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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakspere And Montaigne, by Jacob Feis
+
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+Title: Shakspere And Montaigne
+
+Author: Jacob Feis
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8139]
+[This file was first posted on June 18, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SHAKSPERE AND MONTAIGNE ***
+
+
+
+
+E-text prepared by Bill Boerst, Juliet Sutherland, and Tonya Allen
+
+Editorial note: "Shakspere" is the spelling used by the author and
+                therefore was not changed
+
+
+
+
+SHAKSPERE AND MONTAIGNE
+
+An Endeavour to Explain the Tendency of 'Hamlet'
+from Allusions in Contemporary Works
+
+BY JACOB FEIS
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+I.
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+II.
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA
+
+THE STAGE A MEDIUM FOR POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES
+
+SHAKSPERE'S POLITICAL CREED
+
+FLORIO'S TRANSLATION OF MONTAIGNE'S ESSAYS
+
+III.
+
+MONTAIGNE
+
+IV.
+
+HAMLET
+
+V.
+
+THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN BEN JONSON AND DEKKER
+
+MENTION OF A DISPUTE BETWEEN BEN JONSON AND SHAKSPERE
+IN 'THE RETURN FROM PARNASSUS'
+
+CHARACTERISTIC OF BEN JONSON
+
+BEN JONSON'S HOSTILE ATTITUDE TOWARDS SHAKSPERE
+
+DRAMATIC SKIRMISH BETWEEN BEN JONSON AND SHAKSPERE
+
+BEN JONSON'S 'POETASTER'
+
+DEKKER'S 'SATIROMASTIX'
+
+VI.
+
+'VOLPONE,' BY BEN JONSON
+
+'EASTWARD HOE,' BY CHAPMAN, BEN JONSON, AND MARSTON
+
+'THE MALCONTENT,' BY JOHN MARSTON
+
+
+
+I.
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+It has always been a daring venture to attempt finding out Shakspere's
+individuality, and the range of his  philosophical and political ideas,
+from his poetical productions. We come nearest to his feelings in his
+'Sonnets;' but only a few heavy sighs, as it were, from a time of
+languish in his life can be heard therefrom. All the rest of those
+lyrical effusions, in spite of the zealous exertions of commentators
+full of delicate sentiment and of deep thought, remain an unsolved
+secret.
+
+In his historical dramas, a political creed has been pointed out, which,
+with some degree of certainty, may be held to have been his. From his
+other dramas, the most varied evidence has been drawn. A perfect maze of
+contradictions has been read out of them; so much so that, on this
+ground, we might almost despair of trustworthy results from further
+inquiry.
+
+The wildest and most incongruous theories have been founded upon 'Hamlet'
+--the drama richest in philosophical contents. Over and over again men
+have hoped to be able to ascertain, from this tragedy, the great
+master's ideas about religion. It is well-nigh impossible to say how
+often such attempts have been made, but the reward of the exertions
+has always remained unsatisfactory. On the feelings which this masterwork
+of dramatic art still excites to-day--nearly three hundred years after
+its conception--thousands have based the most different conclusions;
+every one being convinced of the correctness of his own impressions.
+There is a special literature, composed of such rendering of personal
+impressions which that most enigmatical of all dramas has made upon
+men of various disposition. Every hypothesis finds its adherents among
+a small group, whilst those who feel differently smile at the
+infatuation of their antagonists. Nothing that could give true and final
+satisfaction has yet been reached in this direction.
+
+It is our intention to regard 'Hamlet' from a new point of view, which
+seems to promise more success than the critical endeavours hitherto
+made. We propose to enter upon a close investigation of a series of
+circumstances, events, and personal relations of the poet, as well
+as of certain indications contained in other dramatic works--all of
+the period in which 'Hamlet' was written and brought into publicity.
+This valuable material, properly arranged and put in its true connection,
+will, we believe, furnish us with such firm and solid stepping-stones
+as to allow us, on a perfectly trustworthy path, to approach the real
+intentions of this philosophical tragedy. It has long ago been felt
+that, in it, Shakspere has laid down his religious views. By the means
+alluded to we will now explain that _credo_.
+
+We believe we can successfully show that the tendency of 'Hamlet' is of
+a controversial nature. In closely examining the innovations by which
+the augmented second quarto edition [1](1604) distinguishes itself
+from the first quarto, published the year before (1603), we find that
+almost every one of these innovations is directed against the principles
+of a new philosophical work--_The Essays of Michel Montaigne_--which
+had appeared at that time in England, and which was brought out under
+the high auspices of the foremost noblemen and protectors of literature
+in this country.
+
+From many hints in contemporary dramas, and from some clear passages in
+'Hamlet' itself, it follows at the same time that the polemics carried
+on by Shakspere in 'Hamlet' are in most intimate connection with a
+controversy in which the public took a great interest, and which, in
+the first years of the seventeenth century, was fought out with much
+bitterness on the stage. The remarkable controversy is known, in
+the literature of that age, under the designation of the dispute
+between Ben Jonson and Dekker. A thorough examination of the dramas
+referring to it shows that Shakspere was even more implicated in
+this theatrical warfare than Dekker himself.
+
+The latter wrote a satire entitled 'Satiromastix,' in which he replies
+to Ben Jonson's coarse personal invectives with yet coarser abuse.
+'Hamlet' was Shakspere's answer to the nagging hostilities of the
+quarrelsome adversary, Ben Jonson, who belonged to the party which
+had brought the philosophical work in question into publicity. And
+the evident tendency of the innovations in the second quarto of
+'Hamlet,' we make bold to say, convinces us that it must have been
+far more Shakspere's object to oppose, in that masterly production
+of his, the pernicious influence which the philosophy of the work
+alluded to threatened to exercise on the better minds of his nation,
+than to defend himself against the personal attacks of Ben Jonson.
+
+The controversy itself is mentioned in 'Hamlet.' It is a disclosure
+of the poet, which sheds a little ray of light into the darkness in
+which his earthly walk is enveloped. The master, who otherwise is
+so sparing with allusions as to his sphere of action, speaks [2]
+bitter words against an 'aery of children' who were then 'in fashion,'
+and were 'most tyrannically clapped for it.' We are further told that
+these little eyases cry out on the top of the question and so berattle
+the common stages (so they call them), that many, wearing rapiers,
+are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither.' The
+'goose-quills' are, of course, the writers of the dramas played by
+the 'little eyases.' We then learn 'that there was for a while no
+money bid for argument' (Shakspere, we see, was not ashamed of honest
+gain) 'unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.'
+Lastly, the reproach is made to the nation that it 'holds it no sin to
+tarre them (the children) to controversy.' This satire is undoubtedly--all
+commentators agree upon this point--directed against the performances of
+the children who at that time flourished. The most popular of these
+juvenile actors were the Children of Paul's, the Children of the Revels,
+the Children of the Chapel Royal.
+
+Shakspere's remarks, directed against these forward youngsters, may
+appear to us to-day as of very secondary importance in the great drama.
+To the poet, no doubt, it was not so. The words by which he alludes
+to this episode in his life come from his very heart, and were written
+for the purpose of reproving the conduct of the public in regard to
+himself.
+
+'Hamlet' was composed in the atmosphere of this literary feud, from
+which we draw confirmatory proof that our theory stands on the solid
+ground of historical fact.
+
+Even should our endeavour to finally solve the great problem of
+'Hamlet' be made in vain, we believe we shall at least have pointed
+out a way on which others might be more successful. In contradistinction
+to the manner hitherto in use of drawing conclusions from impressions
+only, our own matter-of-fact attempt will have this advantage, that the
+time spent in it will not be wholly wasted; for, in looking round on
+the scene of that eventful century, we shall become more intimate with
+its literature and the characters of Shakspere's contemporaries.
+
+Before entering upon the theme itself, it is necessary to cast a rapid
+glance at the condition of the dramatic art of that period.
+
+
+ 1: 'Enlarged to almost as much-againe as it was.'
+
+ 2: Act ii. sc. 2.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA.
+
+THE STAGE A MEDIUM FOR POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES.
+
+SHAKSPERE'S POLITICAL CREED.
+
+FLORIO'S TRANSLATION OF MONTAIGNE'S ESSAYS.
+
+Long before Shakspere, perhaps with fardel on his back, travelled to
+London, the stage, not only in the capital, but in the whole country,
+had begun to exercise its attractive power upon the people's imagination.
+
+In the year 1586, a Protestant zealot, a soldier, [1] writes:--'When the
+belles tole to the Lectorer, the trumpetts sound to the Stages, whareat
+the wicked faction of Rome lawgeth for joy, while the godly weepe for
+sorrowe. Woe is me! the play houses are pestered when the churches are
+naked. At the one it is not possible to gett a place; at the other voyde
+seates are plentie.... Yt is a wofull sight to see two hundred proude
+players jett in their silks where five hundred pore people sterve
+in the streets.'
+
+Already in the reign of Henry VIII. a 'Master of the Revels' was required,
+whose task it was to control the public representations and amusements.
+Queen Elizabeth had to issue several special ordinances to define more
+closely the functions, and provide with fresh power this office, which had
+been created by her father.
+
+Like all other great achievements of the English nation, the drama, too,
+developed itself in this country unhampered by foreign influence. Its
+rapid growth was owing to the free and energetic spirit of Englishmen,
+to their love for public life. Every event which in some way attracted
+public attention, furnished the material for a new ballad, or a new drama.
+
+Among the dramatists of that time, there was a specially active group
+of malcontents--men of culture, who had been at the colleges and
+universities; such as Peel, Greene, Marlowe, Chapman, Marston, Ben
+Jonson, and others. If we ask ourselves how it came about that these
+disciples of erudition turned over to a calling so despised in their
+days (for the dramatist, with few exceptions, was then mostly held
+in as low a repute as the player), the cause will be found in the
+peculiar circumstances of that epoch.
+
+The revival of classical studies, and the art of printing, were, in
+the hands of the peace-loving citizen, fresh means for strengthening
+his position in the State. The handicraftsman or the merchant, who
+had gained a small fortune, was no longer satisfied with the modest
+prospects which he could offer to his talented son in an ordinary
+workshop, or in his narrow store-rooms. Since Rome no longer
+exercised her once all-powerful influence in every walk of life,
+university men, owing to their superior education, saw before them
+a brighter, a more hopeful, future.
+
+In the sixteenth century the number of students in colleges and
+at theuniversities increased in an astonishing degree, especially
+from the middle classes. The sons of simple burghers entered upon
+the contests of free, intellectual aspirations with a zeal mostly
+absent in those whose position is already secured by birth. At Court,
+no doubt, the feudal aristocracy were yet powerful indeed. They could
+approach their sovereign according to their pleasure; influence him;
+and procure, by artful intrigue, positions of dignity and useful
+preferments for themselves and their favourites. Against these abuses
+the written word, multiplied a thousandfold, was a new weapon. Whoever
+could handle it properly, gained the esteem of his fellow-men; and a
+means was at his disposal for earning a livelihood, however scanty.
+
+Towards the middle and the end of the sixteenth century there were many
+students and scholars possessing a great deal of erudition, but very
+little means of subsistence. Nor were their prospects very encouraging.
+They first went through that bitter experience, which, since then,
+so many have made after them--that whoever seeks a home in the realm
+of intellect runs the risk of losing the solid ground on which the
+fruits for maintaining human life grow. The eye directed towards the
+Parnassus is not the most apt to spy out the small tortuous paths of
+daily gain. To get quick returns of interest, even though it be small,
+from the capital of knowledge and learning, has always been, and still
+is, a question of difficult solution.
+
+These young scholars, grown to manhood in the Halls of Wisdom, were
+unable, and even unwilling, to return to simple industrial pursuits,
+or to the crafty tactics of commerce. Alienated from practical
+activity, and too shy to take part in the harder struggles of life,
+many of them rather contented themselves with a crust of bread, in
+order to continue enjoying the 'dainties of a book.' The manlier and
+bolder among them, dissatisfied with the prospect of such poor fare,
+looked round and saw, in the hands of incapables, fat livings and
+lucrative emoluments to which they, on account of their superior
+culture, believed they had a better claim.
+
+There were yet many State institutions which by no means corresponded
+to the ideal gathered from Platon, Cicero, and other writers of
+antiquity. Men began expressing these feelings of dissatisfaction
+in ballads and pamphlets. Even as the many home and foreign products
+of industry were distributed by commerce, so it was also the case with
+these new products of the intellectual workshop, which were carried to
+the most distant parts of the land. At the side of his other wares, the
+pedlar, eager for profit, offered the new and much-desired achievements
+of the Muse to the dwellers in the smallest village, in the loneliest
+farm.
+
+Moreover, the cunning stationers had their own men, to whom they lent
+'a dossen groates worth of ballads.' If these hucksters--as Henry
+Chettle relates--proved thrifty, they were advanced to the position
+of 'prety (petty) chapman,' 'able to spred more pamphlets by the
+State forbidden, then all the bookesellers in London; for only in
+this Citie is straight search, abroad smale suspition, especially
+of such petty pedlars.' [2]
+
+Chettle speaks strongly against these 'intruders in the printings
+misserie, by whome that excelent Art is not smally slandered, the
+government of the State not a little blemished, nor Religion in the
+least measure hindred.'
+
+Besides the profit to be derived from the Press by the malcontent
+travelling scholars, there was yet another way of acquiring the means
+of sustenance and of making use of mental culture; and in it there
+existed the further advantage of independence from grumbling
+publishers. This was the Stage. For it no great preparations were
+necessary, nor was any capital required. A few chairs, some boards;
+in every barn there was room. Wherever one man was found who could
+read, there were ten eager to listen.
+
+A most characteristic drama, 'The Return from Parnassus,' depicts
+some poor scholars who turn away from pitiless Cambridge, of which
+one of them says--
+
+  For had not Cambridge been to me unkind,
+  I had not turn'd to gall a milky mind. [3]
+
+After having long since completed their studies, they go to London
+to seek for the most modest livelihood. Bitter experience had taught
+these disciples of learning that the employment for which they waited
+could only be gained by bribery; and bribe they certainly could not,
+owing to their want of means. Some of them already show a true
+Werther-like yearning for solitude:--
+
+  We will be gone unto the downs of Kent....
+
+  STUDIOSO.
+
+  So shall we shun the company of men,
+  That grows more hateful as the world grows old.
+  We'll teach the murm'ring brooks in tears to flow,
+  And sleepy rocks to wail our passed woe. [4]
+
+Another utters sentiments of grief, coming near the words of despair
+of Faust. There is a tone in them of what the Germans call
+_Weltschmerz_:--
+
+  Curs'd be our thoughts, whene'er they dream of hope,
+  Bann'd be those haps that henceforth flatter us,
+  When mischief dogs us still and still for aye,
+  From our first birth until our burying day. [5]
+
+In the difficult choice of a calling which is to save them from need
+and misery, these beggar-students also think of the stage:--
+
+  And must the basest trade yield us relief?
+
+So Philomusus, in a woebegone tone, asks his comrade Studioso; and
+the latter looks with the following envious words upon the players
+whose prospects must have been brighter and more enticing than those
+of the learned poor scholars:--
+
+  England affords those glorious vagabonds,
+  That carried erst their fardles on their backs,
+  Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets,
+  Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,
+  And pages to attend their masterships:
+  With mouthing words that better wits have framed,
+  They purchase lands, and now esquires are made. [6]
+
+Shakspere, as well as Alleyn, bought land with the money earned by
+their art. For many, the stage was the port of refuge to which they
+fled from the lonely habitations of erudition, where they--
+
+  ... sit now immur'd within their private cells,
+  Drinking a long lank watching candle's smoke,
+  Spending the marrow of their flow'ring age
+  In fruitless poring on some worm-eat leaf. [7]
+
+Many of these beggar students sought a livelihood by joining the
+players. That which the poor scholar had read and learnt in books
+old and new; all that he had heard from bold, adventurous warriors
+and seamen returning from foreign lands or recently discovered
+islands; in short, everything calculated to awaken interest and
+applause among the great mass, was with feverish haste put on the
+stage, and, in order to render it more palatable, mixed with a
+goodly dose of broad humour.
+
+The same irreconcilable spirit of the Reformation, which would not
+tolerate any saint's image in the places of worship, also destroyed
+the liking for Miracle Plays. The tendency of the time was to turn
+away from mysteries and abstract notions, and to draw in art and
+poetry nearer to real life. Where formerly 'Miracles and Moralities'
+were the delight of men, and Biblical utterances, put in the mouth
+of prophets and saints, served to edify the audience, there the wordy
+warfare and the fisticuffs exchanged between the Mendicant Friar and
+the Seller of Indulgences [8] or Pardoner, whose profane doings
+were satirised on the stage, became now the subject of popular
+enjoyment and laughter. Every question of the day was boldly handled,
+and put in strong language, easily understood by the many, before
+a grateful public of simple taste.
+
+The drama, thus created anew, soon became the most popular amusement
+in the whole country. Every other sport was forgotten over it. In
+every market town, in every barn, a crowd of actors met. In those
+days no philosophical hair-splitting was in vogue on the boards.
+Everything was drawn from real life; a breath of freedom pervaded
+all this exuberant geniality. That which a man felt to-day, tomorrow
+he was able to communicate to his public. The spoken word was freer
+than the printed one. The latter had to pass a kind of censorship; the
+author and the publisher could be ascertained, and be made responsible.
+But who would be so severe against an extemporised satirical hit,
+uttered perhaps by a clown? Who would, for that sake, be the denouncing
+traitor?
+
+Yet it must not be thought that poets and players could do exactly as
+they listed. They, too, had their enemies. More especially, the austere
+Puritans were their bitter foes; they never ceased bringing their
+influence to bear upon highly-placed persons, in order to check the
+daring and forward doings of the stage, whose liberty they on every
+occasion wished to see curtailed, and its excesses visited by
+punishment. The ordinary players, if they did not possess licences
+from at least two justices of the peace, might be prosecuted, in
+accordance with an old law, as 'rogues and vagabonds,' and subjected
+to very hard sentences. It was not so easy to proceed against the
+better class of actors, who, with a view of escaping from the
+chicanery which their calling rendered them liable to, had placed
+themselves under the protection of the first noblemen, calling
+themselves their 'servants.' An ordinance of the Privy Council was
+required in order to bring actors who were thus protected, before
+a court of justice.
+
+Nevertheless, these restless people got into incessant conflicts with
+the authorities. Actors would not allow themselves to be deprived of
+the right of saying a word on matters of the State and the Church;
+and what did occupy men's minds more than the victory of the
+Reformation?
+
+Already, in the year 1550, Cardinal Wolsey felt bound to cast an author,
+Roo, [9] and 'a fellow-player, a young gentleman,' into prison, because
+they had put a piece on the stage, the aim of which was to show that
+'Lord Governaunce (Government) was ruled by Dissipation and Negligence,
+by whose misgovernment and evil order Lady Public-Weal was put from
+Governaunce; which caused Rumor-populi, Inward Grudge, and Disdain of
+Wanton Sovereigntie to rise with a great multitude to expel Negligence
+and Dissipation, and to restore Publike-weal again to her estate--which
+was so done.'
+
+The reproaches made to the bishops about the year 1544 prove, that the
+stage had already long ago boldly ventured upon the territory of
+religion, in order to imbue the masses with anti-ecclesiastical
+tendencies. In this connection the following words of an actor,
+addressed to the clerics, are most significant. 'None,' he says,
+'leave ye unvexed and untroubled; no, not so much as the poor
+minstrels and players of interludes. So long as they played lies
+and sang bawdy songs, blaspheming God, and corrupting men's
+consciences, ye never blamed them, but were very well contented;
+but since they persuaded the people to worship the Lord aright,
+according to His holy laws and not yours, ye never were pleased
+with them.' [10]
+
+The first Act of Parliament for 'the controul and regulation of stages
+and dramatic representations' was passed in the reign of Henry VIII.
+(1543). Its title is, 'An Act for the Advancement of True Religion
+and the Punishment of the Contrary.'
+
+In 1552 Edward VI. issued a further proclamation both in regard to the
+stage and the sellers of prints and books; this time mainly from
+political reasons.
+
+Whilst poets and players under Henry VIII. and his youthful successor
+could bring out, without hindrance, that which promoted their ideas of
+'true religion,' they ran great risk, in the reign of Queen Mary, with
+any Protestant tendencies; for, scarcely had this severe queen been a
+month on the throne than she issued an ordinance (August 16, 1553)
+forbidding such dramas and interludes as were calculated to spread the
+principles and doctrines of the Reformation.
+
+Under this sovereign, spectacles furthering the Roman Catholic cause
+were of course favoured. On the other hand, it may be assumed that,
+during the long and popular reign of Queen Elizabeth, Protestant
+tendencies on the stage often passed the censorship, although from
+the first years of her government there is an Act prohibiting any
+drama in which State and Church affairs were treated, 'being no
+meete matters to be written or treated upon but by men of authoritie,
+nor to be handled before any audience, but of grave and discreete
+persons.'
+
+However, like all previous ordinances, proclamations, and Acts of
+Parliament, this one also remained without effect. The dramatists
+and the disciples of the mimic art continued busying themselves, in
+their customary bold manner, with that which awakened the greatest
+interest among the public at large; and one would think that at a
+certain time they had become a little power in the State, against which
+it was no longer possible to proceed in arbitrary fashion, but which,
+on the contrary, had to be reckoned with.
+
+Only such measures, it appears, were afterwards passed which were
+calculated to harmonise the religious views uttered on the stage with
+the tenets of the Established Church. This follows from a letter of Lord
+Burleigh, addressed, in 1589, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which
+he requests him to appoint 'some fytt person well learned in divinitie.'
+The latter, together with the Master of the Revels and a person chosen
+by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, were to form a kind of
+Commission, which had to examine all pieces that were to be publicly
+acted, and to give their approval.
+
+It would be an error to believe that this threefold censorship had any
+greater success than the former measures. The contrary was the case;
+matters rather became worse. Actors were imprisoned; whereupon they
+drew up beautiful petitions to their august protectors who brought
+about their deliverance--that is, until they were once more clapped
+into prison. Then they were threatened with having their ears and noses
+cut off; [11] but still they would not hold their tongues. We know
+from a letter of the French ambassador (1606)--who himself had several
+times to ask at the Court of James I. for the prohibition of pieces in
+which the Queen of France and Mademoiselle Verneuil, as well as the Duke
+of Biron, were severely handled--that the bold expounders of the
+dramatic art dared to bring their own king on the stage. Upon this
+there came an ordinance forbidding all further theatrical representations
+in London.
+
+In the words of the French ambassador:--'I caused certain players to be
+forbid from acting the history of the Duke of Biron. When, however,
+they saw that the whole Court had left the town, they persisted in acting
+it; nay, they brought upon the stage the Queen of France and Mademoiselle
+de Verneuil.... He (the King) has upon this made order that no play shall
+henceforth be acted in London; for the repeal of which order they (the
+players) have offered 100,000 livres. Perhaps the permission will
+be again granted, but upon condition that they represent no recent
+history, nor speak of the present time.' [12]
+
+From this sum--a very large one at that time--the importance of the
+theatre of those days may be gathered.
+
+The Corporation of the City of London was among those most hostile to
+all theatrical representations. It exerted itself to the utmost in
+order to render them impossible in the centre of the capital; issuing,
+with that object, the most whimsical decrees. Trying, on their part,
+to escape from the despotic restrictions, the various players'
+companies settled down beyond the boundary of the Lord Mayor's
+jurisdiction. The citizens of London, wishing to have their share
+of an amusement which had become a national one, eagerly flocked
+to Bankside, to Blackfriars, to Shoreditch, or across green fields
+to the more distant Newington Butts.
+
+Comparatively speaking, very little has come down to us from the
+hey-day of the English drama. That which we possess is but an
+exceedingly small portion of the productions of that epoch. Henslowe's
+'Diary' tells us that a single theatre (Newington Butts) in about
+two years (June 3, 1594, to July 18, 1596) brought out not less than
+forty new pieces; and London, at that time, had already more than a
+dozen play-houses. The dramas handed down to us are mostly purged
+of those passages which threatened to give offence in print.
+The dramatists did not mean to write books. When they went to the
+press at all, they often excused themselves that 'scenes invented
+merely to be spoken, should be inforcibly published to be read.'
+They were well aware that this could not afford to the reader the
+same pleasure he felt 'when it was presented with the soule
+of living action.' [13]
+
+The stage was the forum of the people, on which everything was expressed
+that created interest amidst a great nation rising to new life. The
+path towards political freedom of speech was not yet opened in
+Parliament; and of our important safety-valve of to-day, the public
+press, there was yet only the first vestige, in the shape of pamphlets
+secretly hawked about. The stage as rapidly decayed as it had grown,
+when the chief interest on which it had thriven for a while--namely,
+the representation of affairs of public interest--obtained more practical
+expression in other spheres. In the meantime, however, it remained the
+platform on which everything could be subjected to the criticism and
+jurisdiction of public opinion.
+
+In Chettle's 'Kind-Harte's Dreame' (1592) the proprietor of a house of
+evil fame concludes his speech with reproaches against actors on
+account of their spoiling his trade; 'for no sooner have we a tricke
+of deceipt, but they make it common, singing jigs, and making jeasts
+of us, that everie boy can point out our houses as they passe by.'
+Again, in Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster,' we read that 'your courtier cannot
+kiss his mistress's slippers in quiet for them; nor your white innocent
+gallant pawn his revelling suit to make his punk a supper;' or that
+'an honest, decayed commander cannot skelder, cheat, nor be seen in a
+bawdy house, but he shall be straight in one of their wormwood comedies.'
+[14]
+
+Not less boldly than social affairs were political matters treated; but
+in order to avoid a prosecution, these questions had to be cautiously
+approached in parable fashion. Never was greater cleverness shown
+in this respect than at Shakspere's time. Every poet, every statesman,
+or otherwise highly-placed person, was 'heckled' under an allegorical
+name--a circumstance which at present makes it rather difficult for us
+to fully fathom the meaning of certain dramatic productions.
+
+In order to attract the crowd, the stage-poets had to present their
+dishes with the condiments of actual life; thus studying more the
+taste of the guests than showing that of the cook. Prologues and
+Epilogues always appealed more to the public at large as the highest
+judge; its verdict alone was held to be the decisive one.
+Manuscripts--the property of companies whose interest it was not
+to make them generally known in print--were continually altered
+according to circumstances. Guided by the impressions of the public,
+authors struck out what had been badly received; whilst passages
+that had earned applause, remained as the encouraging and deciding
+factor for the future.
+
+At one time dramas were written almost with the same rapidity as leading
+articles are to-day. Even as our journalists do in the press, so the
+dramatists of that period carried on their debates about certain
+questions of the day on the stage. In language the most passionate,
+authors fell upon each other--a practice for which we have to thank them,
+in so far as we thereby gain matter-of-fact points for a correct
+understanding of 'Hamlet.'
+
+In the last but one decennium of the sixteenth century, the first
+dramatists arose who pursued fixed literary tendencies. Often their
+compositions are mere exercises of style after Greek or Roman models
+which never became popular on the Thames. The taste of the English
+people does not bear with strange exotic manners for any length of
+time. It is lost labour to plant palm-trees where oaks only can thrive.
+Lily and others endeavoured to gain the applause of the mass by words
+of finely-distilled fragrance, to which no coarse grain, no breath
+or the native atmosphere clung. A fruitless beginning, as little
+destined to succeed as the exertions of those who tried to shine by
+pedantic learning and hollow glittering words.
+
+Marlowe's powerful imagination attempts marshalling the whole world, in
+his booth of theatrical boards, after the rhythm of drumming
+decasyllabon and bragging blank-verse. In his dramas, great conquerors
+pass the frontiers of kingdoms with the same ease with which one steps
+over the border of a carpet. The people's fancy willingly follows
+the bold poet. In the short space of three hours he makes his
+'Faust' [15] live through four-and-twenty years, in order 'to conquer,
+with sweet pleasure, despair.' The earth becomes too small for this
+dramatist. Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, have to respond to
+his inquiries. Like some of his colleagues, Marlowe is a sceptic:
+he calls Moses a 'conjurer and seducer of the people,' and boasts
+that, if he were to try, he would succeed in establishing a
+better religion than the one he sees around himself. The apostle of
+these high thoughts, not yet thirty years old, breathed his last,
+in consequence of a duel in a house of evil repute.
+
+Another hopeful disciple of lyric and dramatic poetry and prose-writer,
+Robert Greene, once full of similar free-thinking ideas, lay on his
+deathbed at the age of thirty-two, after a life of dissipation.
+Thence he writes to his forsaken wife:--
+
+'All my wrongs muster themselves about me; every evill at once plagues
+me. For my contempt of God, I am contemned of men; for my swearing and
+forswearing, no man will believe me; for my gluttony, I suffer hunger;
+for my drunkenesse, thirst; for my adulterie, ulcerous sores. Thus God
+has cast me downe, that I might be humbled; and punished me, for
+examples of others' sinne.'
+
+Greene offers his own wretched end to his colleagues as a warning
+example; admonishing them to employ their 'rare wits in more profitable
+courses;' to look repentingly on the past; to leave off profane
+practices, and not 'to spend their wits in making plaies.' He
+especially warns them against actors--because these, it seems, had
+given him up. His rancorous spite against them he expresses in the
+well-known words:--'Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart
+Crow, beautified with our feathers, that _with his Tygers heart
+wrapt in a Players hide_, supposes he is as well able to bumbast
+out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute _Johannes
+Fac-totum_, is in his owne conceit the onely 'SHAKE-SCENE in a
+countrie.'
+
+This satirical point, directed, without doubt, against Shakspere, is
+the only thing reliable which, down to the year 1592, we know of his
+dramatic activity. He had then been only about four years in London.
+Yet he must already have wielded considerable authority, seeing that
+he is publicly, though with sneering arrogance, called a complete
+Johannes Fac-totum--a man who has laid himself out in every direction.
+
+It is the divine mission of a genius to bring order out of chaos, to
+regulate matters with the directing force of his superior glance.
+Certainly, Shakspere, from the very beginning of his activity, sought,
+with all the energy of his power, to rule out all ignoble, anarchical
+elements from the stage, and thus to obtain for it the sympathies of
+the best of his time. Fate so willed it, that one of the greatest
+minds which Heaven ever gave to mankind, entered, on this occasion,
+the modest door of a playhouse, as if Providence had intended showing
+that a generous activity can effect noble results everywhere, and
+that the most despised calling (such, still, was that of the actors
+then) can produce most excellent fruits.
+
+Shakspere's life is a beneficial harmony between will and deed; no
+attempt to draw down Heaven to Earth, or to raise up Earth to Heaven.
+His are rather the ways and manners peculiar to a people which likes
+to adapt itself to given circumstances, to make use of the existing
+practical good, in order to produce from it that which is better.
+
+It is an ascertained fact that Shakspere, who had received some training
+at school--but no University education--began, at the age of twenty-four,
+to arrange the pieces of other writers, to make modest additions to
+them; in short, to render them fit and proper for stage purposes. This
+may have been one of the causes why Greene dubbed him a 'Johannes
+Fac-totum.' Others, too, have accused him, during his lifetime, of
+'application' (plagiarism), because he took his subjects mostly from
+other authors. Among those who so charged him, were, as we shall show,
+more especially Ben Jonson and Marston.
+
+Shakspere never allowed himself to be induced by these reproaches to
+change his mode of working. Down to his death it remained the same.
+Is his merit, on that account, a lesser one? Certainly not: in the
+Poetical Art, in the Realm of Feeling and Thought, there are no
+regular boundary-stones. No author has the right to say: 'Thou must
+not step into the circle drawn by me; thou hast to do thy work wholly
+outside of it!'
+
+An author who so expresses an idea, or so describes a situation as to
+fix it most powerfully in men's imagination, is to be looked upon as
+the true owner or creator of the image: to him belongs the crown.
+The Greeks reckoned it to be the highest merit of the masters of
+their plastic art when they retained the great traits with which their
+predecessors had invested a conception; only endeavouring to better
+those parts in which a lesser success had been achieved--until that
+section of the work, too, had attained the highest degree of
+perfection. Thus arose the Jupiter of Pheidias, a Venus of Milo, an
+Apollo of Belvedere. Thus the noblest ideal of beauty as created,
+and in this wise the Greek national epic became the model of all
+kindred poetry.
+
+There is a most characteristic fact which shows how greatly the drama
+had risen in universal esteem after Shakspere had devoted to it twelve
+years of his life. It is this. The Corporation of the City of London,
+once so hostile to all theatrical representations, and which had used
+every possible chicanery against the stage, had become so friendly to it
+towards the year 1600, that, when it was asked from governmental
+quarters to enforce a certain decree which had been launched against
+the theatre, it refused to comply with the request. On the contrary,
+the Lord Mayor, as well as the other magistrates, held it to be an
+injustice towards the actors that the Privy Council gave a hearing
+to the charges brought forward by the Puritans. Truly, the feelings
+of this conservative Corporation, as well of a large number of those
+who once looked down upon the stage with the greatest contempt,
+must, in the meanwhile, have undergone a great change.
+
+Unquestionably the Company of the Lord Chamberlain--which in summer
+gave its masterly representations in the Globe Theatre, beyond the
+Thames, and in winter in Black-Friars--had been the chief agency
+in working that change. The first noblemen, the Queen herself, greatly
+enjoyed the pieces which Shakspere, in fact, wrote for that society;
+but the public at large were not less delighted with them.
+
+When, the day after such a representation, conversation arose in the
+family circle as to the three happy hours passed in the theatre, an
+opportunity was given for discussing the most important events of the
+past and the present. The people's history had not yet been written
+then. Solitary events only had been loosely marked down in dry folios.
+The stage now brought telling historical facts in vivid colours before
+the eye. The powerful speeches of high and mighty lords, of learned
+bishops, and of kings were heard--of exalted persons, all different
+in character, but all moved, like other mortals, by various passions,
+and driven by a series of circumstances to definite actions. It was
+felt that they, too, were subject to a certain spirit of the time,
+the tendency of which, if the poet was attentively listened to, could
+be plainly gathered. In this way conclusions might be drawn which shed
+light even upon the events of the present.
+
+True, it was forbidden to bring questions of the State and of religion
+upon the stage. But has Shakspere really avoided treating upon them?
+
+Richard Simpson has successfully shown that Shakspere, in his historical
+plays, carried on a political discussion easily understood by his
+contemporaries. [16] The maxims thus enunciated by the poet have been
+ascertained by that penetrating critic in such a manner that the results
+obtained can scarcely be subjected to doubt any more.
+
+On comparing the older plays and chronicles of which the poet made use
+for his historical dramas, with the creations that arose on this basis
+under his powerful hand, one sees that he suppresses certain tendencies
+of the subject-matter before him, placing others in their stead.
+Taking fully into account all the artistic technicalities calculated to
+produce a strong dramatic effect, we still find that he has evidently
+made a number of changes with the clear and most persistent intention
+of touching upon political questions of his time.
+
+If, for instance, Shakspere's 'King John' is compared with the old play,
+'The Troublesome Raigne,' and with the chronicles from which (but more
+especially from the former piece) the poet has drawn the plan of
+his dramatic action, it will be seen that very definite political
+tendencies of what he had before him were suppressed. New ones are
+put in their place. Shakspere makes his 'King John' go through two
+different, wholly unhistorical struggles: _one against a foe at
+home, who contests the King's legitimate right; the other against
+Romanists who think it a sacred duty to overthrow the heretic_.
+These were not the feuds with which the King John of history had to
+contend.
+
+But the daughter from the unhappy marriage of Henry VIII. and the
+faithless Anne Boleyn--Queen Elizabeth--had, during her whole lifetime,
+to contend against rebels who held Mary Stuart to be the legitimate
+successor; and it was Queen Elizabeth who had always to remain armed
+against a confederacy of enemies who, encouraged by the Pope, made war
+upon the 'heretic' on the throne of England.
+
+Thus, in the Globe Theatre, questions of the State were discussed; and
+politics had their distinct place there. Yet who would enforce the rules
+of censorship upon such language as this:--
+
+  This England never did, and never shall,
+  Lie at the proud feet of a Conqueror
+  But when it first did help to wound itself.
+  ... Nought shall make us rue
+  If England to herself do rest but true?
+
+Such thoughts were not taken from any old chronicle, but came from the
+very soul of the age that had gained the great victory over the Armada.
+They emphasized a newly-acquired independent position, which could only
+be maintained by united strength against a foreign foe.
+
+Even as 'King John,' so all the other historical plays contain a clearly
+provable political tendency. Not everything done by the great queen met
+with applause among the people. Dissatisfaction was felt at the
+prominence of personal favourites, who made much abuse of commercial
+monopolies granted to them. The burdens of taxation had become heavier
+than in former times. In 'Richard the Second' a king is produced,
+who by his misgovernment and by his maintenance of selfish favourites
+loses his crown.
+
+Shakspere's sympathies are with a prince whom Nature has formed into a
+strong ruler; and such an aristocrat of the intellect is depicted in his
+'Henry the Fifth.' In this ideal of a king, all the good national
+qualities attain their apotheosis. This hero combines strength of
+character with justice and bravery. With great severity he examines
+his own conscience before proceeding to any action, however small.
+War he makes with all possible humanity, and only for the furtherance
+of civilisation. Nothing is more hated by Shakspere than a government
+of weak hands. From such an unfortunate cause came the Wars of the
+Two Roses. It seems that, in order to bring this fact home to the
+understanding of the people, Shakspere put the sanguinary struggles
+between the Houses of York and Lancaster on the stage. (See Epilogue
+of 'King Henry the Fifth.')
+
+More strongly even than in his plays referring to English history, the
+deep aversion he felt to divided dominion pierces through his Roman
+tragedies; for in Shakspere the aristocratic vein was not less developed
+than in Goethe. To him, too, the multitude--
+
+  ...This common body,
+  Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,
+  Goes to, and back, lackeying the varying tide
+  To rot itself with motion. [17]
+
+As in politics, so also in the domain of religion (of all things the
+most important to his contemporaries), Shakspere has made his
+profession of faith. For its elucidation we believe we possess a
+means not less sure than that which Richard Simpson has made use of
+for fixing the political maxims of the great master.
+
+'Hamlet' first appeared in a quarto edition of the year 1603. The
+little book thus announces itself:--
+
+'The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke, By William
+Shakespeare. As it hath been diverse times acted by his Highnesse
+servants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniversities
+of Cambridge & Oxford, and elsewhere.'
+
+This drama is different, in most essential traits, from the piece we
+now possess, which came out a year later (1604), also in quarto edition.
+The title of the latter is:--
+
+'The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. By William
+Shakespeare, Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much-againe as
+it was, according to the true & perfect coppie.'
+
+The most diverse hypotheses have been started as to the relation between
+the older 'Hamlet' and the later  one. [18] We share the view of those
+who maintain that the first quarto edition was a rough-draught, advanced
+to a certain degree, and for which the poet, as is the case with so many
+of his other plays, had used an older play as a kind of model. A
+'rough-draught advanced to a certain degree' may be explained as a
+piece already produced on the stage. The public, always eager to
+see novelties, allowed the dramatists little time for fully working out
+their conceptions. The plays matured, as it were, on the stage itself;
+there they received their final shape and completion. As mentioned
+before, that which had displeased was struck out, whilst the passages
+that had obtained applause were often augmented, in order to confer
+upon the play the attraction of novelty. 'Enlarged to almost as
+much-againe as it was' is an expression which shows that 'Hamlet' had
+drawn from the very beginning. The poet, thereby encouraged, then worked
+out this drama into the powerful, comprehensive tragedy which we now
+possess.
+
+Now, in closely examining the changes and additions made in the second
+'Hamlet,' we find that most of the freshly added philosophical thoughts,
+and many characteristic peculiarities, have clear reference to the
+philosophy of a certain book and the character of its author--namely,
+to Michel Montaigne and his 'Essais.' This work first appeared in an
+English translation in 1603, after it had already been entered at
+Stationers' Hall for publication in 1599. The cause which may have
+induced Shakspere to confer upon his 'Hamlet' the thoughts and
+the peculiarities of Montaigne, and to give that play the shape in which
+we now have it, will become apparent when we have to explain the
+controversy between Jonson and Dekker. We have thus the advantage
+over Simpson's method, that our theory will be confirmed from other
+sources.
+
+Montaigne's 'Essais' were a work which made a strong mark, and created
+a deep sensation, in his own country. There, it had already gone through
+twelve editions before it was introduced in England--eleven years after
+the death of its author--by means of a translation. Here it found its
+first admirers among the highest aristocracy and the patrons of
+literature and art. Under such august auspices it penetrated into
+the English public at large. The translator was a well-known teacher
+of the Italian language, John Florio.
+
+From the preface of the first book of the 'Essais' we learn that,
+at the request of Sir Edward Wotton, Florio had first Englished one
+chapter, doing it in the house of Lady Bedford, a great lover of art.
+In that preface, Florio, in most extravagant and euphuistic style,
+describes how this noblewoman, after having 'dayned to read it (the
+first chapter) without pitty of my fasting, my fainting, my
+laboring, my langishing, my gasping for some breath ... yet commaunded
+me on'--namely, to turn the whole work into English. It was a heavy
+task for the poor schoolmaster. He says:--'I sweat, I wept, and I went
+on sea-tosst, weather-beaten ... shippe-wrackt--almost drowned.'
+'I say not,' the polite maestro adds, 'you took pleasure at shore'
+(as those in this author, iii. 1). No; my lady was 'unmercifull,
+but not so cruell;' she ever and anon upheld his courage, bringing
+'to my succour the forces of two deare friends.' One of them
+was Theodore Diodati, tutor of Lady Bedford's brother, the eldest
+son of Lady Harrington whose husband also was a poet.
+
+The grateful Florio calls this worthy colleague, 'Diodati as in name,
+so indeed God's gift to me,' and a 'guide-fish' who in this
+'rockie-rough ocean' helped him to capture the 'Whale'--that is,
+Montaigne. He also compares him to a 'bonus genius sent to
+me, as the good angel to Raimond in "Tasso," for my assistant to
+combat this great Argante.'
+
+The other welcome fellow-worker was 'Maister Doctor Guinne;' according
+to Florio, 'in this perilous, crook't passage a monster-quelling
+Theseus or Herkules;' aye, in his eyes the best orator, poet,
+philosopher, and medical man (_non so se meglior oratore e poeta,
+o philosopho e medico_), and well versed in Greek, Latin, Italian,
+and French poetry. It was he who succeeded in tracing the many
+passages from classic and modern writers which are strewn all over
+Montaigne's Essays to the divers authors, and the several places
+where they occur, so as to properly classify them.
+
+Samuel Daniel, a well-known and much respected poet of that time, and a
+brother-in-law of Florio, also made his contribution. He opens this
+powerful, highly important work with a eulogistic poem. Florio, in his
+bombastic style, says:--'I, in this, serve but as Vulcan to hatchet
+this Minerva from that Jupiter's bigge braine.' He calls himself 'a
+fondling foster-father, having transported it from France to England,
+put it in English clothes, taught it to talke our tongue, though many
+times with a jerke of French jargon.'
+
+The 'Essais' consist of three different books. Each of them is
+dedicated to two noblewomen, the foremost of this country. The
+first book isdedicated to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and her mother,
+Lady Anne Harrington. The second to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland,
+daughter of the famous poet Sir Philip Sidney, therefore a near
+relation of Shakspere's youthful friend, William Herbert, the later
+Earl of Pembroke ('the only begetter' of the 'Sonnets'), whose mother
+also was a daughter of that much-admired poet.
+
+The second book is dedicated to the renowned as well as evilly notorious
+Lady Penelope Rich, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex. She shone
+by her extraordinary beauty as well as by her intellectual gifts. Of
+her Sir Philip Sidney was madly enamoured, but she married a Croesus,
+Lord Rich. This union was a most unhappy one. Her husband, a man far
+below her in strength of mind, did not know how to value the jewel
+that had come into his possession. A crowd of admirers flocked around
+her, among whom was William Herbert, much younger in years than herself.
+It is suspected that Shakspere's last sonnets (127-152) touch upon
+this connection, with the object of warning the friend against the
+true character of that sinful woman.
+
+The last book is dedicated to Lady Elizabeth Grey, the wife of Henry
+Grey, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and to Lady Mary Nevill,
+the latter being the daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
+and wife of Sir Henry Nevill of Abergavenny.
+
+Each of the noblewomen mentioned is praised in a sonnet. No book of
+that period had such a number of aristocratic sponsors. Yet it was
+of foreign origin, and for the first time a French philosopher had
+appeared in an English version on this side of the Channel. His easy,
+chatty tone must have created no small sensation. The welcome given
+to him by a great number of men is proved by the fact of the 'Essais'
+soon reaching their third edition, a rare occurrence with a book so
+expensive as this. [19]
+
+We will endeavour to sketch the character of Michel Montaigne and his
+writings. His individuality, owing to the minute descriptions he gives
+of his own self in the Essays, comes out with rare distinctness from
+the dark environs of his time--more clearly so than the personality
+of any other author, even of that seventeenth century which is so much
+nearer to us.
+
+This French nobleman devoted the last thirty years of his life to
+philosophical speculations, if that expression is allowable; for
+fanciful inclination and changing sentiment, far more than strict
+logic and sound common sense, decided the direction of his thoughts.
+The book in which he tries to render his ideas is meant to be the
+flesh and blood of his own self. The work and the author--so he
+says--are to be one. 'He who touches one of them, attacks both.'
+In the words of Florio's translation, he observes:--'Authors communicate
+themselves unto the world by some speciall and strange marke, I the
+first by my generall disposition as Michael Montaigne; not as a
+Grammarian, or a Poet, or a Lawyer.'
+
+Few writers have been considered from such different points of view as
+Montaigne. The most passionate controversies have arisen about him.
+Theologians have endeavoured to make him one of their own; but the
+more far seeing ones soon perceived that there was too much scepticism
+in his work. Some sceptics would fain attach him to their own ranks;
+but the more consistent among them declined the companionship of one
+who was too bigoted for them. The great mass of men, as usual, plucked,
+according to each one's taste and fancy, some blossom or leaf from his
+'nosegay of strange flowers,' [20] and then classified him from that
+casual selection.
+
+Montaigne, a friend of truth, admonishes posterity, if it would judge
+him, to do so truthfully and justly. With gladsome heart, he says,
+he would come back from the other world in order to give the lie to
+those who describe him different from what he is, 'even if it were
+done to his honour.'
+
+We shall strive to comply with his wish by drawing the picture of this
+most interesting, and in his intellectual features thoroughly modern,
+man, from the contours furnished by his own hand. We shall exert
+ourselves to lay stress on those characteristics by which he must
+have created most surprise among his logically more consistent
+contemporaries on the other side of the Channel.
+
+In taking up Montaigne's 'Essais' for perusal we are presently under
+the spell of a feeling as though we were listening to the words of a
+most versatile man of the world, in whom we become more and more
+interested. We find in him not only an amiable representative of the
+upper classes, but also a man who has deeply entered into the spirit
+of classic antiquity. Soon he convinces us that he is honestly
+searching after truth; that he pursues the noble aim of placing
+himself in harmony with God and the world. Does he succeed in this?
+Does he arrive at a clear conclusion? What are the fruits of his
+thoughts? what his teachings? In what relation did he stand to his
+century?
+
+As in no other epoch, men had, especially those who came out into the
+fierce light of publicity, to take sides in party warfare during the
+much-agitated time of the Reformation. To which party did Montaigne
+belong? Was he one of the Humanists, who, averse to all antiquated
+dogmas, preached a new doctrine, which was to bring mankind once more
+into unison with the long despised laws of Nature?
+
+We hope to show successfully that Shakspere wrote his 'Hamlet' for
+the great and noble object of warning his contemporaries against the
+disturbing inconsistencies of the philosophy of Montaigne who preached
+the rights of Nature, whilst yet clinging to dogmatic tenets which
+cannot be reconciled with those rights.
+
+We hope to prove that Shakspere who made it his task 'to hold the mirror
+up to Nature,' and who, like none before him, caught up her innermost
+secrets, rendering them with the chastest expression; that Shakspere,
+who denied in few but impressive words the vitality of any art or
+culture which uses means not consistent with the intentions of Nature:
+
+  Yet Nature is made better by no mean,
+  But Nature makes that mean; so o'er that art
+  Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art
+  That Nature makes; [21]--
+
+we hope to prove successfully that Shakspere, this true apostle of
+Nature, held it to be sufficient, ay, most godly, to be a champion
+of 'natural things;' that he advocated a true and simple obedience
+to her laws, and a renunciation of all transcendental dogmas,
+miscalled 'holy and reverent,' which domineer over human nature,
+and hinder the free development of its nobler faculties.
+
+Let us then impartially examine the character and the work of Montaigne.
+If we discover contradictions in both, we shall not endeavour to argue
+them away, but present them with matter-of-fact fidelity; for it is
+on those very contradictions that the enigmatic, as yet unexplained,
+character of Hamlet reposes.
+
+
+ 1: Collier's _Drama_, i. 265.
+
+ 2: _Kind-hartes Dreame_, 1592.
+
+ 3: Act v. sc. 4.
+
+ 4: Act v sc. 4.
+
+ 5: Act iii sc. 5.
+
+ 6: _The Return from Parnassus_, act v. sc. I.
+
+ 7: _Ibid._, act iv. sc. 3.
+
+ 8: _The Pardoner and the Friar_: 1533.
+
+ 9: Collier's _Drama_, i. 104.
+
+10: _The Political Use of the Stage in Shakspere's Time_.
+  New Shakspere Society: 1874, ii. p. 371.
+    Henry Stalbrydge, _Epistle Exhortatory_, &c.: 1544.
+
+11: This threat was uttered against Chapman, Ben Jonson, and Marston
+  on account of _Eastward Hoe_.
+
+12: Von Raumer, ii. p. 219.
+
+13: Marston's _Malcontent_: Dedication.
+
+14: Act i. sc. I.
+
+15: It is very characteristic that, in this serious piece also, low
+  humour was still largely employed. In printing--the publisher
+  remarks--the passages in question were left out, as derogatory 'to
+  so honourable and stately a history.'
+
+16: _The Politics of Shakspere's Historical Plays_. New
+  Shakspere Society, ii. 1874.
+
+17: _Antonius and Cleopatra_, act i. sc. 4.
+
+18: We mean the usually received text, seeing that the folio edition
+  of 1623 contains some passages which are wanting in the quarto
+  edition, and _vice versâ_.
+
+19: Montaigne's _Essays_, which were published in folio, may have
+  had the same price as Shakspere's folio of 1623. The latter was only
+  re-issued in 1632 and 1664, whilst the former came out in new
+  editions in 1613 and 1632.
+
+20: 'Icy un amas de fleur estrangieres, n'y ayant fourny du mien
+  que le filet à les lier' (iii. 12).
+
+21: _Winter's Tale_, act iv. sc. 3.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+MONTAIGNE.
+
+Michel Montaigne was favoured by birth as few writers have been. He
+was the son of a worthy nobleman who gave him, from early childhood, a
+most carefully conducted education. He never tires in praising
+the good qualities of his father, who had followed Francis I. to his
+Italian campaigns, and, like that monarch, had conceived a preference
+for those classical studies which were then again reviving. Even as
+his king, he, too, wished to promote the new knowledge, and was bent
+upon so initiating young Michel into it as to make him in the fullest
+manner conversant with the conquests of Greece and Rome in the realm
+of intellect.
+
+In this, as a practical man who felt the greatest respect for erudition
+without personally possessing a proper share of it, he allowed himself
+to be thoroughly guided by 'men of learning and judgment.' He had been
+told that the only reason why we do not 'attain to the greatness
+of soul and intellect of the ancient Greeks and Romans was the length of
+time we give to learning these languages which cost them nothing.' In
+bringing up the boy, to whom the best masters were given, the procedures
+chosen were therefore such that young Michel, in his sixth year, spoke
+Latin thoroughly before he was able to converse in his own mother-tongue.
+
+Montaigne relates [1] that he was much more at home on the banks of the
+Tiber than on the Seine. Before he knew the Louvre, his mind's eye
+rested on the Forum and the Capitol. He boasts of having always been
+more occupied with the life and the qualities of Lucullus, of Metellus,
+and Scipio, than with the fate of any of his own countrymen. Of the
+hey-day of classic Rome he, who otherwise uses such measured terms,
+speaks with a glowing enthusiasm. He often avers that he belongs to
+no special school of thought; that he advocates no theory; that he is
+not the adherent of any party or sect. To him--so he asserts--an
+unprejudiced examination of all knowledge is sufficient. His endeavour
+was, to prove the devise of his escutcheon: 'Que sçais-je?'
+
+Have the humanistic studies not given to him, as to so many of his
+contemporaries, a distinctive mental bent? Have Greek and Roman
+philosophy and poetry remained without any influence upon him? Has
+his character not been formed by them? Does he not once reckon himself
+among 'nous autres naturalistes?' [2]
+
+Once only, it is true, he does this; but even if he who would not belong
+to any special school of thought, and who would rather be 'a good
+equerry than a logician,' [3] had not ascribed to himself this
+designation, a hundred passages of his work would bear witness to
+the fact of his having been one of the Humanists, on whose banner
+'Nature' was written as the parole. Ever and anon he says (I here
+direct attention more specially to his last Essays) that we ought
+willingly to follow her prescriptions; and incessantly he asserts
+that, in doing so, we cannot err. He designates her as a guide as
+mild as she is just, whose footprints, blurred over as they are by
+artificial ones, we ought everywhere to trace anew. 'Is it not folly,'
+he asks with Seneca, [4] 'to bend the body this way, and the mind that
+way, and thus to stand distorted between two movements utterly at
+variance with each other?'
+
+To bring up and to guide man in accordance with his capacities, is
+with him a supreme law. 'Le glorieux chef-d'oeuvre de l'homme,
+c'est de vivre a propos.' He, the sage, is already so much in advance
+of his century that he yearns for laws and religions which are not
+arbitrarily founded, but drawn from the roots and the buds of a
+universal Reason, contained in every person not degenerate or
+divorced from nature _desnature_. A mass of passages in the
+Essays strengthen the opinion that Montaigne was an upright,
+noble-minded Humanist, a disciple of free thought, who wished to
+fathom human nature, and was anxious to help in delivering mankind
+from the fetters of manifold superstitions. Read his Essay on Education;
+and the conviction will force itself upon you that in many things he
+was far in advance of his time.
+
+But now to the reverse of the medal--to Montaigne as the adherent of
+Romanist dogmas!
+
+'The bond,' he says--and here we quote Florio's translation, [5] only
+slightly changed into modern orthography--'which should bind our
+judgment, tie our will, enforce and join our souls to our Creator,
+should be a bond taking his doublings and forces, not from our
+considerations, reasons, and passions, but from a divine and
+supernatural compulsion, having but one form; one countenance, and
+one grace; which is the authority and grace of God.' The latter, be
+it well understood, are to Montaigne identical with the Church of
+Rome, to which he thinks it best blindly to submit.
+
+Men--he observes--who make bold to sit in judgment upon their judges,
+are never faithful and obedient to them. As a warning example he points
+to England, which, since his birth, had already three or four times
+changed its laws, not only in matters political, in which constancy is
+not insisted upon, but in the most important matter imaginable--namely,
+in religion. He declares himself all the more ashamed of, and vexed by,
+this, as his own family were allied by close private ties with the
+English nation.
+
+An attempt has been made to show [6] that in Montaigne's 'Apologie
+de Raymond Sebond,' in which he expounds his theological opinions
+in the most explicit manner, a hidden attack is contained upon the
+Church. But it bespeaks an utter misconception of the character of
+this writer to hold him capable of such perfidious craftiness; for
+he calls it 'a cowardly and servile humour if a man disguises and
+hides his thoughts under a mask, not daring to let himself be seen
+under his true aspect.' [7]
+
+We know of not a few, especially Italian, Humanists who publicly
+made a deep bow before the altar, whilst behind it they cynically
+laughed, in company with their friends; making sport of the silly
+crowd that knelt down in profound reverence. Montaigne was no such
+double-dealer. We can fully believe him when he states that it is to
+him no small satisfaction and pleasure to 'have been preserved from
+the contagion of so corrupt an age; to have never brought affliction
+and ruin upon any person; not to have felt a desire for vengeance,
+or any envy; nor to have become a defaulter to his word.' [8]
+
+His word, his honour, were to him the most sacred treasure. He never
+would have descended so low as to fling them to the winds. Let us,
+therefore, not endeavour to deny any logical inconsistencies in his
+writings--inconsistencies which many other men since his time have
+equally shown. Let us rather institute a strict and close inquiry
+into these two modes of thought of his, which, contradictory as they
+are, yet make up his very character and individuality.
+
+We can fully believe in Montaigne's sincerity when elsewhere he asserts
+that we must not travel away from the paths marked down by the Roman
+Catholic Church, lest we should be driven about helplessly and aimlessly
+on the unbounded sea of human opinions. He tells us [9] that 'he, too,
+had neglected the observance of certain ceremonies of the Church,
+which seemed to him somewhat vain and strange; but that, when he
+communicated on that subject with learned men, he found that these
+things had a very massive and solid foundation, and that it is only
+silliness and ignorance which make us receive them with less reverence
+than the other doctrines of religion.' Hence he concludes that we must
+put ourselves wholly under the protection of ecclesiastical authority,
+or completely break with it.
+
+He never made a single step to withdraw himself from that authority.
+He rather prides himself on having never allowed himself, by any
+philosophy, to be turned away from his first and natural sic
+opinions, and from the condition in which God had placed him; being
+well aware of his own variability _volubilité_. 'Thus I have,
+by the grace of God, remained wholly attached, without internal
+agitation and troubles of conscience, to the ancient beliefs of our
+religion, during the conflict of so many sects and party divisions
+which our century has produced.' [10]
+
+Receiving the holy Host, he breathed his last.
+
+In the 'Apologie de Raymond Sebond,' Montaigne defends the 'Theologia
+Naturalis' of the latter--a book in which the author, who was a medical
+man, a philosopher, and a theologian, endeavours to prove that the Roman
+Catholic dogmas are in harmony with the laws of nature. That which is
+to be received in full faith, Sebond exerts himself to make
+comprehensible by arguments of the reason. This book--so Montaigne
+relates--had been given to his father, at the time when Luther's new
+doctrines began to be popular, by a man of great reputation for
+learning, Pierre Bunel, who 'well foresaw, by his penetration, [11]
+that this budding disease would easily degenerate into an execrable
+atheism.' Old Pierre Montaigne, a very pious man, esteemed this work
+very highly; and a few days before his death, having fortunately found
+it among a lot of neglected papers, commanded his son to translate it
+from 'that kind of Spanish jargon with Latin endings,' in which it
+was written.
+
+Michel, with filial piety, fulfilled his task. He translated the work,
+and in the above-mentioned Essay--the largest of the series--he
+advocates its philosophy. The essence of this panegyric of the Church
+(for logic would in vain be sought for in that Essay) is: that
+knowledge and curiosity are simply plagues of mankind, and that the
+Roman Catholic religion, therefore, with great wisdom, recommends
+ignorance. Man would be most likely to attain happiness if, like
+the animal, he were to allow himself to be guided by his simple
+instinct. All philosophising is declared to be of no use. Faith only
+is said to afford security to the weakest of all beings, to man, who
+more than any other creature is exposed to the most manifold dangers.
+No elephant, no whale, or crocodile, was required to overcome him who
+proudly calls himself the 'lord of creation.' 'Little lice are
+sufficient to make Sylla give up his dictatorship. The heart and the
+life of a mighty and triumphant emperor form but the breakfast of a
+little worm.' [12] (Compare 'Hamlet,' iv. 3).
+
+Montaigne, who, in his thirty-eighth year, 'long weary of the bondage
+of Court and of public employment, while yet in the vigour of life,
+hath withdrawn himself into the bosom of the Learned Virgins (Doctarum
+Virginum),' [13] so as to be able to spend the rest of his days in
+his ancestral home, in peaceful, undisturbed devotion to ennobling
+studies, and to present the world with a new book, in which he means
+to give expression to his innermost thoughts--Montaigne, in his Essay
+'On Prayers,' calls his writings 'rhapsodies,' which he submits
+to the judgment of the Church, so that it may deal with anything he,
+'either ignorantly or unadvisedly, may have set down contrary to the
+sacred decrees, and repugnant to the holy prescriptions of the Catholic,
+Apostolic, and Roman Church, wherein I die, and in which I was born.'
+
+Let us not dwell too long on the contradictions of a man who professes
+to think independently, and who yet is content with having a
+mind-cramping dogmatic creed imposed upon him. Let us look at a few
+other, not less irreconcilable, inconsistencies of his logic.
+
+Montaigne, the Humanist, advocates toleration. Justice, he says, is
+to be done to every party, to every opinion. 'Men are different in
+feeling and in strength; they must be directed to their good, according
+to themselves, and by diverse ways.' [14] He bears no grudge to anyone
+of heterodox faith; he feels no indignation against those who differ
+from him in ideas. The ties of universal humanity he values more than
+those of national connection. He has some good words for the Mexicans,
+so cruelly persecuted by the Spaniards. 'I hold all men to be my
+compatriots; I feel the same love for a Pole as for a Frenchman.' [15]
+
+But when we read what the Roman Catholic Montaigne writes, there is a
+different tone:--
+
+'Now that which, methinks, brings so much disorder into our
+consciences--namely, in these troubles of religion in which we are--is
+the easy way with which Catholics treat their faith. They suppose they
+show themselves properly moderate and skilful when they yield to
+their adversaries some of the articles that are under debate.
+But--besides that they do not see what an advantage it is to your
+antagonist if you once begin making a concession, thus encouraging
+him to follow up his point--it may further be said that the articles
+which they choose as apparently the lightest, are sometimes most
+important indeed.' [16]
+
+Again, the humane nobleman who looks with pity and kindliness upon
+'the poor, toiling with heads bent, in their hard work;' he who calls
+the application of the torture 'a trial of patience rather than of
+truth'--he maintains that 'the public weal requires that one should
+commit treachery, use falsehoods, and perform massacres.' [17]
+Personally, he shrinks from such a mission. His softer heart is not
+strong enough for these deeds. He relates [18] that he 'never could
+see without displeasure an innocent and defenceless beast pursued
+and killed, from which we have received no offence at all.' He is
+moved by the aspect of 'the hart when it is embossed and out of
+breath, and, finding its strength gone, has no other resource left
+but to yield itself up to us who pursue it, asking for mercy from us by
+its tears. He calls this 'a deplorable spectacle.'
+
+Yet, this sentimental nobleman advocates the commission of treachery
+and cruelty, in the interest of the State, by certain more energetic,
+less timorous men. Nor does he define their functions so as to raise a
+bar against a second St. Bartholomew massacre. A deed of this kind he
+would submissively take to be an act of Heaven, shirking all
+responsibility for, or discussion of, anything that 'begins to molest
+him.' He merely says:--'Like those ancients who sacrificed their lives
+for the welfare of their country, so they (the guardians of the State)
+must be ready to sacrifice their honour and their conscience. We who
+are weaker, take easier, less risky parts.' [19]
+
+In Montaigne, the Humanist, we read that beautiful passage (in his last
+Essay [20]) where he says that 'those who would go beyond human nature,
+trying to transform themselves into angels, only make beasts of
+themselves.' [21] Yet, elsewhere [22] he writes that he shall be
+exalted, who, renouncing his own natural means, allows himself to be
+guided by means purely celestial--by which he clearly understands
+the dogmas of Roman Catholicism.
+
+As a humanistic thinker, Montaigne fears nothing more than any strivings
+after transcendentalism. Such yearnings terrify him like inaccessible
+heights. In the life of Sokrates, of that sage for whom he felt a special
+preference, the 'ecstasies and daimons' greatly repel him. Nevertheless,
+Montaigne, the mystic, attributes a great magic power to such daimons;
+for he says: 'I, too, have sometimes felt within myself an image of such
+internal agitations, as weak in the light of reason as they were violent
+in instinctive persuasion or dissuasion (a state of mind more ordinary to
+Sokrates), by which I have so profitably, and so happily, suffered myself
+to be drawn on, that these mental agitations might perhaps be thought to
+contain something of divine inspiration.' [23]
+
+Montaigne, the admirer of classic antiquity, says that serving the
+Commonwealth is the most honourable calling. [24] Acts without some
+splendour of freedom have, in his eyes, neither grace, nor do they merit
+being honoured. [25] But elsewhere [26] we come upon his other view,
+less imbued with the spirit of antiquity--namely, that 'man alone,
+without other help, armed only with his own weapons, and unprovided with
+the grace and knowledge of God, in which all his honour, his strength,
+and the whole ground of his being are contained,' is a sorry specimen of
+force indeed. His own reason gives him no advantage over other
+creatures; the Church alone confers this privilege upon him!
+
+During several years, Montaigne was Mayor of Bordeaux. With great
+modesty, he relates [27] that in his mere passive conduct lay
+whatever little merit he may have had in serving his town. This
+fully harmonises with the view expressed in his last but one Essay,
+in which he declares that we are to be blamed for not sufficiently
+trusting in Heaven; expecting from ourselves more than behoves us:
+'Therefore do our designs so often miscarry. Heaven is envious of
+the large extent which we attribute to the rights of human wisdom,
+to the prejudice of its own rights; and it curtails ours all the
+more that we endeavour to enlarge them.' [28]
+
+Montaigne by no means ignores the troublous character of the times
+in which he lived. He often alludes to it. He thinks astrologers cannot
+have any great difficulty in presaging changes and revolutions near at
+hand:--'Their prophetic indications are practically in our very
+midst, and most palpable; one need not search the Heavens for that.'
+
+'Cast we our eyes about us' (here again we follow Florio's translation),
+'and in a generall survay consider all the world: all is tottring;
+_all is out of frame_. Take a perfect view of all great states,
+both in Christendome and where ever else we have knowledge of, and
+in all places you shall finde a most evident threatning of change
+and ruine ... Astrologers may spout themselves, with warning us,
+as they doe of iminent alterations and succeeding revolutions: their
+divinations are present and palpable, we need not prie into the
+heavens to find them out.' [29]
+
+But Montaigne, always resigned to the will of God, inactively stands by.
+Not even a manly counsel comes from his lips. He believes he has
+fulfilled his Christian duty by trusting in Heaven for the conduct
+of human affairs, and trying to comfort his fellow-men by the hollow
+words that he 'sees no cause for despair. Perchance we have not yet
+arrived at the last stage. The maintenance of states is most probably
+something that goes beyond our powers of understanding.' [30]
+
+Montaigne, the Humanist, says that 'it is an absolute perfection, and,
+as it were, a divine accomplishment for a man to know how to loyally
+enjoy his existence.' The most commendable life for him is 'that which
+adapts itself, in an orderly way, to a common human model, without
+miracle, and without extravagance.' [31]
+
+But Montaigne, the Christian, relates that he has 'never occupied
+himself with anything more than with ideas of death, even at the most
+licentious time of his youth.' With touching ingenuousness he confesses
+his weaknesses and his vanities, of which he scarcely dares to think any
+longer. The descriptions he often gives of himself--such as, 'a dreamer'
+(_songe-creux_), 'soft' (_molle_), 'heavy' (_poisante_), 'pensive,' and so
+forth [32]--prove that he cannot have arrived at a pure enjoyment of
+life. He questions the happiness of being a husband and father. We
+shall touch upon his views as regards woman, and many other peculiarities
+of his, in the passages of 'Hamlet' referring to them.
+
+In nothing does Montaigne arrive at any clear conclusion within himself.
+Though he knows how to speak much and well about everything, it is all
+mere _bel esprit_, a display of glittering words, hollow verbiage,
+which only lands us in a labyrinth of contradictions, from which we
+seek an issue as vainly as the author himself. Striving, through all his
+life, to arrive at a knowledge of himself, he at last lays down his arms,
+considering the attempt a fruitless and impossible task, and, in his last
+Essay, [33] he makes this avowal:--
+
+'That which in Perseus, the King of Macedon, was remarked as a rare
+thing--viz. that his mind, not settling down into any kind of condition,
+went wandering through every manner of life, thus showing such flighty
+and erratic conduct that neither he nor others knew what sort of man he
+was: this seems to me to apply nearly to the whole world, and more
+especially to one of that ilk whom this description would eminently fit.
+This, indeed, is what I believe of him (he speaks of himself):--"No
+average attitude; being always driven from one extreme to the other by
+indivinable chances; no manner of course without cross-runnings and
+marvellous controversies; no clear and plain faculty, so that the
+likeliest idea that could one day be put forth about him will be this:
+that he affected and laboured to make himself known by the
+impossibility of really knowing him" ('qu'il affectoit et estudioit
+de se rendre cogneu par estre mecognoissable').' This is Montaigne
+all over.
+
+In the British Museum there is a copy of the Essays of Montaigne, in
+Florio's translation, with Shakspere's name, it is alleged, written
+in it by his own hand, and with notes which possibly may in part have
+been jotted down by him. Sir Frederick Madden, one of the greatest
+authorities in autographs, has recognised Shakspere's autograph as
+genuine. [34] Whatever disputes may be carried on on this particular
+point, we think we shall be able to prove that Shakspere about the year
+1600 must have been well acquainted with Montaigne. We shall show
+that in the first text of 'Hamlet,' which, it is assumed, was
+represented on the stage between 1601 and 1602, there are already
+to be found some allusions to Montaigne, especially as far as the
+middle of the second and towards the end of the fifth act. In all
+likelihood, Shakspere knew the 'Essais' even in the original French
+text or perhaps from the manuscript of the translation which, as
+above stated, had been begun towards the year 1599; for Shakspere,
+it is to be supposed, had access to the houses of, at least, two
+of the noble ladies to whom the Italian teacher dedicated his
+translation.
+
+In the 'Tempest,' assumed to be of later date than 'Hamlet,' there is
+a passage unmistakably taken from Florio's version of Montaigne. [35]
+
+Ben Jonson, the most quarrelsome and the chief adversary of Shakspere,
+was an intimate friend of Florio. When Montaigne, in 'Hamlet'--as
+Jonson says--became the target of 'railing rhetoric,' the latter
+took sides with Florio and his colleagues; launching out against
+Shakspere in his comedy, 'Volpone.' This play, as well as an
+Introduction in which it is dedicated to the two Universities, gives
+us a clue to a great many things otherwise difficult to understand.
+
+A new book, especially a philosophical work like that of Michel
+Montaigne, was then still a remarkable event. [36] To counteract the
+pernicious influence which the frivolous, foreign talker threatened to
+exercise, in large circles, through an English translation--this, in
+our opinion, was the object which Shakspere had when touching upon
+ground interdicted, as a rule, to the stage--namely, upon questions of
+religion. We shall find that it was not through any preference for ghost
+and murder scenes that, a year after the second quarto, in 1605,
+'Hamlet' was reprinted--a circumstance occurring with but one other
+drama of Shakspere; which testifies that this particular play attained
+great popularity from its first appearance. [37]
+
+A very instructive insight into the intellectual movement of the great
+Reformation epoch here opens itself to us. In this case, also, we shall
+gain the conviction that a true genius takes the liveliest interest in
+the fate of his own nation, and does not occupy himself with distant,
+abstruse problems (such as fussy metaphysicians would fain philosophise
+into 'Hamlet'), whilst the times are going out of joint. The greatest
+Englishman remained, in the most powerful drama of his, within the
+sphere of the questions that agitated his time. In 'Hamlet' he
+identifies Montaigne's philosophy with madness; branding it as a
+pernicious one, as contrary to the intellectual conquests his own
+English nation has made, when breaking with the Romanist dogmas.
+
+What sense of duty do Montaigne's Essays promote? What noble deed can
+ripen in the light of the disordered and discordant ideas they contain?
+All they can do is, to disturb the mind, not to clear it; to give rise
+to doubts, not to solve them; to nip the buds from which great actions
+may spring, not to develop them. Instead of furthering the love for
+mankind, they can only produce despair as to all higher aims and ideals.
+
+In 'Hamlet,' Shakspere personified many qualities of the complex
+character of Montaigne. Before all, he meant to draw this conclusion:
+that whoever approaches a high task of life with such wavering
+thoughts and such logical inconsistencies, must needs suffer
+shipwreck. Hamlet's character has only remained an enigma to us for
+so long a time because he is flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood;
+'but, to knew a man well, were to know himself.'
+
+
+ 1: Essay III. 9.
+
+ 2: Essay III. 12, 235.
+
+ 3: _Ibid_. 9.
+
+ 4: Essay III. 13 (_Edition Variorum_, par Charles Louandre,
+   Paris; which we always refer to).
+
+ 5: The _Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Millitarie Discourses_
+   of Lo. Michaell de Montaigne, London, 1603, p. 256.
+
+ 6: Sainte-Beuve.
+
+ 7: Essay II. 17, p. 71.
+
+ 8: III. 2, 330.
+
+ 9: Essay I. 26, 257.
+
+10: II. 12, 487-8.
+
+11: Montaigne, _Discours de Raison_ (Discourse of Reason). Florio,
+   252.
+
+12: Essay II. 12, 297. Florio, 266.
+
+13: Part of an inscription still legible in Montaigne's castle.
+
+14: Essay II. 12.
+
+15: III. 9.
+
+16: I. 26.
+
+17: Essay III. 1
+
+18: II. 11.
+
+19: III. 1.
+
+20: III. 13.
+
+21: Essay III. 13.
+
+22: II. 12.
+
+23: I. 11.
+
+24: III. 9.
+
+25: _Ibid_.
+
+26: II. 12.
+
+27: Essay III. 10.
+
+28: _Ibid_. 12.
+
+29. Florio, 575.
+
+30: Essay III. 9.
+
+31: III. 13.
+
+32: Essay II. 12.
+
+33: III. 13.
+
+34: _Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere_. London, 1838.
+
+35: This is the passage, which occurs in the _Tempest_, act ii.
+   sc. I:
+
+      '_Gonzalo_.--I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
+      Execute all things: for no kind of traffic
+      Would I admit; no name of magistrate:
+      Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
+      And use of service, none; contract, succession,
+      Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
+      No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
+      No occupation: all men idle, all;
+      And women too.'
+
+   This passage is almost literally taken from Essay I. 30, 'On
+   Cannibals.' We shall later on show Shakspere's reason for giving
+   us this fanciful description of such an Utopian commonwealth.
+
+36: Florio, after enumerating the difficulties he encountered in the
+   translation of the _Essays_, concludes his preface to the
+   courteous reader with the following words:--
+
+   'In summe, if any think he could do better, let him trie, then
+   will he better think of what is done. Seven or eight of great wit
+   and worth have assayed, but found those Essais no attempt for
+   French apprentises or Littletonians. If thus done it may please
+   you, as I wish it may and I hope it shall, and I with you shall be
+   pleased: though not, yet still I am.'
+
+   We learn, from this remark, of what great importance the _Essais_
+   must have been considered in literary circles, and it is not
+   improbable that a few attempts 'of the seven or eight of great wit
+   and worth' may have appeared in print long before Florio's
+   translation. We may well ask: Is it likely that the greatest
+   literary genius of his age should have been unaware of the
+   existence of a work which was considered of such importance that
+   'seven or eight of great wit and worth' thought it worth while to
+   attempt to translate it? Shakspere, who in _King Henry the Fifth_
+   (1599) wrote some scenes in French, must surely have had sufficient
+   knowledge of this language to read it.
+
+37: Besides the quartos of 1603 and 1604, thee were reprints of the
+   latter in 1605 and 1611; also another edition without date.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+HAMLET.
+
+In the foregoing sketch of Montaigne our especial object was to point
+out the inconsistency of the French writer in advising us to follow
+Nature as our guide, yet at the same time maintaining a strict
+adherence to tenets and dogmas which qualify the impulses and
+inclinations of nature as sinful, and which even declare war against
+them.
+
+Let us see how Shakspere incarnates these contrasts in the character
+of Hamlet.
+
+He makes the Danish Prince come back from the University of Wittenberg.
+There, we certainly may assume, he has become imbued with the new spirit
+that then shook the world. We refrain from mentioning it by name,
+because the designation we now confer upon it has become a lifeless
+word, comprising no longer those free thoughts of the Humanist, for
+which Shakspere, in this powerful tragedy, boldly enters the lists.
+
+Hamlet longs to be back to Wittenberg. This desire represents his
+inclination towards free, humanistic studies. On the other hand, his
+adherence to old dogmatic views can be deduced from the fact of his
+being so terribly impressed by the circumstance of his father having
+had to die
+
+  Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled;
+
+a fact recorded with a threefold outcry:--
+
+  Oh, horrible! Oh, horrible! most horrible!
+
+Again, we must direct the reader's attention to this very noteworthy
+point, that the first quarto edition of 'Hamlet' was already worked out
+tolerably well as far as the middle of the second act. For the completion
+of this part, only a few details were necessary. From them, we must all
+the more be enabled to gather Shakspere's intention.
+
+In the speech of the Ghost in the second quarto--otherwise of well-nigh
+identical contents with the one in the first edition--there is only
+one new line, but one which deserves the closest consideration.
+It is that which we have quoted--
+
+  Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled.
+
+The effect this statement has on the course of the dramatic action we
+shall explain later on. In act iii. sc. 3, where Hamlet's energy is
+paralysed by this disclosure of the Ghost, we afterwards again come upon
+a short innovation, and a most characteristic one, though but consisting
+of two lines.
+
+In the first quarto we see Hamlet, in the beginning of the play,
+seized with an unmanly grief which makes him wish that heaven and
+earth would change back into chaos. But a new addition to this
+weariness of life is the contempt of all earthly aspirations: the
+aversion to Nature as the begetter of sin. The following passages
+are not to be found in the first quarto:--
+
+  Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
+  His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
+  How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
+  Seem to me all the uses of this world!
+  Fie on't! Ah fie! 't is an unweeded garden,
+  That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
+  Possess it merely.
+
+The scene between Hamlet and Horatio (act i. sc. 4), which in both
+texts is about the same, contains an innovation in which the Prince's
+mistrust of nature is even more sharply expressed. These lines are new:--
+
+  This heavy-headed revel east and west
+  Makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations--
+
+as far as--
+
+  ... The dram of eale (evil)
+  Doth (drawth) all the substance of a doubt
+  To his own scandal.
+
+The contents of this interpolated speech may concisely be thus given:
+that the virtues of man, however pure and numerous they may be, are
+often infected by 'some vicious mole of Nature,' wherein he himself
+is guiltless; and that from such a fault in the chance of birth a stamp
+of defect is impressed upon his character, and thus contaminates the
+whole.
+
+These innovations are evidently introduced for the purpose of making
+us understand why Hamlet does not trust to the excitements of his own
+reason and his own blood, in order to find out by natural means whether
+it be true what his 'prophetic soul' anticipates--namely, that his
+uncle may 'smile and smile, and yet be a villain.'
+
+Man, says Montaigne, has no hold-fast, no firm and fixed point, within
+himself, in spite of his apparently splendid outfit. [1]
+
+Man can do nothing with his own weapons alone without help from outside.
+In the Essay 'On the Folly of Referring the True and the False to the
+Trustworthiness of our Judgment,' [2] he maintains that 'it is a
+silly presumption to go about despising and condemning as false that
+which does not seem probable to us; which is a common fault of those who
+think they have more self-sufficiency than the vulgar. So was I formerly
+minded; and if I heard anybody speak either of ghosts coming back, or of
+the prophecy of coming things, of spells, of witchcraft, or of any other
+tale I could not digest--
+
+  Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
+  Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala--
+
+I felt a kind of compassion for the poor people who were made the
+victims of such follies. And now I find that I was, at least, to be
+as much pitied myself.... Reason has taught me that, so resolutely
+to condemn a thing as false and impossible, is to boldly assume that
+we have in our head the bounds and limits of the will of God and of
+our common mother, Nature; and I now see that there is no more notable
+folly in the world than to reduce them to the measure of our capacity
+and of our self-sufficient judgment.' [3]
+
+Not less weak than Montaigne's trust in human reason is that of Hamlet
+when he fears 'the pales and forts of reason' may be broken down--
+
+  by the o'ergrowth of some complexion.
+
+With such a mode of thought it is not to be wondered at that he should
+welcome the first occasion when the task of his life may be revealed
+to him by a heavenly messenger. Hoping that 'the questionable shape'
+would not let him 'burst in ignorance,' but tell him why 'we fools of
+Nature so horridly shake our disposition with thoughts beyond the
+reaches of our souls,' he follows the spectral apparition. Good Horatio
+does his best to restrain his friend, who has waxed 'desperate with
+imagination,' from approaching the 'removed ground,' that might deprive
+him of the 'sovereignity of reason,' and whither the Ghost beckons him.
+
+Here there are several new lines:--
+
+  Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff....
+  The very place puts toys of desperation,
+  Without more motive, into every brain
+  That looks so many fathoms to the sea,
+  And hears it roar beneath.
+
+Here we have one of those incipient ecstasies of which Montaigne says
+that 'such transcending humours affright me as much as _steep,
+high, and inaccessible places_.' [4]
+
+In the following scene between Hamlet and the Ghost the introduction is
+new:--
+
+  _Ghost_. My hour is almost come,
+  When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
+  Must render up myself.
+  _Hamlet_. Alas, poor ghost!
+  _Ghost_. Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
+  To what I shall unfold.
+  _Hamlet_. Speak; I am bound to hear.
+  _Ghost_. So art thou to revenge, when thou shall hear.
+
+This picturing of the torments of hell--how very characteristic! It
+is forbidden to the Ghost to communicate to 'ears of flesh and blood'
+the secrets of its fiery prison-house. Yet it knows how to tell enough
+of the horrors of that gruesome place to make the hair of a stronger
+mortal than Hamlet is, stand on end, 'like quills upon the fretful
+porcupine.'
+
+With masterly hand, the poet depicts the distance which henceforth
+separates Hamlet's course of thought from that of his friends who have
+remained on the firm ground of human reason. Hamlet cannot say more
+than--
+
+  that there's ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark
+  But he's an arrant knave.
+
+When Horatio answers that 'there needs no ghost, my lord, come from
+the grave to tell us this,' [5] Hamlet asks his friends to shake hands
+with him and part, giving them to understand that every man has his
+own business and desire, and that--
+
+  for my own poor part,
+  Look you, I'll go pray.
+
+Horatio calls this 'wild and whirling words.' The Prince who at this
+moment, no doubt, expresses his own true inclination, says:--'I am
+sorry they offend you--heartily; yes, 'faith, heartily.' It is difficult
+for him to justify his own procedure. He feels unable to explain
+his thoughts and sentiments to the clear, unwarped reason of a Horatio,
+to whom the Ghost did not reply, and to whom no ghost would.
+
+Hamlet assures his friend, for whose sympathy he greatly cares, that
+the apparition is a true one, an honest ghost. He advises Horatio to
+give the 'wondrous strange' a welcome even as to 'a stranger;' and,
+lest he might endeavour to test the apparition by human reason, he speaks
+the beautiful words:--
+
+  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy
+
+Hamlet tells his friends that in future he will put on 'an antic
+disposition.' Towards them he has, in fact, already done so. His desire
+for a threefold oath; his repeated shifting of ground; his swearing
+by the sword on which the hands are laid (a custom referable to the
+time of the Crusades, and considered tantamount to swearing by the
+cross, but which, at the same time, is an older Germanic, and hence
+Danish, custom); his use of a Latin formula, _Hic et ubique_--all
+these procedures have the evident object of throwing his comrades into
+a mystic frame of mind, and to make them keep silence ('so help you
+mercy!') as to what they have seen. These are the mysterious means
+which those have to use that would make themselves the medium of a
+message supernaturally revealed. [5]
+
+A perusal of the fifty-sixth chapter of the first Essay of Montaigne
+will show with what great reverence he treated ceremonial customs
+and hollow formulas; for instance, the sign of the cross, of which he
+'continually made use, even if he be but yawning' (_sic_). It is
+not a mere coincidence, but a well-calculated trait in the character of
+Hamlet, that in his speech he goes through a scale of exclamations and
+asseverations such as Shakspere employs in no other of his poetical
+creations. Hamlet incessantly mentions God, Heaven, Hell, and the
+Devil, the Heavenly Hosts, and the Saints. He claims protection from
+the latter at the appearance of the Ghost. He swears 'by St. Patrick,'
+by his faith, by God's wounds, by His blood, by His body, by the
+Cross, and so forth. [6]
+
+Stubbs, in his 'Anatomy of Abuses' (1583), [7] lays stress, among other
+characteristics of the Papists, upon their terrible inclination to
+swearing: 'in so muche, as if they speake but three or fower words,
+yet must thei needes be interlaced with a bloudie othe or two, to the
+great dishonour of God and offence of the hearers.'
+
+An overwhelming grief and mistrust in his own nature filled Hamlet's
+bold imagination with the desire of receiving a complete mandate
+for his mission from the hands of superior powers. So he enters the
+realm of mysticism, where mind wields no authority, and where no
+sound fruit of human reason can ripen.
+
+Between the first and the second act there is an interval of a few
+months. The poet gives us no other clue to the condition and the
+doings of his hero than that, in the words of Polonius, [8] he 'fell
+into sadness; then into a fast; thence to a watch; thence into a
+weakness,' and so forth. We may therefore assume that he has followed
+his inclination to go to pray; that he tries by fasting, watching,
+and chastising, as so many before him, to find his way in the dreamland
+which he has entered following the Ghost; sincerely striving to remain
+true to his resolution to 'wipe from the table of his memory all
+pressures past.'
+
+A new passage in the monologue of Hamlet, after the Ghost has left him,
+is this:--
+
+  And thy commandment all alone shall live
+  Within the book and volume of my brain,
+  Unmix'd with baser matter; yes, by Heaven!
+  O most pernicious woman!
+
+We next hear about the Prince from Ophelia after the interval which, as
+mentioned above, lies between the first and the second act. [9] In the
+old play she relates that, when 'walking in the gallery all alone,' he,
+the lover, came towards her, altogether 'bereft of his wits.' In the
+scene of the later play he comes to her closet with a purpose, appearing
+before her in a state of mental struggle. No doubt, he then approaches
+her with the intention, which afterwards he carries out, of renouncing
+woman, the begetter of all evil in the world, which makes such monsters
+of wise men. The sight of his true love has shaken him. He stands before
+her: [10]
+
+  ... with a look so piteous in purport
+  As if he had been loosed out of hell
+  To speak of horrors...
+  And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
+  He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
+  As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
+  And end his being.
+
+Thus he leaves her, not daring to speak the word which is to separate him
+from her.
+
+In the following scene between Hamlet and Polonius (act ii. sc. 2 [11])
+there is again a new passage which equally proves that Hamlet's thoughts
+only dwell upon one theme; that is, the sinfulness of our human nature:--
+
+    _Hamlet_. For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a
+    god, kissing carrion--Have you a daughter?
+    _Polonius_. I have, my lord.
+    _Hamlet_. Let her not walk i' the sun. Conception is a blessing;
+    but not as your daughter may conceive:--friend, look to't.
+
+Hamlet said before, that 'To be honest, is to be one man picked out of
+ten thousand.' There is method in Hamlet's madness. With correct logic
+he draws from dogmas which pronounce Nature to be sinful, the conclusion
+that we need not wonder at the abounding of evil in this world, seeing
+that a God himself assists in creating it. He, therefore, warns Polonius
+against his daughter, too, becoming 'a breeder of sinners.'
+
+Before we follow Hamlet now to the scene with Ophelia, where, 'in an
+ecstasy of divine inspiration, equally weak in reason, and violent in
+persuasion and dissuasion,' [12] he calls upon her to go to a nunnery,
+we must direct attention to the concluding part of an Essay [13] of
+Montaigne. It is only surprising that nobody should as yet have pointed
+out how unmistakeably, in that famous scene, the inconsistencies of the
+whimsical French writer are scourged. In that Essay the following thought
+occurs, which one would gladly accept as a correct one: 'Falsely do we
+judge the _honesty_ and the _beauty_ of an action from its usefulness.
+Equally wrong it is to conclude that everyone is bound to do the
+same, and that it is an honest action for everybody, if it be a
+useful one.'
+
+Now, Montaigne endeavours to apply this thought to the institution of
+marriage; and he descends, in doing so, to the following irrational
+argument:--'Let us select the most necessary and most useful institution
+of human society: _it is marriage_. Yet the counsel of the saints
+deems the contrary side to be more _honest_; thus excluding the most
+venerable vocation of men.'
+
+The satire of that famous scene in 'Hamlet' is here apparent. It will
+now be understood why the Danish Prince comes with a warning to his
+beloved, 'not to admit _honesty_ in discourse with _beauty_,' and why
+his resolution is that 'we will have no more _marriage_.' Those words
+of Hamlet, too, '_this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives
+it proof_,' are easy of explanation. It was not yet so long ago that
+celibacy had been abolished in England. The 'time' now confirms
+celibacy once more in this French book.
+
+Most characteristic is the following passage: in this scene the only new
+one. It goes far to show the intention with which the poet partly
+re-wrought the play. I mean the words in which Hamlet confesses to
+Ophelia that he has deceived her. The repentant sinner says: '_You
+should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old
+stock but we shall relish of it_.'
+
+Can a poet who will not convert the stage into a theological Hall of
+Controversy, make the soul-struggle of his hero more comprehensible?
+Hamlet has honestly tried (we have seen with what means) to inoculate
+and improve the sinful 'old stock.' But how far away he still feels
+himself from his aim! He calls himself 'proud, revengeful, ambitious.'
+These are the three sins of which he must accuse himself, when listening
+to the voice of Nature which admonishes him to fulfil the duty of his
+life--the deed of blood--that inner voice of his nobler nature which
+impels him to seize the crown in order to guide the destinies of his
+country; given over, as the latter is, to the mischievous whims of a
+villain.
+
+Yet he cries out against Ophelia, 'We are arrant knaves all; believe
+none of us!' He reproaches this daughter of Eve with her own weaknesses
+and the great number of her sins in words reminding us of Isaiah, [14]
+where the wantonness of the daughters of Zion is reproved. He, the
+ascetic, calls out to his mistress: 'Go thy ways to a nunnery!... Why
+wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?'
+
+Let us hear what his mistress says about him. This passage also,
+explaining Hamlet's madness, is new:--
+
+  Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
+  Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
+  That unmatched form and feature of blown youth,
+  Blasted with ecstasy. [15]
+
+With what other word can Hamlet's passionate utterances be designated
+than that of religious ecstasy?
+
+From the first moment when he sees Ophelia, and prays her to remember
+his sins in her 'orisons,' down to the last moment when he leaves her,
+bidding her to go to a nunnery, there is method in his madness--the
+method of those dogmas which brand nature and humanity as sinful,
+whose impulses they do not endeavour to lead to higher aims, but which,
+by certain mysteries and formulas, they pretend to be able to overcome.
+The soul-struggle of Hamlet arises from his divided mind; an inner
+voice of Nature calling, on the one hand:--
+
+  Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
+  A couch for luxury and damned incest;
+
+whilst another voice calls out that, howsoever he pursues his act, he
+should not 'taint his mind.'
+
+In the English translation of the 'Hystorie of Hamblet,' from which
+Shakspere took his subject, the art of dissembling is extolled, in
+most naive language, as one specially useful towards great personages
+not easily accessible to revenge. He who would exercise the arts of
+dissembling (it is said there) must be able to 'kisse his hand whome
+in hearte hee could wishe an hundredfoot depth under the earth, so hee
+mighte never see him more, if it were not a thing _wholly to bee
+disliked in a Christian, who by no meanes ought to have a bitter
+gall, or desires infected with revenge_.'
+
+We shall find later on that Hamlet's gall also claims its rights; all
+the more so as he endeavours, by an unnatural and superstitious use of
+dogmatism, to suppress and to drive away the 'excitements of the reason
+and of the blood.' We have heard from Polonius that the Prince,
+after his 'sadness,' fell into a 'fast.' And everything he says to
+his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [16] about his frame of
+mind, confirms us in the belief that he has remained faithful to the
+intention declared in the first act--'Look you, I will go pray'--so
+as to prepare himself, like many others, to contemplate passively
+a world sinful from its very nature, and therefore not to be changed
+and bettered.
+
+This scene is, in the first quarto, a mere hasty sketch, but faintly
+indicated. In the second quarto it is, so to say, a new one; and a
+comparison between the two need, therefore, not be instituted.
+
+Before his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet, for a few
+moments, gives up his brain-racking thoughts of penitence; he even
+endeavours to philosophise, as he may have done at the University
+of Wittenberg before he allowed himself to be lured into dreamland.
+He utters a thought--'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
+makes it so'--which occurs in an Essay of Montaigne, and is thus given
+by Florio (127):--
+
+'If that what we call evil and torment be neither torment nor evil,
+but that our fancy only gives it that quality, is it in us to change
+it?' [17]
+
+Hamlet then pictures his mental condition in words of deepest sincerity.
+In order to fully understand this description, we have once more to
+refer to an Essay of Montaigne, [18] in which he asserts that man is
+not furthered by his reason, his speculations, his passions; that
+they give him no advantage over other creatures. A divinely appointed
+authority--the Church--confers upon him 'those great advantages and
+odds he supposes to have over other creatures.' It is she that seals
+to him the patent and privilege which authorises him to 'keep account
+both of the receipts and layings-out of the world.' Ay, it is she who
+convinces him that '_this admirable swinging-round of the heavenly
+vaults, the eternal light of those constellations rolling so nobly over
+our heads_, the terrible commotions of this infinite ocean, were
+established, and have continued for so many ages, for his advantage and
+his service.' To her authority he must wholly surrender himself; by her
+he must allow himself to be guided. And in doing so, it is 'better for
+us to have a weak judgment than a strong one; better to be smitten with
+blindness than to have one's eyes open and clear-sighted.'
+
+Striving to live up to similar views, Hamlet 'lost all his mirth.'
+This is the cause of his heavy disposition; of his having 'foregone
+all custom of exercise'--so 'that this goodly frame, the earth,' seems
+to him 'a sterile promontory,' a mere place of preparation for gaining
+the next world through penance and prayer. Verily, '_this brave
+o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden
+fire_,' appears to him no better 'than a foul and pestilent
+congregation of vapours.' Quite in accordance with such tenets which
+we need not qualify by name, Man, to him, is but a 'quintessence of
+dust.'
+
+Both man, and still more sinful woman, displease Hamlet. Yet he has
+not succeeded in so wholly subjugating Nature within himself as to be
+fully secured against her importunate claims. Now we would point out
+here that Montaigne [19] mentions a tyrant of antiquity who 'could not
+bear seeing tragedies acted in the theatre, from fear that his subjects
+should see him sob at the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache--him
+who, without pity, caused daily so many people to be cruelly killed.'
+Again, Montaigne [20] speaks of actors, mentioned by Quinctilian, who
+were 'so deeply engaged in a sorrowful part that they wept even after
+having returned to their lodgings;' whilst Quinctilian reports of
+himself that, 'having undertaken to move a certain passion in others,
+he had entered so far into his part as to find himself surprised, not
+only with the shedding of tears, but also with a paleness of countenance
+and the behaviour of a man truly weighed down with grief.'
+
+Hamlet has listened to the player. In the concluding monologue of the
+second act--which is twice as long in the new quarto--we are told of the
+effect produced upon his mind when seeing that an actor, who merely holds
+a mirror up to Nature--
+
+  ... but in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
+  Could force his soul so to his own conceit
+  That from her working all his visage wann'd....
+  ... And all for nothing!--For Hecuba?
+
+whilst he (Hamlet), 'a dull and muddy-mettled rascal,' [21] like
+John-a-dreams, in spite of his strong 'motive and the cue for passion,'
+mistrusts them and is afraid of being guided by them.
+
+All at once, Hamlet feels the weight and pressure of a mode of thought
+which declares war against the impulses of Nature, calling man a born
+sinner.
+
+  Who calls me villain? ...
+  ... Gives me the lie i' the throat,
+  As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
+  Ha!
+  'S wounds,[1] I should take it: for it cannot be.
+  But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
+  To make oppression bitter; or ere this
+  I should have fatted all the region kites
+  With this slave's offal. [22]
+
+The feelings of Hamlet, until then forcibly kept down, now get the
+mastery over him. He gives vent to them in oaths of which he is himself
+at last ashamed, when he compares himself to 'a very drab, a scullion,'
+who 'must fall a-cursing.'
+
+He now will set to work and get more natural evidence of the King's
+guilt. He begins to entertain doubts as to those mystic views by
+which he meant to be guided. He mistrusts the apparition which he
+had called an honest ghost ('true-penny'):--
+
+  The spirit that I have seen
+  May be the Devil: and the Devil hath power
+  To assume a pleasing shape. Yea, perhaps
+  Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
+  As he is very potent with such spirits,
+  Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
+  More relative than this. [23]
+
+Over weakness the Devil is potent; all flesh is weak. What mode of
+thought is this? What philosophy taught this doctrine? Hamlet's
+weakness, if we may believe Polonius, [24] has been brought on by
+fasting and watching.
+
+Over melancholy, too, the Devil is powerful. Are we not here in the
+sombre atmosphere of those who turn away their reason from ideal
+aspirations; who denounce the impulses of nature as sinful excitements;
+who would fain look upon the earth as 'a sterile promontory'--having
+dark death more before their mind's eye than beautiful life? Are
+such thoughts not the forerunners of melancholy?
+
+Hamlet's incessant thoughts of death are the same as those of his
+model, Montaigne. In an Essay, [25] entitled 'That to Philosophise
+is to Learn how to Die,' the latter explains that the Christian
+religion has no surer basis than the contempt for the present life,
+and that we are in this world only to prepare ourselves for death.
+His imagination, he says, has occupied itself with these thoughts
+of death more than with anything else. Referring to a saying of
+Lykurgos, he approves of graveyards being laid out close to churches
+and in the most frequented places of a city, so as to accustom the
+common people, women, and children not to be scared at the sight of
+a dead person, and to forewarn everyone, by this continual spectacle
+of bones, tombs, and funerals, as to our real condition.
+
+Montaigne also, like Hamlet, ponders over suicide. He devotes a whole
+Essay [26] to it. Life, he observes, would be a tyranny if the liberty
+to die were wanting. For this liberty, he thinks, we have to thank
+Nature, as for the most favourable gift which, indeed, deprives us
+of all right to complain of our condition. If--as Boiocal, the German
+chieftain, [27] said--earth is wanting to us whereon to live, earth
+is never wanting to us for death. [28]
+
+That is the wisdom of Montaigne, the admirer of antiquity. But
+Montaigne, the modern man, introduces the Essay in which he dares to
+utter such bold thoughts with the following restriction:--
+
+'If, as it is said, to philosophise be to doubt, with much more reason
+to play pranks (_niaiser_) and to rave, as I do, must be to doubt.
+For, to inquire and to discuss, behoves the disciples. The decision
+belongs to the chairman (_cathédrant_). My chairman is the
+authority of the divine will which regulates us without contradiction,
+and which occupies its rank above those human and vain disputes.'
+This chairman, as often observed, by which Montaigne's thoughts are
+to be guided, is an ecclesiastic authority.
+
+In 'Hamlet,' also, it is a 'canon' [29] fixed against self-slaughter,
+which restrains him from leaving, out of his own impulse, this whilom
+paradise, this 'unweeded garden' of life.
+
+Montaigne, whose philosophy aims at making us conversant with death
+as with a friend, is yet terrified by it. Altogether, he says, he would
+fain pass his life at his ease; and if he could escape from blows,
+even by taking refuge under a calf's skin, [30] he would not be the
+man who would shrink from it.
+
+In a few graphic words Shakspere brands this cowardly clinging to life.
+In the scene where Hamlet gives to Polonius nothing more willingly
+than his leave, the new quarto (in every other respect the conclusion
+of this scene is identical in both editions) contains these additional
+words:--'Except my life, except my life, except my life.' Of the 'calf's
+skin' we hear in the first scene of act v., where those are called sheep
+and calves, who seek out assurance in parchments which are made of
+sheep-skins and of calves-skins too.
+
+Montaigne, who does not cease pondering over the pale fellow, Death,
+looks for consolation from the ancients. He takes Sokrates as the
+model of all great qualities; and he reproduces, in his own manner,
+the speech this sage, who was fearless of death, made before his
+judges. First of all, he makes him say that the qualities of death
+are unknown to him, as he has never seen anybody who could instruct
+him in them. 'Those who fear death, presuppose that they know it....
+Perhaps death may be an indifferent thing; perhaps a desirable one.
+However, one may believe that, if it be a transmigration from one
+place to another, it will be an amelioration ... and free us from
+having any more to do with wicked and corrupt judges. If it be a
+consummation (_anéantissement_) [31] of our being, it is also
+an amelioration to enter into a long and quiet night. We find nothing
+so sweet in life as a quiet rest--a tranquil and profound sleep without
+dreams.'
+
+Now compare the monologue, 'To be or not to be,' of the first quarto
+with the one contained in the second. It will then be seen that those
+Sokratic ideas, rendered by Montaigne in his own manner, have been
+worked into the first quarto. In the latter we hear nothing at all
+about the end of our being (a complete destruction or _consummation_)
+producing an amelioration. [32] Shakspere expresses this thought by
+the words that if we could say that, by a sleep, we 'end the heartache
+and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to--'tis a consummation
+devoutly to be wished.' [33]
+
+Keen commentators have pointed out the contradiction in Hamlet's
+monologue, where he speaks of--
+
+  The undiscovered country from whose bourn
+  No traveller returns,
+
+whilst he saw such a traveller in his father's ghost. Certainly there
+were then, even as there are now, besides the logical thinkers, also
+a considerable number of inconsistent persons who believed in
+supernaturally revealed messages, and who, nevertheless, now and then,
+felt contradictory thoughts rising within themselves. Why should the
+great master, who exhausted in his dramatic personages almost all
+types of human nature, not have put such a character also on the stage?
+
+To the poet, whose object it was to show 'to the very age and body of
+time his form and pressure' (this passage is wanting in the first
+quarto), the presentation of such a psychological problem of
+contradictory thoughts must have been of far greater attraction than
+an anticipatory description of a metaphysician aching under the heavy
+burden of his philosophic speculations. The latter is the character
+attributed, by some, to Hamlet. But we think that such an utterly
+strange modern creature would have been altogether incomprehensible
+to the energetic English mind of this period.
+
+In the course of the drama, Shakspere makes it sufficiently clear that
+the thoughts by which Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution is sicklied
+o'er,' have come from the narrow cells of a superstitious Christianity,
+not from the free use of his reason. According to Montaigne, however,
+we ought to 'use our reason only for strengthening our belief.'
+
+Hamlet, with Purgatory and Hell, into which he has cast a glance,
+before his eyes, would fain fly, like Montaigne, from them. In his
+Essay I. 19 [34] the latter says that our soul must be steeled against
+the powers of death; 'for, as long as Death frightens us, how is it
+possible to make a single step without feverish agitation?'
+
+Hamlet as little attains this condition of quiet equanimity as the
+pensive and pondering Montaigne. The latter, however, speaks of souls
+that know no fear. It is true, he has to go to the ancients in order
+to meet with this frame of mind. Quoting Horace [35]--
+
+  Non vultus instantis tyranni
+  Mente quatit solida, neque Auster,
+  Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae,
+  Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus--
+
+he describes such a soul as being made '_mistress over her passions
+and concupiscence; having become proof against poverty and disgrace,
+and all the other injuries of fortune_. Let those who can, gain this
+advantage. Herein lies true and sovereign freedom that allows us to
+scorn force and injustice, and to deride prisons and fetters.'
+
+To a friend with such a soul, to a living Horace or Horatio, Hamlet
+addresses himself. Horatio also is his fellow-student and friend
+from the University days at Wittenberg, and he has made the views
+of the new philosophical school quite his own. He does not tremble
+before the fire of Purgatory and Hell. Despising death, he wishes,
+in the last scene, to empty the cup of poison from which his friend
+Hamlet has drunk, in order to follow him. When the latter keeps him
+back, Horatio makes answer--
+
+  I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.
+
+Hamlet, trusting more to this firmer and truly antique character than
+to his own, requests Horatio to aid him during the play-scene in
+watching the King, so as to procure more natural evidence of his guilt.
+This school-friend--how often may he have philosophised with him!--is
+to him
+
+  as just a man
+  As e'er my conversation coped withal.
+
+The following passage, [36] in which Horatio's character is described
+by Hamlet, is wanting in the first quarto:--
+
+  Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,
+  And could of men distinguish, her election
+  Hath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been
+  As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;
+  A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
+  Hath ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are those
+  Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled
+  That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger
+  To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
+  That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
+  In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,
+  As I do thee.
+
+How near these words of Shakspere come to those with which Montaigne
+describes an intrepid man after the poem of Horace!
+
+But, in spite of subtle reasoning, the French philosopher cannot fathom
+the cause why he himself does not attain any mind's ease, and why he
+has no plain and straightforward faculty (_nulle faculté simple_)
+within himself. He once [37] uses the expression, 'We trouble death
+with the care of life, and life with the care of death;' but he does
+not succeed in firmly attaching himself to life with all the fibres of
+his nature, and gathering strength from the mother-earth, like Antaeus.
+He oscillates between two antagonistic views, and feels unable to decide
+for either the one or the other.
+
+We have explained the elements of which Hamlet's complex character is
+made up. He is an adherent of old superstitions and dogmas; he believes
+in Purgatory, a Hell, and a Devil, and in the miraculous powers of
+confession, holy communion, and the extreme unction. Yet, to some
+degree, he is a Humanist, and would fain grant to Nature certain
+rights. Scarcely has he yielded to the impulses of his blood, than
+doubts begin to rise in him, and he begins to fear the Devil, who
+might lure him into perdition. This inner discord, creating, as it does,
+a mistrust in his own self, induces him, in the most important task of
+his life, to appeal to Horatio. To him he says that, if the King's
+occulted guilt does not come out ('unkennel itself'), he (Hamlet) will
+look upon the apparition as a damned ghost, and (this is new) will
+think that his 'imaginations are as foul as Vulcan's stithy.' [38]
+
+By the interlude, Hamlet--and in this he is confirmed by Horatio--becomes
+convinced of the King's guilt. All that he thereupon does is--to recite
+a little ditty!
+
+We have already made the acquaintance of Montaigne the soft-hearted,
+who, as above mentioned, always was touched when seeing innocent
+animals hunted to death, and who felt much emotion _at the tears
+of the hart asking us for mercy_. At the same time we have
+directed the reader's attention to the fact of his having said that
+the 'common weal requires some to betray, some to lie, and some to
+massacre,' [39] and that this task must be left to those who are
+ready to sacrifice their honour and their conscience, and that men
+who do not feel up to such deeds must leave their commission to the
+stronger ones. This French nobleman naïvely avows that he has resolved
+upon withdrawing into private life, not because he is averse to
+public life--for the latter, he says, would 'perhaps equally suit
+him'--but because, by doing so, he hopes to serve his Prince all the
+more joyfully and all the more sincerely, thus following the free
+choice of his own judgment and reason, and not submitting to any
+restraint (_obligation particulière_), which he hates in every
+shape. And he adds the following curious moral doctrine:--'This is
+the way of the world. We let the laws and precepts follow their way,
+but we keep another course.' [40]
+
+Who could mistake Shakspere's satire against this sentimental nobleman,
+who fights shy of action, in making Hamlet recite a little ditty at a
+moment when he has become convinced of the King's guilt:--
+
+  Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
+  The hart ungalled play;
+  For some must watch, while some must sleep:
+  Thus runs the world away.
+
+This gifted Frenchman, Montaigne, was a new, a strange, phenomenon
+in the eyes of Shakspere and his active and energetic countrymen.
+A man, a nobleman too, who lives for no higher aim; who allows himself
+to be driven about, rudderless, by his feelings and inclinations;
+who even boasts of this mental disposition of his, and sends a vain
+book about it into the world! What is it to teach? What good is it
+to do? It gives mere words, behind which there is no manly character.
+Are there yet more _beaux esprits_ to arise who, in Epicurean
+fashion, enjoy the beautiful thoughts of others, whilst they themselves
+remain incapable for action, letting the time go out of joint?
+
+Let us further study the character of Hamlet, and we shall find that
+the satire against Montaigne becomes more and more striking--a veritable
+hit.
+
+The Queen asks for her son. Before he fulfils her wish and comes to her,
+he utters a lullaby of superstition (these lines are new), wherewith to
+tide over the excitement of his nature:--
+
+  'Tis now the very witching time of night,
+  When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
+  Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
+  And do such bitter business as the day
+  Would quake to look on.
+
+Hamlet, always shrinking back from the impulses of his blood, fears
+that the Devil might once more gain power over him:--
+
+  Soft! now to my mother!
+  O heart, lose not thy nature!
+
+This nature of his, inclining to mildness and gentleness, he wishes
+to preserve, and he resolves upon being 'cruel, not unnatural.' In
+vain one seeks here for logic, and for the boundary between two words
+which to ordinary common sense appear synonymous. In Montaigne,
+however, we discover the clue of such a senseless argumentation.
+In one of his Essays, [41] which contains a confusion of ideas that
+might well make the humane Shakspere shudder, he writes:--
+
+'Our condition, both public and private, is full of imperfections;
+yet there is nothing useless in Nature, not even uselessness
+itself.... Our being is cemented with sickly qualities: ambition,
+jealousy, envy, vengeance, superstition, despair dwell in us, and
+hold there so natural a possession that their counterfeit is also
+recognised in beasts; for instance, cruelty--so unnatural a vice.
+Yet he who would root out the seed of these qualities from the human
+breast would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.'
+
+Now, Hamlet's resolution to be 'cruel, but not unnatural,' is but a
+fresh satire against Montaigne's train of thoughts, who would fain be
+a Humanist, but who does not break with the reasoning of Loyola and
+of the Church, by which he permits himself to be guided as by
+the competent authority, and which tolerates cruelty--nay, orders its
+being employed for the furtherance of what it calls the 'good aim.'
+
+The idea that cruelty is a necessary but useful evil, no doubt
+induced Montaigne [42] to declare that to kill a man from a feeling
+of revenge is tantamount to our protecting him, for we thus 'withdraw
+him from our attacks.' Furthermore, this Humanist argues that revenge
+is to be regretted if its object does not feel its intention; for,
+even as he who takes revenge intends to derive pleasure from
+it, so he upon whom revenge is taken must perceive that intention,
+in order to be harrowed with feelings of pain and repentance. 'To kill
+him, is to render further attacks against him impossible; not to
+revenge what he has done.'
+
+Shakspere already gives Hamlet an opportunity in the following scene
+to prove to us that there is no boundary between cruel and unnatural
+conduct; and that one cannot be cruel and yet remain natural. In
+the most telling words, the cause of Hamlet's want of energy is
+substantiated. Fate gives the criminal, the King, into the hands of
+Hamlet. It is the most important moment of the drama. A stroke of
+the sword would be enough to do the deed of revenge. The cause
+which makes Hamlet hesitate is, that the criminal is engaged in
+prayer, and that--
+
+    He took my father grossly, full of bread,
+    With all his crimes broad-blown, as flush as May;
+    And how his audit stands, who knows save Heaven?
+
+Does Hamlet, then, _not_ act with refined cruelty?
+
+Here, a new thought is inserted, which we mentioned already in the
+beginning, and which turns the balance at the decisive moment:--
+
+    But in our circumstance and course of thought
+    It is heavy with him. [43]
+
+A Shaksperean hero, with drawn sword, allows himself to be restrained
+from action by the thought that, because 'it is heavy' with his own
+murdered father, who is suffering in Purgatory, he (Hamlet) ought not
+to kill the criminal now, but later on, when the latter is deeply
+wading in sin--
+
+  When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, ...
+  And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
+  As Hell, whereto it goes.
+
+Hamlet has been called a philosopher whose energy has been paralysed
+by too great a range of thought. For the sovereignty of human reason
+this is a most dangerous premiss. Do we not owe to the full and free
+use of that reason everything great which mankind has created?
+History speaks of a thousand heroes (only think of Alexander, of Julius
+Caesar, of Frederick the Great!) whose doings convince us that a strong
+power of thought and action can go hand in hand, nay, that the latter
+cannot be successful without the former.
+
+But, on the other hand, there is a way of thinking with preconceived
+supernatural conclusions--or rather, we must call it an absence of
+thinking--when men allow themselves to be moved by the circumstances
+of a traditional course of thought. Against such intellectual
+slavery the great century of the Reformation rose. And the greatest
+Humanist, Shakspere, scourges that slavery in the catharsis of his
+powerful drama.
+
+Questions of religion were not permitted to be treated on the stage.
+But not merely the one deeply intelligent person for whom Shakspere
+asks the players to act, and for whom the great master certainly
+endeavoured to write--no, the public at large, too, will have
+understood that the 'course of thought' which induced Hamlet to forego
+action from a subtle refinement of cruelty, was not the course of
+thought prevalent on this side of the Channel, and held up, in this
+important scene, as that of a hero to be admired.
+
+Hamlet resolved upon keeping out the soul of Nero from his 'firm bosom.'
+(What a satire there is in this adjective 'firm'!) He means to be cruel,
+but not unnatural; he will 'speak daggers, but use none.' A man who
+lets himself be moved by extraneous circumstances is not his own
+master. In cruel, unnatural manner, for no object whatever, he
+murders poor Polonius. Then he begins to speak daggers in such a
+manner as to get into a perfect ecstasy. Nor need any priest have
+been ashamed of the sermon he preaches to his own mother.
+
+In the first edition of 'Hamlet,' the scene between mother and son is
+rather like a sketch in which most things are merely indicated, not
+worked out. Only the part of the Ghost, with the exception of the line:--
+
+  Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,
+
+which is wanting in the first edition, and  Hamlet's address to the
+Ghost, are in both quartos the same. Even as in the first act, so this
+time also, Hamlet, on seeing the Ghost, calls upon the saints:--
+
+  Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings,
+  You heavenly guards!
+
+This was the usual course on the occasion of such doubtful apparitions,
+of which one did not know whether they were 'airs of heaven' or 'blasts
+from hell.'
+
+A new intercalation is (in the first quarto there is no vestige of it),
+that Hamlet reproaches his mother with having degraded 'sweet religion'
+to 'a rhapsody of words;' that he says 'the Devil hath conquered her at
+hoodman blind ;' that she should confess herself to Heaven, and 'assume
+a virtue if she have it not;' that 'virtue itself of vice must pardon
+beg in the fatness of these pursy times, yea, curb and woo, for leave
+to do him good.' So also is the Queen's question new:--
+
+  Ay me, what act,
+  That roars so loud, and thunders in the _index_? [44]
+
+There is no trace, in the first quarto, of the following most
+characteristic thoughts:--
+
+  For, use almost can change the stamp of Nature [45]
+  And either curb (?) the Devil, or throw him out
+  With wondrous potency....
+  And when you are desirous to be blest,
+  I'll blessing beg of you.
+
+Let us figure to ourselves before what public Hamlet first saw the
+wanderer from Purgatory; before what youth he bade Ophelia go to
+a nunnery; before what men he remained inactive at the critical
+moment simply because the criminal is engaged in his prayers,
+whilst his own murdered father died without Holy Communion, without
+having confessed and received the Extreme Unction. Let us remember
+before what audience he purposely made the thunders of the Index
+roar so loud; at what place he gets into ecstasy; and where he first
+preaches to his mother that the Devil may be mastered and thrown out.
+
+Here, certainly, we have questions of religion!
+
+Shakspere's genius has known how to transport these most important
+questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary
+disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends
+and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy
+with the passionless, indifferent eyes of our century. Many men, no
+doubt, were filled with the thought, to which Bacon soon gave a
+scientific form, that the human mind can only make true progress if
+it turns towards the inquiry into Nature, keeping far away from the
+hampering influence of transcendental dogmas. The liberal, intellectual
+tendencies of the Reformation were not yet fettered in England with
+the new dogmatic strait waistcoat of a narrow-minded, melancholy sect.
+And Shakspere's views, which he has embodied in 'Hamlet,' were not in
+divinatory advance of his age; they were easily comprehensible to the
+best of his time.
+
+Our chief argument will be contained in the chapter in which we shall
+hear Shakspere's adversaries launch out furiously against the tendency
+of this drama. Meanwhile, we will exhaust the course of its action.
+
+Hamlet has already come very near to that point of view where Reason
+at last ceases to guide his conduct, and where he becomes convinced that
+indiscretion often is of better service than deep planning.
+
+Now in Montaigne's Essay [46] already mentioned we read:--'When an
+urgent circumstance, or any violent or unexpected accident of State
+necessity, induces a Prince to break his word and faith, or otherwise
+forces him out of his ordinary duty, he is to ascribe that compulsion
+to a lash of God's rod.'
+
+The passage in which Hamlet consoles himself in regard to the murder
+committed against Polonius is new:--
+
+  I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
+  To punish me with this, and this with me,
+  That I must be their scourge and minister.
+
+Hamlet, beholding the victim of his indiscretion, excuses himself thus:--
+
+  I must be cruel, only to be kind.
+
+The cruel deed he has done, he palliates with the remark that
+lovingkindness has forced him to it. Love of her God also forced
+Catherine of Medicis to the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
+
+  Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
+
+Yes; worse is coming! Hamlet knows that he is to be sent to England;
+that the letters are sealed; that his two schoolfellows whom he trusts
+as he will adders, bear the mandate. What does he do to prevent further
+misfortune?
+
+He rejoices that--
+
+  they must sweep my way,
+  And marshall me to knavery. [47]
+
+He enjoys, in advance, the sweet presentiment of revenge which he
+intends taking upon them. He lets things go without hindrance:--
+
+  Let it work!
+  For 'tis sport to have the engineer
+  Hoist with his own petard.
+
+He enjoys his own crafty policy which shall blow his school-friends,
+Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who yet, so far as he knows, have not
+been guilty in any way towards him!) 'at the moon:'--
+
+  O, 'tis most sweet
+  When in one line two crafts directly meet.
+
+Because Hamlet gives utterance to high-sounding thoughts, to
+sentimental dreams, and melancholy subtleties, it has been assumed
+that his character is one nourished with the poet's own heart's blood.
+A thousand times the noble sentiment of duty has been dwelt upon,
+which it is alleged he is inspired with; and on account of his fine
+words he has been more taken a fancy to than any other Shaksperian
+figure. But that was not the poet's object. Great deeds were more
+to him than the finest words. His contemporaries understood him;
+for Montaigne--as we shall prove--was given over to the lowest scorn
+of the age through 'Hamlet,' because the whole reasoning of Hamlet not
+only was a fruitless, but a pernicious one.
+
+In the fourth scene of the fourth act, the poet describes the frame of
+mind of the hero before he steps on board ship. 'Excitements of his
+reason and his blood' once more call him to revenge. This monologue,
+in which Hamlet gives expression to his feelings and thoughts, is only
+in the quarto of 1604. The folio of 1623 does not contain it. Shakspere,
+in later years, may have thought that the soul-struggle of his hero had
+been ended; and so he may have regarded the passage as a superfluous one,
+in which Hamlet's better self once more asks him to seize the reins of
+destiny with his own hands.
+
+He sees how young Fortinbras, the delicate and tender prince, 'puff'd
+with divine ambition, mouthes the invisible event for a piece of land not
+large enough to hide the slain.' Hamlet philosophises that the man who
+uses not his god-like reason is but a beast; for--
+
+  --He that made us with such large discourse
+  Looking before and after, gave us not
+  That capability and god-like reason,
+  To fust in us unused.
+
+We further hear how Hamlet reasons about the question as to how 'to
+be rightly great.' All the thoughts he produces, seem to flow from
+the pen of the French philosopher. In Essay III. (13) of Montaigne
+we read the beautiful words that 'the noblest master-work of man is to
+live for a purpose (yivre d fropos),' and:--'The greatness of the soul
+does not consist so much in drawing upwards, and haling forwards,
+than in knowing how to range and to circumscribe itself. It holds
+everything to be great, which is sufficient in itself. It shows
+its superiority in more loving humble things than eminent ones.'
+
+To the majesty of the human reason also, Montaigne, in spite of his so
+often condemning it, knows how to render justice. In Essay I. (40)
+he remarks: 'Shall we then dare to say that this advantage of reason
+at which we rejoice so very much, and out of respect for which
+we hold ourselves to be lords and emperors of all other creatures, has
+been put into us for our torment? Why strive for the knowledge of things
+if we become more cowardly thereby? if we lose, through it, the rest and
+the tranquillity in which we should be without it? ... Shall we use the
+intellect that has been given to us for our greatest good, to effect
+our ruin; combating the designs of Nature and the general order of
+things which implies that everyone should use his tools and means for
+his own convenience?'
+
+Noble thoughts! But it is not enough to play an aesthetic game with
+them. The energetic English genius wishes that they should regulate
+our life; that we should act in accordance with them, so that no tragic
+complication should form itself, which could only be solved by the ruin
+and death of the innocent together with the guilty. The monologue
+concludes thus:--
+
+    O, from this time forth,
+    My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
+
+Nevertheless, Hamlet continues his voyage.
+
+The reader will remember that Montaigne spoke of an instinctive impulse
+of the will--a daimon--by which he often, and to his final advantage,
+had allowed himself to be guided, so much so that such strong impulses
+might be attributed to divine inspiration. A daimon of this kind,
+under whose influence Hamlet acts, is described in the second scene of
+the fifth act. The passage is wanting in the first quarto. [48] Hamlet
+tells Horatio how he lay in the ship, and how in his heart there was a
+kind of fighting which would not let him sleep. This harassing condition,
+the result of his unmanly indecision, he depicts in these words:--
+
+Methought I lay
+Worse than the mutines in the bilboes.
+
+Then all at once (how could an impulsive manner of action be better
+described?), before he could 'make a prologue to his brains,' Hamlet
+lets himself be overcome by such a daimonic influence. He breaks open
+the grand commission of others, forges a seal with a signet in his
+possession, becomes a murderer of two innocent men, and draws the evil
+conclusion therefrom:--
+
+Let us know,
+Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
+When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us,
+There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
+Rough-hew them how we will.
+
+This view we have already quoted from Essay III. (12). In Florio's
+translation (632):--'Therefore do our dessigns so often miscarry....
+The heavens are angry, and I may say envious of the extension
+and large privilege we ascribe to human wisdome, to the prejudice of
+theirs: and abridge them so more unto us, by so much more we endeavour
+to amplifie them.'
+
+Hamlet takes the twofold murder committed against Rosencrantz and
+Guildenstern as little to heart as the 'indiscreet' deed by which
+Polonius was killed. Then the consolation was sufficient for him that
+lovingkindness had forced him to be cruel. This time, his conscience
+is not touched, because--
+
+  't is dangerous when the baser nature comes
+  Between the pass and fell incensed points
+  Of mighty opposites.
+
+With such argumentation every tyranny may be palliated, especially by
+those who, like Hamlet, think that--
+
+  A man's life 's no more than to say 'One.'
+
+Yet another peculiarity of Montaigne's complex being is depicted by
+Shakspere in the graveyard scene. He shows us every side of this
+whimsical character who says of himself that he has no staying power
+for any standpoint, but that he is driven about by incalculable
+emergencies.
+
+Let us read a passage in Essay II (12), and compare it with Hamlet's
+enigmatic conduct towards Laertes. Montaigne describes himself in
+these sentences:--'Being of a soft and somewhat heavy temperament, I
+have no great experience of those violent agitations which mostly
+come like a surprise upon our mind without allowing it leisure to
+collect itself.' In spite of the resistance--he further says--which
+he endeavoured to offer, even he, however, was occasionally thus
+seized. He felt these agitations rising and growing in, and becoming
+master over, himself. As in drunkenness, things then appeared to him
+otherwise than he usually saw them. 'I manifestly saw the advantages
+of the object which I sought after, augmenting and growing; and I felt
+them becoming greater and swelling by the wind of my imagination.
+I felt the difficulties of my enterprise becoming easier and simpler,
+my reasoning and my conscience drawing back. But, that fire being gone,
+all of a sudden, as with the flash of lightning, my mind resumed another
+view, another condition, another judgment.'
+
+In this manner Hamlet conducts himself towards Laertes. A great grief
+takes possession of him when he hears of the death of Ophelia: he leaps,
+like Laertes, into her grave; he grapples with him; he warns him that,
+though 'not splenetive and rash,' he (Hamlet) yet has 'something
+dangerous' in him. (He means the daimon which so fatally impelled
+him against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.) Hamlet and Laertes wrestle,
+but they are parted by the attendants. Hamlet begins boasting, in
+high-flown language, of what great things he would be able to do.
+
+The Queen describes Hamlet's rage in these words:--
+
+  And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
+  Anon, as patient as the female dove,
+  When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
+  His silence will sit drooping. [49]
+
+In the meantime, the fire with which Hamlet's soul had been seized,
+is gone, like a flash of lightning. He changes to another point of
+view--probably that one according to which everything goes its way
+in compliance with a heavenly decree. The little verse he recites in
+parting:--
+
+Let Hercules himself do what he may,
+The cat will mew and dog will have his day,
+
+quite corresponds to such a passive philosophy which has gained the
+mastery over him, and to which he soon falls a victim.
+
+We are approaching the conclusion of the great drama. Here, again, in
+order to explain Hamlet's action, or rather his yielding to influences
+around him, we have to direct the attention of the reader to Essay
+(III. 10), in which Montaigne tells how easily he protects himself
+against the dangers of inward agitation by dropping the subject which
+threatens to become troublesome to him before he is drawn on and carried
+along by it. The doughty nobleman says that he has escaped from
+many difficulties by not staking frivolously, like others, happiness
+and honour, life and everything, on his 'rapier and his dagger.' [50]
+
+There may be some truth in Montaigne's charge that the cause of not a
+few struggles he has seen, was often of truly pitiful origin, and that
+such struggles were only carried on from a mistaken feeling of
+self-respect. It may be true also that it is a bad habit--as he
+maintains--to proceed still further in affairs of this kind simply
+because one is implicated. But how strange a confession of a nobleman
+from whom we at all times expect bravery: 'For want of judgement our
+hearte fails us.' [51]
+
+Hamlet is engaged in such a struggle with Laertes through the graveyard
+scene. The King, who has had good cause to study Hamlet's character
+more deeply than anyone else, reckons upon his vanity in order to
+decide him to the fencing-match. 'Rapier and dagger' are forced upon
+weak-willed Hamlet by Osric. [52] How subtle is this satire! For
+appearance' sake, in order to outshine Laertes, the Prince accepts
+the challenge. [53] Happiness and life, which he ought long ago to
+have risked for the purpose of avenging his father and his honour,
+are now staked from sheer vanity. The 'want of prudence' Hamlet displays
+in accepting a challenge which he must 'carry out from a (mistaken)
+feeling of self-respect,' has the 'intolerable' consequence that,
+shortly before he crosses swords with Laertes, he confesses to
+Horatio:--'But thou would'st not think how ill all's here about my
+heart.'
+
+Again, Shakspere, very briefly, but not less pointedly, depicts the
+way in which Hamlet allows himself to be influenced and driven to a
+decision. This time the poet does so by bringing in a clearly expressed
+dogmatic tenet whereby Hamlet's fate is sealed. It is 'ill all about
+his heart.' He would prefer not going to meet Laertes. [54]
+
+  _Horatio_. If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will
+  forestal their repair hither, and say you are not fit.
+
+The fatalist Hamlet, whom we have seen coming ever closer to the doctrine
+of Predestination, answers as follows:--
+
+  'Not a whit; we defy augury; there is special providence in
+  the fall of a sparrow. [55] If it be now, 'tis not to come;
+  if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet
+  it will come; the readiness is all. Since no man has aught
+  of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.'
+
+This time it is a 'Let be!'--even as it was a 'Let it go' when he was
+sent to England.
+
+Now let us read Montaigne's Essay, [56] 'To Philosophise is to Learn
+how to Die:'--
+
+'Our religion has had no surer human foundation than the contempt of
+life. Not only does the course of our reason lead us that way; for,
+why should we fear to lose a thing which, when lost, cannot be
+regretted?--but also, seeing that we are threatened by so many kinds
+of death, is it not a greater inconvenience to fear them all than to
+endure one? What does it matter when Death comes, since it is
+inevitable?... Moreover, nobody dies before his hour. The time you
+leave behind was no more yours than that which was before your birth,
+and concerns you no more.'
+
+No further comment is needed to prove that Hamlet's and Montaigne's
+thoughts are in so close a connection that it cannot be a mere accident.
+And the nearer we come to the conclusion of the drama, the more
+striking become Shakspere's satirical hits.
+
+Hamlet allows his hand to be put into that of Laertes by the King. He
+does not think of the wrong he has done to Laertes--of the murder of
+the latter's father, or the unhappiness he has criminally brought
+upon Laertes' sister. In most cowardly manner, hoping that Laertes
+would desist from the combat, Hamlet endeavours to excuse his conduct
+at the grave of Ophelia, by pleading his own madness. Laertes insists
+on the combat; adding that he would stand aloof 'till by some elder
+masters of known honour' the decision were given.
+
+Hamlet avenges the death of his father; he kills the criminal, the
+enemy, when his wrath is up and aflame, and every muscle of his is
+swelled with indignation--but it is _too late_. Together with
+himself, he has dragged them all into the grave. It is blind passion,
+unbridled by reason, which does the deed: a sublime satire upon the
+words of Montaigne in Essay II. (12), 'that the most beautiful actions
+of the soul proceed from, and have need of, this impulse of passion;
+valour, they say, cannot become perfect without the help of wrath; and
+that nobody pursues the wicked and the enemies with sufficient energy,
+except he be thoroughly in anger.'
+
+Even the kind of death by which Shakspere makes Hamlet lose his life,
+looks like a satire against Montaigne. The latter, always a coward in
+regard to death, and continually pondering over it, says: [57]--'I
+would rather have chosen to drink the potion of Sokrates than wound
+myself as Cato did.' Their 'virtuous deeds' he calls [58] 'vain and
+fruitless ones, because they were done from no love of, or obedience
+to, the true Creator of all things.'
+
+Hamlet dies wounded and poisoned, as if Shakspere had intended expressing
+his abhorrence of so vacillating and weak-willed a character, who places
+the treacherous excesses of passion above the power of that human
+reason in whose free service alone Greeks and Romans did their most
+exalted deeds of virtue. [59]
+
+The subtlety of the best psychologists has endeavoured to fix the limits
+of Hamlet's madness, and to find the proper name for it. No agreement
+has been arrived at. We think we have solved the problem as to the
+nature of Hamlet's madness, and to have shown why thought and action,
+in him, cannot be brought into a satisfactory harmony. Every fibre
+in Shakspere's artistic mind would have rebelled against the idea
+of making a lunatic the chief figure of his greatest drama. He wished
+to warn his contemporaries that the attempt of reconciling two opposite
+circles of ideas--namely, on the one hand, the doctrine that we are
+to be guided by the laws of Nature; and on the other, the yielding
+ourselves up to superstitious dogmas which declare human nature to be
+sinful--must inevitably produce deeds of madness.
+
+The main traits of Montaigne's character Shakspere confers upon the
+Danish Prince, and places him before a difficult task of life. He is to
+avenge his father's death. (Montaigne was attached to his father with
+all his soul, and speaks of him almost in the same words as Hamlet
+does of his own.) He is to preserve the State whose legitimate sovereign
+he is. The materials for a satire are complete. And it is written in
+such a manner as to remain the noblest, the most sublime poetical
+production as long as men shall live.
+
+The two circles of ideas which in the century of the Reformation began
+a struggle that is not yet brought to an end, are, in that drama,
+represented on the stage. The poet shows, by making the gifted
+Prince perish, on which side every serious thinker ought to place
+himself. That these intentions of Shakspere were understood by his more
+intelligent contemporaries and friends, we shall prove when we come to
+the camp of his adversaries, at whose head a Roman Catholic stood,
+who launches out in very marked language against the derision of
+Montaigne as contained in the character of Hamlet.
+
+The noblemen who went to the theatre for the sake of the intellectual
+attractions (the fairer sex being still excluded from acting on the
+stage and therefore not forming a point of attraction) were initiated
+into the innermost secret of what authors meant by their productions.
+Dekker, in his 'Gulls Horn Book' (c. 6), reports that 'after the play
+was over, poets adjourned to supper with knights, where they, in private,
+unfolded the secret parts of their drama to them.'
+
+As in no other of his plays, there is in Shakspere's 'Hamlet'--the drama
+richest in philosophy--a perfect wealth of life. Argument is pitted
+against argument; every turn of a phrase is a missile, sharp, and
+hitting the mark. In not a few cases, the aim and object is no longer
+recognisable. Here and there we believe we shall be able to shed the
+light of day upon some dark passages of the past.
+
+To the doughty friends of Shakspere, this French Knight of the Order of
+St. Michael, who says [60] that, if his freedom were in the least
+encroached upon, or 'if the laws under which he lives threatened
+merely the tip of his finger, he would at once betake himself to
+any other place to find better ones;' but who yet lets everything
+around him go out of joint without offering a helping hand for repair,
+because 'the maintenance of States is probably something beyond our
+powers of understanding' [61]--verily, to Shakspere's doughty friends,
+such a specimen of humanity as Montaigne must have been quite a new and
+strange phenomenon. They were children of an age which achieved great
+things because its nobler natures willingly suffered death when the
+ideals of their life were to be realised. In them, the fire of
+enthusiasm of the first Reformation, of the glorious time of Elizabeth,
+was still glowing. They energetically championed the cause of Humanism.
+The sublime conceptions of their epoch were not yet marred by that
+dark and gloomy set of men whose mischievous members were just
+beginning to hatch their hidden plans in the most remote manors of
+England.
+
+The friends of Shakspere well understood the true meaning of Hamlet's
+words: [62]--'What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth
+and heaven?' [63] They easily seized the gist and point of the answer
+given to the King's question: [64]--'How fares our cousin Hamlet?'
+when Hamlet replies:--
+
+  Excellent, i' faith; of the chameleon's dish!
+
+Surely, some of them had read the Essay 'On the Inconsistency of our
+Actions,' and had smiled at the passage:--
+
+'Our ordinary manner is, to follow the inclination of our appetite--this
+way, that way; upwards, downwards; even as the wind of the occasion
+drives us. We never think of what _we would have_, but at the moment
+we _would have it_; and _we change like that animal_ (the chameleon)
+of which it is said that it takes the colour of the place where it
+is laid down.' [65]
+
+Shakspere's teaching is, that if the nobler-gifted man who stands at
+the head of the commonwealth, allows himself to be driven about by every
+wind of the occasion, instead of furthering his better aims with all
+his strength and energy of will, the wicked, on their part, will all
+the more easily carry out their own ends. He therefore makes the King
+say: [66]--
+
+  That we would do,
+  We should do when we would; for this 'would' changes...
+
+Shakspere's friends understood the allusion contained in the first act,
+after the apparition of the Ghost, when Hamlet calls for his 'tablets.'
+They knew that the much-scribbling Montaigne was meant, who, as he
+avows, had so bad a memory that he could not receive any commission
+without writing it down in his 'tablets' (_tablettes_). This defect of
+his, Montaigne mentions over and over again, and may have been the
+cause of his many most ludicrous contradictions. [67]
+
+After Hamlet has written down the important fact that 'one may smile,
+and smile, and be a villain--at least, I am sure it may be so in
+Denmark,' he exclaims:--'Now to my word!' That 'word' undoubtedly
+consists of the admonition addressed to him by the Ghost, that Hamlet,
+after having heard his duty, also should fulfil it--that is:--
+
+  'So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.'
+
+But he only recollects the last words of the Ghost; and Hamlet's parole,
+therefore, is only this:--
+
+  Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me!
+
+The value of Montaigne's book is harshly treated in the second scene of
+the second act. To the question of Polonius as to what he is reading,
+Hamlet replies:--'Words, words, words!' Indeed, Shakspere did not think
+it fair that 'the satirical rogue' should fill the paper with such
+remarks (whole Essays of Montaigne consist of similar useless prattle)
+as 'that old men have grey beards; that their faces are wrinkled; their
+eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum; and that they have a
+plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.' [68]
+
+The ideas of Shakspere as to the duties of a writer were different,
+indeed, from the contents of the book which Hamlet characterises by
+his exclamation.
+
+As to Polonius' answer: 'Though this be madness, yet there's method in
+it,' the public had no difficulty in finding out what was meant by
+that 'madness,' and to whom it applied.
+
+What may the great master have thought of an author who, as Montaigne
+does, jots down everything in kaleidoscopic manner, just as changeful
+accident brings it into his head? In Essay III. (2) we read:--
+
+  'I cannot get a fixed hold of my object. It moves
+  and reels as if with a natural drunkenness. I just seize
+  it at some point, such as I find it at the moment, when I
+  amuse myself with it. I do not describe its essence, but
+  its volatile passage ... from one minute to the other.'
+
+Elsewhere he prides himself on his method of being able to write as long
+as there is paper and ink.
+
+Hamlet says to the players: 'We'll e'en to it like French falconers: fly
+at anything we see.' Montaigne's manner of spying out and pouncing upon
+things cannot be better depicted than by comparing it with a French
+falconer's manner. In the first act already, Hamlet, after the
+ghost-scene, answers the friends who approach, with the holla-call of
+a falconer:--
+
+  Hillo, ho, ho, boy; come, bird, come!
+
+Furthermore, Hamlet says in act ii. sc. 2:--'I am but mad
+north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a
+handshaw (heronshaw!).' Now, the north-west wind would drive Montaigne
+back into his native province, Perigord, where, very likely according
+to Shakspere's view, he ought to have remained with his sham logic.
+The south wind, on the contrary, brings the able falconer to England.
+The latter possesses such a penetrating glance for the nature of
+things as to be able to distinguish the bird (the heronshaw) that is
+to be pursued from the hawk that has been unhooded and cast.
+
+In the second scene of the fifth act, between Hamlet and Horatio
+(to the weak-minded Osrick the words spoken there are incomprehensible),
+the excellent qualities of Laertes are apparently judged. [69] This
+whole discussion is meant against Montaigne; and in the first quarto
+the chief points are wanting. Florio calls Montaigne's Essays 'Moral,
+Political, and Military Discourses.' [70] Osrick praises the qualities
+of the cavalier who has returned from France; and Hamlet replies that
+'to divide him inventorily would dizzy the arithmetic of memory.'
+
+The further, hitherto utterly unexplained, words ('and  yet but yaw
+neither in respect of his quick sail') seem to have reference to the
+sonnet [71] by which the third book of the Essays is dedicated by
+Florio to Lady Grey. Montaigne is praised therein under the guise
+of Talbot's name, who, 'in peace or war, at sea or land, for princes'
+service, countries' good, sweetly sails before the wind.' In act ii.
+sc. 2, the north-north-west and the south wind were already alluded
+to, which are said to influence Hamlet's madness.
+
+The translators and admirers of Montaigne are meant when Hamlet says
+that 'to make true diction of him, his semblable' must be 'his mirror;
+and, who else would trace him, his umbrage--nothing more.' That is,
+one must be Montaigne, or become his absolute admirer, 'his umbrage,'
+'his semblable,' in order to do justice to him. The whole scene is
+full of allusions, easily explainable from the point of view we have
+indicated. So also, the reference to self-knowledge ('to know himself)
+--an art which Montaigne never learnt and the 'two weapons' with which
+he fights, are full of deep meaning.
+
+It was probably no small number of men that took delight in the French
+essayist. No doubt, the jest of the gravedigger is directed against
+them, when he says that if the mad Hamlet does not recover his wits
+in England, it is no great matter there, because there the men are
+as mad as he.
+
+Montaigne, especially in Essay III. (2) and III. (5), brings forward
+indecencies of the most shameless kind. We quite bear in mind what
+period it was when he wrote. Our manners and ideas are totally
+different from those of the sixteenth century. But what indignation
+must Shakspere have felt--he who had already created his noblest female
+characters, Helena and Olivia; and who had sung his paean of love,
+'Romeo and Juliet'--when he read the ideas of the French nobleman
+about love and women! Nowhere, and on no occasion, does Shakspere in
+his dramas, in spite of phrases which to-day we qualify as obscene ones,
+lower the ideal of the womanly character--of the _ewig Weibliche_.
+
+But let us read Montaigne's view: [72]--
+
+'I find that love is nothing else than a thirst of enjoying a desired
+subject; nor that Venus is anything else but the pleasure of emptying
+one's seminary vessels, similar to the pleasure which Nature has given
+us in discharging other parts.'
+
+Now, this significant quality also, of saying indecencies without shame,
+Hamlet has in common with Montaigne. No character in Shakspere's dramas
+uses such language as Hamlet; and in this case, let it be observed, it
+is not used between men, but towards the beloved one! We shall remark
+upon his relations with Ophelia later on.
+
+The frivolous Montaigne speaks of love as one might do of a good dish to
+be enjoyed at every degree of age, according to taste and inclination.
+In Essay III.(4) we learn how, in his youth, 'standing in need of a
+vehement diversion for the sake of distraction, he made himself
+amorous by art and study.' Elsewhere he tells what great things he was
+able, as a young man, to achieve in this line. [73] He, therefore,
+does not agree with the sage who praises age because it frees us from
+voluptuousness. [74]
+
+He, on the contrary, says:--'I shall never take kindly to impotence,
+whatever good it may do me.'
+
+Montaigne, the old and young lover, is lashed in act v. sc. I, in
+disfigured verses of a song sung by the grave-digger, which dates about
+from the year 1557, and at Shakspere's time probably was very popular.
+In the original, where the image of death is meant to be represented,
+an old man looks back in repentance, and with great aversion, upon
+his youthful days when he found pleasure in love. The original verse
+stood thus:--
+
+  I lothe that I did love,
+  In youth that I thought swete,
+  As time requires for my behove,
+  Methinks they are not mete.
+
+Until now, no sense could be made of the first verse which the
+gravedigger sings. It runs thus:--
+
+  In youth, when I did love, did love,
+  Methought it was very sweet,
+  To contract, OH! the time, for, AH! my behove,
+  O, methought, there was nothing meet.
+
+Let it be observed what stress is laid on the 'Oh!'--the proper time,
+and the 'Ah!'--the delight felt at the moment of enjoyment. The meaning
+of the old verse is changed in such a manner as to show that old
+Montaigne looks back with pleasure upon the time of his dissolute youth,
+whilst the author of the original text shrinks back from it.
+
+The second verse [75] is a further persiflage of the old song. Its
+reading, too, is changed. It is said there that age, with his stealing
+steps, as clawed the lover in his clutch [76] and shipped him into the
+land as if he 'never had been such.'
+
+By none has the relation between Ophelia and Hamlet been better felt and
+described than by Goethe. He calls her 'the good child in whose soul,
+secretly, a voice of voluptuousness resounds.' Hamlet who--driven
+rudderless by his impulse, his passion, his daimon, from one extreme to
+the other--drags everything that surrounds him into the abyss, also
+destroys the future of the woman that might truly make him happy. He
+disowns and rejects her whom Nature has formed for love. At a moment when
+fanatical thoughts have mastered his reason, he bids her go to a nunnery.
+
+Once more we must point to the Essay in which Montaigne lays down his
+ideas about woman and love. French ladies, he says, study Boccaccio
+and such-like writers, in order to become skilful (_habiles_). 'But
+there is no word, no example, no single step in that matter which
+they do not know better than our books do. That is a knowledge bred
+in their very veins ... Had not this natural violence of their desires
+been somewhat bridled by the fear and a feeling of honour wherewith
+they have been provided, we would be dishonoured (_diffamez_).' Montaigne
+says he knows ladies who would rather lend their honour than their
+'_coach_.' [77]
+
+'At last, when Ophelia has no longer any power over her own mind,' says
+Goethe, 'her heart being on her tongue, that tongue becomes a traitor
+against her.' [78]
+
+In the scene of Ophelia's madness, we hear songs, thoughts, and
+phrases probably caught up by her from Hamlet. The ideal which man
+forms of woman, is the moral altitude on which she stands. Now, let
+the language be called to mind, which Hamlet, before the players'
+scene, uses towards his beloved!
+
+Ophelia's words: 'Come, my _coach_ [79]' will be understood
+from the passage in Montaigne above quoted. The meaning of: 'Oh, how
+the _wheel_ becomes it!' has reference to a thought developed
+by Montaigne in Essay III. (11), [80] which we cannot render here,
+as it is opposed to every feeling of decency.
+
+All commentators agree in thinking that the character of Laertes is in
+direct contrast to that of Hamlet. In the first quarto, the figure of
+Laertes is but rapidly indicated. Only that scene is worked out where
+he cries out against the priest who will not follow his sister to
+the grave:--
+
+  A ministering angel shall my sister be.
+  When thou liest howling.
+
+In the second quarto only, we meet with the most characteristic speeches
+in which the strong-willed Laertes, [81] unmindful of any future world,
+calls for revenge with every drop of his indignant blood:--
+
+  To Hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devils!
+  Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
+  I dare damnation....
+  ... Both the worlds I give to negligence,
+  Let come what comes ...
+  ... to cut his throat i' the church.
+
+That passage, too, is new, in which Ophelia's madness is explained as
+the consequence of blighted love:--
+
+  Nature is fine in love, and where 't is fine,
+  It sends some precious instance of itself
+  After the thing it loves.
+
+Her own reason, which succumbs to her love, is the precious token.
+
+In the same way, those words are not in the first quarto, in which
+Laertes gives vent to the oppressed feelings of his heart, on hearing
+of the death of his sister:--
+
+  Nature her custom holds,
+  Let shame say what it will. When these (the tears) are gone,
+  The woman will be out.
+
+All those beautiful precepts, also, which Laertes gives to his sister,
+are wanting in the quarto of 1603. [82]
+
+Hamlet is the most powerful philosophical production, in the domain of
+poetry, written at the most critical epoch of mankind--the time of the
+Reformation. The greatest English genius recognised that it was
+everyone's duty to set a time out of joint to right. Shakspere showed
+to his noble friends a gifted and noble man whose life becomes a
+scourge for him and his surroundings, because he is not guided by manly
+courage and conscience, but by superstitious notions and formulas.
+
+This colossal drama ranges from the thorny, far-stretching fields which
+man, only trusting in himself, has to work with the sweat of his brow,
+to that wonder-land of mystery--
+
+  Where these good tidings of great joy are heard. [83]
+
+If the principles that are fought out in this drama, in tragic conflict,
+were to be described by catchwords, we might say: Reason stands against
+Dogma; Nature against Tradition; Self-Reliance against Submission.
+The great elementary forces are here at issue, which the Reformation
+had unchained, and with which we all have to reckon.
+
+Shakspere's loving, noble heart beautifully does justice to the defeated
+Hamlet by making him be borne to his grave 'like a soldier,' with all
+the honouring 'rites of war.' The poet who knew the human heart so
+well, no doubt had seen many brave and gifted men who, after having
+been to Wittenberg's Halls of Intellectual Freedom, and become disciples
+of Humanism, once more were turned into slaves of dogmas which, under
+a new guise, not less restricted the free use of reason than the tenets
+of the old faith had done:--
+
+  Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
+  Looking before and after, gave us not
+  The capability and god-like reason
+  To fust in us unused.
+
+The life of the most gifted remains fruitless if, through fear of what
+may befall us in a future world, we cravenly shrink back from following
+the dictates of our reason and our conscience. From them we must take
+the mandate and commission for the task of our life; not from any
+mysterious messenger, nor from any ghost out of Purgatory. On the way
+to action, no 'goblin damned' must be allowed to cross our path with
+his assumed terrors. That which we feel to be right we must do, even if
+'it be the very witching time of night, and hell breathes contagion into
+the world.'
+
+Shakspere broke with all antiquated doctrines. He was one of the
+foremost Humanists in the fullest and noblest meaning of the word. [84]
+
+ 1: Essay II. 12.
+
+ 2: Essay I. 26.
+
+ 3: The whole contents of this chapter may be said to be condensed
+   into two lines of Shakspere:--
+
+     'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
+     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'
+
+ 4: Essay III. 13.
+
+ 5: See Bacon's Essay 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation,' where
+   he says that 'dissimulation followeth many times upon secrecy by
+   a necessity: so that he that will be secret must be a dissembler in
+   some degree,' &c.
+
+ 6: The following are Hamlet's modes of asseveration:--
+   'Angels and ministers of grace,' 'All you host of Heaven,' 'God's
+   love,' 'God and mercy,' 'God's willing,' 'Help and mercy,' 'God's
+   love,' 'By St. Patrick,' 'God-a-mercy,' 'By my fay (_ma foi_),'
+   'S' blood (God's blood),' 'S' wounds,' 'God's bodykins,' 'By'r Lady,'
+   'Perdy (_Pardieu_),' 'By the rood (Cross),' 'Heavenly guards,' 'For
+   love and grace,' 'By the Lord,' 'Pray God,' &c.
+
+ 7: New Shakspere Society (Stubbs, _Abuses in England_), 1879,
+   p. 131.
+
+ 8: Act ii. sc. 2.
+
+ 9: Act ii. sc. i.
+
+10: This description is wanting in the first quarto. The passages
+   there are essentially different; there is no allusion to Hamlet's
+   mental struggle.
+
+11: About various allusions and satirical hints in this scene later on.
+
+12: Florio, 21; Montaigne, I. ii.
+
+13: Essay III. i.
+
+14: Isaiah, ch. iii. v. 16.
+
+15: The word 'ecstasy,' which is often used in the new quarto, is
+   wanting in the first edition where only madness, lunacy, frenzy--the
+   highest degrees of madness--are spoken of.
+
+16: In the old play their names are 'Rosencroft' and 'Guilderstone.'
+   _Reynaldo_, in the first quarto, is called '_Montano_.'
+   This change of name in a _dramatis persona_ of minor importance
+   indicates, in however a trifling manner, that the interest excited
+   by the name of Montaigne (to which 'Montano' comes remarkably near
+   in English pronunciation) was now to be concentrated on another point.
+
+17: Essay I. 40.
+
+18: II. 12.
+
+19: Essay II. 27, p. 142.
+
+20: Essay III. 4, p. 384.
+
+21: Rather sharp translations of _songe-creux_, as Montaigne
+   calls himself (Florio, i. 19, p. 34). 'I am given rather to
+   dreaming and sluggishness.'
+
+22: ''S wounds' (God's wounds)--a most characteristic expression;
+   used by Shakspere only in _Hamlet_, in this scene, and again
+   in act v. sc. 2.
+
+23: As yet, Hamlet has but one ground of action--namely, the one
+   which, after the apparition of the Ghost, he set down in his tablets:
+   'that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; at least, I am sure,
+   it may be so in Denmark.'
+
+24: Act ii. sc. 2.
+
+25: Essay I. 19.
+
+26: II. 3.
+
+27: Tacitus, _annal_. xiii. 56.
+
+28: Essay I. 19.
+
+29: Act. i. sc. 2.
+
+30: Shakspere already uses this expression in _King John_ (1595) for
+   purposes of mirthful mockery. He makes the Bastard say to the
+   Archduke of Austria (act iii. sc. i):--'Hang a calf's skin on
+   those recreant limbs!'--a circumstance which convinces us that
+   Shakspere knew the Essays of Montaigne from the original at an
+   early time. We think it a fact important enough to point out that
+   Florio translates _peau d'un veau_ by 'oxe-hide' (fo. 34). We
+   cannot think of any other explanation than that the phrase in
+   question had become so popular through _King John_ as to render
+   it advisable for Florio to steer clear of this rock. Jonson, in his
+   _Volpone_ (act. i. sc. i), makes Mosca the parasite say in
+   regard to his master: 'Covered with hide, instead of skin.'
+
+31: Florio's translation: 'If it be a _consummation_ of one's being'
+   (p. 627). Shakspere: 'a _consummation_ devoutly to be wished.' This
+   word is only once used by Shakspere in such a sense. It occurs in
+   another sense in _King Lear_ (iv. 6) and _Cymbeline_ (iv. 2), but
+   nowhere else in his works.
+
+32: Monologue of the first quarto:--
+
+      'To be, or not to be, I there's the point,
+      To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
+      No, to sleepe, to dreame, I, mary there it goes,
+      For in that dreame of death, when wee 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 damned.
+      But for this, the joyful hope of this,
+      Whol'd beare the scornes of flattery of the world,
+      Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?
+      The widow being oppress'd, the orphan wronged,
+      The taste of hunger, or a tyrants raigne,
+      And thousand more calamities besides,
+      To grunte and sweate under the weary life,
+      When that he may his full quietus make,
+      With a bare bodkin, who would this indure,
+      But for a hope of something after death?
+      Which pushes the brain and doth connfound the sence,
+      Which makes us rather beare those evilles we have,
+      Than flie to others that we know not of.
+      I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of us all.
+      Lady in thy orizons, be all my sinnes remembered.
+
+33: On closely examining the copy of Montaigne's Essays in the British
+   Museum, which bears Shakspere's autograph on the title-page, we
+   found--long after our treatise had been completed--that on the
+   fly-leaf at the end of the volume is written: _Mors incrta_,
+   (Written somewhat indistinctly, meaning probably _incerta_.
+   It might also be an abbreviation of 'incertam horam' [_incr.
+   ho_.], as contained in the Latin verse on p. 626:--
+
+     Incertam frustra, mortales, funeris horam
+     Quaeritis, et qua sit mors aditura via.)
+
+   626, 627. These two numbers, apparently, refer to the corresponding
+   pages of Montaigne's work, which contain nothing but thoughts
+   about the uncertainty of the hour of death and the hereafter. On
+   p. 627 there is the speech of Sokrates, which in Florio's
+   translation, as shown above, bears such striking resemblance to
+   Hamlet's monologue. There are other Latin sentences on the same
+   fly-leaf, pronounced by Sir Frederic Madden to be written by a
+   later pen than Shakspere's. To us, at any rate, the above words
+   and numbers appear to proceed from a different hand than the other
+   sentences. Judgments thereon from persons well versed in the
+   writings of that time would be of great interest.
+
+34: P. 103.
+
+35: I. 19.
+
+36: Act iii. sc. 2.
+
+37: III. 12 (Florio, 626).
+
+38: We do not doubt that this is a sly thrust at Florio, who, in the
+   preface to his translation, calls himself 'Montaigne's Vulcan,' who
+   hatches out Minerva from that 'Jupiter's bigge brain'.
+
+39: Florio, 476.
+
+40: Florio, 592: 'Thus goe the world, and so goe men.'
+
+41: III. 1.
+
+42: II. 27.
+
+43: Clarendon: 'Circumstance of thought' means here the details
+   over which thought ranges, and from which its conclusions are
+   formed.
+
+44: '_Index_,' in our opinion, does not signify here either the
+   title, or prologue, or the indication of the contents of a book,
+   but is an allusion to the Index of the Holy See and its thunders.
+
+45: Montaigne, III. 10; Florio, 604: 'Custome is a second nature,
+   and no less powerfull.... To conclude, I am ready to finish this
+   man, not to make another. By longe custome this forme is changed
+   into substance, Fortune into Nature.'
+
+46: III. 1.
+
+47: This is wanting in the first quarto, like the whole conclusion
+   of this scene.
+
+48: This whole scene between Horatio and Hamlet consists of the
+   following four lines in the old quarto:--
+
+     _Hamlet_. Beleeuve me, it greeuves me much, Horatio,
+     That to Laertes I forgot myselfe:
+     For by myselfe methinkes I feel his greefe,
+     Though there's a difference in each other's way.
+
+   Does this not look like a draught destined to be the kernel of a
+   scene? The end of the scene where Osrick comes in, is also much
+   shorter in the older play.
+
+49: Florio, 330: 'We amend ourselves by privation of reason and
+   by her drooping.' Hamlet's conduct is only to be explained by his
+   quietly sitting down until his reason should droop.--II. 12.
+
+50: Florio, 608.
+
+51: Florio, 609.
+
+52: This whole scene is nearly new (in the first quarto it is a mere
+   sketch). There are in it several direct allusions to Montaigne's
+   book, on which we shall touch later on.
+
+53: Here the dramatist, in order to paint a trait of vanity in Hamlet's
+   character, uses a device. He makes the latter say that, since Laertes
+   went into France, he (Hamlet) has been in continual practice. Yet we
+   know (act ii. sc. 2) that he had given up his accustomed exercise.
+   In that scene the poet wishes to describe Hamlet's melancholy; in
+   the other, his vanity. He chooses the colours which are apt to
+   produce quickest impressions among the audience.
+
+54: Act v. sc. 2.
+
+55: See St. Matthew x.29.
+
+56: I. 19.
+
+57: III. 9.
+
+58: II. 12.
+
+59: The Queen describes Hamlet as 'fat, and scant of breath.' Here
+   is Montaigne's description of himself (Essai II. 27):--'J'ay,
+   au demourant, la taille forte et ramassee; le visage non pas
+   gras, mais plein, la complexion entre le jovial et le melancholique,
+   moyennement sanguine et chaude.' Florio's translation, p. 372:--'As
+   for me, I am of a strong and well compact stature, my face is not
+   fat, but full, my complexion betweene joviall and melancholy,
+   indifferently sanguine and hote--('_not splenetive and rash_').
+
+60: III. 13
+
+61: III. 9.
+
+62: Act iii. sc. 1.
+
+63: We shall now oftener touch upon satirical passages uttered by
+   the character himself against whom they are directed. The true
+   dramatist gives the public no time to think over an incident in full
+   leisure. Every means--as we have already shown before--is welcome to
+   him, which aids in rapidly bringing out the telling traits of his
+   figures. No surprise need therefore be felt that Hamlet, though
+   representing Montaigne, sneers at, and morally flagellates, himself.
+
+64: Act iii. sc. 2.
+
+65: II. 1.
+
+66: Act iv. sc. 7.
+
+67: I. 9, 25; II. 10, &c. If an attentive reader will take the
+   trouble to closely examine that part of the scene in Shakspere's
+   _Tempest_ (act ii. sc. 1) wherein the passage occurs, which he
+   borrowed from Essay I. 30--'On Cannibals'--and compare it with
+   this most 'strange Essay,' he will clearly convince himself that
+   Shakspere can only have made use of it as a satire on Montaigne's
+   defective memory, which entangles this author in the most ludicrous
+   contradictions. Gonzala declares that, if he were king of the isle
+   on which he and his companion were wrecked, he would found a
+   commonwealth as described in the above passage. He concludes this
+   description, saying he would have 'no sovereignty.'
+
+   Sebastian justly remarks: 'Yet he would be king on't;' and
+   Antonio continues by saying: 'The latter end of his commonwealth
+   forgets the beginning.'
+
+   Even such is the contradiction in Montaigne's fanciful Essay 'On
+   Cannibals,' where, towards the end, he speaks of a captain who
+   holds authority over these savages, not only in war, but also in
+   peace, 'that when he went to visit the village of his dependence,
+   they cut him paths through the thick of their woods, through which
+   he might pass at ease.' The beginning of this Essay described the
+   commonwealth of these cannibals as tolerating no politic superiority,
+   no use of service, no occupation, &c. 'What short memory!
+   much wanting tablets!'
+
+   In the above-mentioned scene of the _Tempest_ Sebastian makes
+   the remark: 'No marrying 'mong his subjects,' which evidently is
+   also meant as a hit against Montaigne's anti-matrimonial ideas,
+   which we dwelt upon in the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia.
+
+68: Jonson, long afterwards, had not forgotten this hit against
+   Montaigne. In _Epicoene_ (1609) he makes Cleremont say:--'When
+   we come to have grey heads and weak hams, moist eyes and shrunk
+   members ... then we'll pray and fast.'
+
+69: This whole passage of act v. sc. 2 (106-138) is again
+   only to be found in the quarto of 1604, not in the folio edition of
+   1623. In later years the poet may have struck it out, as being only
+   comprehensible to a smaller circle of his friends. In the same way
+   that passage of act iv. sc. 4, which only contains thoughts
+   of Montaigne, was not received into the folio of 1623.
+
+70: This is their title in Florio's translation: _Morall, Politike,
+   Millitarie Discourses of Lo. Michaell de Montaigne, Knight of the
+   noble order of Saint Michaell, and one of the Gentlemen in ordinary
+   of the French King Henry III. his Chamber_.
+
+71: The sonnet runs thus:--
+
+      _To the Right Honourable Ladie Elizabeth Grey_. (She was a
+      daughter of Count Shrewsbury, a Talbot.)
+      Of honorable TALBOT honored farre,
+      The forecast and the fortune, by his WORD
+      _Montaigne_ here descrives; what by his Sword,
+      What by his wit; this, as the guiding starre;
+      That, as th' Aetolian blast, in peace or warre,
+      At sea, or land, as cause did use afforde,
+      _Avant le vent_, to tacke his sails aboarde,
+      So as his course no orethwart crosse might barre,
+      But he would sweetly sail _before the wind_;
+      For Princes service, Countries good, his fame.
+      Heire-Daughter of that prudent, constant kinde,
+      Joyning thereto of GREY as great a name, Of
+      both chief glories shrining in your minde,
+      Honour him that your Honor doth proclaime.'
+
+   We have already learned from the preface of the first book of the
+   _Essais_ how Florio was 'sea-tosst, weather-beaten,' 'ship-wrackt,'
+   'almost drowned,' when exerting himself to capture the
+   whale--Montaigne--and drag him through 'the rocke-rough Ocean'
+   with the assistance of his colleague Diodati, whom he compares to
+   'a guide-fish.' Hamlet calls Polonius a fish-monger. The latter
+   fools Hamlet by pretending that yonder cloud is in the shape of a
+   whale, which just before appeared to him like the back of a weasel.
+   Every word almost in this wonderful drama is a well-directed hit.
+
+72: Essay III. 5.
+
+73: _Ibid_. 13.
+
+74: _Ibid_. 2.
+
+75: The quarto of 1623 has only the third verse.
+
+76: The old song has the word 'crouch.'
+
+77: Essay III. 5, p. 460. Florio, p. 529.
+
+78: We think it is worth while to quote the following verse Montaigne
+   (III. 5) mentions when speaking of that nature of woman, which
+   he thinks suggests to her every possible act of libidinousness:--
+
+     Nec tantum niveo gavisa est ulla columbo
+     Compar, vel si quid dicitur improbius,
+     Oscula mordenti semper decerpere rostro,
+     Quantum praecipue multivola est mulier.
+
+   Florio translates (514):--
+
+     No Pigeons hen, or paire, or what worse name
+     You list, makes with hir Snow-white cock such game,
+     With biting bill to catch when she is kist,
+     As many-minded women when they list.
+
+   Is not this the character of Ophelia, as described by Shakspere--the
+   virgin inclining to voluptuousness in Goethe's view?
+
+79: Hamlet, act iv. sc. 5. In _Eastward Hoe_, Marston, Chapman,
+   and Jonson make capital out of this word, and use it as a sneer
+   against Hamlet and Ophelia. We shall return to this point later on.
+
+80: Florio, 617.
+
+81: Act iv. sc. 5.
+
+82: Laertes, act i. sc. 3:--
+
+     For nature crescent does not grow alone
+     In thews and bulk, but, as this temple waxes,
+     The inward service of the mind and soul
+     Grows wide withal.
+
+    Montaigne, II. 12; Florio, 319:
+
+     The mind is with the body bred we do behold,
+     It jointly growes with it, it waxeth old.--Lucr. xliii. 450.
+
+83: Goethe's _Faust_.
+
+84: We must mention that John Sterling, in an essay on Montaigne
+   (_Westminster Review_, 1838), makes the following introductory
+   remarks:--'On the whole, the celebrated soliloquy in _Hamlet_
+   presents a more characteristic and expressive resemblance to much of
+   Montaigne's writings than any other portion of the plays of the great
+   dramatist which we at present remember, though it would doubtless be
+   easy to trace many apparent transferences from the Frenchman into the
+   Englishman's works, as both were keen and many-sided observers in the
+   same age and neighbouring countries. But Hamlet was in those days no
+   popular type of character; nor were Montaigne's views and tone
+   familiar to men till he himself had made them so. Now, the Prince
+   of Denmark is very nearly a Montaigne, lifted to a higher eminence,
+   and agitated by more striking circumstances and severer destiny,
+   and altogether a somewhat more passionate structure of man. It is
+   not, however, very wonderful that Hamlet, who was but a part of
+   Shakspere, should exhibit to us more than the whole of Montaigne,
+   and the external facts appear to contradict any notion of a French
+   ancestry for the Dane, as the play is said to have been produced
+   in 1600, and the translation of the English not for three years later.'
+
+   During our long search through the Commentaries written on
+   _Hamlet_, we also met with the following treatise: 'HAMLET;
+   _ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspeare's_ (sic!!) _gegen die skeptische
+   und kosmopolitische Weltanschauung des Michael de Montaigne, von G.
+   F. Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath_. Berlin, 1871.'
+
+   The author of the latter-mentioned little book holds it to be
+   probable that Shakspere wrote his _Hamlet_ for the object
+   of freeing himself from the impressions of the famous French sceptic.
+   He regards this masterwork as 'the Drama of the Doubter;' as 'the
+   apotheosis of a practical Christianity.' Hamlet, he says, is wanting
+   in Christian piety. He has no faith, no love, no hope. His last words,
+   'The rest is silence,' show that he has no expectation of a future
+   life. He must perish because he has given up the belief in
+   a divine government of the world and in a moral order of things.
+
+   We believe we have read the Essays of Michel Montaigne with
+   great attention. We not only do not regard him as a 'sceptic' in
+   the sense meant by Mr. Stedefeld, but we hold him, as well as
+   Hamlet, to be an adherent of the so-called 'practical Christianity'
+   --at least, of what both Montaigne and Hamlet reckon to be such.
+   This 'practical Christianity,' however, is a notion somewhat
+   difficult to define.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+THE  CONTROVERSY  BETWEEN   BEN  JONSON  AND DEKKER.
+
+MENTION OF A DISPUTE BETWEEN BEN JONSON AND SHAKSPERE IN 'THE RETURN
+FROM PARNASSUS.'
+
+CHARACTERISTIC OF BEN JONSON.
+
+BEN JONSON'S HOSTILE ATTITUDE TOWARDS SHAKSPERE.
+
+DRAMATIC SKIRMISH BETWEEN BEN JONSON AND SHAKSPERE.
+
+BEN JONSON'S 'POETASTER.'
+
+DEKKER'S 'SATIROMASTIX.'
+
+We now proceed to an inquiry into the 'controversy between Jonson
+and Dekker,' which has been repeatedly mentioned before.
+
+Shakspere, we shall find, was implicated in it in a very large degree.
+Instead of indicating, however, that controversy by the designation
+under which it is known in literature, it would be more correct to
+put SHAKSPERE'S name in the place of that of Dekker. Many a reader
+who perhaps does not fully trust yet our bold assertion that Hamlet
+is a counterfeit of Montaigne's individuality, will now, we hope, be
+convinced by vouchers drawn from dramas published in 1604 and 1605,
+and which are in the closest connection with that controversy. We
+intend partly making a thorough examination of, partly consulting in
+a cursory manner, the following pieces:--
+
+1. 'Poetaster' (1601), by Ben Jonson.
+2. 'Satiromastix' (1602), by Thomas Dekker.
+3. 'Malcontent' (1604), by John Marston.
+4. 'Volpone' (1605), by Ben Jonson.
+5. 'Eastward Hoe' (1605), by Ben Jonson, Chapman,
+and Marston.
+
+In 'The Poetaster' Ben Jonson makes his chief attack upon Dekker and
+Shakspere. In 'Satiromastix,' Dekker defends himself against that attack.
+In doing so, he sides with Shakspere; and we thereby gain an insight
+into the noble conduct of the latter. Between Jonson and Shakspere
+there had already been dramatic skirmishes during several years before
+the appearance of 'The Poetaster.' We shall only be able to touch
+rapidly upon their meaning, considering that we confine ourselves,
+in the main, to a statement of that which concerns 'Hamlet.'
+
+After Jonson, in his 'Poetaster,' had exceeded all bounds of decent
+behaviour with most intolerable arrogance, Shakspere seems to have
+become weary of these malicious personal onslaughts; all the more so
+because they were apparently put into the mouth of innocent children.
+So he wrote his 'Hamlet,' showing up, therein, the loose and perplexing
+ideas of his chief antagonist, who belonged to the party of
+Florio-Montaigne.
+
+Hamlet, as we shall prove beyond the possibility of cavil, is the
+hitherto unexplained 'purge' in 'The Return from Parnassus,' which
+'our fellow Shakspere' administered to Ben Jonson in return for the
+'pill' destined for himself in 'The Poetaster.' After the publication
+of 'Hamlet,' Jonson wrote his 'Volpone' as a counterblast to this drama.
+Now 'Volpone,' and the Preface in which the author dedicates it to the
+two Universities, furnish us with the evidence that our theory must be
+a fact; for Jonson therein defended both the party of Florio-Montaigne
+and himself.
+
+Moreover, we shall adduce a series of proofs from 'The Malcontent' and
+from 'Eastward Hoe.'
+
+A drama, written by an unknown author, and printed in 1606, offers us
+a valuable material wherewith to make it clear that, at that time, a
+very bitter feud must have raged between Jonson and Shakspere; for it
+is scarcely to be believed that it would have been brought on the
+stage had a larger public not been deeply interested in the controversy.
+'The Return from Parnassus, or the Scourge of Simony,' [1] is the title
+of the play, mentioned several times before, in which this controversy
+is referred to in clear words. Philomusus and Studioso, two poor scholars
+who in vain had sought to pursue their calling as medical men, resolve
+upon going to the more profitable stage. They are to be prepared for
+it by two of the most famous actors from the Globe Theatre (Shakspere's
+company), Burbage and Kemp. Whilst these are waiting for their new
+pupils, [2] they converse about the capabilities of the students for
+the histrionic art. Kemp, in words which show that the author must have
+had great knowledge of the stage, condemns their ways and manners,
+mocking the silly kind of acting which he had once seen in a performance
+of the students at Cambridge. Burbage thinks they might amend their
+faults in course of time, and that, at least, advantage could be taken
+of them in so far as to make them write a part now and then; which
+certainly they could do. To this Kemp replies:--
+
+'Few of the University pen plaies well; they smell too much of that
+writer _Ovid_ and that writer _Metamorphosis_, and talk too much of
+_Proserpina_ and _Jupiter_. Why, here's our fellow _Shakespeare_ puts
+them all down--I, and _Ben Jonson_ too. O that _Ben Jonson_ is a pestilent
+fellow; he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill; [3] but our
+fellow Shakespeare hath given him spurge that made him bewray his
+credit.'
+
+Burbage answers:--'It's a shrewd fellow indeed.'
+
+For the better understanding of this most interesting controversy, the
+centre of which Hamlet forms, it is necessary that we should give a
+characteristic of Shakspere's adversary, Ben Jonson, whose individuality
+and mode of action are too little known among the general reading
+public.
+
+Ben Jonson, born in 1573, in the neighbourhood of Westminster, was
+the posthumous child of a Scot who had occupied a modest position at
+the Court of Henry VIII., but who, under Queen Mary, had to suffer
+long imprisonment, probably on account of his religious opinions.
+His estates were confiscated by the Crown. After having obtained his
+liberation, he became a priest of the Reformed Church of England.
+Two years after his death, his widow, the mother of Ben, again
+married: this time her husband was a master bricklayer. The education
+of the boy from the first marriage, who at an early age showed talent
+for learning, was not neglected. It is assumed that friends of his
+father, seeing Ben's ability, rendered it possible for him to enter
+Westminster School, and afterwards to study at the University of
+Cambridge. In his seventeenth or eighteenth year, probably from a want
+of means, he had to give up the career of learning, in order to follow
+the simple calling of his stepfather. It may be easily understood that
+Ben was little pleased with the use of the trowel; he fled to the
+Netherlands, became a soldier, and took part in a campaign. After a year,
+the youthful adventurer, then only nineteen years old, came back to
+London. He talks of a heroic deed; but the truthfulness of his account
+may well be doubted. He pretends having killed an enemy, in the face
+of both camps, and come back to the ranks, laden with his spoils.
+
+After his return to London, Jonson first tried to earn his livelihood
+as an actor. His figure [4] and his scorbutic face were, however, sad
+hindrances to his success. Soon he gave up the histrionic attempts and
+began to write additions to existing plays, at the order of a theatrical
+speculator, of the name of Philip Henslowe. The only further detail we
+have of Jonson's doings, down to 1598, [5] is, that he fell out with
+one of his colleagues, an actor (Jonson's quarrelsome disposition as
+regards his comrades commenced very early), and that finally he killed
+his antagonist. We then find him in prison where a Catholic priest
+induced him to become a convert to the Roman Church which, after the
+lapse of about twelve years, he again left, returning to the Established
+Protestant Church of England. Jonson himself afterwards said once that
+'he was for any religion, as being versed in both.' [6] It is, therefore,
+not to be assumed that he once more changed from conviction. His
+reconversion appears rather to have been a prudential act on his part,
+in order to conform to the religious views of the pedantic James I.,
+and thus to obtain access at Court, which aim he indeed afterwards
+reached; whereas he had not been able to obtain that favour under
+Elizabeth. [7]
+
+It is not known by what, or by whom, Ben Jonson was saved from the near
+prospect of the gallows. In 1598 his name is mentioned as one of the
+better-known writers of comedies, by Francis Meres, in his 'Palladis
+Tamia.' His first successful comedy was, 'Every Man in his Humour.' Fama
+says that the manuscript which the author had sent in to the Lord
+Chamberlain's Company, was on the point of being rejected when Shakspere
+requested to have the play given to him, read it, and caused its being
+acted on the stage. This anecdote belongs, however, to the class of
+traditional tales of that age, whose value for fixing facts is a most
+doubtful one. It is more certain that Ben, at the age of twenty, took
+a  wife; which contributed very little to the lessening of his chronic
+poverty with which he constantly had to struggle. It does not appear that
+the union was a very happy one; for he relates that he once left his wife
+for five years.
+
+A diary written by an unknown barrister informs us, February 12, 1602:
+'Ben Jonson, the poet, nowe lives upon one Townesend and scornes the
+world.' [8] In the society of gallants and lords, the young poet felt
+himself most at home. All kinds of mendicant epistles, sonnets,
+dedications, petitions, and so forth, which he addressed to high
+personages, and which have been preserved, convince us that Jonson
+neglected nothing that could give an opportunity to the generosity
+of liberal noblemen to prove themselves patrons of art in regard to
+him. He boasts on the stage of being more in the enjoyment of the
+favour of the great ones than any of his literary contemporaries. [9]
+Modesty was certainly not a mitigating trait in the character of
+hot-tempered Jonson, whose wrath was easily roused.
+
+Convinced of the power of his own genius, he most eagerly wanted to see
+the value of his work acknowledged. Not satisfied with the slow judgment
+his contemporaries might come to, or the niggardly reward they might
+confer; nor content with the prospects of a laurel wreath which grateful
+Posterity lays on the marble heads of departed eminent men, this
+pretentious disciple of the Muse importunately claimed his full recompense
+during his own life. For the applause of the great mass, the dramatist,
+after all, has to contend. Jonson strove hard for it; but in vain. A more
+towering genius was the favourite of the age. Ben, however, laid the
+flattering unction to his soul that he was above Shakspere, [10] even
+as above all other contemporary authors; and he left nothing unattempted
+to gain the favour of the great public. All his endeavours remained
+fruitless. On every occasion he freely displays the rancour he felt at
+his ill-success; for he certainly was not master of his temper. In poems,
+epistles, and epigrams, as well as in his dramas, and in the dedications,
+prologues, and epilogues attached thereto, he shows his anger against the
+'so-called stage poets.' We shall prove that his fullest indignation is
+mainly directed against one--the very greatest: need we name him?
+
+Jonson, resolved upon making the most of his Muse in a remunerative
+sense, well knew how to obtain the patronage of the highest persons
+of the country; and his ambition seems to have found satisfaction when,
+afterwards, a call was made upon him, on the part of the Court, to
+compose 'Masques' for Twelfth-Night and similar extraordinary occasions.
+He produced a theatrical piece in consonance with the barbaric taste
+prevailing in Whitehall, which gave plenty to do to the machinists,
+the decorators, and the play-dresser of the stage. With such a division
+of labour in the domain of art, it is not easy, to-day, to decide to
+whom the greater merit belongs, among those concerned, of having
+afforded entertainment to the courtiers. Dramatic or poetical value
+is wanting in those productions of Jonson.
+
+From his poems, as well as from the 'Conversations with Drummond,'
+we know that among the patronesses of Jonson there were Lucie Countess
+of Bedford and Elizabeth Countess of Rutland--two ladies to whom
+Florio dedicated a translation of Montaigne. Lady Rutland's marriage
+was a most unhappy one. In the literary intercourse with prominent men
+of her time she appears to have sought consolation and distraction.
+
+Jonson's relations with this lady must have been rather friendly ones,
+for 'Ben one day being at table with my Lady Rutland, her husband
+coming in, accused her that she keept table to poets, of which she
+wrott a letter to him (Jonson), which he answered. My lord intercepted
+the letter, but never chalenged him.' [11]
+
+From the same source which makes this statement we take the following
+trait in Jonson's character, which is as little calculated as his
+passionate quarrelsomeness to endear him to us. Sir Thomas Overbury
+had become enamoured of unhappy Lady Rutland. Jonson was asked by this
+nobleman, who at the same time was a poet, to read to the adored one
+a lyrical effusion of his; evidently for the purpose of fomenting her
+inclinations towards the friend who was languishing for her. Ben Jonson
+relates that he fulfilled Overbury's wish 'with excellent grace,' at the
+same time praising the author. Next morning he fell out with Overbury,
+who would have him to make an unlawful proposal to Lady Rutland.
+
+But how, we may ask, was it possible that Jonson's noble friend could at
+all think of trying to use him as a go-between in this shameful manner?
+Are we not reminded here of the position of thirsty Toby Belch towards
+the simple Aguecheek, if not even of honest [12] Iago in his dealings
+with the liberal Rodrigo? Neither in Olivia's uncle, nor in Othello's
+Ancient is it reckoned a merit to have omitted doing pimp service to
+friends. Their policy of taking advantage of amorous inclinations,
+although they did not even try to promote them by the reading of
+poetical productions, remains not the less contemptible.
+
+As to Jonson's passion for the cup that does more than cheer, neither
+he himself conceals it, nor is evidence to the same effect wanting
+on the part of his contemporaries. Drayton says that he was in the
+habit of 'wearing a loose coachman's coat, frequenting the Mermaid
+Tavern, where he drank seas of Canary; then reeling home to bed, and,
+after a profuse perspiration, arising to his dramatic studies.' [13]
+
+At a certain time, Jonson accompanied a son of Sir Walter Raleigh as
+tutor during a voyage to France. The young hopeful pupil, 'being
+knavishly inclined,' and not less quick in the execution of practical
+jokes than in spying out human weaknesses, had no difficulty in
+understanding his tutor's bent, and succeeded in making Jonson 'dead
+drunk.' He then 'laid him on a carr, which he made to be drawen by
+pioners through the streets, at every corner showing his governour
+stretched out, and telling them, that was a more lively image of
+the Crucifix than any they had.' The mother of young Raleigh greatly
+relished this sport. It reminded her of similar tricks her husband had
+been addicted to in his boyish days, 'though the father abhorred it.'
+
+With habits of the kind described, Jonson had a hard but fruitless
+struggle against oppressing poverty and downright misery during his
+whole life. When age was approaching, he addressed himself to his
+highborn patrons with petitions in well-set style. His needy condition
+was, however, little bettered, even when Charles I., in 1630, conferred
+upon him, seven years before his death, an annual pension of 100
+pounds, with a terse of Spanish wine yearly out of his Majesty's
+store at Whitehall.
+
+A letter of Sir Thomas Hawkins describes one of the last circumstances
+of Jonson's life. At 'a solemn supper given by the poet, when good
+company, excellent cheer, choice wine, and jovial welcome had opened
+his heart and loosened his tongue, he began to raise himself at the
+expense of others.'
+
+Wine, joviality, good company, and bitter satire--these were the elements
+of Ben Jonson's happiness.
+
+'O rare Ben Jonson!' Sir John Young, [14] who, walking through
+Westminster Abbey, saw the bare stone on the poet's grave, gave
+one of the workmen eighteenpence to cut the words in question, and
+posterity is still in doubt whether the word 'rare' was meant for
+the valuable qualities of the poet or for those of the boon-companion.
+
+We will give a short abstract of Jonson's character from the notes of a
+contemporary whose guest he had been during fully a month in 1619. One
+might doubt the sincerity of this judgment if Sir William Drummond, his
+liberal host, had made it public for the purpose of harming Jonson.
+There was, however, no such intention, for it remained in manuscript
+for fully two hundred years.
+
+Only then, a copy of this incisive characteristic came before the world
+at large. The Scottish nobleman and poet had written it down, together
+with many utterances of Jonson, after his guest who most freely and
+severely criticised his contemporaries had left. The perspicacity
+of Drummond, and the truthful rendering of his impressions, are fully
+confirmed by Jonson's manner of life and the contents of his literary
+productions. [15] Drummond concludes his notes thus:--
+
+'He' (Jonson) 'is a great lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and
+scorner of others; given rather to loose 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): a dissembler of ill
+parts which reigne in him; a bragger of some good that he wanteth;
+thinking nothing well but what either himself or some of his friends
+and countrymen have said or done. He is passionately kind and angry;
+careless either to gain or keep; vindicative, but, if he be well
+answered, at himself. For any religion, as being versed in both;
+interpreteth best sayings and deeds often to the worst. Oppressed
+with fantasie, which has ever mastered his reason: a general disease
+in many poets.'
+
+It will easily be understood that between two natures of so opposite a
+bent as that of the quarrelsome Jonson and 'gentle Shakspere,'
+friendship for any length of time could scarcely be possible. [16]
+
+The creations of the dramatist obtain their real value by the poet's
+own character. He who breathes a soul into so many figures destined
+for action must himself be gifted with a greatness of soul that
+encompasses a world. In the dramatic art, such actions only charm which
+are evolved out of clearly defined passions; and such characters only
+awake interest which bear human features strongly marked. If, however,
+we cast a glance at the dramatic productions of Ben Jonson, we in vain
+look among the many figures that crowd his stage for one which could
+inspire us with sympathy. Time has pronounced its verdict against his
+creations: they are lying in the archive of mere curiosities. Even the
+inquirer feels ill at ease when going for them to their hiding-place.
+Jonson's characters do not speak with the ever unmistakeable and
+touching voice of human passions. In his comedies he produces the
+strangest whims, caprices, and crotchets, by which he probably points
+to definite persons. The clue to these often malignant dialectics
+is very difficult to find.
+
+The action of his plays--if incidental quarrels, full of sneering
+allusions, are left aside--is generally of such diminutive proportions
+that one may well ask, after the perusal of some of his dramas, whether
+they contain any action at all. No doubt the satirist, too, has his
+legitimate place in the dramatic art; but he must know how to hit the
+weaknesses of human nature in certain striking types. Jonson, however,
+is far from being able to lay a claim to such dramaturgic merit. At
+'haphazard he took certain individualities from the idly gossiping crowd
+that congregated in the central nave of St. Paul's Church, and put them
+on the stage. Whoever had been strutting about there to-day in his
+silken stockings, proudly displaying the nodding feathers in his hat,
+his rich waist-coat and mantle, and boasting a little too loud before
+some other gallant of his love adventures, ran great danger--like all
+those whose demeanour in St. Paul's gave rise to backbiting gossip--of
+being pourtrayed in the 'Rose,' in the 'Curtain,' or in the theatres
+of the 'little eyases,' in such a manner that people were able, in
+the streets, to point them out with their fingers.
+
+Like so many other novelties, this kind of comedy, too, may for a while
+have found its admirers. Soon, however, this degradation of the Muse
+brought up such a storm that Jonson had to take refuge in another
+domain of the dramatic art (1601). He himself confesses:--
+
+  And since the Comic Muse
+  Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try
+  If Tragedy have a more kind aspect. [17]
+
+But he is nothing if not satirical. The persons that are to enliven his
+tragedies are not filled with the true breath of life. They are mere
+phantoms or puppets of schoolcraft, laboriously put together by a
+learning drawn from old folios. In his tragedies, 'Sejanus' and
+'Cataline,' he seeks to describe Romans whose whole bearing was to be
+in pedantically close harmony with the time in which the dramatic
+action occurs. Only a citizen from a certain period of ancient Rome
+would be able to decide whether this difficult but thankless problem
+had been solved. These cold academic treatises--for such we must,
+practically, take them to be--were not relished by the public. There
+is no vestige of human passion in the bookish heroes thus put on the
+stage. For their sorrows the audience has no feeling of fear or anguish
+and no tear of compassion.
+
+Jonson, indignant at the small estimate in which his arduously composed
+works were received, ill-humoured by their want of success, looked
+enviously upon Shakspere, who had not been academically schooled; who
+audaciously overthrew the customs of the antique drama; who made his
+own rules, or rather, who made himself a rule to others; who created
+metrics that were peculiarly his; who chose themes hitherto considered
+non-permissible, and unusual with Greeks and Romans; who flung the
+'three unities' to the winds; and who, nevertheless, had an unheard-of
+success!
+
+This favourite of the public, Jonson seems to have looked upon as the
+main obstacle barring the way to his own genius. Against this towering
+rival, Jonson directed a hail of satirical arrows. Only take, for
+instance, the prologue to 'Every Man in his Humour.' [18] There, Jonson,
+with the most arrogant conceit, tries to make short work of various
+dramas of Shakspere's--for instance, of his historical plays, in which
+he dared--
+
+  ... with three rusty swords,
+  And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
+  Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
+  And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.
+
+In 'The Poetaster,' which in 1601 was acted by the children of the Queen's
+Chapel, Jonson made an attack upon three poets. We hope to be able to
+prove that the one most bitterly abused, and who is bidden to swallow
+the 'pill,' is no other than Shakspere, whilst the two remaining ones
+are John Marston and Thomas Dekker. From the 'Apologetical Dialogue'
+which Jonson wrote after 'The Poetaster' had already passed over the
+stage, we see that this satire had excited the greatest indignation
+and sensation in the dramatic world. It was a new manner of falling
+out with a colleague before the public. The conceited presumption
+of the author, who in the play itself assumes the part of Horace,
+seriously proclaiming himself as the poet of poets, as the worthiest
+of the worthy, is not less enormous and repulsive than the way in
+which he proceeds against his rivals.
+
+Quite innocently, Jonson asks in that dialogue (which was spoken on the
+stage after 'The Poetaster' had given rise to a general squabble), how
+it came about that such a hubbub was made of that play, seeing that it
+was free from insults, only containing 'some salt' but 'neither tooth,
+nor gall,' whilst his antagonists, after all, had been the cause of
+whatever remarks he himself had made:--
+
+  ... But sure I am, three years
+  They did provoke me with their petulant styles,
+  On every stage. And I at last, unwilling,
+  But weary, I confess, of so much trouble,
+  Thought I would try if shame could win upon 'em.
+
+In some comedies of Shakspere, which appeared between the years 1598
+and 1601, there are characters markedly stamped with Jonsonian
+peculiarities. We may be convinced that 'gentle Shakspere' had
+received many a provocation [19] before he took notice of the obscure
+dramatist who was younger by ten years than himself, and publicly
+gave him a strong lesson. 'All's Well that Ends Well' contains a
+figure, Parolles, whose peculiarities are too closely akin to those
+of Ben Jonson to be regarded as a mere fortuitous accident; especially
+when we find that Jonson, in 'The Poetaster,' again tries to ridicule
+this hit by a characteristic expression. [20]
+
+Parolles is a follower of Count Rousillon. His position is not further
+defined than that he follows Bertram; he is a cross between a gentleman
+and a servant. We hear the old Lord Lafeu reproaching him in act ii.
+sc. 3:--
+
+'Why dost thou garter up thy arms o' this fashion? dost make hose of thy
+sleeves? Do other servants do so?'
+
+Again he calls him--'a vagabond, no true traveller: you are more saucy
+with lords and honourable personages than the heraldry of your birth and
+virtue gives you commission.' [21]
+
+Parolles boasts of being born under the sign of Mars, and up to every
+heroic deed; and it is certainly an allusion to Jonson's bravado of
+having in the Low Countries, in the face of both camps, killed an enemy
+and taken _opima spolia_ from him, that Shakspere lets this
+character make the attempt to retake, single-handed, from the enemy, a
+drum that had been lost in the battle. Of course, Parolles finally comes
+out a coward and a traitor. Parolles also mentions that he understands
+'Low Dutch.'
+
+In the character of Malvolio ('Twelfth Night; or What You Will,'
+1600-1601), the quarrelsome Ben has long ago been suspected, who,
+puffed up with braggart pride, contemptuously looks down upon his
+colleagues, and impudently exerts himself to gain access to high social
+circles; thus assuming, like Parolles, a position that does not properly
+belong to him. Even as Lord Lafeu takes Parolles a peg lower, so Sir
+Toby (act. ii. sc. 3) reminds the haughty Malvolio that he is nothing
+more than a steward. The religion of Malvolio also is several times
+discussed. Merry Maria relates that he is a 'Puritan or anything
+constantly but a time-pleaser.' Nor is the priest wanting who is to
+drive out the hyperbolical fiend from the captive Malvolio: an
+unmistakeable allusion to Ben Jonson's conversion in prison. The Fool
+who represents the Priest, puts a question referring to Pythagoras to
+Malvolio who is groaning 'in darkness' and yearning for freedom. He
+receives an evasive answer from the prisoner. In 'Volpone,' as we
+shall see, Jonson answers it very fully. [22]
+
+Altogether, there are allusions in 'The Poetaster,' and in 'Volpone,'
+to 'All's Well that Ends Well,' and to 'What You Will,' which we shall
+have to touch upon in speaking of those plays.
+
+The scene of 'The Poetaster' is laid at the court of Augustus Caesar.
+Jonson therein describes himself under the character of Horace. The
+whole drift of the play is, to take the many enemies of the latter
+to task for their calumnies and libels against him. Rome is the place
+of action, and the persons of the drama bear classic names. There are,
+besides Augustus and Horace, Mecaenas (_sic_), Virgil, Propertius,
+Trebatius, Ovid, Demetrius Fannius, _Rufus Laberius Crispinus_, and
+so forth. The characters whom they are to represent are mostly
+authors of the dramatic world around Ben Jonson. They are depicted
+with traits so easily recognisable that--as Dekker says in his
+'Satiromastix'--of five hundred people four hundred could 'all point
+with their fingers in one instant at one and the same man.'
+
+More especially against two disciples of the Muse is Jonson's 'gally
+ink' directed. Let us give a few instances of the lampoons and
+calumnious squibs by which Horace pretends having been insulted on
+the part of envious colleagues who, he maintains, look askance at
+him because 'he keeps more worthy gallants' company' than they can get
+into. In act iv. sc. I, Demetrius tells Tucca:--
+
+'Alas, Sir, Horace! he is a mere sponge; nothing but humours and
+observation; he goes up and down, sucking from every society, and
+when he comes home, squeezes himself dry again.'
+
+Tucca adds:--'He will sooner lose his best friend than his least jest.'
+
+Crispinus is found guilty of having composed a libel against Horace,
+of which the following may serve as a specimen:--
+
+  Ramp up my genius, be not retrograde;
+  But boldly nominate a spade a spade.
+  What, shall thy lubrical and glibbery muse
+  Live, as she were defunct, like punk in stews?
+  Alas! that were no modern consequence,
+  To have cothurnal buskins frighted hence.
+  No, teach thy Incubus to poetize;
+  And throw abroad thy spurious snotteries....
+  O poets all and some! for now we list
+  Of strenuous vengeance to clutch the fist.
+
+Such was the language the contemporaries of Shakspere used. Are we to
+wonder, then, if here and there we find in his works an offensive
+expression?
+
+The two persons who are specially taken to task, and most harshly
+treated, are Demetrius Fannius, 'play-dresser and plagiarius,' and
+RUFUS LABERIUS CRISPINUS, '_poetaster and plagiarius_.' In 'Satiromastix,'
+Demetrius clearly comes out as Dekker. Crispinus is the chief character
+of the play:--'the poetaster.' Against him the satire is mainly directed,
+and for his sake it seems to have been written, for the title runs
+thus: 'The Poetaster, or His Arraignment.' From all the characteristic
+qualities of Crispinus we draw the conclusion that this figure
+represented SHAKSPERE.
+
+From the above-mentioned passage in 'The Return from Parnassus' it would
+seem as if a '_pill_' had been administered in the play to several poets.
+That is, however, not so. Then, as now, the plural form was a favourite
+one with writers afraid to attack openly. Horace administers a pill
+only to one poet--to Crispinus. And as Kemp says that Shakspere,
+thereupon, gave a '_purge_,' the conclusion is obvious that he who took
+revenge by administering the purge, must have been the one to whom
+the pill had been given. 'Volpone,' a play directed against the
+'purge'--that is, 'Hamlet'--will convince us that the chief controversy
+lay between Jonson and Shakspere, and not between Jonson and Dekker.
+
+The following points will, we think, make it still clearer that we are
+warranted in believing that the figure of Crispinus was intended by
+Jonson for Shakspere.
+
+When, in presence of Augustus, as well as of the high jurors Maecenas,
+Tibullus, and Virgil, the two poetasters have been heard; when Horace
+has forgiven Demetrius, [23] and Crispinus, under the sharp effects of
+the pill, has thrown up, amidst great pain, [24] the disgraceful
+words which he had used against Horace, he is dismissed by the latter
+with the admonition to observe, in future, a strict and wholesome diet;
+to take each morning something of Cato's principles; then taste a
+piece of Terence and suck his phrase; to shun Plautus and Ennius as
+meats too harsh for his weak stomach, and to read the best Greeks,
+'but not without a tutor.'
+
+This fits in with Shakspere's 'small Latin and less Greek'--a
+circumstance of which Jonson himself, in his poem in memory of
+Shakspere (1623), thought he should remind the coming generations.
+
+It is, no doubt, a little revenge for the 'dark chamber' in which
+Malvolio [25] is imprisoned, that, after Horace has concluded his
+speech in which the study of Latin and Greek is recommended to
+Crispinus as something very necessary for him, Virgil should add the
+further advice:--
+
+  And for a week or two see him locked up
+  In some dark place, removed from company;
+  He will talk idly else after his physic.
+
+The full name given by Jonson to Crispinus is--RUFUS LABERIUS CRISPINUS.
+John Marston already, in 1598, designates Shakspere with the nickname
+'_Rufus_.' Everyone can convince himself of this by first reading
+Shakspere's  'Venus and Adonis,' and immediately afterwards John
+Marston's 'Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image.' [26] We do not know
+whether it has struck anyone as yet that this poem of Marston is a
+most evident satire, written even in the same metre as Shakspere's
+first, and at that time most popular, poem. [27] In his sixth satire
+of 'The Scourge of Villanie,' Marston explains why he had composed
+his  'Pigmalion's Image:'--
+
+  Yet deem'st that in sad seriousnesse I write
+  such nasty stuff as in Pigmalion?
+  Such maggot-tainted, lewd corruption! ...
+  Hence, thou misjudging censor: know I wrot
+  Those idle rimes to note the odious spot
+  and blemish that deformes the lineaments
+  of modern poesies habiliments.
+
+At the end of his satire ('Pigmalion's Image'), Marston
+self-complacently tacks on a concluding piece: 'The Author in Praise
+of his Precedent Poem.' Whom else does he address there than him
+whose poetical manner he wished to mock--namely, Shakspere's--when
+he begins with these words:--
+
+  Now, Rufus! by old Glebron's fearfull mace,
+  Hath not my Muse deserv'd a worthy place? ...
+  Is not my pen compleate? Are not my lines
+  Right in the swaggering humour of these times?
+
+The name of 'Rufus' has two peculiarities which may have induced
+Marston to confer it upon Shakspere. First of all, like the English
+king of that name, Shakspere's pre-name was William. Secondly, the
+best-preserved portrait of Shakspere shows him with hair verging upon
+a reddish hue.
+
+But not only the colour of the hair, but also its thinness (according
+to all pictures and busts we have of Shakspere, he was bald-headed),
+seems to have been satirised by Jonson in his 'Poetaster.' In act ii.
+sc. 1, Chloe asks Crispinus, who, excited by her love and her beauty,
+pretends becoming a poet, whether, as a poet, he would also change his
+hair? To which Crispinus replies, 'Why, a man may be a poet, and yet not
+change his hair.'
+
+Now Dekker, in his 'Satiromastix, in which all personal insults are to be
+avenged [28](for which reason the chief personages of 'The Poetaster' are
+introduced under the same name), makes Horace give forth a long song in
+praise of 'heades thicke of hair,' whilst Crispinus gives another in
+honour of 'balde heads;' from which we conclude that Chloe's remark on
+Crispinus' hair has reference to a bald pate, but the name of 'Rufus'
+to the colour of whatever hair there is.
+
+'Rufus Laberius Crispinus' might truly be thus rendered: 'The red-haired
+SHAK-erius, with the crisp-head, who cribs like St. Crispin.' The word
+Rufus, as already explained, reminds us both of Shakspere's red
+hair and his pre-name 'William.' Laberius (from _labare_, to shake;
+hence Shak-erius, a similar nickname as Greene's SHAKE-_scene_)
+is clearly an indication of the poet's family name. The Roman custom
+of placing the name of the _gens_, or family, in the middle of a
+person's name, leaves no doubt as to Jonson's intention. Laberius
+was a dramatic poet, even as Shakspere. Laberius was an actor (Suet. c.i.
+39). So was Shakspere. Laberius played in his own dramas. Shakspere did
+the same. Laberius' name corresponds etymologically, as regards meaning,
+to the root-syllable in Shakspere's name. Could Jonson, who was so well
+versed in classics, have made his satirical allusion plainer or more
+poignant? In Crispinus, both Shakspere's curly hair and the offence of
+application, plagiarism, or literary theft, with which he is charged
+by his antagonist, are manifestly marked; St. Crispin being noted among
+the saints for his filching habits. He made shoes for the poor from
+materials stolen from the rich.
+
+Crispinus approaches Horace quite as a 'Johannes Factotum,' as Greene
+had designated Shakspere in 1592. Jonson makes him assert that he, too,
+is a scholar, a writer conversant with every kind of poetry, and a
+Stoic. He also declares that he is studying architecture, and that,
+if he builds a house, [29] it must be similar to one before which
+they are standing.
+
+In Dekker's 'Satiromastix,' Crispinus is described as being of a most
+gentle nature. This is in harmony with the well-known quality generally
+attributed to Shakspere. In the beginning of 'Satiromastix,' Crispinus
+approaches Horace for the object of peace and reconciliation. The latter
+excuses himself, in words similar to those of the 'Apologetical
+Dialogue,' that even if he should 'dip his pen in distilde Roses,'
+or strove to drain out of his ink all gall, [30] yet his enemies would
+look at his writings 'with sharpe and searching eyes.' Nay--
+
+  When my lines are measur'd out as straight
+  As even parallels, 'tis strange that still,
+  Still some imagine they are drawne awry.
+  The error is not mine, but in their eye;
+  That cannot take proportions.
+
+  _Crispinus_. Horrace, Horrace!
+  To stand within the shot of galling tongues,
+  Proves not your gilt, for could we write on paper,
+  Made of these turning leaves of heaven, the cloudes,
+  Or speak with Angels tongues: yet wise men know,
+  That some would shake the head, tho' saints should sing,
+  Some snakes must hisse, because they're borne with stings.
+
+  _Horace_. 'T is true.
+
+  _Crispinus_. Doe we not see fooles laugh at heaven? and mocke
+  The Makers workmanship?
+
+Crispinus goes on telling Horace that none are safe from such calumnies;
+but that, if his 'dastard wit' will 'strike at men in corners,' if he
+will 'in riddles folde the vices' of his best friends, then he must
+expect also that they will 'take off all gilding from their pilles,'
+and offer him 'the bitter coare' (core). [31] With great emphasis,
+Crispinus admonishes Horace not to swear that he did not intend whipping
+the private vices of his friends while his '_lashing jestes make all
+men bleed_.' Crispinus concludes his mild, conciliatory speech with
+the words:--
+
+  We come like your phisitions (physicians) to purge
+  Your sicke and daungerous minde of her disease.
+
+A peace is then concluded, which Horace (Jonson) again breaks, for which
+he receives his punishment towards the end of 'Satiromastix.' Dekker,
+who brings in the chief personages of 'The Poetaster' under the same
+name, makes, in this counter-piece, two parts of the figure of Rufus
+Laberius Crispinus--namely, that of William Rufus, the king, at whose
+court he lays the scene (Jonson's drama has the court of Augustus), and
+that of Crispinus, the poet. The part of the king is a very unimportant
+one; and it may be assumed that Dekker intended the king and the poet
+to be looked upon as the same person. The object of the play-dresser
+Demetrius (Dekker) was, no doubt, to do homage in this way to his
+chief Crispinus--that is, Shakspere. When the accused Horace is to be
+judged, the King says to Crispinus:--
+
+  Not under us, but next us take thy seate;
+  Artes nourished by Kings make Kings more great.
+
+Crispinus declares Horace guilty of having 'rebelled against the sacred
+laws of divine Poesie,' not out of love of virtue, but--
+
+  Thy pride and scorn made her turne saterist.
+
+Horace, on account of his crimes against the sacred laws of divine
+poesy, is not 'lawrefyed,' but 'nettlefyed:' not crowned with laurels,
+but with a wreath of nettles, and afterwards, in Sancho Panza manner,
+tossed in a blanket. He then is told:--'You shall not sit in a
+Gallery when your Comedies and Enterludes have entred their Actions,
+and there make vile faces at everie lyne, to make Gentlemen have an eye
+to you, and to make Players afraide to take your part.' Furthermore,
+he 'must forsweare to venter on the stage when your Play is ended, and
+to exchange courtezies and complements with Gallants in the Lordes
+roomes, to make all the house rise up in Armes, and to cry that's
+Horace, that's he, that's he, that's he, that pennes and purges
+Humours and diseases.' He must promise 'not to brag in Bookebinders
+shops that your Vize-royes or Tributorie Kings have done homage to
+you, or paide Quarterage.' And--'when your Playes are misse-likt at
+Court, you shall not Crye Mew like a Pusse-Cat, and say you are
+glad you write out of the Courtiers Elements.' [32]
+
+In his Preface to 'Satiromastix' ('To the World '), Dekker says that
+in this play he did '_only whip his_ (Horace's) _fortunes and
+condition of life, where the more noble_ REPREHENSION _had bin of
+his_ MINDES DEFORMITIE.' [33]
+
+This nobler reprehension, as we have sufficiently shown, was undertaken
+by Shakspere in his 'Hamlet.' [34] Dekker, in his Epilogue to
+'Satiromastix' (he there speaks of the 'Heretical Libertine Horace'),
+asks the public for its applause; for Horace would thereby be induced
+to write a counter-play: which, if they hissed his own 'Satiromastix,'
+would not be the case. By applauding, they would thus, in fact, get
+more sport; for we 'will untrusse him agen, and agen, and agen.'
+
+Shakspere may have been tired of this fruitless pastime, of those
+pitiful squabbles, as appears also from the reproach he makes in
+'Hamlet'to his people. By the '_more noble_ REPREHENSION' which
+he administered to Jonson and his party, he became absorbed in the
+profounder problems concerning mankind. The time of the lighter
+comedies is now past for him. There follow now his grandest
+master-works. Henceforth the poet stands in a relation created by
+himself to his God and to the world.
+
+We proceed to an examination of 'Volpone,' of that play which Jonson
+sent as a counter-thrust after 'Hamlet,' and from which, as regards
+our Hamlet-Montaigne theory, we hope to convince our readers in the
+clearest manner possible.
+
+ 1: Arber's _English Scholars Library_, 1879, shows that this highly
+   interesting drama was for the first time given at Cambridge in
+   1602. If so, the manuscript has unquestionably received additions
+   during the four years before its appearance in print. The fact is,
+   we find in the play certain evident allusions which could not
+   possibly have been added before the years 1603-4; for instance,
+   references to the translators of Montaigne--John Florio, and the
+   friends who aided him;--references which must have been made after
+   the _Essais_ were published.
+
+   In act i. sc. 2, Judicio speaks of the English 'Flores Poetarum,
+   against whom can-quaffing hucksters shoot their pellets.' These
+   '_Flores_ Poetarum' are _Florio_ and his fellow-workers, among whom Ben
+   Jonson is also to be reckoned; and we shall see farther on that the
+   latter abuses these offensive hucksters as 'vernaculous orators,'
+   because they make Montaigne the target of their sneers. Again,
+   in act iv. sc. 2, Furor Poeticus, Ingenioso, and Phantasma indulge
+   in expressions which can only apply to the Dedications and the
+   Sonnets of Florio's translation. Phantasma, for instance, addresses
+   an Ode of Horace to himself:--
+
+     'Maecenas, atavis edite regibus,
+     O et praesidium et dulce decus meum
+     Dii faciant votis vela secunda tuis.'
+
+   The latter line ought to run:--
+
+     Sunt, quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum,
+
+   and if we take into consideration that Juror says in the same
+   scene:--
+
+     And when thy swelling vents amain,
+     Then Pisces be thy sporting chamberlain,
+
+   it is not asserting too much that these are manifest hits at Florio,
+   who, to please his Maecenas, tries with Dr. Diodati, his 'guide-fish'
+   to capture the 'whale' in the 'rocke rough ocean.'
+
+   Florio's way of translating the Latin classic writers into
+   indifferent English rhymes is also repeatedly ridiculed. The
+   latter (Florio, p. 574.) once gives a passage from Plautus
+   (_The Captives_, Prologue, v. 22) correctly enough: 'The Gods,
+   perdye (_pardieu_), doe reckon and racket us men as their
+   tennis balls.' Furor Poeticus, in one of his fits of fine frenzy,
+   accuses Phoebus:--
+
+     The heavens' promoter that doth peep and prey
+     Into the acts of mortal tennis balls.
+
+   This he says after having, in the same highly comic speech,
+   travestied Florio's Dedication of the third book, in which that
+   gallant compares himself to 'Mercury between the radiant orbs of
+   Venus and the Moon'--that is, the two ladies to whom he dedicates
+   the book in question, and before whom he alleges he 'leads a
+   dance.' A further sneer is directed by Furor Poeticus against the
+   lazy manner with which Florio's Muse rises from her nest.
+
+   Additional allusions to dramatic publications from the years
+   1603-4 will be found on pp. 201, 202. Another proof that the play
+   (_The Return from Parnassus_) cannot be of a uniform cast,
+   is this: In act i. sc. 2 a list of the poets is given, that are to
+   be criticised. The list is kept up in proper succession as far as
+   'John Davis.' Then there are variations, and names not contained
+   in that list. These additions mostly refer to dramatic authors,
+   whilst the previous names, as far as 'John Davis,' only refer to
+   lyric poets.
+
+   We believe the intention of the first writer of _The Return
+   from Parnassus_ was only to criticise lyric poets. Moreover,
+   Monius says in the Prologue:--'What is presented here, is an old
+   musty show, that has lain this twelvemonth in the bottom of a
+   coal-house amongst brooms and old shoes.' Our opinion is that
+   _The Return from Parnassus_, after having been acted before
+   a learned public at Cambridge, came into the hands of players
+   who applied the manner in which lyric poets had been criticised
+   in it, to dramatic writers. The authors of the additions must
+   have been friends of Shakspere; for, as we shall find, the enemies
+   of the latter are also theirs.
+
+ 2: Act iv. sc. 3.
+
+ 3: In _The Poetaster_, of which we shall speak farther on.
+
+ 4: According to certain indications in _Satiromastix_,
+   he had an 'ambling' walk, or dancing kind of step. (See _note_
+   28.)
+
+ 5: Collier's _Memoirs of Alleyn_, pp. 50 and 51.
+
+ 6: _Conversations with Drummond_.
+
+ 7: _Satiromastix_, 1602.
+
+ 8: Collier's _Drama_, i. 334.
+
+ 9: _Poetaster_.
+
+10: Compare his Dedication in _Volpone_, of which we shall have
+   more to say.
+
+11: _Drummond's Conversations_.
+
+12: Of all styles, Jonson liked best to be named 'Honest;' and he
+   'hath ane hundred letters so naming him.'--_Conversations with
+   Drummond_.
+
+13: _Life of Dryden_, p. 265.
+
+14: By Aubrey called 'Jack Young.'
+
+15: As if the whole world had made it a point to conspire against
+   Jonson, Gifford laboriously exerts himself to defend him against the
+   numberless attacks of all the previous commentators, critics, and
+   biographers. The endeavour of Gifford to whitewash him seems to me
+   as fruitless a beginning as that of the little innocent represented
+   in a picture as trying to change, with sponge and soap, the African
+   colour of her nurse's face.
+
+16: Jonson's _Eulogy of Shakspere_ was composed seven years after the
+   death of the latter. Having most probably been requested by
+   Heminge and Condell not to withhold his tribute from the departed,
+   to whom both his contemporaries as well as posterity had done homage,
+   Jonson may readily have seized the occasion to do amends for the
+   wrong he had inflicted upon the great poet during his lifetime. A
+   later opinion of Jonson in regard to Shakspere (_Timber; or
+   Discoveries made upon Men and Matter_, 1630-37) is of a more moderate
+   tone, and on some points in contradiction to the words of praise
+   contained in the published poem.
+
+17: _Poetaster_, Apol. Dialogue.
+
+18: This Prologue is not contained in the first edition (1598), but
+   only in the second (1616). It may, therefore, have been written
+   in the meantime. It is supposed that it was so in 1606. (See
+   _Shakspere's Century of Praise_, 1879, pp. 118, 119.)
+
+19: Only a few of the earliest productions of Jonson have come
+   down to us. Some of them are: _Every Man in His Humour_
+   (1598); _Every Man out of His Humour_ (1599); and _Cynthia's
+   Revels_ (1600), all of them full of personal allusions. Many of
+   these are meant against Shakspere. We cannot, however, enter more
+   fully upon that, as we have to confine ourselves to the chief
+   controversy out of which _Hamlet_ arose. Neither on Jonson's
+   nor on Shakspere's part did the controversy cease after the
+   appearance of _Hamlet_. It was still carried on through several
+   dramas, which, however, we leave untouched, as not belonging
+   to our theme.
+
+20: See _note_ 25.
+
+21: In _Satiromastix_ this reproach is made to Ben Jonson:--'Horace
+   did not screw and wriggle himselfe into great Mens famyliarity,
+   impudentlie as thou doost.'
+
+22: Gifford, in his nervous anxiety to parry every reproach
+   against his much-admired, and, in his eyes, blameless Jonson whose
+   quarrelsomeness had from so many parts been properly charged, and
+   particularly desirous of shielding him against the accusation of
+   having taken up an attitude hostile to Shakspere, declares, in
+   contradiction to the opinion of all previous commentators, that
+   _Crispinus_ is to represent John Marston. Since then, Gifford's
+   assertion has been taken for granted, without deeper inquiry. The
+   authority of this fond editor of Jonson has, however, proved an
+   untrustworthy one in many things, especially in matters relating to
+   Shakspere. Thanks to the exertions of more recent inquirers, not a
+   a few things are now seen in a better perspective than Gifford was
+   able to offer. We admit the difficulty of reconstructing facts from
+   productions like _The Poetaster_, which had been dictated by the
+   overwrought feelings of the moment. But in a satire which bred so much
+   'tumult,' which 'could so deeply offend,' and 'stir so many hornets'
+   (four hundred persons out of five hundred being able to point with
+   their fingers, in one instant, at one and the same man), the
+   characters must have been very broadly drawn for general
+   recognition. By such broad traits we must still be guided in our
+   judgment to-day. All the characteristic qualities of Crispinus,
+   which we shall explain farther on, prove that Gifford's idea about
+   Crispinus being John Marston is not tenable.
+
+   This latter poet was very well versed in Greek and Latin, and had a
+   complete classic education. The admonition of Horace to perfect
+   himself in both languages, is therefore not applicable to him.
+   Furthermore, Marston, at the time The Poetaster was composed (this
+   may have been towards the end of the year 1600, or the beginning of
+   1601), had scarcely yet written anything for the stage. Only his
+   _Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image and Certaine Satyres_ (1598),
+   and his _Scourge of Villanie_ (1599) had been published. His first
+   tragedy came out in print in 1602; it may just have been in course
+   of becoming known on the stage. We have no means of ascertaining
+   whether it had already been acted when _The Poetaster_ appeared.
+   This much is however certain, that when this latter satire obtained
+   publicity, Marston's relations to the drama and the stage must yet
+   have been of the most insignificant kind; for Philip Henslowe, in
+   his Diary (pp. 156, 157), expressly speaks of him, even in 1599, as
+   a 'new' poet to whom he had lent, through an intermediary, the sum
+   of forty shillings 'in earneste of a Boocke,' the title of which is
+   not mentioned. Is it, then, conceivable that such a dramatist who
+   in 1601 certainly was yet very insignificant, should have been made
+   the subject, in 1601, in Jonson's _Poetaster_, of the following
+   very characteristic remark--assuming Crispinus to have been
+   intended for Marston?
+
+   Tucca says, in regard to the former, to a poor player (act
+   iii. sc. i):--'If he pen for thee once, thou shalt not need to travel
+   with thy pumps full of gravel any more, after a blind jade and a
+   hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel-heads to an old cracked
+   trumpet.'
+
+   Does this not quite fit Shakspere's popularity and dramatic
+   success?
+
+   Jonson, it is true, tells Drummond that he had written his
+   _Poetaster_ against Marston. (According to his declaration in the
+   'Apologetical Dialogue,' there is nothing personal in the whole
+   _Poetaster!_ 'I can profess I never writt that piece more innocent
+   or empty of offence.') However, we form our judgment in this
+   matter from the clear, well-marked, and indubitably characteristic
+   traits of the play, as well as from the results of modern criticism,
+   which are fully in harmony with those traits. Everything points
+   to the figure of Ovid being a mask for Marston. Jonson perhaps
+   chose the name of Ovid for him because he, too, had written
+   _Metamorphoses_. Besides the before-mentioned _Metamorphosis
+   of Pigmalion's Image_, it is not improbable that Marston is the
+   author of the manuscript preserved in the British Museum:--_The
+   New Metamorphosis; or, A Feaste or Fancie of Poeticall Legendes.
+   The first parte divided into twelve books. Written by I. M.,
+   gent._, 1600. Ovid--Marston--in the _Poetaster_, is described as the
+   younger son of a gentleman of considerable position. He is
+   dependent on a stipend allowed to him by his father. After having
+   absolved his studies, he is to become an advocate, but secretly he
+   devotes his time to poetry. The father warns him that poverty will
+   be his lot if he does not renounce poetry. Ovid senior makes the
+   following reproach to his son (which probably has reference to
+   Marston's first tragedy, _Antonio and Mellida_):--'I hear of a
+   tragedy of yours coming forth for the common players there, called
+   _Medea_. By my household gods, if I come to the acting of it, I'll
+   add one tragic part more than is yet expected to it.... What?
+   shall I have my son a stager now? an enghle for players?... Publius,
+   I will set thee on the funeral pile first!'
+
+   All this harmonises with the few facts we know of Marston's
+   career, who is said to have been the son of a counsellor of the
+   Middle Temple, who was at Corpus Christi College at Oxford,
+   and who was made a _baccalaureus_ there on February 23, 1592. In
+   comparison with Crispinus and Demetrius, Ovid is but mildly
+   chaffed; and this, again, is in accord with the relations which soon
+   after arose, in a very friendly manner, between Jonson and Marston. It
+   is scarcely to be thought that, if Marston had been derided as
+   Crispinus, he would already have composed, as early as 1603, his
+   eulogistic poem on Jonson's _Sejanus_, and dedicated to him in
+   1604, in such hearty words, his own _Malcontent_.
+
+   From some pointed words in the libel composed by Crispinus
+   against Horace, Gifford concludes that the former must be Marston,
+   because we meet with these pointed words in some satires and
+   dramas of Marston. We, on our part, go, in these controversial
+   plays, by the main and most prominent characteristics; and these
+   show that Crispinus is Shakspere, and Ovid Marston.
+
+   The latter even once says (_Scourge of Villanie_, sat. vi.) that
+   many a one, in reading his _Pigmalion_, has compared him to Ovid.
+   In order to make out Crispinus to be guilty before Augustus, strong
+   language is required. For this purpose, Jonson may have used the
+   way and manners of Marston, and applied some of his newly coined
+   graphic words. But this proves nothing for the identity of characters.
+   The libel also contains a pointed word of Shakspere--'retrograde'--an
+   expression little employed by the latter, and which is hurled as a
+   reproach against Parolles, the figure which in all likelihood is
+   to represent Jonson; Helena (act i. sc. 2) says to him, that he was
+   born under Mars, 'when he was retrograde.'
+
+   The remark in _The Return from Parnassus_ that few of the University
+   can pen plays well, smelling too much of that writer Ovid and
+   that writer _Metamorphosis_, has, in our opinion, also reference to
+   John Marston whose first dramatic attempts--although he, like
+   Jonson, may be called a 'University man'--do not admit of any
+   comparison with those of Shakspere.
+
+23: Demetrius repentingly admits that it was from envy he had
+   ill-treated Horace, because 'he kept better company for the most
+   part than I, better men loved him than loved me; and his writings
+   thrived better than mine, and were better liked and graced.'
+
+24: The little word 'clutcht' for a long time 'sticks strangely' in
+   Crispinus' throat; it is only thrown up with the greatest difficulty.
+   In _Hamlet_ (act v. sc. i, in the second verse of the grave-digger's
+   song) we hear, 'Hath claw'd me in his _clutch_. In the original song,
+   which is here travestied, the words are, 'Hath claw'd me with his
+   crouch'.
+
+25: The following allusion in _The Poetaster_ (act iv. sc. 3) also has
+   reference to _Twelfth Night_:--'I have read in a book that to play
+   the fool wisely is high wisdom.' For Viola (act iii. sc. i) says:--
+
+     This fellow 's wise enough to play the fool;
+     And, to do that well, craves a kind of wit...
+     As full of labour as a wise man's art.
+
+   There are several indications in _The Poetaster_ pointing to
+   Shakspere's _Julius Caesar_ which had appeared in the same year
+   (1601). Not only does Horace say to Trebatius that 'great Caesar's
+   wars cannot be fought with words,' but he also corrects Shakspere,
+   who makes Antony (act iii. sc. 2) speak of Caesar's gardens on this
+   side of the Tiber, by putting into the mouth of Horace (act iii.
+   sc. i) the words:--' On the far side of all Tyber yonder.' In this
+   scene, where the two Pyrgi are examined, there are some more
+   allusions to _Julius Caesar_. Even the boy, whose instrument Brutus
+   takes away when he is asleep, is not wanting. In _The Poetaster_
+   it is a drum, instead of a lyre (the drum in _All's Well that Ends
+   Well_). And are the following words of the same scene no satire
+   upon act i. sc. 3 of _Julius Caesar_, where Casca and Cicero meet
+   amidst thunder and lightning?
+
+     2 _Pyrgi_. Where art thou, boy? where is Calipolis?
+     Fight earthquakes in the entrails of the earth,
+     And eastern whirlwinds in the hellish shades;
+     Some foul contagion of the infected heavens
+     Blast all the trees, and in their cursed tops
+     The dismal night-raven and tragic owl
+     Breed and become forerunners of my fall!
+
+   Casca dwells especially on the 'bird of night.'
+
+26: The y, in Pygmalion, seems to us not without cause to be changed
+   by Marston into an i.
+
+27: The number of metaphors used by Shakspere in 'Venus and Adonis,'
+   which Marston travesties, is strikingly large.
+
+28: A few instances may here be given of the coarseness with which
+   Dekker pays back Jonson for his personal allusions. In _The Poetaster_,
+   Crispinus is told that his 'satin-sleeve begins to fret at the rug
+   that is underneath it.' In _Satiromastix_, Tucca cries out against
+   Horace (Jonson):--'Thou never yet fel'st into the hands of sattin.'
+   And again:--'Thou borrowedst a gowne of Roscius the stager, and
+   sentest it home lousie.' Crispinus, in _The Poetaster_, is derided
+   on account of his short legs. In _Satiromastix_, Horace is laughed at
+   for his 'ambling' walk; wherefore he had so badly played mad
+   Jeronimo's part. Jonson is reproached with all his sins: that he
+   had killed a player; that he had not thought it necessary to keep
+   his word to those whom he held to be _heretics_ and _infidels_, and
+   so forth. His face, which, as above mentioned, had scorbutic
+   marks, is stated to be 'like a rotten russet apple when it is
+   bruiz'd'; or, like the cover of a warming-pan, 'full  of oylet-holes.'
+   He is called an 'uglie Pope Bonifacius;' also a 'bricklayer;' and
+   he is asked why, instead of building chimneys and laying down
+   bricks, he makes 'nothing but railes'--'filthy rotten railes'--upon
+   which alone his Muse leans. ('Railes' has a double meaning here:
+   rails for fencing in a house; and gibes.) He is told that his feet
+   stamp as if he had mortar under them--an allusion to his metrics,
+   as well as to his ambling walk.
+
+29: Shakspere was already then the proprietor of a house--New
+   Place, in Stratford. In this scene Horace also asks
+   Crispinus:--'You have much of the mother in you, sir? Your father
+   is dead?' John Shakspere, the father, died in the year when
+   _The Poetaster_ was first performed--in September, 1601.
+
+30: _Twelfth Night_, act iii. sc. 2. _Sir Toby_:--'Let there
+   be gall in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen.'
+
+31: Here Crispinus threatens Horace with the 'purge' (a word
+   that may be used as a noun or a verb), which, in _The Return from
+   Parnassus_, is mentioned as having been administered by Shakspere
+   to Jonson. It is highly probable that the reconciliation between
+   Crispinus and Horace, which is described in the beginning of
+   _Satiromastix_, had taken place between Shakspere and Ben Jonson,
+   and that, during this period of peace, the performance of _Sejanus_
+   occurred, in which Shakspere actively co-operated. After that,
+   traces of hostility only are to be discovered between the two
+   poets.
+
+   Even when Horace, in the 'Satiromastix,' has again broken the peace,
+   the gentle Crispinus says to him:--
+
+     Were thy warpt soule put in a new molde,
+     I'd weare thee as a jewell set in golde.
+
+32: The _Satiromastix_ was performed in 1602, probably in the
+   beginning of the year, as the Epilogue speaks of cold weather, and
+   Dekker scarcely would have waited a year with his answer to _The
+   Poetaster_. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Another decennium had to
+   pass (Shakspere had long since withdrawn to his Stratford) before
+   the taste of Whitehall had been so much lowered that Jonson could
+   become a favourite of the courtly element.
+
+33: In such type it is printed in the original.
+
+34: In _Satiromastix_, Captain Tucca once  bawls out against Horace,
+   'My name's Hamlet Revenge!' as if it had become known already then
+   in the dramatic world that Shakspere was preparing his reply to
+   _The Poetaster_. In the latter play (act iii. sc. I) which was
+   probably added after _The Poetaster_ had already been acted, and
+   Jonson had heard that Dekker was writing his _Satiromastix_),
+   Jonson makes a player from the other side of the Tiber say:--'We
+   have hired him to abuse Horace, and bring him in, in a play, with
+   all his gallants, as Tibullus, Mecaenas, Cornelius Gallus, and the
+   rest....O, it will get us a huge deal of money, Captain, and we have
+   need on't; for this winter has made us all poorer than so many starved
+   snakes. Nobody comes at us, not a gentleman, nor a--'
+
+   In the same scene Tucca utters curses, before that player, against
+   the theatres on the other side of the Tiber. The actor he addresses
+   belongs to one of them. Tucca mentions two theatres by name--'your
+   Globes, and your Triumphs.' He says to the actor:--'Commend me
+   to seven shares and a half.' Shakespere and his colleagues had
+   certain fixed shares in the 'Globe;' and the words of the actor, as
+   regards the poor winter they had, confirm that which Shakspere gives
+   to understand in _Hamlet_, that 'there was, for a while, no money
+   bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the
+   question.'
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+'VOLPONE,' by Ben Jonson.
+
+'EASTWARD HOE,' by Chapman, Ben Jonson, and Marston.
+
+'THE MALCONTENT,' by John Marston.
+
+Ben Jonson's 'Volpone' was first acted in 1605; and on February 11, 1607,
+it appeared in print. [1] It is preceded by a Dedication, in which the
+author dedicates 'both it and himself' to 'the most noble and most
+equal sisters, the two famous Universities,' in grateful acknowledgment
+'for their love and acceptance shown to this Poem in the presentation.'
+
+In this Dedication the most passionate language is used against all
+contemporary poets--especially against those who now, he says, practise
+'in dramatic, as they term it: stage-poetry, nothing but ribaldry,
+profanation,' and 'all licence of offence to God and man.' Their
+petulancy, he continues, 'hath not only rapt me to present indignation,
+but made me studious heretofore;' for by them 'the filth of the time
+is uttered, and with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of
+solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, so racked metaphors,
+with brothelry able to violate the ear of a pagan, and blasphemy to
+turn the blood of a Christian to water.'
+
+Jonson expresses his purpose of standing off from them (the stage-poets)
+'by all his actions.' Solemnly he utters this vow:--'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 form, restore
+her to her primitive habit, feature, and majesty, and render her worthy
+to be embraced and kist of all the great and master-spirits of our
+world.' This object of his--he adds--'may most appear in this my latest
+work ('Volpone'), which you, most learned Arbitresses, have seen, judged,
+and, to my crown, approved; wherein I have laboured for their instruction
+and amendment, to reduce, not only the ancient forms, but manners of the
+scene, the easiness, the propriety, the innocence, and last, the doctrine,
+which is the principal end of poesie, to inform men in the best reason of
+living.'
+
+All contemporary dramatists are most pitilessly condemned by Ben Jonson,
+and the cause of his present indignation is clearly stated: '_A name
+so full of authority, antiquity, and all great mark, is, through their
+insolence, become the lowest scorn of the age_;' moreover, '_my_
+(Jonson's) _fame, and the reputation of divers honest and learned,
+are the question_--that is to say, have been injured.
+
+As in 'Volpone,' wherein Jonson, as he states, 'laboured for their
+(the contemporary poets') instruction and amendment,' we shall find
+most numerous allusions to Shakspere and 'Hamlet,' we feel justified
+in asserting that Jonson's whole fury is, in his 'present indignation,'
+roused against this particular author and against this special drama.
+Therein, as we have shown, a name of authority, antiquity, and all
+great mark--Montaigne--has been tampered with, and, through this
+satire, divers honest and learned (John Florio and his coadjutors
+in the translation--all friends of Jonson) have been injured, as well
+as the latter's own fame. In 'Hamlet,' Shakspere brought his own
+ideal of friendship in the figure of Horatio on the stage, in contrast
+to the Horace of 'The Poetaster.' Jonson was not the man to be edified
+by the beautiful examples and the nobler words of his gentle adversary,
+Shakspere, or to alter his sentiments in accordance with them. He rather
+welcomed every opportunity for a quarrel. That was the element in which
+he lived; for thus he got the materials and the spicy condiments for his
+dramas. Now in 'Hamlet' there were motives enough for lighting up a fire
+of hatred against Shakspere, and to entertain the public therewith.
+
+Jonson, always ready for battle, willingly takes up the pen in their
+defence. In doing so, the favour of a nobleman and of some high-born
+ladies could be earned, at whose wish and request Montaigne had been
+Englished. Besides, every occasion was relished for opposing Shakspere,
+who had attacked Montaigne whose religious creed was the same as that
+of Jonson.
+
+The British Museum possesses a copy of 'Volpone,' on which Jonson has,
+with his own hand, written the words:--'_To his loving father and
+loving freind, Mr. John Florio, the ayde of his Muses: Ben Jonson seals
+this testemony of freindship and love_.' Not the gift of this little
+book, however, but its contents--namely, the attack which Jonson made,
+both for the sake of his friend and for himself, against the great
+antagonist (Shakspere)--must be held to be the token or '_testemony
+of freindship and love_.'
+
+In the very beginning of the Dedication, Jonson says that every author
+ought to be heedful of his fame:--'Never, most equal sisters, had any
+man a wit so presently excellent as that it could raise itself, but
+there must come both matter, occasion, commenders, and favourers to it.
+If this be true, and that the fortune of all writers doth daily prove
+it, it behoves the careful to provide well towards these accidents;
+and, having acquired them, to preserve that part of reputation most
+tenderly, wherein the benefit of a friend is also defended.' He then
+asserts that this is an age in which poetry, and the professors of it,
+are so ill-spoken of on all sides because, in their petulancy, they
+have yet to learn that one cannot be a good poet without first being
+a good man.
+
+In the following passage, curiously enough, a certain person is extolled
+as the model of a good man, against whom the stage dramatists, who
+themselves, according to Jonson, are not good men ('nothing remaining
+with them of the dignity of the poet'), have, as he thinks, grievously
+sinned:--'_He that is said to be able to inform young men to all good
+disciplines, inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in
+their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover
+them to their first strength;_ [2] _that comes forth the interpreter and
+arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human,_ [3]
+_a master in manners; and can alone, or with a few, effect the business
+of mankind:_ [4] _this, I take him, is no subject for pride and ance
+to exercise their railing rhetoric upon._'
+
+In this description we again see Montaigne, against whom 'railing
+rhetoric' has been used.
+
+Ben Jonson proudly points to himself as having never done such mischief:
+'For my particular, I can, and from a most clear conscience, affirm
+that I have ever trembled to think toward the least profaneness.'
+Though--he says--he cannot wholly escape 'from some the imputation of
+sharpness,' he does not feel guilty of having offered insult to anyone,
+'except to a mimic, cheater, bawd, or buffoon.' But--'I would ask of
+these supercilious politics, _what nation, society, or general order_
+of state I have provoked? ... What public person?_ Whether I have not,
+in all these, preserved their dignity, as mine own person, safe? ...
+Where have I been particular? where personal?'
+
+Who does not see in the following words a reproach launched against
+Shakspere, that he has taken his materials from other writers? Who
+does not feel that the warning addressed to 'wise and noble persons'
+has reference to the highly placed protectors of the great rival whose
+favour Ben Jonson, in spite of his Latin and Greek, was not able to
+obtain? He says:--
+
+'Application' (that is, plagiarism) 'is now grown a trade with many;
+and there are that profess to have a key for the decyphering of
+everything: but let wise and noble persons take heed how they be too
+credulous, or give leave to these invading interpreters to be
+over-familiar with their fames, who cunningly, and often, utter
+their own virulent malice under other men's simplest meanings.'
+
+Jonson then approves of those 'severe and wise patriots' who, in order
+to provide against 'the hurts these licentious spirits may do in a State,'
+rather desire to see plays full of 'fools and devils,' and 'those
+antique relics of barbarism' (he means 'Masques,' which he wrote
+with great virtuosoship) acted on the stage, than 'behold the wounds
+of private men, of princes and nations.'
+
+And now we come to the passage, partly already quoted, which more than
+anything else shows that the '_purge_' which 'our fellow Shakspere
+gave him'--'Hamlet'--must have greatly damaged, in the eyes of
+the public, both the reputation of Jonson and of his friends. He
+confesses it in these remarkable words:--
+
+'_I cannot but be serious in a cause of this nature, wherein my fame,
+and the reputation of divers honest and learned are the question; when
+a name so full of authority, antiquity, and all great mark, is, through
+their insolence, become the lowest scorn of the age; and those men
+subject to the petulancy of every vernaculous orator, that were wont
+to be the care of kings and happiest monarchs_.' [5]
+
+Is there a character, we may ask, not only in Shakspere's dramas, but
+in any play of that period, to which the description given by Jonson
+could apply?--of course, Hamlet always excepted, who is but a mask
+for Montaigne. And who else but Montaigne is designated by the
+expressions: 'a name so full of authority, antiquity, and all great
+mark;' 'the care of kings and happiest monarchs?'
+
+That the 'railing rhetoric' in which such a character was derided, could
+not be contained in a satirical poem, but had reference to a drama, is
+proved, as already explained, by the fact of Jonson's wrath being
+directed against the stage-poets. He says expressly, that henceforth,
+by all his actions, he will 'stand off from them.' To the most learned
+authorities, the two Universities, he announces that, by his own regular
+art, he intends giving these wayward disciples of Dramatic Poesy proper
+instruction and amendment. Had his object not been to strike the most
+popular of the stage-poets--Shakspere--he would have been bound to make
+an exception for that name of which everyone must have thought first
+when stage-poets were subjected to reproof. We repeat: Jonson only
+intended measuring himself against him who was the greatest of his time.
+This was fully in accordance with his disputatious inclination. [6]
+
+The person once '_wont to be the care of kings and happiest monarchs_'
+[7] must have been a foreigner, for we do not know of any favourite
+'_full of authority and antiquity_' who enjoyed such high privilege
+from English kings. However, if a dramatist had been bold enough to
+put such a favourite on the stage, he would have met with the most
+severe punishment long before Jonson had pointed out his reprehensible
+audacity. By the '_happiest monarchs_,' Henry III. and Henry IV.
+of France are meant. The latter, at that time, yet stood in the zenith
+of his good fortune. Again, the expression: '_of every vernaculous
+orator_,' points to the circumstance of the mockery being directed
+against a foreigner; and the same may be said of Jonson's question,
+addressed to supercilious politicians, as to what nation, society, or
+general order of State he had provoked? Clearly, another nation, a
+society of different modes of thought than the English one, and foreign
+institutions, are here indicated.
+
+We now come to some hints contained in 'Volpone,' which partly consist
+of an endeavour to expose Shakspere on account of plagiarisms committed
+against other writers, partly of references to irreligious tendencies,
+against which Jonson warns, and which he strives to ridicule.
+
+Under the existing strict laws which forbade religious questions being
+discussed on the stage, the latter references had to be made in parable
+manner, but still not too covertly, so that they might be understood by
+a certain audience--namely, the members of the Universities of Oxford
+and Cambridge. [8]
+
+Already, in the Prologue of his 'Volpone,' Jonson says of himself that--
+
+  In all his poems still hath been this measure,
+  To mix profit with your pleasure.
+
+He also despises certain deceptive tricks of composition:--
+
+  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 Bethlem a faction:
+  Nor made he his play for jests stolen from each table,
+  But makes jests to fit his fable....
+  The laws of time, place, persons he observeth,
+  From no needful rule he swerveth.
+
+In the observance of the technical rules of the classic drama--this
+much Jonson could certainly prove to the world--he was superior to
+Shakspere. The severe words: 'monstrous and forced action,' can only
+refer to a drama written not long before; for, in 'Volpone,' Jonson
+wishes to give to the stage-poets of his time his own ideal of a
+drama. 'Bethlem' (Bedlam) indicates madness round which all kinds of
+lunatics might gather as factionaries or adherents of the kind of
+drama which Jonson wishes to stigmatise.
+
+Do we go too far in thinking that 'Hamlet' is the play which is made
+the target of allusions in this very Prologue?
+
+However, we proceed at once to the Interlude which follows after the
+first scene of the first act of 'Volpone.' In it, Shakspere himself
+is practically put on the stage, by being asked:
+
+  how of late thou hast suffered translation,
+  And shifted thy coat in these days of reformation.
+
+This Interlude is in no connection with the course of
+the dramatic action.
+
+Mosca, a parasite, brings in, for the entertainment of his master
+(Volpone), three merry Jack Andrews. One of them, Androgyno, must be
+held to be SHAKSPERE.
+
+Here we have to note that Francis Meres, a scholar of great repute,
+and M.A. of both Universities, wrote in 1598 a book, entitled 'Palladis
+Tamia,' which in English he calls 'Wit's Treasury.' It contains, so far
+as the sixteenth century is concerned, the most valuable statements
+as regards Shakspere: nay, the only trustworthy ones dating from that
+century. In that work, Meres classifies and criticises the poets of his
+time and country by comparing each of them with some Greek or Roman
+poet, kindred to the corresponding English one in the line of production
+chosen and in quality. Ben Jonson is only mentioned once, at a very modest
+place; his name stands last, after Chapman and Dekker.
+
+Meres confers upon Shakspere most enthusiastic but just praise:--
+
+'As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the
+sweete, wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued
+Shakespeare; witness his 'Venus and Adonis;' his 'Lucrece;' his sugred
+'Sonnets' among his private friends.... As Plautus and Seneca are
+accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy amongst the Latines: so
+Shakspere among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for
+the stage.'
+
+He then mentions twelve of his plays, [9] and thus concludes his
+eulogy:--
+
+'As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue,
+if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak with
+Shakespeare's fine filed phrases if they would speake English.'
+
+The envious Jonson who pledges himself, in the Dedication to the two
+Universities, to give back to Poesy its former majesty, may have
+considered it necessary, before all, to deride, before a learned
+audience, the enthusiastic praise conferred by Francis Meres upon
+Shakspere, as well as Shakspere himself on account of the free
+religious tendencies he had expressed in 'Hamlet' This is done, as
+we said, in the Interlude prepared by Mosca for the entertainment
+of his master. Volpone boasts of the clever manner with which he
+gains riches:--
+
+  I use no trade, no venture;
+  I wound no earth with ploughshares, fat no beasts
+  To feed the shambles; have no mills for iron,
+  Oil, corn, or men, to grind them into powder:
+  ... expose no ships
+  To threatenings of the furrow-faced sea;
+  I turn no monies in the public bank,
+  Nor usure private.
+
+Mosca, in order to flatter his master, continues the speech of the latter
+in the same strain:--
+
+  ... No, sir, nor devour
+  Soft prodigals. You shall have some will swallow
+  A melting heir as glibly as your Dutch
+  Will pills of butter, and ne'er purge for it; [10]
+  Tear forth the fathers of poor families
+  Out of their beds, and coffin them alive
+  In some kind clasping prison, where their bones
+  May be forthcoming, when the flesh is rotten:
+  But your sweet nature doth abhor these courses;
+  You lothe the widow's or the orphan's tears
+  Should wash your pavements, or their piteous cries
+  Ring in the roofs, and beat the air for vengeance.
+
+We have here an allusion to Hamlet, [11] where he asks the Ghost why
+the sepulchre has opened its 'ponderous and marble jaws' to cast him
+up again; also to the Queen and whilom widow; and, furthermore, to
+the orphans, Ophelia and Laertes, and to the tears shed by the latter
+at his sister's death. The cry of vengeance refers to the similar
+utterances of the Ghost, of Hamlet, and of Laertes, who all seek revenge.
+
+Mosca, with a view of preparing for his master a pleasure more suitable
+to his taste than that which a play like 'Hamlet,' we suppose, could
+afford him, brings in the three gamesters:--Nano, a dwarf; Castrone,
+a eunuch; and Androgyne, a hermaphrodite. [12] The latter is meant to
+represent Shakspere; for he is introduced by Nano as a soul coming from
+Apollo, which migrated through Euphorbus and Pythagoras (Meres uses
+these two names in his eulogy of the soul of Shakspere). [13]
+After having recounted several other stages in the migration of Androgyne's
+soul (we shall mention them further on), the latter has to give an
+answer why he has 'shifted his coat in these days of reformation,'
+and why his 'dogmatical silence' has left him. He replies that an
+obstreperous 'Sir Lawyer' had induced him to do so. From this it may
+be concluded that Bacon had some influence on Shakspere's 'Hamlet.'
+Are not, in poetical manner, the same principles advocated in 'Hamlet,'
+which Bacon promoted in science? [14]
+
+After the Hermaphrodite has admitted that he has become 'a good dull
+mule,' [15] he avows that he is now a very strange beast, an ass, an
+actor,a hermaphrodite, and a fool; and that he more especially relishes
+this latter condition of his, for in all other forms, as Jonson makes
+him confess, he has 'proved most distressed.' [16]
+
+Let us now quote from this Interlude some highly-spiced satirical passages.
+
+Nano, the dwarf, coming in with Androgyno and Castrone, asks for room for
+the new gamesters or players, and says to the public:--
+
+  They do bring you neither play, nor university show;
+  And therefore do intreat you that whatsoever they rehearse,
+  May not fare a whit the worse, for the false pace of the verse. [17]
+  If you wonder at this, you will wonder more ere we pass,
+  For know, here [18] is inclosed the soul of Pythagoras, [19]
+  That juggler divine, as hereafter shall follow;
+  Which soul, fast and loose, sir, came first from Apollo.
+
+It is explained how that soul afterwards transmigrated into 'the
+goldy-locked Euphorbus who was killed, in good fashion, at the siege
+of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta;' how it then passed into
+Hermotimus, 'where no sooner it was missing, but with one Pyrrhus
+of Delos [20] it learned to go a-fishing;' [21] how thence it did
+enter the Sophist of Greece, Pythagoras. After having been changed
+into whom,
+
+  she became a philosopher,
+  Crates the cynick, as itself doth relate it: [22]
+  Since kings, knights and beggars, knaves, lords, and fools get it,
+  Besides ox and ass, camel, mule, goat, and brock, [23]
+  In all which it has spoke, as in the cobbler's cock. [24]
+
+
+Nano's present intention, however, is not to refer to such things:--
+
+  But I come not here to discourse of that matter,
+  Or his one, two, or three, or his great oath, BY QUATER, [25]
+  His musics,[26] his trigon, his golden thigh, [27]
+  Or his telling how elements [28] shift: but I
+  Would ask, how of late thou hast suffered translation
+  And shifted thy coat in these days of Reformation.
+
+  _Androgyno_. Like one of the reformed, a fool, as you see,
+  COUNTING ALL OLD DOCTRINE HERESIE.
+
+  _Nano_. But not on thine own forbid meats hast thou ventured.
+
+  _Androgyno_. On fish, when first a Carthusian I entered.[29]
+
+  _Nano_. Why, then thy dogmatical silence hath left thee?
+
+  _Androgyno_. Of that an _obstreperous_ lawyer bereft me.
+
+  _Nano_.  O wonderful change, when sir lawyer forsook thee!
+  For Pythagore's sake, what body then took thee?
+
+  _Androgyno_.  A good dull mule.
+
+  _Nano_.  And how! by that means Thou wert brought to allow of
+  the eating of beans?
+
+  _Androgyno_.  Yes.
+
+  _Nano_.  But from the mule into whom didst thou pass?
+
+  _Androgyno_.  Into a very strange beast, by some writers called
+  an ass;
+  By others, a precise, pure, _illuminate brother_,
+  Of those devour flesh, and sometimes one another;
+  And will drop you forth a libel, or a sanctified lie,
+  Betwixt every spoonful of a Nativity [30] pie.
+
+Nano then admonishes Androgyno to quit that profane nation. Androgyno
+answers that he gladly remains in the shape of a fool and a hermaphrodite.
+To the question of Nano, as to whether he likes remaining a hermaphrodite
+in order to 'vary the delight of each sex,' Androgyno replies:--
+
+  Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken;
+  No 't is your fool wherewith I am so taken,
+  The only one creature that I can called blessed;
+  For all other forms I have proved most distressed.
+
+  _Nano_.  Spoke true, as thou wert in Pythagoras still.
+  This learned opinion we celebrate will,...
+
+With a song, praising fools, the Interlude closes.
+
+In act ii. sc. 2, after Mosca and Volpone have erected a stage upon
+the stage, Volpone enters, disguised as a mountebank, and abuses those
+'ground ciarlatani' (charlatans, impostors) 'who come in lamely, with
+their mouldy tales out of Boccaccio.' Then there is a most clear
+allusion to Hamlet (act iv. sc. 6), where he informs his friend Horatio,
+by letter, of his voyage to England when he was made prisoner by
+pirates, who dealt with him 'like thieves of mercy.' A further remark
+of Volpone on 'base pilferies,' and 'wholesome penance done for it,'
+may be taken as a hit against Hamlet's 'fingering' the packet to 'unseal
+their grand commission;' for which, in Jonson's view, he would be forced
+by his father confessor, in a well-regulated Roman Catholic State, to
+do penance.
+
+This is what Volpone says:--
+
+'No, no, worthy gentlemen; to tell you true, I cannot endure to see
+the rabble of these ground ciarlatani, that ... come in lamely, with
+their mouldy tales out of Boccaccio, like stale Tabarine, the fabulist;
+some of them discoursing their travels; and of their tedious captivity
+[31] in the Turks' galleys, when, indeed, were the truth known, they
+were the Christians' gallies, where very temperately they eat bread
+and drunk water, as a wholesome penance, [32] enjoined them by their
+confessors for base pilferies.'
+
+Shakspere, as we have already explained, got a 'pill' in 'The Poetaster,'
+whereupon 'our fellow Shakespeare,' as is maintained in the 'Return from
+Parnassus,' 'has given him' (Jonson) 'a purge that made him bewray his
+credit' Now Ben, clearly enough, calls this answer of the great
+adversary--a 'finely wrapt-up antimony,' whereby minds 'stopped with
+earthy oppilations,' are purged into another world.
+
+Volpone says:--'These turdy-facy, nasty-paty, lousy-fartical rogues,
+with one poor groat's worth of unprepared antimony, finely wrapt up in
+several scartoccios (covers), [33]  are able, very well, to kill their
+twenty a week, and play; yet these meagre, starved spirits, who have
+stopt the organs of their minds with earthy oppilations, want not their
+favourers among your shrivelled sallad-eating artizans, [34] who are
+overjoyed that they may have their half-pe'rth of physic; though it
+purge them into another world, it makes no matter.'
+
+Jonson then continues his satire against 'Hamlet' by making Volpone,
+disguised as a mountebank, sell medicine which is to render that 'purge'
+('Hamlet') perfectly innocuous. He calls his medicine 'Oglio del Scoto:'
+[35] good for strengthening the nerves; a sovereign remedy against all
+kinds of illnesses; and, 'it stops a dysenteria, immediately.'
+
+Nano praises its miraculous effects in a song:--
+
+  Had old Hippocrates, or Galen,
+  That to their books put med'cines all in,
+  But known this secret, they had never
+  (Of which they will be guilty ever)
+  Been murderers of so much paper,
+  Or wasted many a hurtless taper;
+  No Indian drug had e'er been famed,
+  Tobacco, sassafras not named;
+  Ne yet of guacum one small stick, sir,
+  Nor Raymund Lully's great elixir.
+  Ne had been known the _Danish Gonswart_,
+  Or Paracelsus, with his long sword.
+
+Is not HAMLET here as good as indicated by name?
+
+The Danish Prince appears on the stage in his 'inky cloak.' No doubt,
+Jonson picked up the word 'Gonswart' (_gansch-zwart_, in Flemish)
+among his Flemish, Dutch, and other Nether-German comrades of war in
+the Low  Countries. Surely, the Danish Prince 'All-Black' is none else
+but Hamlet clad in black.
+
+In the same scene, the connection between Hamlet and Ophelia also is
+satirically pulled to pieces. In 'Eastward Hoe' (1605), Jonson and
+his party do the same in the most indecent and most despicable manner.
+
+Nano, praising the sublime virtues of the 'Oglio del Scoto,' sings:--
+
+  Would you live free from all diseases?
+  Do the act your mistress pleases,
+  Yet fright all aches from your bones?
+  Here's a medicine for the nones. [36]
+
+The scene of the action in 'Volpone' is laid in Venice. During the
+whole scene above-mentioned, Sir Politick Would-Be and a youthful
+gentleman-traveller are present Others have already pointed out that,
+by the former, Shakspere is meant. [37] The traveller, Peregrine, is
+a youth whom the jealous Lady Politick once declares to be 'a female
+devil in a male outside,'--again an allusion to Shakspere's 'two
+loves' which he himself describes in Sonnet 144.
+
+The words, also, with which Hamlet (act iii. sc. 3) praises his friend
+Horatio (the Shaksperian ideal of a Horace) are ridiculed by Jonson in
+this scene. Sir Politick Would-Be says to Peregrine:--
+
+  Well, if I could but find one man, one man,
+  To mine own heart, whom I durst trust, I would--
+
+When the stage is raised on the theatre for Volpone, who is disguised
+as a quacksalver, Sir Politick wishes to enlighten Peregrine as to the
+fellows that 'mount the bank.' [38] We need not explain that this is
+directed against the 'so-called stage-poets' and players. It will
+easily be perceived that the meaning of the subsequent conversation
+is the same as in the Preface of 'Volpone,' where Jonson says that
+'wis and noble persons 'ought to' take heed how they be too credulous,
+or give leave to these invading interpreters to be over-familiar with
+their fames.'
+
+Sir Politick (describing the fellows, one of which is to mount the
+bank) says:--
+
+  They are the only knowing men of Europe!
+  Great general scholars, excellent physicians, [39]
+  Most admired statesmen, profest favourites,
+  And Cabinet counsellors to the greatest princes;
+  The only languaged men of all the world!
+
+  _Peregrine_. And I have heard, they are most lewd [40] impostors
+  Made all of terms and shreds, no less beliers
+  Of great men's favours, than their own vile med'cines...
+
+In act iv. sc. 1, Sir Politick gives counsels to the young Peregrine,
+which are a manifest satire upon Polonius' fatherly farewell speech to
+Laertes; and here again, let it be observed, religious tendencies are
+made the subject of persiflage.
+
+  _Sir Politick_. First, for your garb, it must
+  be grave and serious
+  Very reserved and locked; not tell a secret
+  On any terms, not to your father; scarce
+  A fable, but with caution; make sure choice
+  Both of your company and your discourse; beware
+  You never speak a truth--....
+  And then, for your religion, profess none,
+  But wonder at the diversity of all;
+  And, for your part, protest, were there no other
+  But simply the laws o' th' land, you could content you.
+  Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin, both
+  Were of this mind.
+
+In act iii. sc. 2, it is openly said that English authors namely, such
+as understand Italian, have stolen from Pastor Fido 'almost as much as
+from MONTAIGNIÉ' (Montaigne). In vain we have looked for traces of
+Montaigne's Essays in other dramas that have come down to us from that
+epoch. That Shakspere must have been conversant with the Italian tongue,
+Charles Armitage Brown has tried to prove, and according to our opinion
+he has done so successfully. [41]
+
+The talkative Lady Politick wishes to offer some distraction to the
+apparently sick Volpone. She recommends him an Italian book in these
+words:--
+
+    All our English writers,
+    I mean such as are happy in the Italian,
+    Will deign to steal out of this author mainly;
+    Almost as much as from _Montagnié_: [42]
+    He has so modern and facile a vein,
+    Fitting the time, and catching the court-ear! [43]
+
+When Sir Politick (act v. sc. 2) is to be arrested (he is suspected of
+having got up a conspiracy, and betrayed the Republic of Venice to the
+Turks), he asserts his innocence; and when his papers are to be examined,
+he exclaims:--
+
+  Alas, Sir! I have none but notes
+  Drawn out of play-books--
+  And some essays. [44]
+
+Mosca (act i-v. sc. 2), spurring on his counsel, says:--
+
+  Mercury sit upon your thundering tongue,
+  Or the _French Hercules_ [45] and make your language
+  As conquering as his club, to beat along,
+  As with a tempest, flat, our adversaries.
+
+Hamlet, when asked by the King how he 'calls the play, answers:--'_The
+Mouse-trap_.' Mosca calls his own cunningness with which he thinks
+he can overreach his master, the '_Fox-trap_.'
+
+If our intention were not to restrict this treatise to desirable limits,
+many more satirical passages might be pointed out in 'Volpone,' which are
+manifestly directed against 'Hamlet' and Shakspere. Those who take a
+deeper interest in the subject, will discover not a few passages of this
+kind in 'Volpone.'
+
+In 1605--we believe, a few months before 'Volpone' [46]--'Eastward Hoe'
+came out, a comedy written by Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Marston, in which,
+as already stated, the connection between Hamlet and Ophelia is derided
+in a low, burlesque manner.
+
+Shakspere, in order to flagellate Montaigne's mean views about womankind,
+puts into the mouth of Ophelia, when she has no longer the control of her
+tongue, the hideous words:--'Come, my coach!' and 'Oh, how the wheel
+become it!' [47] This is a satirical hit, rapidly indicated, but only
+understood by those who had carefully read Montaigne's book. Ben Jonson,
+Chapman, and Marston try to make capital out of these expressions,
+by deriding and denouncing them to the crowd, in order to defame
+Shakspere.
+
+Girtred (Gertrud, name of Hamlet's mother, the Queen,) is the figure
+under which Ophelia is ridiculed in 'Eastward Hoe.' [48] The first is a
+girl of loosest manners. Her ambition torments her to marry a nobleman,
+in order to obtain a 'coach.' To her mother (Mrs. Touchstone) she
+incessantly speaks words of most shameless indecency, which cannot be
+repeated; more especially as regards her 'coach,' for which she asks
+ever and anon. A lackey, called _Hamlet_, must procure it to her.
+We will give some fragments of that scene. The remainder cannot be offered
+to a modern circle of general readers.
+
+  _Enter_ Hamlet, _a Foote-man, in haste_.
+
+  _Hamlet_. What coachman--my ladye's coach! for shame!
+  Her ladiship's readie to come down.
+
+  _Enter_ Potkinne, _a Tankard-bearer_.
+
+  _Potkinne_. 'Sfoote! Hamlet, are you madde? Whither run
+  you nowe? You should brushe up my olde mistresse!
+
+Thereupon neighbours come together, all impelled by the greatest
+curiosity 'to see her take coach,' and wishing to congratulate her.
+
+  _Gertrud_. Thank you, good people! My coach for the love of
+  Heaven, my coach! In good truth, I shall swoune else.
+
+  _Hamlet_. Coach, coach, my ladye's coach! [_Exit_ Hamlet.
+
+After a little conversation between mother and daughter, which we must
+leave out, Hamlet enters again:
+
+  _Hamlet_. Your coach is coming, madam.
+
+  _Gertrud_. That's well said. Now Heaven! methinks I am eene up
+  to the knees in preferment....
+  But a little higher, but a little higher, but a little higher!
+  There, there, there lyes Cupid's fire!
+
+  _Mrs. Touchstone_. But must this young man (Hamlet), an't
+  please you, madam, run by your coach all the way a foote?
+
+  _Gertrud_. I by my faith, I warrant him; hee gives no other
+  milke, as I have another servant does.
+
+  _Mrs. Touchstone_. Ahlas! 'tis eene pittie meethinks; for God's
+  sake, madam, buy him but a hobbie horse; let the poore youth have
+  something betwixt his legges to ease 'hem. Alas! we must doe as we
+  would be done too.
+
+That is all we dare to quote from this comedy; but it quite suffices
+to characterise the meanness of the warfare which Jonson's clique
+carried on against Shakspere.
+
+However, the lofty ideas contained in 'Hamlet' could not be lowered by
+such an attack; they became the common property of the best and noblest.
+Those ideas were of too high a range, too abstract in their nature, to
+be easily made a sport of before the multitude. A few pleasantries,
+used by Shakespeare in a moment of easy-going style, were laid hold
+of maliciously, and caricatured most indecently, by his antagonists,
+in order to entertain the common crowd there with. Innocent children,
+moreover, were made to act such satires: 'little eyases, that cry
+out on the top of the question, and are most tyrannically clapped
+for't: these are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages.'
+
+Not less than in 'Volpone,' the tendency of 'Hamlet' as regards religious
+questions is, in the most evident manner, ridiculed in John Marston's
+'Malcontent.' Although this satire (so the play is called in the
+preface 'To the Reader') appeared before 'Volpone,' we yet thought
+it more useful first to speak of Jonson's comedy being the work of
+Shakspere's most formidable adversary.
+
+'The Malcontent' was printed in 1604; and soon afterwards (in the same
+year) a second edition appeared, augmented by the author, as well as
+enriched by a few additions from the pen of John Webster. [49] The
+play is preceded by a Latin Dedication to Ben Jonson, which sufficiently
+shows that a close friendship must have existed, at that time, between
+the two. [50] The satire is replete with phrases taken from 'Hamlet'
+for the purpose of mockery; and they are introduced in the loosest,
+most disconnected manner, thus doubly showing the intention
+and purpose. Marston's style is pointedly described in 'The Return
+from Parnassus;' and we do not hesitate to say that the following
+criticism was written in consequence of his 'Malcontent:'--
+
+    Methinks he is a ruffian in his style,
+    Withouten bands or garters' ornament:
+    He quaffs a cup of Frenchman's [51] Helicon,
+    Then roister doister in his oily terms,
+    Cuts, thrusts, and foins at whomsoever he meets...
+    Tut, what cares he for modest close-couch'd terms,
+    Cleanly to gird our looser libertines?...
+    Ay, there is one, that backs a paper steed,
+    And manageth a penknife gallantly,
+    Strikes his poinardo at a button's breadth,
+    Brings the great battering-ram of terms to towns;
+    And, at first volley of his cannon-shot,
+    Batters the walls of the old fusty world.
+
+Who else can be indicated by the 'One' but Shakspere? To Marston's
+hollow creations, which drag the loftiest ideas through the mire to
+amuse the vulgar, the sublime and serious discourses of Shakspere are
+opposed, which are destined to afford profoundest instruction. Is not
+the whole tendency of 'Hamlet' described in the last two lines just
+quoted, in which it is stated that under this poet's attack the
+walls of the _old fusty world_ are battered down? [52]
+
+The chief character in 'The Malcontent' is a Duke of Genoa. Marston,
+in his preface 'To the Reader,' lays stress on the fact of this Duke
+being, not an historical personage, but a creation of fiction, so 'that
+even strangers, in whose State I laid my scene, should not from
+thence draw any disgrace to any, dead or living.' After having
+complained that, in spite of this endeavour of his, there are some
+who have been 'most unadvisedly over-cunning in misinterpreting' him,
+and, 'with subtletie, have maliciously spread ill rumours,' he goes
+on declaring that he desires 'to satisfie every firme spirit, who in
+all his actions proposeth to himself no more ends then God and vertue
+do, whose intentions are alwaies simple.' Those only he means to
+combat 'whose unquiet studies labor innovation, contempt of holy
+policie, reverent comely superioritie and establisht unity.' He fears
+not for the rest of his 'supposed tartnesse; but unto every worthy
+minde it will be approved so generall and honest as may modestly passe
+with the freedome of a satyre.'
+
+That this satire could only be directed against 'Hamlet,' every one
+will be convinced who spends a short hour in reading Marston's
+'Malcontent.' Here, too, we must confine ourselves to pointing out
+only the most important allusions; especially such as refer to
+religion. Indeed, we would have to copy the whole play, in order
+to make it fully clear how much Marston, with his undoubted talent
+for travesty, has succeeded in grotesquely deriding the lofty,
+noble tone of Shakspere's drama.
+
+The chief character in 'The Malcontent' is Malevole, the Duke of
+Genoa before-mentioned, who has been wrongfully deprived of the
+crown. With subtle dissimulation, disguised and unknown, he
+hangs about the Court. Against the ladies especially, whom he
+all holds to be adulteresses, he entertains the greatest mistrust.
+He watches every one; but most closely women. He is the image of
+mental distemper; and Pietro, the ruling Duke, describes him in
+act i. sc. 2 by saying that 'the elements struggle within him; his
+own soule is at variance within her selfe;' he is 'more discontent
+than Lucifer.' In short, he confers upon him all the qualities
+of a 'Hamlet' character.
+
+Whenever religious questions are addressed to Malevole, we have to
+look upon him as the very type of Shakspere himself, whom Marston
+takes to task for his spirit of 'innovation' and his 'contempt of
+holy policie and establisht unity.' Shakspere, it ought to be
+remembered, had scourged Ben Jonson under the figure of Malvolio.
+Marston, who dedicates 'The Malcontent' to Jonson, no doubt wished
+to please Jonson by calling the chief character, which represents
+Shakspere, Malevole.
+
+The play opens with an abominable charivari. ('The vilest out-of-time
+musicke being heard.') This is partly a hit against the Globe Theatre
+where--as we see from Shakspere's dramas--music was often introduced
+in a play; partly it is to indicate the disharmony of Malevole's
+mind.
+
+Only a few travesties may be mentioned here, before we quote the
+treatment of religious questions.
+
+In act i. sc. 7 (here the scene is ridiculed in which Hamlet, with
+drawn sword, stands behind the King), Pietro enters, 'his sword drawne.'
+
+  _Pietro_. A mischiefe fill thy throate, thou fowle-jaw'd slave!
+  Say thy praiers!
+
+  _Mendozo_. I ha forgot um.
+
+  _Pietro_. Thou shall die.
+
+  _Mendozo_. So shall Ihou.  I am heart-mad.
+
+  _Pietro_. I am horne-mad.
+
+  _Mendozo_. Extreme mad.
+
+  _Pietro. Monstrously mad.
+
+  _Mendozo_. Why?
+
+  _Pietro_. Why? thou, thou hast dishonoured my bed.
+
+Hamlet's words: [53]--'O, most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity
+to incestuous sheets!' are so often ridiculed because Shakspere, instead
+of the word 'bed,' uses the more unusual 'sheets.'
+
+Aurelia [54] speaks of 'chaste sheets,' Malevole [55] prophesies that
+'the Dutches (Duke, Doge) sheets will smoke for't ere it be long.'
+Mendozo [56] 'hates all women, waxe-lightes, antique bed-postes,' &c.;
+'also sweete sheetes.' Aurelia, parodying the words Hamlet addresses
+to his mother, asks herself: 'O, judgement, where have been my eyes?
+What bewitched election made me dote on thee? what sorcery made me love
+thee?'
+
+The counsel which Hamlet gives to his mother 'to throw away the worser
+part of her cleft heart,' Pietro ridicules in act i. sc. 7:--
+
+  My bosome and my heart,
+  When nothing helps, cut off the rotten part.
+
+The splendid speech of Hamlet: 'What a piece of work is man!' sounds
+from Mendozo's [57] lips thus:--'In body how delicate; in soule how
+wittie; in discourse how pregnant; in life how warie; in favours how
+juditious; in day how sociable; in night how!--O pleasure unutterable!'
+
+Hamlet's little monologue: [58] 'Tis now the very witching time of night,'
+runs thus with Mendozo:--[59]
+
+  'Tis now about the immodest waste of night;
+  The mother of moist dew with pallide light
+  Spreads gloomie shades about the mummed earth.
+  Sleepe, sleepe, whilst we contrive our mischiefes birth.
+
+Then, parodying Hamlet as he draws forth the dead Polonius from behind
+the arras, Mendozo says:--
+
+  This man Ile (I'll) get inhumde.
+
+Thus, all kinds of Shaksperian incidents and locutions are brought
+forward, wherever they are apt to produce the most comic effect. Several
+times, from the beginning, the 'weasel' is mentioned with which Hamlet
+rallies Polonius. We also hear of the 'sponge which sucks'--a simile
+used by Hamlet (act iv. sc. 3) in regard to Rosencrantz. Nor is the
+'true-penny' forgotten--a word used by Hamlet [60] to designate his
+father's ghost as a true and genuine one; nor the 'Hillo, ho, ho.'
+
+In all these allusions, of which an attentive reader might easily find
+scores, there is no systematic order of thoughts. Only in the religious
+questions we meet with a clear system: they are all addressed to Malevole,
+who is represented as a kind of freethinker, similar to the one whom
+Marston, in his preface, wishes to be outlawed, and of whom he says
+that he fully merits the 'tartness' and freedom of his satire. In the
+very beginning of 'The Malcontent,' Pietro asks Malevole:
+
+  I wonder what religion thou art of?
+
+  _Malevole_. Of a souldiers religion. [61]
+
+  _Pietro_. And what doost thinke makes most infidells now?
+
+  _Malevole_. Sects. Sects! I have seene seeming Pietie change
+  her roabe so oft, that sure none but some arch-divell can shape her
+  pitticoate.
+
+  _Pietro_. O! a religious pllicie.
+
+  _Malevole_. But damnation on a politique religion!
+
+In act ii. sc. 5 we find the following:--
+
+
+   _Malevole_. I meane turne pure Rochelchurchman. [62]
+   I--
+
+   _Mendozo_. Thou Churchman! Why? Why?
+
+   _Malevole_. Because He live lazily, raile upon authoritie,
+   deny Kings supremacy in things indifferent, and be a pope in mine owne
+   parish.
+
+   _Mendozo_. Wherefore doost thou thinke churches were made?
+
+   _Malevole_. To scowre plow-shares. I have seene oxen plow
+   uppe altares: _Et nunc seges ubi Sion fuit_.
+
+Then there is again what appears to be an allusion to Hamlet, act i.
+sc. 4, resembling that in 'Volpone':--
+
+  I have seen the stoned coffins of long-flead Christians burst up
+  and made hogs troughs.
+
+In act iv. sc. 4, Mendozo says to Malevole, whom he wishes to use for
+the murder of a hermit:--
+
+  Yea, provident. Beware an hypocrite!
+  A Church-man once corrupted, Oh avoide!
+  A fellow that makes religion his stawking horse.
+  He breeds a plague. Thou shalt poison him.
+
+From the many hints in 'Volpone' and in 'The Malcontent,' it clearly
+follows that Shakspere was to be represented, in those dramas, before
+the public at large, as an Atheist. [63] According to Jonson, he
+counted 'ALL OLD DOCTRINE HERESIE.' According to Marston, he
+had an aversion for all sects, and 'CONTEMPT OF HOLY POLICIE,
+REVERENT COMELY SUPERIORITIE, AND ESTABLISHT UNITIE.' We hope we
+have convinced our readers that Shakspere spoke in matters of religion
+as clearly as his 'tongue-tied muse' [64] permitted him to do. Above
+all, we think of having successfully proved that the controversy
+of 'Hamlet' is directed against doctrines which assert that there is
+nothing but evil in human nature.
+
+Shakspere's prophetic glance saw the pernicious character of Montaigne's
+inconsistent thoughts, which, unable to place us in sound relation to the
+Universe, only succeed in making men pass their lives in subtle
+reflection and unmanly, sentimental inaction. Shakspere, intending to
+avert the blighting influence of such a philosophy from the best and
+foremost of his country, wrote his 'Hamlet.' As a truly heaven-born
+poet he bound for ever, by Thought's enduring chain,
+
+  All that flows unfixed and undefined
+  In glimmering phantasy before the mind.
+
+In spite of the powerful impression his master-work, 'Hamlet,' has made
+upon all thinking minds, the deepest and most serious meaning of
+Shakspere's warning words could not have been fathomed by the many.
+The parables through which a Prophet spoke were cast into the form of a
+theatrical play, not easy to understand for the mass of men; for
+'tongue-tied' was his Muse by earthly powers. And Shakspere deeply felt
+the disgrace of being compelled to give forth his utterances in so
+dubious a manner.
+
+His Sonnets [65] express the feeling that weighed upon him on this account.
+Had he not 'gor'd his own thoughts,' revealed his innermost soul? Yet,
+now, his narrow-minded fellow-dramatists--but no! not fellow-dramatists:
+mere contemporary playwrights, immeasurably far behind him in rank--eaten
+up, as they were, with envy and jealous malice, meanly derided everything
+sacred to him; holding up his ideals to ridicule before a jeering
+crowd. It has long ago been surmised that Sonnet lxvi. belongs to the
+'Hamlet' period. But now it will be better understood why that sonnet
+speaks of 'a maiden virtue rudely strumpeted; [66] of 'right perfection
+wrongfully disgrac'd, and strength by limping sway disabled;' of 'simple
+truth miscall'd simplicity.'
+
+These are the full words of this mighty sigh of despair:--
+
+  Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry--
+  As, to behold desert a beggar born,
+  And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
+  And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
+  And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
+  And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
+  And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
+  And strength by limping sway disabled,
+  And art made tongue-ty'd by authority,
+  And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
+  And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
+  And captive Good attending captain ill:
+  Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
+  Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
+
+'Purest faith unhappily forsworn' was Shakspere's faith in God--without
+any 'holy policie' and without 'old doctrines'--trusting above all in
+the majesty of ennobled human nature. He was a veritable Humanist,
+the truest and greatest, who ever strove to raise the most essential
+part of human nature, man's soul and mind, yet by no mean supernatural,
+but by 'mean that Nature makes.'
+
+Shakspere's 'Hamlet' appears to us like a solemn admonition to his
+distinguished friends. He showed them, under the guise of that Prince,
+a nobleman without fixed ideal--'virtues which do not go forth' to
+assert themselves, and to do good for the sake of others--noble life
+wasted, letting the world remain 'out of joint' without determined will
+to set it right: this was the poet's prophetic warning.
+
+One aspiration of Shakspere clearly shines through his career, in
+whatever darkness it may otherwise be enveloped--namely, his longing to
+acquire land near the town he was born in. When he had realised this
+ambition, he cheerfully seems to have left the splendour of town life,
+and to have readily renounced all literary fame; for he did not even care
+to collect his own works.
+
+He was contented to cultivate his native soil: a giant Antaeus who, as
+the myth tells us, ever had to touch Mother Earth to regain his strength.
+
+ 1: _Volpone_ is stated to have been first acted in the Globe Theatre
+   in 1605. It is simply impossible that this drama, in its present shape,
+   should have been given in that theatre as long as Shakspere
+   was actively connected with it. We therefore must assume that
+   Shakspere--as Delius holds it to be probable--had at that time
+   already withdrawn to Stratford, or that the biting allusions which
+   are contained in _Volpone_ against the great Master, had been added
+   between 1605 (the year of its first performance) and 1607 (the year
+   of its appearance in print). We consider the latter opinion the
+   likelier one, as we suspect, from allusions in _Epicoene_,
+   that Shakspere, when this play was published, still resided in
+   London. However, it is also probable that in 1605 he may for a
+   while have withdrawn from the stage.
+
+ 2: In this enumeration, Jonson seems to have the various Qualities of the
+   Essays in view which Florio calls 'Morall, Politike, and Millitarie.'
+
+ 3: Against Montaigne, '_the teacher of things divine no less than
+   human_,' Shakspere's whole argumentation in 'Hamlet' is directed.
+
+ 4: Here we have the noble Knight of the Order of St. Michael, as well
+   as the courtier and Mayor of Bordeaux.
+
+ 5: Montaigne was Knight of the Order of St. Michael, and
+   Chamberlain of Henry III. He was on terms of friendship with
+   Henry IV. Both Kings he had as guests in his own house. In his
+   _Essai de Vanitie_, Montaigne also relates with great pride
+   and satisfaction, that during his sojourn at Rome he was made a
+   burgess of that city, 'the most noble that ever was, or ever shall
+   be.'
+
+ 6: In spite of Gifford's protest we do not hesitate to maintain
+   that Jonson's Epigram LVI. (_On Poet-Ape_) is directed against
+   Shakspere, and that the poet whom Jonson--in the Epistle XII.
+   (_Forest_) to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland--abuses, is
+   also none else than Shakspere.
+
+ 7: Montaigne died in 1592.
+
+ 8: We can only quote the most striking points, and must leave it to
+   the reader who takes a deeper interest in the subject, to give his
+   own closer attention to the dramas concerning the controversy.
+
+ 9: _Gentlemen of Verona_; _Comedy of Errors_; _Love's Labour Lost_;
+   _Love's Labour Won_ (probably _All's Well that Ends Well_); _Midsummer
+   Night's Dream_; _Merchant of Venice_. Of Tragedies: _Richard the
+   Second_; _Richard the Third_; _Henry the Fourth_; _King John_; _Titus
+   Andronicus_; _Romeo and Juliet_.
+
+10: As the words that follow seem to contain an allusion to
+   Shakspere's _Hamlet_, it is to be supposed that by the
+   'melting heir' Jonson points to some protector of the great poet.
+   Whether this be William Herbert, or the Earl of Southampton, we
+   must leave undecided.
+
+11: Act i. sc. 4.
+
+12: Jonson probably calls Shakspere an hermaphrodite because,
+   having a wife, he cultivated an intimate friendship at the same time
+   with William Herbert, the later Earl of Pembroke. Jonson's _Epicoene,
+   or The Silent Woman_ (1609) satirises this connection. We are
+   not the first in making this assertion. (See _Sonnets of Shakspere
+   Solved_, by Henry Brown: London, 1876, p. 16.)
+
+   In Epicoene a College is described, which is stated to be
+   composed of women. Instead of women, we may boldly assume men to
+   be meant. Truewitt thus describes the new Society:--
+
+   'A new foundation, Sir, here in the town, of ladies, that call
+   themselves the Collegiates: an order between courtiers and country
+   madams that live from their husbands, and give entertainment to all
+   the wits and braveries of the time, as they call them: cry down, or up,
+   what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion, with most masculine
+   or rather hermaphroditical authority; and every day gain to their
+   College some new probationer.
+
+     _Clerimont_.  Who is the president?
+     _Truewitt_.   The grave and youthful matron, the Lady Haughty.'
+
+   Shakspere at that time was in the 'matronly' age of forty-five.
+   We have seen how a 'dislike in a brain' has been expressed in _Hamlet_.
+
+13: The name of Ovid, likewise used in that eulogy, Jonson assigned,
+   in his _Poetaster_, to Marston. (See _note_ 22 at end of
+   Section V.)
+
+14: It would have been most strange, indeed, if the two greatest
+   geniuses of their time had not exercised some influence on each
+   other; if the greatest thinker of that age had not given some
+   suggestive thoughts to the poet; and if the poet had not animated
+   the thinker to the cultivation of art, inducing him to offer his
+   philosophical thoughts in beautiful garment. Hence Mrs. Henry Pott
+   may have found vestiges of a more perfected and nobler style in
+   Bacon's _Diaries_, on which she founded her wild theory. Had not Kant
+   and Fichte great influence on their contemporary, Schiller? Does
+   not Goethe praise the influence exercised by Spinoza upon him? Let
+   us assume that the latter two had been contemporaries; that they
+   had lived in the same town. Would it not have been extraordinary
+   if they had remained intellectual strangers to each other, instead
+   of drawing mutual advantage from their intercourse? Why should
+   Bacon not have been one of the noblemen who, after the performance
+   of a play, were initiated, in the Mermaid Tavern, into the more
+   hidden meaning of a drama? Is it not rather likely that Bacon
+   drew Shakspere's attention to the inconsistencies of Montaigne?
+
+15: The advocates, in festive processions, made use of mules. Maybe
+   that Jonson calls Shakspere a 'good dull mule' because in _Hamlet_
+   he champions the views of 'Sir Lawyer' Bacon.
+
+16: This notion, that Shakspere has mainly distinguished himself in
+   the comic line--in the representation of Foolery--harmonises
+   with Jonson's opinion, as privately expressed in _Timber; or,
+   Discoveries made upon Men and Matter_ (1630-37), in a noteworthy
+   degree. There he says of Shakspere:--'His wit was in his own power.
+   Would the rule of it had been so, too.'
+
+17: An allusion to Shakspere's unclassical metrics, and his great
+   success among the public, although in Jonson's opinion he brings
+   neither regular 'play nor university show.'
+
+18: In Androgyno, whom he brings in.
+
+19: This is Jonson's answer to the question raised in _Twelfth Night_
+   (act iv. sc. 2), when Malvolio is in prison, in regard to Pythagoras.
+
+20: We can nowhere find any clue to such a personage of antiquity,
+   and we take it to be a reference to Pyrrhon of Elis, the founder
+   of the sceptic school.
+
+21: Bacon was a friend of this sport. Mrs. Pott points out some
+   technical expressions which we find both in Bacon's works and in
+   Shakspere. Perhaps we might stretch our fancy so far as to assume
+   that Bacon is Pyrrhus of Delos, and that gentle Shakspere
+   sometimes went a-fishing with him on the banks of the Thames.
+
+22: 'As itself doth relate it.' Yet the soul does not relate anything,
+   except that it is said to have spoken, in all the characters it
+   assumed, 'as in the cobbler's cock.' We must, therefore, probably
+   look in plays--in Shakspere's dramas--for that which the soul has
+   spoken in its various stages as a king, as a beggar, and so forth.
+
+23: 'Brock' (badger)--a word which Shakspere only uses once;
+   viz. in _Twelfth Night_ (act ii. sc. 5). Sir Toby's whole
+   indignation against Malvolio culminates in the words:--'Marry,
+   hang thee, brock!' We know of Jonson's unseemly bodily figure,
+   his 'ambling' gait, which rendered him unfit for the stage. The
+   pace of a badger would be a very graphic description of his manner
+   of walking. Now, Jonson sneers at the word 'brock' in a way not
+   unfrequent with Shakspere himself, in regard to various words used
+   by Jonson against him. In _The Poetaster_, Tucca falls out
+   against the 'wormwood' comedies, which drag everything on to the
+   stage. We are reminded here of Hamlet's exclamation:--'Wormwood,
+   wormwood!' when the Queen of the Interlude speaks the two lines he
+   had probably intercalated:--
+
+     In second husband let me be accurst!
+     None wed the second but who kill'd the first.
+
+24: 'Cobbler's cock' refers most likely to a drama by Robert
+   Wilson, entitled: _Cobbler's Prophecy_. In Collier's
+   _History of the English Drama_ (iii. pp. 247-8) it is thus
+   described:--
+
+   'It is a mass of absurdity without any leading purpose, but here and
+   there exhibiting glimpses of something better. The scene of the play
+   is laid in Boeotia which is represented to be ruled by a duke, but
+   in a state of confusion and disorganisation.... One of the principal
+   characters is a whimsical Cobbler who, by intermediation of the
+   heathen god Mercury, obtains prophetic power, the chief object
+   of which is to warn the Duke of the impending ruin of his state
+   unless he consents to introduce various reforms, and especially
+   to unite the discordant classes of his subjects.' Jonson may have
+   looked upon _Hamlet_ in this manner from his point of view.
+   It is for us to admire the prophetical spirit of Shakspere who
+   in Montaigne perceived the germ of the helplessly divided nature
+   of modern man.
+
+ 25: 'Or his great oath, by _Quarter_.' No doubt, this is an
+   allusion of Jonson to Shakspere's 'quarter share,' the fourth
+   part of the receipts of his company. The Blackfriars Theatre had
+   sixteen shareholders. It is proved that Shakspere at that time,
+   when a valuation of the theatre was made, had a claim to four
+   parts, each of £233 6s. 8d. (Chr. Armitage Brown, _Shak.
+   Autobiographical Poems_, London, 1838, p. 101). In _The
+   Poetaster_ (act iii. sc. i), Tucca says to Crispinus the
+   Poetaster:--'Thou shall have a quarter share.' In Epistle xii.
+   (_Forest_), which Jonson addresses to Elizabeth, Countess
+   of Rutland, and which, in our opinion, also contains an allusion
+   to Shakspere, as well as to his protector, William Herbert, Ben
+   speaks of poets with 'their quarter face.'
+
+26: Shakspere often introduced music in his dramas. Jonson ridicules
+   this; so did Marston, as we shall see. (_Twelfth Night_, for instance,
+   opens with music.)
+
+27: 'His golden thigh.' The shape of the legs, the 'yellow cross-gartered
+   stockings' of poor Malvolio in _Twelfth Night_ are here ridiculed.
+
+28: Malvolio says to his friends:--'I am not of your element.' In
+   the same play, great sport is made of this word, until the Fool himself
+   at last gets weary of it, when he says (act iii. sc. i):--'You are
+   out of my welkin--I might say _element_, but the word is overworn.'
+
+29: Blackfriars, where Shakspere first acted, was a former cloister.
+   'On fish, when first a Carthusian I entered,' no doubt means that
+   from the beginning he had preferred keeping mute as a fish, in regard
+   to forbidden matters of the Church.
+
+30: I.e., _Christmas_-pie. In the Prologue of _The Return from
+   Parnassus_, this comedy is called a _Christmas Toy_.
+   Shakspere is therein lavishly praised by his brother actors,
+   whereas Jonson is spoken of as 'a bold whoreson, as confident now
+   in making of a book, as he was in times past in laying of a brick.'
+   A veritable libel!
+
+31: _Hamlet_ (act v. sc. 2):--
+
+      Methought, I lay
+      Worse than the mutines in the bilboes
+
+32: Through Jonson's satire we always see the sanctimonious Jesuit
+   peering out.
+
+33: These are the parables in which Hamlet speaks. Many a reader will
+   understand why Shakspere could not use more explicit language.
+
+34: So the envious Jonson calls Shakspere's public who are satisfied with
+   'salad;' that is, with patchy compositions, pieced together from all
+   kinds of material.
+
+35: Jonson had Scottish ancestry.
+
+36: In a moment of fanaticism, Hamlet wishes Ophelia to go to a
+   nunnery. Jonson, in most cynical manner, means to say that
+   Hamlet had been impotent as regards his _innamorata_. Though
+   'for the nones' may be taken as 'for the nonce,' it yet comes close
+   enough to a _double-entendre_--namely, 'for the _nuns_.'
+
+37: _Dramatic versus  Wit Combats_. London, 1864. Ed. John Russell
+   Smith.
+
+38: To mount a bank = mountebank.
+
+39: From one of them poor Ben received a _vile medicine_: a _purge_.
+
+40: 'Lewd'=unlearned.
+
+41: Shakspere's _Autobiographical Poems_.
+
+42: Karl Elze (_Essays on Shakespeare_; London 1874) thinks this passage
+   is intended against Shakespeare's alleged theft committed in the
+   _Tempest_, the composition of which he, therefore, places in the year
+   1604-5, while most critics assign it to a much later period. It must
+   also be mentioned that Karl Elze draws attention to the more friendly
+   words with which Jonson, in his own handwriting, dedicates his _Volpone_
+   to Florio.
+
+   In the opinion of the German critic, it is not difficult to gather from
+   this Dedication the desire of the meanly quarrelsome scholar Jonson
+   to give his friend Florio to understand that, among other things, he
+   would read with considerable satisfaction how he (Jonson) had made short
+   work with this 'Shake-scene' and this 'upstart Crow.'
+
+43: Dekker tells Horace that his--Johnson's--plays are misliked at Court.
+   According to the above-quoted words of Jonson, _Hamlet_ seems to have
+   pleased at Court on its first appearance.
+
+44: The following passage in Jonson's _Epicoene_ is also
+   interesting, though in the play itself it is not made to refer to
+   Montaigne but apparently to Plutarch and Seneca: 'Grave asses! mere
+   essayists: a few loose sentences, and that's all. A man could talk
+   so his whole age. I do utter as good things every hour if they were
+   collected  and observed, as either of them.' May not such words have
+   fallen from Shakspere's lips, in regard to Montaigne, before an
+   intimate circle in the Mermaid Tavern?
+
+45: This may point either to Montaigne or to Dr. Guinne, the
+   fellow-worker of Florio in the translation of the Essays, whom the
+   latter calls 'a monster-quelling Theseus or Hercules.'
+
+46: The reasons which induce us to this opinion are the following:
+   The three authors of _Eastward Hoe_ were arrested on account of a
+   satire contained in this play against the Scots; James I., himself
+   a Scot, having become King of England a year before. The audacious
+   stage-poets were threatened with having their noses and ears cut
+   off. They were presently freed, however; probably through the
+   intervention of some noblemen. Soon afterwards, Jonson was again
+   in prison; and we suspect that this second imprisonment took place
+   in consequence of _Volpone_. We base this view on several incidents.
+   In a letter Jonson addressed in 1605, from his place of confinement,
+   to Lord Salisbury (_Ben Jonson_, edited by Cunningham, vol. i. xlix.),
+   he says that he regrets having once more to apply to his kindness
+   on account of a play, after having scarcely repented 'his first
+   error' (most probably _Eastward Hoe_).' Before I can shew myself
+   grateful in the least for former benefits, I am enforced to provoke
+   your bounties for more.' In this letter, Jonson uses a tone similar
+   to the one which pervades his Dedication of _Volpone_. We therefore
+   believe that both letter and Dedication have reference to one and
+   the same matter. In the letter, Jonson addresses Lord Salisbury in
+   this way:--'My noble lord, they deal not charitably who are witty in
+   another man's work, and utter sometimes their own malicious meanings
+   under our words.' He then continues, protesting that since his first
+   error, which was punished more with his shame than with his bondage,
+   he has only touched at general vice, sparing particular persons. He
+   goes on:--'I beseech your most honourable Lordship, suffer not other
+   men's errors or faults past to be made my crimes; but let me be
+   examined by all my works past and this present; and trust not to
+   Rumour, but my books (for she is an unjust deliverer, both of
+   great and of small actions), whether I have ever (many things I
+   have written private and public) given offence to a nation, to a
+   public order or state, or any person of honour or authority; but
+   have equally laboured to keep their dignity, as my own person,
+   safe.'
+
+   Now, let us compare the following verses from the second Prologue
+   of _Epicoene_ (the plural here becomes the singular):--
+
+     If any yet will, with particular sleight
+     Of application, (Occasioned by some person's impertinent
+     Exceptions.)
+     wrest what he doth write;
+     And that he meant, or him, or her, will say:
+     They make a libel, which he made a play.
+
+   Nor will it be easy to find out who was the cause of _Volpone_ having
+   been persecuted at one time--that is to say, forbidden to be acted
+   on the stage. (Perchance by the 'obstreperous Sir Lawyer' who is
+   mentioned in it?)
+
+   We direct the reader's attention to the eulogistic poems composed
+   by Jonson's friends on _Volpone_. (_Ben Jonson_, by Cunningham, vol.
+   i. pp. civ.-cv.) First there are the extraordinary praises written
+   by those who sign their names in full:--J. DONNE, E. BOLTON, FRANCIS
+   BEAUMONT. Then follow verses, probably composed somewhat later,
+   which are cautiously signed by initials only--D. D., J. C., G. C.,
+   E. S., J. F., T. R. This is not the case with any other eulogistic
+   poems referring to Jonson's dramas. The verses before mentioned,
+   which are only signed by initials, all speak of a 'persecuted fox,
+   or of a fox killed by hounds.'
+
+47: 'Come, my coach!' means: 'I value my honour less than my coach.'
+   The expression, 'O, how the wheel becomes it!' is of such a character
+   that we must refer the reader to Montaigne's Essay III. 11.
+
+48: _Eastward Hoe_< was acted in the Blackfriars Theatre by
+   'The Children of Her Majestie's Revels.'
+
+49: Until now it has been assumed that The Malcontent was acted by
+   Shakspere's Company in the Globe Theatre. This conclusion was
+   based on the title-page of the drama, which runs thus:--
+
+     THE MALCONTENT
+     _Augmented by Marston_
+     _With the Additions played by the Kings_
+     MAIESTIES SERVANTS
+     _Written
+     by_ JOHN WEBSTER.
+
+   It is, however, to be noted that in regard to all other plays of
+   Marston, whenever it is mentioned by whom they were acted (so,
+   for instance, in regard to _The Parasitaster_, the _Dutch Courtesane_,
+   and _Eastward Hoe_), the title is always indicated in this way
+   (designating both the Theatre and the Company):--'As it was plaid
+   in the Black Friars by the Children of her Maiesties Revels.' Again,
+   the mere perusal of the 'Induction' of _The Malcontent_ (not to speak
+   of the drama itself) shows that this play could not have been acted
+   'by the Kings Maiesties servants' during Shakspere's membership. For,
+   in this Induction there appear four actors of Shakspere's company:
+   Sly, Burbadge, Condell, and Lowin. They are brought in to justify
+   themselves why they act a certain play, 'another Company having
+   interest in it.' One of the actors excuses their doing so by saying
+   that, as they themselves have been similarly robbed, they have a
+   clear right to Malevole, the chief character in _The Malcontent_.
+   'Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo _in decimo sexto_
+   with them? They taught us a name for our play: we call it: "_One
+   for Another_."' (That is to say, we give them 'Tit for Tat.')
+
+     _Sly_. What are your additions?
+     _Burbadge_. Sooth, not greatly needefull, only as your
+     sallet (salad) to your greate feast--to entertaine a little more
+     time, and to abridge the not received custome of musicke in our
+     theater. I must leave you, Sir. [_Exit_ Burbadge.
+     _Sinklow_. Doth he play _The Malcontent_?
+     _Condell_. Yes, Sir.
+
+   Our explanation of the Induction is this: Marston has committed
+   satirical trespass upon _Hamlet_. Shakspere, on his part, made
+   use of the chief action and the chief characters of _The Malcontent_
+   in his _Measure for Measure_ ('One for Another'); but he did so in
+   his own nobler manner. From the wildly confused material before
+   him he composed a magnificent drama. Once more, in the very beginning
+   of act i. sc. I, Shakspere makes the Duke utter words, each of which
+   is directed against the inactive nature of Montaigne:--
+
+     Thyself and thy belongings
+     Are not thine own so proper as to waste
+     Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee.
+     ...For if our virtues
+     Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike
+     As if we had them not.
+
+   Shakspere's contemporaries were not over careful as regards
+   style. 'With the additions played by the Kings Maiesties Servants,
+   written by John Webster,' means that the additions, in which
+   the servants of His Majesty, in the 'Induction,' are brought on the
+   stage, were written by John Webster.
+
+   Read the 'Extempore Prologue' which Sly speaks at the conclusion of
+   the Induction--a shameless travesty of the Epilogue in _As You
+   Like It_. Read the beginning of act iii. sc. 2 of _The Malcontent_,
+   where Malevole ('in some freeze gown') burlesques the splendid
+   monologue in King Henry the Fourth (Part 11. act iv. sc. I). Read
+   act iii. sc. 3 of _The Malcontent_, where Marston sneers at the scene
+   in act iv. of _King Richard the Second_ when Richard says:--
+
+     Now is this golden crown like a deep well,
+     That owes two buckets filling one another.
+
+50: Is it imaginable that Shakspere could have allowed his own
+   most beautiful productions to be thus leered at, and mocked,
+   in his own theatre? Our feeling rebels against the thought.
+
+     Beniamini Jonsonio
+     Poetae Elegantissimo Gravissimo
+     Amico Suo Candido et Cordato
+     Johannes Marston, Musarum Alumnus,
+     Asperam Hanc Suam Thaliam DD.
+
+51: Who else can be meant by the 'Frenchman's Helicon' than
+   Montaigne? He is satirically called 'Helicon,' as he is taken down
+   from his height in 'Hamlet.'
+
+52: In meaning alike to Jonson's: 'Counting all old doctrine heresie.'
+
+53: Act i. sc.2.
+
+54: Act iv. sc. 5.
+
+55: Act i. sc. 4.
+
+56: Act i. sc. 7.
+
+57: Act i. sc. 6.
+
+58: Act iii. sc. 2.
+
+59: Act ii. sc. 5.
+
+60: Act i. Sc. 5 in _Hamlet_; _Malcontent_, act iii. sc. 3.
+
+61: Perhaps an allusion to the conclusion of _Hamlet_, when the
+   State falls into the hands of a soldier (Fortinbras).
+   --Soldaten-Religion, keine Religion ('a soldier's religion, no
+   religion'), as the old German saying is.
+
+62: Rochelle-Churchman--that is, Huguenot.
+
+63: See Bacon's Essay, _Of Atheism_: 'All that impugn a received
+   religion or superstition are by the adverse part branded with the
+   name of Atheists.'
+
+64: Sonnet lxvi. lxxxv.
+
+65: xc. xci. xcii.
+
+66: In _Eastward Hoe_, his most delicate poetical production,
+   Ophelia, is most abominably parodied--'rudely strumpeted.'
+
+
+
+
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