . . . . 100-4 
 
 Recuyell of the Histories of Troy and Troilus and Cressida 297 
 Religious Drama (English), origin of . . . . 19, 20 
 
 Reliquice W ottoniance and King Henry the Eighth . . 192 
 
 Resende, Andres de, on Gil Vicente .... 403 
 
 441
 
 INDEX 
 
 Return from Parnassus and Jonson 
 
 „ Marston . 
 „ Narrative Poems 
 „ Shakespeare 
 „ Troilus and Cressida 
 Ribeiro, Bernardim, and Pastorals 
 Riche, Barnabe, and T^wo Gentlemen of Verona 
 Robin Hood Ballads and Pastorals 
 Rojas, Fernando de, and La Celestina. 
 Rome, Drama of, and English Drama . 
 Romeo and Juliet ..... 
 
 and Antony and Cleopatra 75, 76 
 Bandello's Novelle 
 Belief orest 
 
 Castelvinos y Monteses 
 Confessio Amaritis 
 Cymbeline 
 Efhesiaca 
 Giulietta . 
 Hadriana 
 
 Lovers Labour"^ s Lost . 
 Lover'' s Complaint 
 Metamorphoses (Ovid's) 
 Midsum?ner Nighfs Dream 
 Much Ado About Nothing 
 Palace of Pleasure 
 Poems of Love . 
 Romeus and Juliet 
 Spanish Tragedy 
 Troilus and Cressida . 
 Two Gentleme?i of Verona 
 earliest edition of 
 Maseficld on . 
 possible juvenile form of . 
 Raleigh on . . . 
 
 Romeus and Juliet and Romeo and Juliet 
 Rosalynde and As Tou Like It . 
 „ Tale of Gamelyn . 
 „ Two Gentlemen of Verona 
 442 
 
 PAGE 
 
 • 323 
 
 322,336 
 
 .81,82 
 
 82,323 
 
 • 335 
 
 • 135 
 . 62 
 
 • 135 
 
 290, 291 
 
 . 26 
 
 .75-80 
 80, 274, 299 
 
 . 76 
 . 76 
 
 . 78 
 
 • 75 
 •73,74 
 
 • 75 
 . 76 
 
 • 75 
 72, 76, 77 
 
 78, 103 
 
 75 
 117 
 
 77 
 76 
 
 78 
 
 7S 
 
 77 
 61,76,299 
 
 77,78 
 
 74 
 
 76 
 
 61,76 
 
 61,75,299 
 
 • 75 
 62,132,136-8 
 
 62,132,133 
 
 62, 142
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Rowe, Nicholas, his account of Shakespeare's Life 361, 362 
 on Bust at Stratford . . .354 
 
 „ Jonson's opinion of Shakespeare 
 
 318,319 
 „ Lucy and Shakespeare . . . 362 
 
 „ Oldcastle 185 
 
 „ Shakespeare's boyhood . . -372 
 
 „ „ latter days . . 385 
 
 „ Southampton's alleged gift . . 87 
 
 Ruhbe and a great Cast and Poems of Love ... 82 
 
 Ruins of Time and Lover's Cont'plaint .... 95 
 
 Sainte-More, Benoit de, and Troilus and Cressida 
 
 Saintsbury, George, on First FoHo Order . 
 
 Macbeth 
 
 Measure for Measure 
 Merchant of Venice . 
 Meres' list 
 
 Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 Pericles . 
 
 Taming of the Shrew 
 Troilus and Cressida 
 W interns Tale 
 
 Salisbury, Sir John, and Phoenix and Turtle . 
 
 Sannazaro, Jacopo, and Pastorals 
 
 Satiromastix and Hamlet .... 
 „ Tim on of Jthens 
 description of Horace in 
 on Player who helped Ben Jonson 
 
 Saxo Grammaticus and Hamlet . 
 
 Schlegel on Brutus .... 
 
 Schmidt on a Month's Mind 
 
 School of Abuses and Merchant of Venice 
 
 Scilla^s Metamorphoses and Lodge 
 
 Scoloker, Anthony, and Hamlet . 
 
 „ Shakespeare . 
 
 Scot, Reginald, and Ghosts 
 
 443 
 
 . 296 
 
 7 
 . 217 
 
 6, 7» 73. 301 
 6 
 
 7 
 . 117 
 
 • 45 
 . 142 
 
 32, 293 
 
 • 41 
 . 114 
 
 • 135 
 
 • 231 
 . 284 
 
 • 325 
 
 • 320 
 35, 204, 236, 243 
 
 . 208 
 
 • 391 
 
 • 131 
 
 • 139 
 244, 245 
 
 380,400 
 
 . 238
 
 INDEX 
 
 Scot, Reginald, and Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 Scourge of Folly and Shakespeare 
 Scroope, Sir Charles, on Shakespeare . 
 Seccombe, Thomas, on Cymbeline 
 „ Pistol . 
 „ Winter^s Tale 
 Secular Drama (English), origin of 
 Seneca, Annaeus, and Discoveries 
 Seneca, Lucius Annseus and Chaucer 
 
 „ Discoveries 
 „ Hamlet . 
 „ Kyd . 
 „ Measure for Measure 
 „ Montaigne 
 his Efistolce Morales 
 „ Hercules Mtceus 
 „ „ Fur ens 
 
 ,, Troades . 
 on Fabulse Togatae 
 „ Madness . 
 „ Mob 
 Serf as de Esplandian and Chivalry- 
 Shakespeare, Hamnet, his baptism registered 
 
 „ death. 
 Shakespeare, John, and first Sir Thomas Lucy 
 „ Nine Days' Wonder 
 „ Rowe's account of . 
 Shakespeare, Judith, her baptism registered. 
 
 „ marriage 
 Shakespeare, Susanna, her baptism registered 
 
 „ epitaph 
 „ marriage 
 Shakespeare, William, alleged local traditions 
 
 attitude in his Plays . 
 
 „ towards Catholicism 
 „ „ Puritanism 
 
 Aubrey on . . . 
 
 Beaumont and . 
 Blank Verse 
 
 444 
 
 PAGE 
 . 124 
 
 • 369 
 
 • 404 
 
 • 41 
 179,326 
 
 • 41 
 19,25,26 
 
 348-51 
 
 . 241 
 
 • 349 
 240, 241 
 
 •32,35 
 
 • 302 
 240, 241 
 240, 302 
 
 . 276 
 
 203,216 
 
 204, 240 
 
 28 
 
 • 203 
 . 282 
 . 176 
 
 • 377 
 132,384 
 
 • 365 
 
 • 340 
 
 • 372 
 
 • 377 
 
 • 393 
 
 • 377 
 
 • 393 
 
 • 393 
 .361-8 
 
 383,384 
 
 • 390-3 
 
 394, 395 
 . 361 
 
 . 400 
 
 .15,16 
 
 k
 
 INDEX 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Shakespeare, William, boyhood . 
 
 .372-6 
 
 Bust at Stratford 
 
 •353-5 
 
 Davies, John, on 
 
 • 369 
 
 Davies, Richard, on 
 
 • 362, 393 
 
 descent . 
 
 • 370. 371 
 
 Discoveries on . 
 
 348-51 
 
 Drayton and . 
 
 • 342, 343 
 
 Droeshout Engraving 
 
 353,355,356 
 
 „ " Original 
 
 " Portrait 
 
 
 355,356 
 
 education 
 
 • 372, 373 
 
 Ely House Portrait . 
 
 • 355,357 
 
 First FoHo 
 
 7-9, 400-4, 406 
 
 Fuller, Thomas, on . 
 
 • 340, 341 
 
 Jonson, Ben, and 31; 
 
 '-51,353,358,379 
 
 London Hfe 
 
 377-85 
 
 marriage . 
 
 • 377,378 
 
 Mercutio and . 
 
 359-61 
 
 opinion of his Play 
 
 s (contem- 
 
 porary) 
 
 400, 401 
 
 possible caricature in 
 
 Poetaster . 334 
 
 „ choice of Parts in Plays 
 
 
 359, 360 
 
 „ ill-health 
 
 • 384 
 
 „ Religion 
 
 389-98 
 
 probable note by Aub 
 
 rey . . 382 
 
 Prose 
 
 13 
 
 Rowe's account of 
 
 362, 372 
 
 Stratford, later life at 
 
 .386-8 
 
 Ward, John, on. 
 
 341,384,386 
 
 Sidney, Philip, and Euphuism . 
 
 . 14 
 
 „ King Henry the Fifth . 
 
 • 178,179 
 
 „ King Lear . 
 
 250,251 
 
 „ Tzvo Gentlemen of Verona 
 
 82 
 
 his Afology for Poesy . 178, 
 
 179,288,297,327 
 
 „ Arcadia 
 
 • 14,62,135 
 
 on Dares Phrygius 
 
 • 297 
 
 „ Poet-Apes 
 
 . 327 
 
 „ Tragi- comedies 
 
 . 288 
 
 445 

 
 INDEX 
 
 Skialetheia and Plautus and Seneca 
 Smith, Sir Thomas, on Gentlemen 
 
 „ Yeomen. 
 Sonnets, the . . . . .82, 93-6, 
 
 and Decameron 
 
 Love'^s Labour^ s Lost . 
 Petronius Arbiter 
 Romeo and Juliet 
 Virgil's Eclogues 
 Willobie his A vis a 
 advising marriage . 
 age of Poet in 
 Benson's edition of . 
 dedication in . 
 
 „ of Thorpe's edition 
 
 Master- Poet, in 
 '' Mortal Moon " in 
 Thorpe's edition of 
 Southampton, second Countess of 
 Southampton, third Countess of, her letter 
 
 " Falstaff " 
 
 Southampton, first Earl of 
 Southampton, second Earl of 
 Southampton, third Earl of, and Anglorum Feriae 
 
 „ Bevis of Hampton 
 
 PAGE 
 
 • 32 
 
 • 370 
 
 • 369 
 106-14, 300 
 
 107 
 
 72, 
 
 93» 
 
 112, 
 99. 
 
 of 
 
 107 
 109 
 
 76 
 
 no 
 106 
 III 
 no 
 
 113 
 100 
 
 III 
 
 • 94-6 
 
 • 94 
 III, 300 
 
 84, 85, 105 
 
 about 
 
 • 325 
 . 84 
 
 .83,84 
 
 • 237 
 236, 237 
 
 Jack 
 
 Rape 
 Venus 
 
 97 
 99 
 
 dedication 
 Wilton 
 „ dedication of 
 
 of Lucrece 
 „ dedication of 
 
 and Adonis . 99 
 
 „ Merchant Adventurers in 
 life of . . . 84-8, 199 
 
 possible connection with 
 
 Shakespeare . 86 
 „ description of, in 
 
 As You Like It. 88 
 „ description of, in 
 
 Britain'' s Ida . 89, 90 
 446
 
 INDEX 
 
 Southampton, third Earl of, possible description of, in 
 
 Hamlet . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 236 
 
 description of, in 
 Lover's Complaint 92 
 
 description of, in 
 Rape of Lucrece 
 
 100-103 
 
 description of, in 
 Sonnets 
 
 Southampton, fourth Earl of 
 Southampton House 
 Spain, Drama of. Origin of 
 Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet 
 influence of 
 Spenser, Edmund, and Britain^s Ida . 
 
 „ Cordelia 
 
 „ Euphuism 
 
 ,, Master-Poet in Sonnets 
 
 his Ruins of Time and Lover'' s Complaint 95 
 
 Spielmann, M. H., on Ely House Portrait 
 Squire, Charles, on Puck . 
 Stage-Plays and Interludes 
 Stanley, Ursula, and Phoenix a?id Turtle 
 Stapleton, Thomas, and " Politicians " 
 Statutes concerning Players 
 Stephens, John, on Yeomen 
 Stockwood, John, on Theatres . 
 Stow, John, on weather in 1594 
 Strange, Lord, his Players. 
 Straparola, his Notti Piacevoli . 
 Stratford-on-Avon . 
 
 Camden on . 
 
 Players' visits to 
 Surrey, Earl of, and Blank Verse 
 Swinburne, Algernon, on Marlowe 
 
 „ Middleton 
 Symonds, Addington, on Jew of Malta 
 Symons, Arthur, on Massinger . 
 
 447 
 
 .85= 
 
 91 
 
 84 
 
 86 
 
 35: 
 
 20 
 36, 243 
 
 • 77 
 •35.36 
 . 96 
 
 . 251 
 
 • 14 
 
 94-7 
 
 • 355 
 121 
 
 • 25 
 114,115 
 
 • 395 
 
 • 24 
 
 . 370 
 21 
 
 121 
 
 • 23 
 64,144 
 
 37i> 372 
 371 
 374 
 
 15 
 
 152 
 
 223 
 130 
 197
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 T amburlaifie 2indM.3.Tlowe .... .152-6 
 
 Taming of a Shrew and Taming of the Shrew . 143, 144 
 
 Taming of the Shrew ..... 66, 142-5 
 
 and Arabian Nights^ Entertainments 144 
 „ Conde Lucanor . . 66, 144 
 
 „ Midsummer Nights'' Dream 
 „ Supposes 
 „ Taming of a Shrew 
 Coleridge on . . 142, 
 
 Dowden on . . . 
 
 earliest edition of 
 Gervinus on . . . 
 
 possible juvenile form of 
 Saintsbury on . 
 Tancred and Gesimund and Quatrains 
 Tarleton, Richard, and Yorick .... 
 
 Tasso, Torquato, and Pastorals .... 
 
 Tempest ...... 51-60, 
 
 and Arabian Nights'* Entertainments 
 
 As Tou Like It ... . 
 
 Bartholomew Fair .... 
 
 Cymbeline ..... 
 
 Doctor Faustus .... 
 
 Every Man Out of His Humour 
 Friar Bacon ..... 
 
 King Henry the Sixth 
 
 Man of Law^s Tale. 
 
 Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 
 Mirror of Knighthood 
 
 Montaigne's Essays 
 
 Pericles ..... 
 
 Ariel and Magic in ... . 
 
 „ „ Puck in .... 
 
 Caliban's origin in ... . 
 
 Coleridge on .... . 
 
 Discovery of Bermuda and 
 earliest edition of. 
 Epilogue to. 
 
 448 
 
 143. 
 
 143: 
 
 143 
 144 
 
 144 
 
 H5 
 
 145 
 142 
 
 66 
 
 66 
 
 142 
 
 29 
 
 236 
 
 290 
 
 311-16 
 
 56 
 
 58 
 346 
 
 51 
 
 58 
 
 59 
 
 .59 
 
 314 
 
 57 
 
 55.56 
 
 56 
 
 54.313 
 
 59 
 
 55.56 
 
 55.56 
 
 53.54 
 
 58 
 
 52 
 
 311 
 
 59.315.398 
 
 5!
 
 INDEX 
 
 Tempesiy Lee on . . . 
 
 possible juvenile form of 
 „ revision . 
 Terrors of the Night and the Sonnets 
 Theatres, first building of 
 Thomas, Henry, and Romances of Chivalry 
 
 „ Tempest 
 Thorpe, Thomas, dedication of the Sonnets 
 
 licence to print the Sonnets 
 Timon of Athens ..... 
 and Boiardo's Timone 
 „ Coriolanus 
 „ Lucian's Timon 
 „ Palace of Pleasure 
 „ Plutarch . 
 earliest edition of 
 epitaph in 
 Essex and 
 Masefield on. 
 place in First Folio 
 possible juvenile form of 
 Tirant lo Blanch and Chivalry . 
 
 „ Much Ado About Nothing 
 Titus Andronicus ..... 
 and Confess io A mantis 
 Cymbeline. 
 Hamlet 
 King Lear 
 
 King Richard the Third 
 Lusfs Dominion 
 Macbeth . 
 Merchant of Venice 
 Metamorphoses (Ovid's) 
 Midsummer Nighfs Dream 
 Othello 
 
 Rape of Lucrece 
 Coleridge on . 
 earliest edition of 
 Jonson on 
 
 449 
 
 PAGE 
 .51,52 
 .51-60 
 . 150 
 
 • 300 
 .21, 22 
 
 56, 176 
 
 . 56 
 
 III 
 
 • 300 
 
 33,34,283-5 
 
 • 283 
 
 34. 283 
 . 283 
 
 • 283 
 275, 283 
 
 . 283 
 285,407 
 . 284 
 16,283 
 . 284 
 
 •33.34 
 
 175.176 
 
 .68,69 
 
 .29-32 
 
 • 31 
 
 40,308,310 
 
 35.243 
 
 34»35.37.25i 
 . 168 
 
 • 31 
 34.217 
 
 35.37.129 
 
 •30.32 
 
 118, 127 
 
 35.265 
 
 • 30 
 
 •37.39 
 . 29 
 
 • 347 
 
 30
 
 INDEX 
 
 Titus Andronicus, possible revision 
 Tragedies, the (Shakespeare's) . 
 Troades and Hamlet 
 
 „ Julius Ccesar 
 Troilus and Cressida 
 
 PAGE 
 
 • 79 
 
 199-285 
 
 . 240 
 
 204 
 
 32,292-300,335-8 
 
 and Antony and Cleopatra 75, 76, 291, 299 
 
 Caxton's Recuyell 
 Chapman's Iliad 
 Confessio Ama7itis 
 Coriola7ius . 
 Filo strata 
 Hall's Iliad . 
 Lydgate's Troy Book 
 Measure for Measure 
 Return from Parnassus 
 Romeo and Juliet . 
 Troylus and Creseyde 
 Ajax in, and Ben Jonson 
 Aristophanes and 
 Colonne, Guido delle, and 
 Dares Phrygius and 
 Dictys Cretensis and 
 earliest edition of 
 Masefield on 
 place in First Folio 
 possible juvenile form of 
 Quintus Smyrnaeus and 
 Raleigh on 
 
 Sainte-More, Benoit de, and 
 Saintsbury on 
 Thersites in, and Marston 
 three parts in 
 Ulysses in, and Bacon . 
 War of the Poets and 
 Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers and Tyrell 
 Troublesome Reign of King John and King John 
 True Tragedy of Richard Duke of Tork and King 
 the Sixth ...... 
 
 Twelfth Night 
 
 450 
 
 297 
 298 
 297 
 292 
 296 
 298 
 297 
 292 
 
 335 
 61,76,299 
 
 295-7 
 
 335-8 
 292 
 296 
 297 
 297 
 
 293 
 292 
 
 32 
 
 32,33,61,298 
 
 297 
 
 61,76,299 
 
 296 
 
 32, 293 
 
 336, 337 
 
 33,294,298 
 
 • 293 
 
 336 
 
 248 
 
 181 
 
 85: 
 
 Henry 
 
 161-4 
 146-50
 
 INDEX 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 twelfth Night and ^thiofica .... 
 
 47 
 
 „ Airs Well that Ends Well 
 
 147 
 
 „ Comedy of Errors . 
 
 147 
 
 „ Ingannati 
 
 
 148 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 
 147 
 
 Manningham's Diary and 
 
 
 147 
 
 possible juvenile form of 
 
 
 66 
 
 Twine, Laurence, and Pericles . 
 
 
 46 
 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona . 
 
 
 61-3 
 
 and Afolonius and Silla 
 
 62 
 
 „ Arcadia (Sidney's) . 
 
 62 
 
 „ As Tou Like It 
 
 62 
 
 „ Diana Enamorada . 
 
 62 
 
 „ Felix and Philiomena 
 
 61 
 
 „ Fidele and Fortunio. 
 
 61 
 
 „ Romeo and Juliet . 
 
 77,7^ 
 
 „ Rosalynde 
 
 6\ 
 
 Coleridge on 
 
 37 
 
 earliest edition of 
 
 61 
 
 Masefield on 
 
 62 
 
 Tyrell, Anthony, and Popish Impostures 
 
 248 
 
 „ Southampton House . 
 
 85 
 
 V 
 Venetian Comedy and Merchant of Venice . 
 
 . 128 
 
 Venus and Adonis . . . . . • i?; 
 
 88,99 
 
 earliest edition of . 
 
 • 17 
 
 Vicente, Gil, and Shakespeare .... 
 
 • 403 
 
 Virgil, his Eclogues and dedication of Rape of Lucrece 
 
 • 99 
 
 „ Pastorals 
 
 • 133 
 
 „ Sonnets .... 
 
 no 
 
 Volpone, Prologue to, and Shakespeare . 
 
 • 24» 44' ' 
 
 0. 345 
 
 w 
 
 Walkley, Thomas, on Britain's Ida .... 89, 96 
 Wandering Jew telling Fortunes and Oldcastle . .188 
 
 War of the Poets .... 179,322,323,329,336 
 Ward, Sir Adolphus, on Friar Bacon . . . .58 
 
 451
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ward, John, on Shakespeare . . .341,343, 
 
 Watchmen, Stage, and Dogberry . . . 69, 
 
 Webster, John, on Shakespeare . 
 Weever, John, on Julius Ccesar . 
 
 „ Narrative Poems 
 Weston, William, on Popish Impostures 
 Westward Ho and Hamlet . 
 Whetstone, George, and Measure for Measure 
 
 „ Touchstone 
 White, Thomas, on Theatres 
 Whyte, Rowland, on Essex Device 
 
 „ performance of Oldcastle 
 Wife of BatFs Tale and Fairyland 
 Wilkins, George, and Pericles 
 Willobie his Avisa and Poems of Love 
 Winter'' s Tale ...... 40,41. 
 
 and Alcestis. 
 „ Cymbeline 
 „ Pa?idosto 
 „ Pericles. 
 Antigonus' death in 
 Coleridge on 
 earliest edition of 
 Lee on 
 possible juvenile form of 
 probable addition of fourth Act 
 Saintsbury on ... . 
 
 Seccombe on ... . 
 
 Wifs Misery and Hamlet .... 
 
 Witchcraft and Macbeth ..... 
 
 Wonderful Discovery of Witches and Macbeth 
 Wonderful Thi?igs Beyond Thule and Greek Romances 
 Worthies of Warwickshire and Shakespeare . 
 Wotton, Sir Henry, and King Henry the Eighth . 
 Wyndham, George, on Ajax and Jonson 
 
 „ Every Man In His Humour 
 ,, Marston and Pistol . 
 „ „ „ Thersites 
 
 „ Sonnets .... 
 
 452 
 
 PAGE 
 384, 386 
 
 363, 367 
 
 . 401 
 
 205, 206 
 
 81 
 
 . 248 
 
 231 
 
 66, 304 
 138-40 
 21 
 122 
 188 
 119 
 
 45.46 
 106 
 
 149.307 
 272 
 
 40,41 
 
 40 
 
 48 
 
 79 
 
 39 
 
 311 
 
 51 
 40-1 
 
 149 
 
 41 
 
 41 
 231 
 
 221 
 
 221 
 
 47 
 
 340. 341 
 191,192 
 
 • 335 
 
 • 329 
 
 • 179 
 
 • 335 
 109
 
 
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