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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man Shakespeare, by Frank Harris
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Man Shakespeare
+
+Author: Frank Harris
+
+
+Release Date: October, 2005 [EBook #9079]
+This file was first posted on September 3, 2003
+Last Updated: March 8, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN SHAKESPEARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jon Ingram, Juliet Sutherland and Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN SHAKESPEARE
+
+AND
+
+HIS TRAGIC LIFE STORY
+
+By Frank Harris
+
+
+
+
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY FRIEND, ERNEST BECKETT (NOW LORD GRIMTHORPE),
+A MAN OF MOST EXCELLENT DIFFERENCES, WHO UNITES TO A GENIUS FOR
+PRACTICAL THINGS A PASSIONATE SYMPATHY FOR ALL HIGH ENDEAVOUR IN
+LITERATURE AND ART
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  INTRODUCTION
+
+  BOOK I
+  SHAKESPEARE PAINTED BY HIMSELF
+
+  CHAPTER
+  I. Hamlet: Romeo-Jaques
+  II. Hamlet-Macbeth
+  III. Duke Vincentio-Posthumus
+  IV. Shakespeare's Men of Action: the Bastard,
+  Arthur, and King Richard II
+  V. Shakespeare's Men of Action (_continued_): Hotspur,
+  Prince Henry, and Henry V
+  VI. Shakespeare's Men of Action (_concluded_): King
+  Henry VI. and Richard III
+  VII. Shakespeare as Lyric Poet: “Twelfth Night”
+   VIII. Shakespeare's Humour: “Falstaff”
+
+
+  BOOK II
+
+  I. Shakespeare's early attempts to portray himself
+  and his wife: Biron, Adriana, Valentine
+  II. Shakespeare as Antonio the Merchant
+  III. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part I
+  IV. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part II
+  V. Shakespeare's Love-story: the Sonnets: Part III
+  VI. The First-fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: Brutus
+  VII. Dramas of Revenge and Jealousy: Hamlet
+  VIII. Dramas of Revenge and Jealousy: Othello
+  IX. Dramas of Lust: Part I: Troilus and Cressida
+  X. Dramas of Lust: Part II: Antony and Cleopatra
+  XI. The drama of Madness: Lear
+  XII. The Drama of Despair: Timon of Athens
+  XIII. The Latest Works: All Copies: “Winter's Tale”; “Cymbeline”; “The
+                Tempest”
+   XIV. Shakespeare's Life: Part I
+  XV.  Shakespeare's Life: Part II
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+This book has grown out of a series of articles contributed to “The
+Saturday Review” some ten or twelve years ago. As they appeared they
+were talked of and criticized in the usual way; a minority of readers
+thought “the stuff” interesting; many held that my view of Shakespeare
+was purely arbitrary; others said I had used a concordance to such
+purpose that out of the mass of words I had managed, by virtue of some
+unknown formula, to re-create the character of the man.
+
+The truth is much simpler: I read Shakespeare's plays in boyhood,
+chiefly for the stories; every few years later I was fain to re-read
+them; for as I grew I always found new beauties in them which I had
+formerly missed, and again and again I was lured back by tantalizing
+hints and suggestions of a certain unity underlying the diversity of
+characters. These suggestions gradually became more definite till at
+length, out of the myriad voices in the plays, I began to hear more and
+more insistent the accents of one voice, and out of the crowd of faces,
+began to distinguish more and more clearly the features of the writer;
+for all the world like some lovelorn girl, who, gazing with her soul in
+her eyes, finds in the witch's cauldron the face of the belovèd.
+
+I have tried in this book to trace the way I followed, step by step; for
+I found it effective to rough in the chief features of the man first,
+and afterwards, taking the plays in succession, to show how Shakespeare
+painted himself at full-length not once, but twenty times, at as many
+different periods of his life. This is one reason why he is more
+interesting to us than the greatest men of the past, than Dante even, or
+Homer; for Dante and Homer worked only at their best in the flower of
+manhood. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has painted himself for us in
+his green youth with hardly any knowledge of life or art, and then in
+his eventful maturity, with growing experience and new powers, in
+masterpiece after masterpiece; and at length in his decline with
+weakened grasp and fading colours, so that in him we can study the
+growth and fruiting and decay of the finest spirit that has yet been
+born among men. This tragedy of tragedies, in which “Lear” is only one
+scene--this rise to intensest life and widest vision and fall through
+abysms of despair and madness to exhaustion and death--can be followed
+experience by experience, from Stratford to London and its thirty years
+of passionate living, and then from London to village Stratford again,
+and the eternal shrouding silence.
+
+As soon as this astonishing drama discovered itself to me in its tragic
+completeness I jumped to the conclusion that it must have been set forth
+long ago in detail by Shakespeare's commentators, and so, for the first
+time, I turned to their works. I do not wish to rail at my forerunners
+as Carlyle railed at the historians of Cromwell, or I should talk, as he
+talked, about “libraries of inanities...conceited dilettantism and
+pedantry...prurient stupidity,” and so forth. The fact is, I found all
+this, and worse; I waded through tons of talk to no result. Without a
+single exception the commentators have all missed the man and the story;
+they have turned the poet into a tradesman, and the unimaginable tragedy
+of his life into the commonplace record of a successful tradesman's
+career. Even to explain this astounding misadventure of the host of
+critics is a little difficult. The mistake, of course, arose from the
+fact that his contemporaries told very little about Shakespeare; they
+left his appearance and even the incidents of his life rather vague.
+Being without a guide, and having no clear idea of Shakespeare's
+character, the critics created him in their own image, and, whenever
+they were in doubt, idealized him according to the national type.
+
+Still, there was at least one exception. Some Frenchman, I think it is
+Joubert, says that no great man is born into the world without another
+man being born about the same time, who understands and can interpret
+him, and Shakespeare was of necessity singularly fortunate in his
+interpreter. Ben Jonson was big enough to see him fairly, and to give
+excellent-true testimony concerning him. Jonson's view of Shakespeare is
+astonishingly accurate and trustworthy so far as it goes; even his
+attitude of superiority to Shakespeare is fraught with meaning. Two
+hundred years later, the rising tide of international criticism produced
+two men, Goethe and Coleridge, who also saw Shakespeare, if only by
+glimpses, or rather by divination of kindred genius, recognizing certain
+indubitable traits. Goethe's criticism of “Hamlet” has been vastly
+over-praised; but now and then he used words about Shakespeare which, in
+due course, we shall see were illuminating words, the words of one who
+guessed something of the truth. Coleridge, too, with his curious,
+complex endowment of philosopher and poet, resembled Shakespeare, saw
+him, therefore, by flashes, and might have written greatly about him;
+but, alas, Coleridge, a Puritan born, was brought up in epicene
+hypocrisies, and determined to see Shakespeare--that child of the
+Renascence--as a Puritan, too, and consequently mis-saw him far oftener
+than he saw him; misjudged him hideously, and had no inkling of his
+tragic history.
+
+There is a famous passage in Coleridge's “Essays on Shakespeare” which
+illustrates what I mean. It begins: “In Shakespeare all the elements of
+womanhood are holy”; and goes on to eulogize the instinct of chastity
+which all his women possess, and this in spite of Doll Tearsheet,
+Tamora, Cressida, Goneril, Regan, Cleopatra, the Dark Lady of the
+Sonnets, and many other frail and fascinating figures. Yet whatever
+gleam of light has fallen on Shakespeare since Coleridge's day has come
+chiefly from that dark lantern which he now and then flashed upon the
+master.
+
+In one solitary respect, our latter-day criticism has been successful;
+it has established with very considerable accuracy the chronology of the
+plays, and so the life-story of the poet is set forth in due order for
+those to read who can.
+
+This then is what I found--a host of commentators who saw men as trees
+walking, and mistook plain facts, and among them one authentic witness,
+Jonson, and two interesting though not trustworthy witnesses, Goethe and
+Coleridge--and nothing more in three centuries. The mere fact may well
+give us pause, pointing as it does to a truth which is still
+insufficiently understood. It is the puzzle of criticism, at once the
+despair and wonder of readers, that the greatest men of letters usually
+pass through life without being remarked or understood by their
+contemporaries. The men of Elizabeth's time were more interested in
+Jonson than in Shakespeare, and have told us much more about the younger
+than the greater master; just as Spaniards of the same age were more
+interested in Lope de Vega than in Cervantes, and have left a better
+picture of the second-rate playwright than of the world-poet. Attempting
+to solve this problem Emerson coolly assumed that the men of the
+Elizabethan age were so great that Shakespeare himself walked about
+among them unnoticed as a giant among giants. This reading of the riddle
+is purely transcendental. We know that Shakespeare's worst plays were
+far oftener acted than his best; that “Titus Andronicus” by popular
+favour was more esteemed than “Hamlet.” The majority of contemporary
+poets and critics regarded Shakespeare rather as a singer of “sugred”
+ verses than as a dramatist. The truth is that Shakespeare passed through
+life unnoticed because he was so much greater than his contemporaries
+that they could not see him at all in his true proportions. It was
+Jonson, the nearest to him in greatness, who alone saw him at all fairly
+and appreciated his astonishing genius.
+
+Nothing illustrates more perfectly the unconscious wisdom of the English
+race than the old saying that “a man must be judged by his peers.” One's
+peers, in fact, are the only persons capable of judging one, and the
+truth seems to be that three centuries have only produced three men at
+all capable of judging Shakespeare. The jury is still being collected.
+But from the quality of the first three, and of their praise, it is
+already plain that his place will be among the highest. From various
+indications, too, it looks as if the time for judging him had come:
+“Hamlet” is perhaps his most characteristic creation, and Hamlet, in his
+intellectual unrest, morbid brooding, cynical self-analysis and dislike
+of bloodshed, is much more typical of the nineteenth or twentieth
+century than of the sixteenth. Evidently the time for classifying the
+creator of Hamlet is at hand.
+
+And this work of description and classification should be done as a
+scientist would do it: for criticism itself has at length bent to the
+Time-spirit and become scientific. And just as in science, analysis for
+the moment has yielded pride of place to synthesis, so the critical
+movement in literature has in our time become creative. The chemist, who
+resolves any substance into its elements, is not satisfied till by
+synthesis he can re-create the substance out of its elements: this is
+the final proof that his knowledge is complete. And so we care little or
+nothing to-day for critical analyses or appreciations which are not
+creative presentments of the person. “Paint him for us,” we say, “in his
+habit as he lived, and we will take it that you know something about
+him.”
+
+One of the chief attempts at creative criticism in English literature,
+or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, the only memorable attempt, is
+Carlyle's Cromwell. He has managed to build up the man for us quite
+credibly out of Cromwell's letters and speeches, showing us the
+underlying sincerity and passionate resolution of the great Puritan once
+for all. But unfortunately Carlyle was too romantic an artist, too
+persuaded in his hero-worship to discover for us Cromwell's faults and
+failings. In his book we find nothing of the fanatic who ordered the
+Irish massacres, nothing of the neuropath who lived in hourly dread of
+assassination. Carlyle has painted his subject all in lights, so to
+speak; the shadows are not even indicated, and yet he ought to have
+known that in proportion to the brilliancy of the light the shadows must
+of necessity be dark. It is not for me to point out that this romantic
+painting of great men, like all other make-believes and hypocrisies, has
+its drawbacks and shortcomings: it is enough that it has had its day and
+produced its pictures of giant-heroes and their worshippers for those
+who love such childish toys.
+
+The wonderful age in which we live--this twentieth century with its
+X-rays that enable us to see through the skin and flesh of men, and to
+study the working of their organs and muscles and nerves--has brought a
+new spirit into the world, a spirit of fidelity to fact, and with it a
+new and higher ideal of life and of art, which must of necessity change
+and transform all the conditions of existence, and in time modify the
+almost immutable nature of man. For this new spirit, this love of the
+fact and of truth, this passion for reality will do away with the
+foolish fears and futile hopes which have fretted the childhood of our
+race, and will slowly but surely establish on broad foundations the
+Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the
+change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of
+twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a
+hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless
+fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the
+spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on
+ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to
+statics, like the morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting
+the nature of each individual person. Even now conscience with its
+prohibitions is fading out of life, evolving into a more profound
+consciousness of ourselves and others, with multiplied incitements to
+wise giving. The old religious asceticism with its hatred of the body is
+dead; the servile acceptance of conditions of life and even of natural
+laws is seen to be vicious; it is of the nobility of man to be insatiate
+in desire and to rebel against limiting conditions; it is the property
+of his intelligence to constrain even the laws of nature to the
+attainment of his ideal.
+
+Already we are proud of being students, investigators, servants of
+truth, and we leave the great names of demi-gods and heroes a little
+contemptuously to the men of bygone times. As student-artists we are no
+longer content with the outward presentment and form of men: we want to
+discover the protean vanities, greeds and aspirations of men, and to lay
+bare, as with a scalpel, the hidden motives and springs of action. We
+dream of an art that shall take into account the natural daily decay and
+up-building of cell-life; the wars that go on in the blood; the fevers
+of the brain; the creeping paralysis of nerve-exhaustion; above all, we
+must be able even now from a few bare facts, to re-create a man and make
+him live and love again for the reader, just as the biologist from a few
+scattered bones can reconstruct some prehistoric bird or fish or mammal.
+
+And we student-artists have no desire to paint our subject as better or
+nobler or smaller or meaner than he was in reality; we study his
+limitations as we study his gifts, his virtues with as keen an interest
+as his vices; for it is in some excess of desire, or in some
+extravagance of mentality, that we look for the secret of his
+achievement, just as we begin to wonder when we see hands constantly
+outstretched in pious supplication, whether a foot is not thrust out
+behind in some secret shame, for the biped, man, must keep a balance.
+
+I intend first of all to prove from Shakespeare's works that he has
+painted himself twenty times from youth till age at full length: I shall
+consider and compare these portraits till the outlines of his character
+are clear and certain; afterwards I shall show how his little vanities
+and shames idealized the picture, and so present him as he really was,
+with his imperial intellect and small snobberies; his giant vices and
+paltry self-deceptions; his sweet gentleness and long martyrdom. I
+cannot but think that his portrait will thus gain more in truth than it
+can lose in ideal beauty. Or let me come nearer to my purpose by means
+of a simile. Talking with Sir David Gill one evening on shipboard about
+the fixed stars, he pointed one out which is so distant that we cannot
+measure how far it is away from us and can form no idea of its
+magnitude. “But surely,” I exclaimed, “the great modern telescopes must
+bring the star nearer and magnify it?” “No,” he replied, “no; the best
+instruments make the star clearer to us, but certainly not larger.” This
+is what I wish to do in regard to Shakespeare; make him clearer to men,
+even if I do not make him larger.
+
+And if I were asked why I do this, why I take the trouble to re-create a
+man now three centuries dead, it is first of all, of course, because he
+is worth it--the most complex and passionate personality in the world,
+whether of life or letters--because, too, there are certain lessons
+which the English will learn from Shakespeare more quickly and easily
+than from any living man, and a little because I want to get rid of
+Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all
+that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the
+Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an
+obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man
+of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic
+fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there to be no
+Rembrandt, no Balzac, no greater Tolstoi in English letters? I want to
+liberate Englishmen so far as I can from the tyranny of Shakespeare's
+greatness. For the new time is upon us, with its new knowledge and new
+claims, and we English are all too willing to live in the past, and so
+lose our inherited place as leader of the nations.
+
+The French have profited by their glorious Revolution: they trusted
+reason and have had their reward; no such leap forward has ever been
+made as France made in that one decade, and the effects are still
+potent. In the last hundred years the language of Molière has grown
+fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of
+the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for
+special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may
+deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument,
+while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of
+Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class.
+Divorced from reality, with its activities all fettered in baby-linen,
+our literature has atrophied and dwindled into a babble of nursery
+rhymes, tragedies of Little Marys, tales of Babes in a Wood. The example
+of Shakespeare may yet teach us the value of free speech; he could say
+what he liked as he liked: he was not afraid of the naked truth and the
+naked word, and through his greatness a Low Dutch dialect has become the
+chiefest instrument of civilization, the world-speech of humanity at
+large.
+
+FRANK HARRIS.
+
+LONDON, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE PAINTED BY HIMSELF
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. HAMLET: ROMEO--JAQUES
+
+“As I passed by ... I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE
+UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto
+you.” This work of Paul--the discovery and proclaiming of an unknown
+god--is in every age the main function of the critic.
+
+An unknown god this Shakespeare of ours, whom all are agreed it would be
+well to know, if in any way possible. As to the possibility, however,
+the authorities are at loggerheads. Hallam, “the judicious,” declared
+that it was impossible to learn anything certain about “the man,
+Shakespeare.” Wordsworth, on the other hand (without a nickname to show
+a close connection with the common), held that Shakespeare unlocked his
+heart with the sonnets for key. Browning jeered at this belief, to be in
+turn contradicted by Swinburne. Matthew Arnold gave us in a sonnet “the
+best opinion of his time”:
+
+  “Others abide our question. Thou art free.
+  We ask and ask--Thou smilest and art still,
+  Out-topping knowledge.”
+
+But alas! the best opinion of one generation is in these matters often
+flat unreason to the next, and it may be that in this instance neither
+the opinion of Hallam nor Browning nor Arnold will be allowed to count.
+
+As it is the object of a general to win battles so it is the life-work
+of the artist to show himself to us, and the completeness with which he
+reveals his own individuality is perhaps the best measure of his genius.
+One does this like Montaigne, simply, garrulously, telling us his height
+and make, his tastes and distastes, his loves and fears and habits, till
+gradually the seeming-artless talk brings the man before us, a
+sun-warmed fruit of humanity, with uncouth rind of stiff manners and
+sweet kindly juices, not perfect in any way, shrivelled on this side by
+early frost-bite, and on that softened to corruption through too much
+heat, marred here by the bitter-black cicatrice of an ancient injury and
+there fortune-spotted, but on the whole healthy, grateful, of a most
+pleasant ripeness. Another, like Shakespeare, with passionate
+conflicting sympathies and curious impartial intellect cannot discover
+himself so simply; needs, like the diamond, many facets to show all the
+light in him, and so proceeds to cut them one after the other as
+Falstaff or Hamlet, to the dazzling of the purblind.
+
+Yet Shakespeare's purpose is surely the same as Montaigne's, to reveal
+himself to us, and it would be hasty to decide that his skill is
+inferior. For while Montaigne had nothing but prose at his command, and
+not too rich a prose, as he himself complains, Shakespeare in magic of
+expression has had no equal in recorded time, and he used the lyric as
+well as the dramatic form, poetry as well as prose, to give his soul
+utterance.
+
+We are doing Shakespeare wrong by trying to believe that he hides
+himself behind his work; the suspicion is as unworthy as the old
+suspicion dissipated by Carlyle that Cromwell was an ambitious
+hypocrite. Sincerity is the birthmark of genius, and we can be sure that
+Shakespeare has depicted himself for us with singular fidelity; we can
+see him in his works, if we will take the trouble, “in his habit as he
+lived.”
+
+We are doing ourselves wrong, too, by pretending that Shakespeare
+“out-tops knowledge.” He did not fill the world even in his own time:
+there was room beside him in the days of Elizabeth for Marlowe and
+Spenser, Ben Jonson and Bacon, and since then the spiritual outlook,
+like the material outlook, has widened to infinity. There is space in
+life now for a dozen ideals undreamed-of in the sixteenth century. Let
+us have done with this pretence of doglike humility; we, too, are men,
+and there is on earth no higher title, and in the universe nothing
+beyond our comprehending. It will be well for us to know Shakespeare and
+all his high qualities and do him reverence; it will be well for us,
+too, to see his limitations and his faults, for after all it is the
+human frailties in a man that call forth our sympathy and endear him to
+us, and without love there is no virtue in worship, no attraction in
+example.
+
+The doubt as to the personality of Shakespeare, and the subsequent
+confusion and contradictions are in the main, I think, due to Coleridge.
+He was the first modern critic to have glimpses of the real Shakespeare,
+and the vision lent his words a singular authority. But Coleridge was a
+hero-worshipper by nature and carried reverence to lyric heights. He
+used all his powers to persuade men that Shakespeare was [Greek:
+_myrionous anaer_]--“the myriad-minded man”; a sort of demi-god who
+was every one and no one, a Proteus without individuality of his own.
+The theory has held the field for nearly a century, probably because it
+flatters our national vanity; for in itself it is fantastically absurd
+and leads to most ridiculous conclusions. For instance, when Coleridge
+had to deal with the fact that Shakespeare never drew a miser, instead
+of accepting the omission as characteristic, for it is confirmed by Ben
+Jonson's testimony that he was “of an open and free nature,” Coleridge
+proceeded to argue that avarice is not a permanent passion in humanity,
+and that Shakespeare probably for that reason chose to leave it
+undescribed. This is an example of the ecstasy of hero-worship; it is
+begging the question to assume that whatever Shakespeare did was
+perfect; humanity cannot be penned up even in Shakespeare's brain. Like
+every other man of genius Shakespeare must have shown himself in his
+qualities and defects, in his preferences and prejudices; “a fallible
+being,” as stout old Dr. Johnson knew, “will fail somewhere.”
+
+Even had Shakespeare tried to hide himself in his work, he could not
+have succeeded. Now that the print of a man's hand or foot or ear is
+enough to distinguish him from all other men, it is impossible to
+believe that the mask of his mind, the very imprint, form and pressure
+of his soul should be less distinctive. Just as Monsieur Bertillon's
+whorl-pictures of a thumb afford overwhelming proofs of a man's
+identity, so it is possible from Shakespeare's writings to establish
+beyond doubt the main features of his character and the chief incidents
+of his life. The time for random assertion about Shakespeare and
+unlimited eulogy of him has passed away for ever: the object of this
+inquiry is to show him as he lived and loved and suffered, and the
+proofs of this and of that trait shall be so heaped up as to stifle
+doubt and reach absolute conviction. For not only is the circumstantial
+evidence overwhelming and conclusive, but we have also the testimony of
+eye-witnesses with which to confirm it, and one of these witnesses, Ben
+Jonson, is of rare credibility and singularly well equipped.
+
+Let us begin, then, by treating Shakespeare as we would treat any other
+writer, and ask simply how a dramatic author is most apt to reveal
+himself. A great dramatist may not paint himself for us at any time in
+his career with all his faults and vices; but when he goes deepest into
+human nature, we may be sure that self-knowledge is his guide; as Hamlet
+said, “To know a man well, were to know himself” (oneself), so far
+justifying the paradox that dramatic writing is merely a form of
+autobiography. We may take then as a guide this first criterion that, in
+his masterpiece of psychology, the dramatist will reveal most of his own
+nature.
+
+If a dozen lovers of Shakespeare were asked to name the most profound
+and most complex character in all his dramas it is probable that every
+one without hesitation would answer Hamlet. The current of cultivated
+opinion has long set in this direction. With the intuition of a kindred
+genius, Goethe was the first to put Hamlet on a pedestal: “the
+incomparable,” he called him, and devoted pages to an analysis of the
+character. Coleridge followed with the confession whose truth we
+shall see later: “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.” But
+even if it be admitted that Hamlet is the most complex and profound of
+Shakespeare's creations, and therefore probably the character in which
+Shakespeare revealed most of himself, the question of degree still
+remains to be determined. Is it possible to show certainly that even the
+broad outlines of Hamlet's character are those of the master-poet?
+
+There are various ways in which this might be proved. For instance, if
+one could show that whenever Shakespeare fell out of a character he was
+drawing, he unconsciously dropped into the Hamlet vein, one's suspicion
+as to the identity of Hamlet and the poet would be enormously
+strengthened. There is another piece of evidence still more convincing.
+Suppose that Shakespeare in painting another character did nothing but
+paint Hamlet over again trait by trait--virtue by virtue, fault by
+fault--our assurance would be almost complete; for a dramatist only
+makes this mistake when he is speaking unconsciously in his proper
+person. But if both these kinds of proof were forthcoming, and not once
+but a dozen times, then surely our conviction as to the essential
+identity of Hamlet and Shakespeare would amount to practical certitude.
+
+Of course it would be foolish, even in this event, to pretend that
+Hamlet exhausts Shakespeare; art does little more than embroider the
+fringe of the garment of life, and the most complex character in drama
+or even in fiction is simple indeed when compared with even the simplest
+of living men or women. Shakespeare included in himself Falstaff and
+Cleopatra, beside the author of the sonnets, and knowledge drawn from
+all these must be used to fill out and perhaps to modify the outlines
+given in Hamlet before one can feel sure that the portrait is a
+re-presentment of reality. But when this study is completed, it will be
+seen that with many necessary limitations, Hamlet is indeed a revelation
+of some of the most characteristic traits of Shakespeare.
+
+To come to the point quickly, I will take Hamlet's character as analyzed
+by Coleridge and Professor Dowden.
+
+Coleridge says: “Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting
+and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage,
+skill, will or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking: and it
+is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all
+the play seems reason itself, should be impelled at last by mere
+accident to effect his object.” Again he says: “in Hamlet we see a
+great, an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate
+aversion to real action consequent upon it.”
+
+Professor Dowden's analysis is more careful but hardly as complete. He
+calls Hamlet “the meditative son” of a strong-willed father, and adds,
+“he has slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter of the
+university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on
+the things of life and death who has never formed a resolution or
+executed a deed. This long course of thinking apart from action has
+destroyed Hamlet's very capacity for belief.... In presence of the
+spirit he is himself 'a spirit,' and believes in the immortality of the
+soul. When left to his private thoughts he wavers uncertainly to and
+fro; death is a sleep; a sleep, it may be, troubled with dreams.... He
+is incapable of certitude.... After his fashion (that of one who
+relieves himself by speech rather than by deeds) he unpacks his heart in
+words.”
+
+Now what other personage is there in Shakespeare who shows these traits
+or some of them? He should be bookish and irresolute, a lover of thought
+and not of action, of melancholy temper too, and prone to unpack his
+heart with words. Almost every one who has followed the argument thus
+far will be inclined to think of Romeo. Hazlitt declared that “Romeo is
+Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and
+sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the
+other. Both are absent and self-involved; both live out of themselves in
+a world of imagination.” Much of this is true and affords a noteworthy
+example of Hazlitt's occasional insight into character, yet for reasons
+that will appear later it is not possible to insist, as Hazlitt does,
+upon the identity of Romeo and Hamlet. The most that can be said is that
+Romeo is a younger brother of Hamlet, whose character is much less
+mature and less complex than that of the student-prince. Moreover, the
+characterization in Romeo--the mere drawing and painting--is very
+inferior to that put to use in Hamlet. Romeo is half hidden from us in
+the rose-mist of passion, and after he is banished from Juliet's arms we
+only see him for a moment as he rushes madly by into never-ending night,
+and all the while Shakespeare is thinking more of the poetry of the
+theme than of his hero's character. Romeo is crude and immature when
+compared with a profound psychological study like Hamlet. In “Hamlet”
+ the action often stands still while incidents are invented for the
+mere purpose of displaying the peculiarities of the protagonist. “Hamlet,”
+ too, is the longest of Shakespeare's plays with the exception of “Antony
+and Cleopatra,” and “the total length of Hamlet's speeches,” says
+Dryasdust, “far exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any
+other of his characters.” The important point, however, is that Romeo
+has a more than family likeness to Hamlet. Even in the heat and heyday
+of his passion Romeo plays thinker; Juliet says, “Good-night” and
+disappears, but he finds time to give us the abstract truth:
+
+  “Love goes towards love, as schoolboys from their books,
+  But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.”
+
+Juliet appears again unexpectedly, and again Hamlet's generalizing habit
+asserts itself in Romeo:
+
+  “How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
+  Like softest music to attending ears.”
+
+We may be certain that Juliet would have preferred more pointed praise.
+He is indeed so lost in his ill-timed reverie that Juliet has to call
+him again and again by name before he attends to her.
+
+Romeo has Hamlet's peculiar habit of talking to himself. He falls into a
+soliloquy on his way to Juliet in Capulet's orchard, when his heart must
+have been beating so loudly that it would have prevented him from
+hearing himself talk, and into another when hurrying to the apothecary.
+In this latter monologue, too, when all his thoughts must have been of
+Juliet and their star-crossed fates, and love-devouring Death, he is
+able to picture for us the apothecary and his shop with a wealth of
+detail that says more for Shakespeare's painstaking and memory than for
+his insight into character. The fault, however, is not so grave as it
+would be if Romeo were a different kind of man; but like Hamlet he is
+always ready to unpack his heart with words, and if they are not the
+best words sometimes, sometimes even very inappropriate words, it only
+shows that in his first tragedy Shakespeare was not the master of his
+art that he afterwards became.
+
+In the churchyard scene of the fifth act Romeo's likeness to Hamlet
+comes into clearest light.
+
+Hamlet says to Laertes:
+
+  “I pr'ythee, take thy fingers from my throat;
+  For though I am not splenitive and rash
+  Yet have I something in me dangerous
+  Which let thy wisdom fear.”
+
+In precisely the same temper, Romeo says to Paris:
+
+  “Good, gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man;
+  Fly hence and leave me; think upon these gone,
+  Let them affright thee.”
+
+This magnanimity is so rare that its existence would almost of itself be
+sufficient to establish a close relationship between Romeo and Hamlet.
+Romeo's last speech, too, is characteristic of Hamlet: on the very
+threshold of death he generalizes:
+
+  “How oft when men are at the point of death,
+  Have they been merry? which their keepers call
+  A lightening before death.”
+
+There is in Romeo, too, that peculiar mixture of pensive sadness and
+loving sympathy which is the very vesture of Hamlet's soul; he says to
+“Noble County Paris”:
+
+    “O, give me thy hand,
+  One writ with me in sour misfortune's book.”
+
+And finally Shakespeare's supreme lyrical gift is used by Romeo as
+unconstrainedly as by Hamlet himself. The beauty in the last soliloquy
+is of passion rather than of intellect, but in sheer triumphant beauty
+some lines of it have never been surpassed:
+
+    “Here, here will I remain
+  With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here
+  Will I set up my everlasting rest
+  And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
+  From this world-wearied flesh.”
+
+The whole soliloquy and especially the superb epithet “world-wearied”
+ are at least as suitable to Hamlet as to Romeo. Passion, it is true, is
+more accentuated in Romeo, just as there is greater irresolution
+combined with intenser self-consciousness in Hamlet, yet all the
+qualities of the youthful lover are to be found in the student-prince.
+Hamlet is evidently the later finished picture of which Romeo was merely
+the charming sketch. Hamlet says he is revengeful and ambitious,
+although he is nothing of the kind, and in much the same way Romeo says:
+
+  “I'll be a candle-holder and look on,”
+
+whereas he plays the chief part and a very active part in the drama. If
+he were more of a “candle-holder” and onlooker, he would more resemble
+Hamlet. Then too, though he generalizes, he does not search the darkness
+with aching eyeballs as Hamlet does; the problems of life do not as yet
+lie heavy on his soul; he is too young to have felt their mystery and
+terror; he is only just within the shadow of that melancholy which to
+Hamlet discolours the world.
+
+Seven or eight years after writing “Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare
+growing conscious of these changes in his own temperament embodied them
+in another character, the melancholy “Jaques” in “As You Like It.” Every
+one knows that Jaques is Shakespeare's creation; he is not to be found
+in Lodge's “Rosalynde,” whence Shakespeare took the story and most of
+the characters of his play. Jaques is only sketched in with light
+strokes, but all his traits are peculiarly Hamlet's traits. For Jaques
+is a melancholy student of life as Hamlet is, with lightning-quick
+intelligence and heavy heart, and these are the Hamlet qualities which
+were not brought into prominence in the youthful Romeo. Passages taken
+at haphazard will suffice to establish my contention. “Motley's the only
+wear,” says Jaques, as if longing to assume the cap and bells, and
+Hamlet plays the fool's part with little better reason. Jaques exclaims:
+
+                           “Give me leave
+  To speak my mind, and I will through and through
+  Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
+  If they will patiently receive my medicine.”
+
+And Hamlet cries:
+
+  “The Time is out of joint; O cursèd spite
+  That ever I was born to set it right.”
+
+The famous speech of Jaques, “All the world's a stage,” might have been
+said by Hamlet, indeed belongs of right to the person who gave the
+exquisite counsel to the players. Jaques' confession of melancholy, too,
+both in manner and matter is characteristic of Hamlet. How often
+Shakespeare must have thought it over before he was able to bring the
+peculiar nature of his own malady into such relief:
+
+“I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the
+musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud;
+nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is
+politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all
+these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,
+extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contemplation of my
+travels; which, by often rumination, wraps me in, a most humourous
+sadness.”
+
+This “humourous sadness,” the child of contemplation, was indeed
+Shakespeare's most constant mood. Jaques, too, loves solitude and the
+country as Hamlet loved them--and above all the last trait recorded of
+Jaques, his eagerness to see the reformed Duke and learn from the
+convert, is a perfect example of that intellectual curiosity which is
+one of Hamlet's most attaching characteristics. Yet another trait is
+attributed to Jaques, which we must on no account forget. The Duke
+accuses him of lewdness though lewdness seems out of place in Jaques's
+character, and is certainly not shown in the course of the action. If we
+combine the characters of Romeo, the poet-lover, and Jaques, the
+pensive-sad philosopher, we have almost the complete Hamlet.
+
+It is conceivable that even a fair-minded reader of the plays will admit
+all I have urged about the likeness of Romeo and Jaques to Hamlet
+without concluding that these preliminary studies, so to speak, for the
+great portrait render it at all certain that the masterpiece of
+portraiture is a likeness of Shakespeare himself. The impartial critic
+will probably say, “You have raised a suspicion in my mind; a strong
+suspicion it may be, but still a suspicion that is far from certitude.”
+ Fortunately the evidence still to be offered is a thousand times more
+convincing than any inferences that can properly be drawn from Romeo or
+from Jaques, or even from both together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. HAMLET--MACBETH
+
+There is a later drama of Shakespeare's, a drama which comes between
+“Othello” and “Lear,” and belongs, therefore, to the topmost height of
+the poet's achievement, whose principal character is Hamlet, Hamlet over
+again, with every peculiarity and every fault; a Hamlet, too, entangled
+in an action which is utterly unsuited to his nature. Surely if this
+statement can be proved, it will be admitted by all competent judges
+that the identity of Hamlet and his creator has been established. For
+Shakespeare must have painted this second Hamlet unconsciously. Think of
+it. In totally new circumstances the poet speaks with Hamlet's voice in
+Hamlet's words. The only possible explanation is that he is speaking
+from his own heart, and for that reason is unaware of the mistake. The
+drama I refer to is “Macbeth.” No one, so far as I know, has yet thought
+of showing that there is any likeness between the character of Hamlet
+and that of Macbeth, much less identity; nevertheless, it seems to me
+easy to prove that Macbeth, “the rugged Macbeth,” as Hazlitt and Brandes
+call him, is merely our gentle irresolute, humanist, philosopher Hamlet
+masquerading in galligaskins as a Scottish thane.
+
+Let us take the first appearance of Macbeth, and we are forced to remark
+at once that he acts and speaks exactly as Hamlet in like circumstances
+would act and speak. The honest but slow Banquo is amazed when Macbeth
+starts and seems to fear the fair promises of the witches; he does not
+see what the nimble Hamlet-intellect has seen in a flash--the dread
+means by which alone the promises can be brought to fulfilment. As soon
+as Macbeth is hailed “Thane of Cawdor” Banquo warns him, but Macbeth, in
+spite of the presence of others, falls at once, as Hamlet surely would
+have fallen, into a soliloquy: a thing, considering the circumstances,
+most false to general human nature, for what he says must excite
+Banquo's suspicion, and is only true to the Hamlet-mind, that in and out
+of season loses itself in meditation. The soliloquy, too, is startlingly
+characteristic of Hamlet. After giving expression to the merely natural
+uplifting of his hope, Macbeth begins to weigh the for and against like
+a student-thinker:
+
+  “This supernatural soliciting
+  Cannot be ill; cannot be good; if ill,
+  Why hath it given me earnest of success,
+  Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor:
+  If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
+  Whose horrid image ...
+                           ... function
+  Is smothered in surmise and nothing is
+  But what is not,----”
+
+When Banquo draws attention to him as “rapt,” Macbeth still goes on
+talking to himself, for at length he has found arguments against action:
+
+  “If chance will have me King, why chance may crown me,
+  Without my stir,”--
+
+all in the true Hamlet vein. At the end of the act, Macbeth when
+excusing himself to his companions becomes the student of Wittenberg in
+proper person. The courteous kindliness of the words is almost as
+characteristic as the bookish illustration:
+
+      “Kind gentlemen, your pains
+  Are registered where every day I turn
+  The leaf to read them.”
+
+If this is not Hamlet's very tone, manner and phrase, then individuality
+of nature has no peculiar voice.
+
+I have laid such stress upon this, the first scene in which Macbeth
+appears, because the first appearance is by far the most important for
+the purpose of establishing the main outlines of a character; first
+impressions in a drama being exceedingly difficult to modify and almost
+impossible to change.
+
+Macbeth, however, acts Hamlet from one end of the play to the other; and
+Lady Macbeth's first appearance (a personage almost as important to the
+drama as Macbeth himself) is used by Shakespeare to confirm this view of
+Macbeth's character. After reading her husband's letter almost her first
+words are:
+
+      “Yet do I fear thy nature.
+  It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
+  To catch the nearest way.”
+
+What is this but a more perfect expression of Hamlet's nature than
+Hamlet himself gives? Hamlet declares bitterly that he is “pigeon
+livered,” and lacks “gall to make oppression bitter”; he says to
+Laertes, “I loved you ever,” and to his mother:
+
+  “I must be cruel only to be kind,”
+
+and she tells the King that he wept for Polonius' death. But the best
+phrase for his gentle-heartedness is what Lady Macbeth gives here: he is
+“too full o' the milk of human kindness.” The words are as true of the
+Scottish chieftain as of the Wittenberg student; in heart they are one
+and the same person.
+
+Though excited to action by his wife, Macbeth's last words in this scene
+are to postpone decision. “We will speak further,” he says, whereupon
+the woman takes the lead, warns him to dissemble, and adds, “leave all
+the rest to me.” Macbeth's doubting, irresolution, and dislike of action
+could hardly be more forcibly portrayed.
+
+The seventh scene of the first act begins with another long soliloquy by
+Macbeth, and this soliloquy shows us not only Hamlet's irresolution and
+untimely love of meditation, but also the peculiar pendulum-swing of
+Hamlet's thought:
+
+  “If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
+  It were done quickly: if the assassination
+  Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
+  With his surcease success: that but this blow
+  Might be the be-all and the end-all; here,
+  But here upon this bank and shoal of time
+  We'd jump the life to come. . . . .”
+
+Is not this the same soul which also in a soliloquy questions
+fate?--“Whether 'tis better in the mind....”
+
+Macbeth, too, has Hamlet's peculiar and exquisite intellectual
+fairness--a quality, be it remarked in passing, seldom found in a
+ruthless murderer. He sees even the King's good points:
+
+    ...... “this Duncan
+  Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
+  So clear in his great office, that his virtues
+  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
+  The deep damnation of his taking off.”
+
+Is it not like Hamlet to be able to condemn himself in this way
+beforehand? Macbeth ends this soliloquy with words which come from the
+inmost of Hamlet's heart:
+
+    “I have no spur
+  To prick the sides of my intent, but only
+  Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
+  And falls on the other.”
+
+Hamlet, too, has no spur to prick the sides of his intent, and Hamlet,
+too, would be sure to see how apt ambition is to overleap itself, and so
+would blunt the sting of the desire. This monologue alone should have
+been sufficient to reveal to all critics the essential identity of
+Hamlet and Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, too, tells us that Macbeth left the
+supper table where he was entertaining the King, in order to indulge
+himself in this long monologue, and when he hears that his absence has
+excited comment, that he has been asked for even by the King, he does
+not attempt to excuse his strange conduct, he merely says, “We will
+proceed no further in this business,” showing in true Hamlet fashion how
+resolution has been “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.” In
+fact, as his wife says to him, he lets “'I dare not' wait upon 'I would'
+like the poor cat i' the adage.” Even when whipped to action by Lady
+Macbeth's preternatural eagerness, he asks:
+
+  “If we should fail?”
+
+whereupon she tells him to screw his courage to the sticking place, and
+describes the deed itself. Infected by her masculine resolution, Macbeth
+at length consents to what he calls the “terrible feat.” The word
+“terrible” here is surely more characteristic of the humane
+poet-thinker than of the chieftain-murderer. Even at this crisis, too,
+of his fate Macbeth cannot cheat himself; like Hamlet he is compelled to
+see himself as he is:
+
+  “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”
+
+I have now considered nearly every word used by Macbeth in this first
+act: I have neither picked passages nor omitted anything that might make
+against my argument; yet every impartial reader must acknowledge that
+Hamlet is far more clearly sketched in this first act of “Macbeth” than
+in the first act of “Hamlet.” Macbeth appears in it as an irresolute
+dreamer, courteous, and gentle-hearted, of perfect intellectual fairness
+and bookish phrase; and in especial his love of thought and dislike of
+action are insisted upon again and again.
+
+In spite of the fact that the second act is one chiefly of incident,
+filled indeed with the murder and its discovery, Shakespeare uses
+Macbeth as the mouthpiece of his marvellous lyrical faculty as freely as
+he uses Hamlet. A greater singer even than Romeo, Hamlet is a poet by
+nature, and turns every possible occasion to account, charming the ear
+with subtle harmonies. With a father's murder to avenge, he postpones
+action and sings to himself of life and death and the undiscovered
+country in words of such magical spirit-beauty that they can be compared
+to nothing in the world's literature save perhaps to the last chapter of
+Ecclesiastes. From the beginning to the end of the drama Hamlet is a
+great lyric poet, and this supreme personal gift is so natural to him
+that it is hardly mentioned by the critics. This gift, however, is
+possessed by Macbeth in at least equal degree and excites just as little
+notice. It is credible that Shakespeare used the drama sometimes as a
+means of reaching the highest lyrical utterance.
+
+Without pressing this point further let us now take up the second act of
+the play. Banquo and Fleance enter; Macbeth has a few words with them;
+they depart, and after giving a servant an order, Macbeth begins another
+long soliloquy. He thinks he sees a dagger before him, and immediately
+falls to philosophizing:
+
+                 “Come let me clutch thee:--
+  I have thee not and yet I see thee still.
+  Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
+  To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
+  A dagger of the mind, a false creation
+  Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
+  I see thee yet in form as palpable
+  As that which now I draw....
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses.
+  Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still;
+  And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood
+  Which was not so before.--There's no such thing.”
+
+What is all this but an illustration of Hamlet's assertion:
+
+    “There is nothing either good or bad
+  But thinking makes it so.”
+
+Just too as Hamlet swings on his mental balance, so that it is still a
+debated question among academic critics whether his madness was feigned
+or real, so here Shakespeare shows us how Macbeth loses his foothold on
+reality and falls into the void.
+
+The lyrical effusion that follows is not very successful, and probably
+on that account Macbeth breaks off abruptly:
+
+    “Whiles I threat he lives,
+  Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives,”
+
+which is, of course, precisely Hamlet's complaint:
+
+    “This is most brave;
+  That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
+  Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
+  Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.”
+
+After this Lady Macbeth enters, and the murder is committed, and now
+wrought to the highest tension Macbeth must speak from the depths of his
+nature with perfect sincerity. Will he exult, as the ambitious man
+would, at having taken successfully the longest step towards his goal?
+Or will he, like a prudent man, do his utmost to hide the traces of his
+crime, and hatch plans to cast suspicion on others? It is Lady Macbeth
+who plays this part; she tells Macbeth to “get some water,”
+
+  “And wash this filthy witness from your hand,”
+
+while he, brainsick, rehearses past fears and shows himself the
+sensitive poet-dreamer inclined to piety: here is the incredible scene:
+
+  “_Lady M._ There are two lodged together.
+  _Macb_. One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other,
+  As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
+  Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,'
+  When they did say 'God bless us.'
+  _Lady M_.        Consider it not so deeply.
+  _Macb_. But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?
+  I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
+  Stuck in my throat.”
+
+This religious tinge colouring the weakness of self-pity is to be found
+again and again in “Hamlet”; Hamlet, too, is religious-minded; he begs
+Ophelia to remember his sins in her orisons. When he first sees his
+father's ghost he cries:
+
+  “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,”
+
+and when the ghost leaves him his word is, “I'll go pray.” This new
+trait, most intimate and distinctive, is therefore the most conclusive
+proof of the identity of the two characters. The whole passage in the
+mouth of a murderer is utterly unexpected and out of place; no wonder
+Lady Macbeth exclaims:
+
+             “These deeds must not be thought
+  After these ways: so, it will make us mad.”
+
+But nothing can restrain Macbeth; he gives rein to his poetic
+imagination, and breaks out in an exquisite lyric, a lyric which has
+hardly any closer relation to the circumstances than its truth to
+Shakespeare's nature:
+
+  “Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
+  Macbeth does murder sleep,'--the innocent sleep:
+  Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,”
+
+and so forth--the poet in love with his own imaginings.
+
+Again Lady Macbeth tries to bring him back to a sense of reality; tells
+him his thinking unbends his strength, and finally urges him to take the
+daggers back and
+
+                          “smear
+  The sleepy grooms with the blood.”
+
+But Macbeth's nerve is gone; he is physically broken now as well as
+mentally o'erwrought; he cries:
+
+                     “I'll go no more;
+  I am afraid to think what I have done.
+  Look on't again I dare not.”
+
+All this is exquisitely characteristic of the nervous student who has
+been screwed up to a feat beyond his strength, “a terrible feat,” and
+who has broken down over it, but the words are altogether absurd in the
+mouth of an ambitious, half-barbarous chieftain.
+
+His wife chides him as fanciful, childish--“infirm of purpose,”--she'll
+put the daggers back herself; but nothing can hearten Macbeth; every
+household noise sets his heart thumping:
+
+                   “Whence is that knocking?
+  How is't with me when every noise appals me?”
+
+His mind rocks; he even imagines he is being tortured:
+
+              “What hands are here? Ha!
+  They pluck out my eyes.”
+
+And then he swings into another incomparable lyric:
+
+  “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
+  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
+  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
+  Making the green one red.”
+
+There is a great deal of the poet-neuropath and very little of the
+murderer for ambition's sake in this lyrical hysteria. No wonder Lady
+Macbeth declares she would be ashamed “to wear a heart so white.” It is
+all Hamlet over again, Hamlet wrought up to a higher pitch of intensity.
+And here it should be remembered that “Macbeth” was written three years
+after “Hamlet” and probably just before “Lear”; one would therefore
+expect a greater intensity and a deeper pessimism in Macbeth than in
+Hamlet.
+
+The character-drawing in the next scene is necessarily slight. The
+discovery of the murder impels every one save the protagonist to action,
+but Macbeth finds time even at the climax of excitement to coin
+Hamlet-words that can never be forgotten:
+
+  “There's nothing serious in mortality;”
+
+and the description of Duncan:
+
+  “His silver skin laced with his golden blood”
+
+--as sugar'd sweet as any line in the sonnets, and here completely out
+of place.
+
+In these first two acts the character of Macbeth is outlined so firmly
+that no after-touches can efface the impression.
+
+Now comes a period in the drama in which deed follows so fast upon deed,
+that there is scarcely any opportunity for characterization. To the
+casual view Macbeth seems almost to change his nature, passing from
+murder to murder quickly if not easily. He not only arranges for
+Banquo's assassination, but leaves Lady Macbeth innocent of the
+knowledge. The explanation of this seeming change of character is at
+hand. Shakespeare took the history of Macbeth from Holinshed's
+Chronicle, and there it is recorded that Macbeth murdered Banquo and
+many others, as well as Macduff's wife and children. Holinshed makes
+Duncan have “too much of clemencie,” and Macbeth “too much of crueltie.”
+ Macbeth's actions correspond with his nature in Holinshed; but
+Shakespeare first made Macbeth in his own image--gentle, bookish and
+irresolute--and then found himself fettered by the historical fact that
+Macbeth murdered Banquo and the rest. He was therefore forced to explain
+in some way or other why his Macbeth strode from crime to crime. It must
+be noted as most characteristic of gentle Shakespeare that even when
+confronted with this difficulty he did not think of lending Macbeth any
+tinge of cruelty, harshness, or ambition. His Macbeth commits murder for
+the same reason that the timorous deer fights--out of fear.
+
+    “To be thus is nothing;
+  But to be safely thus. Our fears in Banquo
+  Stick deep, and in his royalty of nature
+  Reigns that which would be feared”:
+
+And again:
+
+    “There is none but he
+  Whose being I do fear”:...
+
+This proves, as nothing else could prove, the all-pervading, attaching
+kindness of Shakespeare's nature. Again and again Lady Macbeth saves the
+situation and tries to shame her husband into stern resolve, but in
+vain; he's “quite unmann'd in folly.”
+
+Had Macbeth been made ambitious, as the commentators assume, there would
+have been a sufficient motive for his later actions. But ambition is
+foreign to the Shakespeare-Hamlet nature, so the poet does not employ
+it. Again and again he returns to the explanation that the timid grow
+dangerous when “frighted out of fear.” Macbeth says:
+
+  “But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer
+  Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
+  In the affliction of these terrible dreams
+  That shake us nightly.”
+
+In passing I may remark that Hamlet, too, complains of “bad dreams.”
+
+In deep Hamlet melancholy, Macbeth now begins to contrast his state with
+Duncan's:
+
+      “After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
+  Treason has done his worst: nor steel nor poison,
+  Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
+  Can touch him further.”
+
+Lady Macbeth begs him to sleek o'er his rugged looks, be bright and
+jovial. He promises obedience; but soon falls into the dark mood again
+and predicts “a deed of dreadful note.” Naturally his wife questions
+him, and he replies:
+
+  “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
+  Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,
+  Scarf up the tender eye of pityful day,
+  And with thy bloody and invisible hand
+  Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
+  Which keeps me pale.”
+
+No other motive for murder is possible to Shakespeare-Macbeth but fear.
+
+Banquo is murdered, but still Macbeth cries:
+
+  “I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in
+  To saucy doubts and fears.”
+ The scene with the ghost of Banquo follows, where-in Macbeth again shows
+the nervous imaginative Hamlet nature. His next speech is mere
+reflection, and again Hamlet might have framed it:
+
+                                “the time has been
+  That when the brains were out the man would die
+  And there an end”: ...
+
+But while fear may be an adequate motive for Banquo's murder, it can
+hardly explain the murder of Macduff's wife and children. Shakespeare
+feels this, too, and therefore finds other reasons natural enough; but
+the first of these reasons, “his own good,” is not especially
+characteristic of Macbeth, and the second, while perhaps characteristic,
+is absurdly inadequate: men don't murder out of tediousness:
+
+                              “For mine own good
+  All causes shall give way: I am in blood[1]
+  Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,
+  Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”
+
+[Footnote 1: It seems to me probable that Shakespeare, unable to find an
+adequate motive for murder, borrowed this one from “Richard III.” Richard
+says:
+
+                             “But I am in
+  So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin”--
+
+This is an explanation following the fact rather than a cause producing
+it--an explanation, moreover, which may be true in the case of a
+fiendlike Richard, but is not true of a Macbeth.]
+
+Take it all in all, this latter reason is as poor a motive for
+cold-blooded murder as was ever given, and Shakespeare again feels this,
+for he brings in the witches once more to predict safety to Macbeth and
+adjure him to be “bloody, bold and resolute.” When they have thus
+screwed his courage to the sticking place as his wife did before,
+Macbeth resolves on Macduff's murder, but he immediately recurs to the
+old explanation; he does not do it for his “own good” nor because
+“returning is tedious “; he does it
+
+  “That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies,
+  And sleep in spite of thunder.”
+
+It is fair to say that Shakespeare's Macbeth is so gentle-kind, that he
+can find no motive in himself for murder, save fear. The words
+Shakespeare puts into Hubert's mouth in “King John” are really his own
+confession:
+
+  “Within this bosom never enter'd yet
+  The dreadful motion of a murderous thought.”
+
+The murders take place and the silly scenes in England between Malcolm
+and Macduff follow, and then come Lady Macbeth's illness, and the
+characteristic end. The servant tells Macbeth of the approach of the
+English force, and he begins the wonderful monologue:
+
+                           “my May of life
+  Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf;
+  And that which should accompany old age,
+  As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
+  I must not look to have; but in their stead
+  Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath
+  Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.”
+
+Truly this is a strange murderer who longs for “troops of friends,” and
+who at the last push of fate can find in himself kindness enough towards
+others to sympathize with the “poor heart.” All this is pure Hamlet; one
+might better say, pure Shakespeare.
+
+We are next led into the field with Malcolm and Macduff, and immediately
+back to the castle again. While the women break into cries, Macbeth
+soliloquizes in the very spirit of bookish Hamlet:
+
+  “I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
+  The time has been, my senses would have cooled
+  To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
+  Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
+  As life were in 't.”
+
+The whole passage, and especially the “dismal treatise,” recalls the
+Wittenberg student with a magic of representment.
+
+The death of the Queen is announced, and wrings from Macbeth a speech
+full of despairing pessimism, a bitterer mood than ever Hamlet knew; a
+speech, moreover, that shows the student as well as the incomparable
+lyric poet:
+
+    “She should have died hereafter:
+  There would have been a time for such a word.--
+  To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
+  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
+  To the last syllable of recorded time;
+  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
+  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
+  Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
+  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
+  And then is heard no more: it is a tale
+  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
+  Signifying nothing.”
+
+Macbeth's philosophy, like Hamlet's, ends in utter doubt, in a passion
+of contempt for life, deeper than anything in Dante. The word “syllable”
+ in this lyric outburst is as characteristic as the “dismal treatise” in
+the previous one, and more characteristic still of Hamlet is the
+likening of life to “a poor player.”
+
+The messenger tells Macbeth that Birnam Wood has begun to move, and he
+sees that the witches have cheated him. He can only say, as Hamlet might
+have said:
+
+  “I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
+  And wish the estate o' the world were now undone.--
+  Ring the alarum bell! Blow wind! Come, wrack!
+  At least we'll die with harness on our back.”
+
+And later he cries:
+
+  “They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,
+  But bear-like I must fight the course.”
+
+This seems to me intensely characteristic of Hamlet; the brutal side of
+action was never more contemptuously described, and Macbeth's next
+soliloquy makes the identity apparent to every one; it is in the true
+thinker-sceptic vein:
+
+  “Why should I play the Roman[1] fool and die
+  On mine own sword?”
+
+[Footnote 1: About the year 1600 Shakespeare seems to have steeped
+himself in Plutarch. For the next five or six years, whenever he thinks
+of suicide, the Roman way of looking at it occurs to him. Having made up
+his mind to kill himself, Laertes cries:
+
+  “I am more an antique Roman than a Dane,”
+
+and, in like case, Cleopatra talks of dying “after the high Roman
+fashion.”]
+
+Macbeth then meets Macduff, and there follows the confession of pity and
+remorse, which must be compared to the gentle-kindness with which Hamlet
+treats Laertes and Romeo treats Paris. Macbeth says to Macduff:
+
+  “Of all men else I have avoided thee:
+  But get thee back, my soul is too much charged
+  With blood of thine already.”
+
+Then comes the “something desperate” in him that Hamlet boasted of--and
+the end.
+
+Here we have every characteristic of Hamlet without exception, The
+crying difference of situation only brings out the essential identity of
+the two characters. The two portraits are of the same person and
+finished to the finger-tips. The slight shades of difference between
+Macbeth and Hamlet only strengthen our contention that both are
+portraits of the poet; for the differences are manifestly changes in the
+same character, and changes due merely to age. Just as Romeo is younger
+than Hamlet, showing passion where Hamlet shows thought, so Macbeth is
+older than Hamlet; in Macbeth the melancholy has grown deeper, the tone
+more pessimistic, and the heart gentler. [Footnote: Immediately after
+the publication of these first two essays, Sir Henry Irving seized the
+opportunity and lectured before a distinguished audience on the
+character of Macbeth. He gave it as his opinion that “Shakespeare has
+presented Macbeth as one of the most blood-thirsty, most hypocritical
+villains in his long gallery of men, instinct with the virtues and vices
+of their kind (_sic_).” Sir Henry Irving also took the occasion to
+praise the simile of pity:
+
+  “And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
+  Striding the blast.”
+
+This ridiculous fustian seemed to him “very beautiful.” All this was
+perfectly gratuitous: no one needed to be informed that a man might have
+merit as an actor and yet be without any understanding of psychology or
+any taste in letters.] I venture, therefore, to assert that the portrait
+we find in Romeo and Jaques first, and then in Hamlet, and afterwards in
+Macbeth, is the portrait of Shakespeare himself, and we can trace his
+personal development through these three stages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. DUKE VINCENTIO--POSTHUMUS
+
+It may be well to add here a couple of portraits of Shakespeare in later
+life in order to establish beyond question the chief features of his
+character. With this purpose in mind I shall take a portrait that is a
+mere sketch of him, Duke Vincentio in “Measure for Measure,” and a
+portrait that is minutely finished and perfect, though consciously
+idealized, Posthumus, in “Cymbeline.” And the reason I take this
+careless, wavering sketch, and contrast it with a highly-finished
+portrait, is that, though the sketch is here and there hardly
+recognizable, the outline being all too thin and hesitating, yet now and
+then a characteristic trait is over-emphasized, as we should expect in
+careless work. And this sketch in lines now faint, now all too heavy, is
+curiously convincing when put side by side with a careful and elaborate
+portrait in which the same traits are reproduced, but harmoniously, and
+with a perfect sense of the relative value of each feature. No critic,
+so far as I am aware, not Hazlitt, not Brandes, not even Coleridge, has
+yet thought of identifying either Duke Vincentio or Posthumus with
+Hamlet, much less with Shakespeare himself. The two plays are very
+unlike each other in tone and temper; “Measure for Measure” being a sort
+of tract for the times, while “Cymbeline” is a purely romantic drama.
+Moreover, “Measure for Measure” was probably written a couple of years
+after “Hamlet,” towards the end of 1603, while “Cymbeline” belongs to
+the last period of the poet's activity, and could hardly have been
+completed before 1610 or 1611. The dissimilarity of the plays only
+accentuates the likeness of the two protagonists.
+
+“Measure for Measure” is one of the best examples of Shakespeare's
+contempt for stagecraft. Not only is the mechanism of the play, as we
+shall see later, astonishingly slipshod, but the ostensible purpose of
+the play, which is to make the laws respected in Vienna, is not only not
+attained, but seems at the end to be rather despised than forgotten.
+This indifference to logical consistency is characteristic of
+Shakespeare; Hamlet speaks of “the undiscovered country from whose
+bourne no traveller returns” just after he has been talking with his
+dead father. The poetic dreamer cannot take the trouble to tie up the
+loose ends of a story: the real purpose of “Measure for Measure,” which
+is the confusion of the pretended ascetic Angelo, is fulfilled, and that
+is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shown what “our seemers be.”
+ It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his
+_alter ego_, should order another to punish loose livers--a task
+which his kindly nature found too disagreeable. But, leaving these
+general considerations, let us come to the first scene of the first act:
+the second long speech of the Duke should have awakened the suspicion
+that Vincentio is but another mask for Shakespeare. The whole speech
+proclaims the poet; the Duke begins:
+
+                                  “Angelo
+  There is a kind of character in thy life,”
+
+Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is supposed to be
+prose:
+
+  “There is a kind of confession in your looks.”
+
+A little later the line:
+
+         “Spirits are not finely touched
+  But to fine issues,”
+
+is so characteristic of Hamlet-Shakespeare that it should have put every
+reader on the track.
+
+The speeches of the Duke in the fourth scene of the first act are also
+characteristic of Shakespeare. But the four lines,
+
+  “My holy sir, none better knows than you
+  How I have ever loved the life removed,
+  And held in idle price to haunt assemblies,
+  Where youth and cost and witless bravery keep,”
+
+are to me an intimate, personal confession; a fuller rendering indeed of
+Hamlet's “Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.” In any case it
+will be admitted that a dislike of assemblies and cost and witless
+bravery is peculiar in a reigning monarch, so peculiar indeed that it
+reminds me of the exiled Duke in “As You Like It,” or of Duke Prospero
+in “The Tempest” (two other incarnations of Shakespeare), rather than of
+any one in real life. A love of solitude; a keen contempt for shows and
+the “witless bravery” of court-life were, as we shall see,
+characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to old age.
+
+In the first scene of the third act the Duke as a friar speaks to the
+condemned Claudio. He argues as Hamlet would argue, but with, I think, a
+more convinced hopelessness. The deepening scepticism would of itself
+force us to place “Measure for Measure” a little later than “Hamlet”:
+
+                 “Reason thus with life:--
+  If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
+  That none but fools would keep; a breath thou art,
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+                           The best of rest is sleep,
+  And that thou oft provok'st, yet grossly fear'st
+  Thy death, which is no more. Thou'rt not thyself;
+  For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
+  That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not;
+  For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get,
+  And what thou hast, forgett'st.
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+                                   What's in this,
+  That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
+  Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,
+  That makes these odds all even.”
+
+That this scepticism of Vincentio is Shakespeare's scepticism appears
+from the fact that the whole speech is worse than out of place when
+addressed to a person under sentence of death. Were we to take it
+seriously, it would show the Duke to be curiously callous to the
+sufferings of the condemned Claudio; but callous the Duke is not, he is
+merely a pensive poet-philosopher talking in order to lighten his own
+heart. Claudio makes unconscious fun of the Duke's argument:
+
+  “To sue to live, I find I seek to die,
+  And seeking death, find life: let it come on.”
+
+This scepticism of Shakespeare which shows itself out of place in Angelo
+and again most naturally in Claudio's famous speech, is one of the
+salient traits of his character which is altogether over-emphasized in
+this play. It is a trait, moreover, which finds expression in almost
+everything he wrote. Like nearly all the great spirits of the
+Renaissance, Shakespeare was perpetually occupied with the heavy
+problems of man's life and man's destiny. Was there any meaning or
+purpose in life, any result of the striving? was Death to be feared or a
+Hereafter to be desired?--incessantly he beat straining wings in the
+void. But even in early manhood he never sought to deceive himself. His
+Richard II. had sounded the shallow vanity of man's desires, the
+futility of man's hopes; he knew that man
+
+  “With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
+  With being nothing.”
+
+And this sad knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking.
+Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to
+dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can
+see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an
+“everlasting farewell” of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest.
+Hamlet dreads “the undiscovered country”; but unsentient death is to him
+“a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Vincentio's mood is
+half-contemptuous, but the melancholy persists; death is no “more than
+sleep,” he says, and life a series of deceptions; while Claudio in this
+same play shudders away from death as from annihilation, or worse, in
+words which one cannot help regarding as Shakespeare's:
+
+  “_Claud_. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
+  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot....”
+
+A little later and Macbeth's soul cries to us from the outer darkness:
+“there's nothing serious in mortality”; life's
+
+                              “a tale
+  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
+  Signifying nothing.”
+
+And from this despairing gloom come Lear's shrieks of pain and pitiful
+ravings, and in the heavy intervals the gibberings of the fool. Even
+when the calmer mood of age came upon Shakespeare and took away the
+bitterness, he never recanted; Posthumus speaks of life and death in
+almost the words used by Vincentio, and Prospero has nothing to add save
+that “our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
+
+It is noteworthy that Shakespeare always gives these philosophic
+questionings to those characters whom I regard as his impersonations,[1]
+and when he breaks this rule, he breaks it in favour of some Claudio who
+is not a character at all, but the mere mouthpiece of one of his moods.
+
+[Footnote 1: One of my correspondents, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has
+been kind enough to send me an article contributed to “Colbourn's
+Magazine” in 1873, in which he declares that “Shakespeare seems to have
+kept a sort of Hamlet notebook, full of Hamlet thoughts, of which 'To be
+or not to be' may be taken as the type. These he was burdened with.
+These did he cram into Hamlet as far as he could, and then he tossed the
+others indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies and histories,
+perfectly regardless of the character who uttered them.” Though Mr.
+Watts-Dunton sees that some of these “Hamlet thoughts” are to be found
+in Macbeth and Prospero and Claudio, he evidently lacks the key to
+Shakespeare's personality, or he would never have said that Shakespeare
+tossed these reflections “indiscriminately into other plays.”
+ Nevertheless the statement itself is interesting, and deserves more
+notice than has been accorded to it.]
+
+I now come to a point in the drama which at once demands and defies
+explanation. In the first scene of the third act the Duke, after
+listening to the terrible discussion between Isabella and Claudio, first
+of all tells Claudio that “Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt”
+ Isabella, and then assures Claudio that to-morrow he must die. The
+explanation of these two falsehoods would be far to seek, unless we take
+it that they were invented simply in order to prolong our interest in
+the drama. But this assumption, though probable, does not increase our
+sympathy with the protagonist--the lies seem to be too carelessly
+uttered to be even characteristic--nor yet our admiration of the
+structure of a play that needs to be supported by such flimsy
+buttresses. Still this very carelessness of fact, as I have said, is
+Shakespearean; the philosophic dreamer paid little attention to the mere
+incidents of the story.
+
+The talk between the Duke and Isabella follows. The form of the Duke's
+speech, with its touch of euphuistic conceit, is one which
+Hamlet-Shakespeare affects:
+
+  “The hand that hath made you fair hath made you
+  good: the goodness that is cheap in beauty makes
+  beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of
+  your complexion, shall keep the body of it ever fair.”
+
+This Duke plays philosopher, too, in and out of season as Hamlet did: he
+says to Isabella:
+
+  “Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful,”
+
+generalizing his praise even to a woman.
+
+Again, when Pompey is arrested, he passes from the individual to the
+general, exclaiming:
+
+  “That we were all as some would seem to be,
+  Free from our faults, as from faults seeming free.”
+
+Then follows the interesting talk with Lucio, who awakens the slightly
+pompous Duke to natural life with his contempt. When Lucio tells the
+Duke, who is disguised as a friar, that he (the Duke) was a notorious
+loose-liver--“he had some feeling of the sport; he knew the
+service”--the Duke merely denies the soft impeachment; but when Lucio
+tells him that the Duke is not wise, but “a very superficial, ignorant,
+unweighing fellow,” the Duke bursts out, “either this is envy in you,
+folly, or mistaking: ... Let him but be testimonied in his own
+bringings-forth, and he shall appear to the envious a scholar, a
+statesman, and a soldier,” which recalls Hamlet's “Friends, scholars,
+and soldiers,” and Ophelia's praise of Hamlet as “courtier, soldier,
+scholar.” Lucio goes off, and the Duke “moralizes” the incident in
+Hamlet's very accent:
+
+  “No might nor greatness in mortality
+  Can censure 'scape; backwounding calumny
+  The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
+  Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?”
+
+Hamlet says to Ophelia:
+
+  “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall
+  not escape calumny.”
+
+And Laertes says that “virtue itself” cannot escape calumny.
+
+The reflection is manifestly Shakespeare's own, and here the form, too,
+is characteristic. It may be as well to recall now that Shakespeare
+himself was calumniated in his lifetime; the fact is admitted in Sonnet
+36, where he fears his “guilt” will “shame” his friend.
+
+In his talk with Escalus the Duke's speech becomes almost obscure from
+excessive condensation of thought--a habit which grew upon Shakespeare.
+
+Escalus asks:
+
+  “What news abroad in the world?”
+
+The Duke answers:
+
+  “None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness,
+  that the dissolution of it must cure it: novelty is only in
+  request. ... There is scarce truth enough alive to make
+  societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships
+  accursed.”
+
+Escalus then tells us of the Duke's temperament in words which would fit
+Hamlet perfectly; for, curiously enough, they furnish us with the best
+description of Shakespeare's melancholy:
+
+  “Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at
+  anything which professed to make him rejoice.”
+
+And, lastly, the curious rhymed soliloquy of Vincentio which closes this
+third act, must be compared with the epilogue to “The Tempest”:
+
+  “He who the sword of Heaven will bear
+  Should be as holy as severe;
+  Pattern in himself to know,
+  Grace to stand and virtue go;”
+          - -        - -        - -        - -        - -
+  “Shame to him whose cruel striking
+  Kills for faults of his own liking!
+  Twice treble shame on Angelo,
+  To weed my vice and let his grow!”
+          - -        - -        - -        - -        - -
+
+In the fifth act the Duke, freed from making plots and plans, speaks
+without constraint and reveals his nature ingenuously. He uses words to
+Angelo that recall the sonnets:
+
+  “O, your desert speaks loud; and I should wrong it,
+  To lock it in the wards of covered bosom,
+  When it deserves, with characters of brass,
+  A forted residence 'gainst the tooth of time
+  And razure of oblivion.”[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Cf. Sonnet 122 with its “full character'd” and “razed
+oblivion.”]
+
+Again, the Duke argues in gentle Shakespeare's fashion for Angelo and
+against Isabella:
+
+                    “If he had so offended,
+  He would have weighed thy brother by himself
+  And not have cut him off.”
+
+It seems impossible for Shakespeare to believe that the sinner can
+punish sin. It reminds one of the sacred “he that is without sin among
+you let him first cast a stone.” The detections and forgivings of the
+last act follow.
+
+It will be admitted, I think, on all hands that Duke Vincentio speaks
+throughout the play with Shakespeare's voice. From the point of view of
+literary art his character is very far from being as complex or as
+deeply realized as that of Hamlet or Macbeth, or even as that of Romeo
+or of Jaques, and yet one other trait besides that of sceptical brooding
+is so over-accentuated that it can never be forgotten. In the last scene
+the Duke orders Barnardine to the block and the next moment respites
+him; he condemns
+
+  “An Angelo for Claudio; death for death,”
+
+then pardons Angelo, and at once begins to chat with him in kindly
+intimacy; he asserts that he cannot forgive Lucio, Lucio who has
+traduced him, shall be whipped and hanged, and in the same breath he
+remits the heavy penalty. Truly he is “an unhurtful opposite” [Footnote:
+The critics are at variance over this ending, and, indeed, over the
+whole play. Coleridge says that “our feelings of justice are grossly
+wounded in Angelo's escape”; for “cruelty with lust and damnable
+baseness cannot be forgiven.” Mr. Swinburne, too, regrets the
+miscarriage of justice; the play to him is a tragedy, and should end
+tragically with the punishment of the “autotype of the huge national
+vice of England.” Perhaps, however, Puritan hypocrisy was not so
+widespread or so powerful in the time of Shakespeare as it is nowadays;
+perhaps, too, Shakespeare was not so good a hater as Mr. Swinburne, nor
+so strenuous a moralist as Coleridge was, at least in theory. In any
+case it is evident that Shakespeare found it harder to forgive Lucio,
+who had hurt his vanity, than Angelo, who pushed lust to outrage and
+murder, which strange, yet characteristic, fact I leave to the mercy of
+future commentators. Mr. Sidney Lee regards “Measure for Measure” as
+“one of Shakespeare's greatest plays.” Coleridge, however, thought it “a
+hateful work”; it is also a poor work, badly constructed, and for the
+most part carelessly written. In essence it is a mere tract against
+Puritanism, and in form a sort of Arabian Nights' Entertainment in which
+the hero plays the part of Haroun-al-Raschid.] whose anger has no
+stead-fastness; but the gentle forgivingness of disposition that is so
+marked in Vincentio is a trait we found emphasized in Romeo, and again
+in Hamlet and again in Macbeth. It is, indeed, one of the most permanent
+characteristics of Shakespeare. From the beginning to the end of the
+play, Duke Vincentio is weakly-kind in act and swayed by fitful
+impulses; his assumed austerity of conduct is the thin varnish of vanity
+that will not take on such soft material. The Hamlet weakness is so
+exaggerated in him, and so unmotived, that I am inclined to think
+Shakespeare was even more irresolute and indisposed to action than
+Hamlet himself.
+
+In the character of Posthumus, the hero of “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare has
+painted himself with extraordinary care; has, in fact, given us as
+deliberate and almost as complete a picture of himself as he did in
+Hamlet. Unluckily his hand had grown weaker in the ten years' interval,
+and he gave such loose rein to his idealizing habit that the portrait is
+neither so veracious nor so lifelike. The explanation of all this will
+be given later; it is enough for the moment to state that as Posthumus
+is perhaps the completest portrait of him that we have after his mental
+shipwreck, we must note the traits of it carefully, and see what manner
+of man Shakespeare took himself to be towards the end of his career.
+
+It is difficult to understand how the commentators have been able to
+read “Cymbeline” without seeing the likeness between Posthumus and
+Hamlet. The wager which is the theme of the play may have hindered them
+a little, but as they found it easy to excuse its coarseness by
+attributing lewdness to the time, there seems to have been no reason for
+not recognizing Posthumus. Posthumus is simply a staider Hamlet
+considerably idealized. I am not at all sure that the subject of the
+play was void of offence in the time of Elizabeth; all finer spirits
+must even then have found it puerile and coarse. What would Spenser have
+said about it? Shakespeare used the wager because of the opportunities
+it gave him of painting himself and an ideal woman. His view of it is
+just indicated; Iachimo says:
+
+“I make my wager rather against your confidence than her reputation:
+and, to bar your offence herein too, I durst attempt it against any lady
+in the world.” But in spite of the fact that Iachimo makes his insult
+general, Posthumus warns him that:
+
+  “If she remain unseduced ... for your ill opinion,
+  and the assault you have made to her chastity, you shall
+  answer me with your sword.”
+
+From this it appears that the bet was distasteful to Posthumus; it is
+not so offenceful to him as it should have been according to our modern
+temper; but this shortcoming, an unconscious shortcoming, is the only
+fault which Shakespeare will allow in his hero. In the first scene of
+the first act Posthumus is praised as men never praise the absent
+without a personal motive; the First Gentleman says of him:
+
+                       “I do not think
+  So fair an outward and such stuff within
+  Endows a man but he.”
+
+The Second Gentleman replies:
+
+  “You speak him far;”
+
+and the First Gentleman continues:
+
+  “I do extend him, sir, within himself;
+  Crush him together, rather than unfold
+  His measure duly.”
+
+And as if this were not enough, this gentleman-eulogist goes on to tell
+us that Posthumus has sucked in “all the learnings” of his time “as we
+do air,” and further:
+
+                            “He lived in court--
+  Which rare it is to do--most praised, most loved;
+  A sample to the young'st, to the more mature
+  A glass that feated them; and to the graver
+  A child that guided dotards.”
+
+This gross praise is ridiculously unnatural, and outrages our knowledge
+of life; men are much more apt to criticize than to praise the absent;
+but it shows a prepossession on Shakespeare's part in favour of
+Posthumus which can only be explained by the fact that in Posthumus he
+was depicting himself. Every word is significant to us, for Shakespeare
+evidently tells us here what he thought about himself, or rather what he
+wished to think, towards the end of his life. It is impossible to
+believe that he was “most praised, most loved”; men do not love or
+praise their superiors in looks, or intellect.
+
+The first words which Posthumus in this same scene addresses to Imogen,
+show the gentle Shakespeare nature:
+
+  “O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause
+  To be suspected of more tenderness
+  Than doth become a man.”
+
+And when Imogen gives him the ring and tells him to wear it till he woos
+another wife, he talks to her exactly as Romeo would have talked:
+
+                        “How! how! another?--
+  You gentle gods, give me but this I have,
+  And sear up my embracements from a next
+  With bonds of death! [_Putting on the ring_.]
+                       Remain, remain thou here
+  While sense can keep it on.”
+
+And he concludes as self-depreciating Hamlet would have concluded:
+
+                  “And sweetest, fairest,
+  As I my poor self did exchange for you,
+  To your so infinite loss, so in our trifles
+  I still win of you; for my sake wear this:
+  It is a manacle of love; I'll place it
+  Upon this fairest prisoner.
+    [Putting a bracelet on her arm.]”
+
+In his fight with Cloten he is depicted as a rare swordsman of wonderful
+magnanimity. Pisanio says:
+
+    “My master rather played than fought,
+  And had no help of anger.”
+
+I call this gentle kindness which Posthumus displays, the birthmark of
+Shakespeare; he had “no help of anger.” As the play goes on we find
+Shakespeare's other peculiarities, or Hamlet's. Iachimo represents
+Posthumus as “merry,” “gamesome,” “the Briton reveller”; but curiously
+enough Imogen answers as Ophelia might have answered about Hamlet:
+
+    “When he was here,
+  He did incline to sadness; and ofttimes
+  Not knowing why.”
+
+This uncaused melancholy that distinguishes Romeo, Jaques, Hamlet,
+Macbeth, and Vincentio is not more characteristic of the
+Hamlet-Shakespeare nature than the way Posthumus behaves when Iachimo
+tries to make him believe that he has won the wager. Posthumus is
+convinced almost at once; jumps to the conclusion, indeed, with the
+heedless rapidity of the naïve, sensitive, quick-thinking man who has
+cultivated his emotions and thoughts by writing in solitude, and not the
+suspicions and distrust of others which are developed in the
+market-place. One is reminded of Goethe's famous couplet:
+
+  “Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
+  Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.”
+
+Posthumus is all in fitful extremes; not satisfied with believing the
+lie, he gives Iachimo Imogen's ring as well, and bursts into a diatribe:
+
+      “Let there be no honour
+  Where there's beauty; truth, where semblance; love,
+  Where there's another man,”
+
+and so forth. Even Philario, who has no stake in the matter, is
+infinitely harder to convince:
+
+      “Have patience, sir,
+  And take your ring again; 'tis not yet won:
+  It may be probable she lost it.”
+
+Then this “unstable opposite,” Posthumus, demands his ring back again,
+but as soon as Iachimo swears that he had the bracelet from her arm,
+Posthumus swings round again to belief from sheer rapidity of thought.
+Again Philario will not be convinced. He says:
+
+      “Sir, be patient,
+  This is not strong enough to be believed
+  Of one persuaded well of--”
+
+But Posthumus will not await the proof for which he has asked. He is
+convinced upon suspicion, as Othello was, and the very nimbleness of his
+Hamlet-intellect, seeing that probabilities are against him, entangles
+him in the snare. Even his servant Pisanio will not believe in Imogen's
+guilt though his master assures him of it. Shakespeare does not notice
+this peculiar imprudent haste of his hero, as he notices, for example,
+the hasty speech of Hotspur by letting Harry of England imitate it,
+simply because the quick-thinking was his own; while the hurried
+stuttering speech was foreign to him. Posthumus goes on to rave against
+women as Hamlet did; as all men do who do not understand them:
+
+  “For even to vice
+  They are not constant, but are changing still.”
+
+And Posthumus betrays as clearly as ever Hamlet did that he is merely
+Shakespeare masquerading:
+
+                        “I'll write against them,
+  Detest them, curse them--yet 'tis greater skill
+  In a true hate, to pray they have their will:
+  The very devils cannot plague them better.”
+
+“Write against them” indeed! This is the same threat which Shakespeare
+uses against his dark mistress in Sonnet 140, and every one will admit
+that it is more in the character of the poet and man of letters than in
+that of the warrior son-in-law of a half-barbarous king. The last line
+here, because it is a little superfluous, a little emphatic, seems to me
+likely to have a personal application. When Shakespeare's mistress had
+her will, did she fall to misery, I wonder?
+
+I may be allowed to notice here how intensely characteristic all this
+play is of Shakespeare. In the third scene of the third act, life in the
+country is contrasted to its advantage with life at Court; and then gold
+is treated as dirt by the princely brothers--both these, the love of
+country life, and the contempt of gold, are, as we shall see later,
+abiding peculiarities of Shakespeare.
+
+When we come to Posthumus again almost at the end of the play we find
+that his anger with Imogen has burned itself out. He is angry now with
+Pisanio for having executed his order and murdered her; he should have
+“saved the noble Imogen to repent.” Surely the poet Shakespeare and not
+the outraged lover speaks in this epithet, “noble.”
+
+Posthumus describes the battle in which he took so gallant a part in
+Shakespeare's usual manner. He falls into rhyme; he shows the cheap
+modesty of the conventional hero; he tells of what others did, and
+nothing of his own feats; Belarius and the two striplings, he says:
+
+  “With their own nobleness ... gilded pale looks.”
+
+Unfortunately one is reminded of the exquisite sonnet line:
+
+  “Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.”
+
+“Gild” is one of Shakespeare's favourite words; he uses it very often,
+sometimes indeed as in this case, ineffectively.
+
+But the scene which reveals the character of Posthumus beyond all doubt
+is the prison scene in the fifth act. His soliloquy which begins:
+
+  “Most welcome, bondage, for thou art a way,
+  I think, to liberty “--
+
+is all pure Shakespeare. When he determines to give up life, he says:
+
+                          “O Imogen!
+  I'll speak to thee in silence,”
+
+and Hamlet at his death comes to the self-same word:
+
+  “The rest is silence.”
+
+The scene with the gaoler is from Hamlet's soul; Posthumus jests with
+his keeper as Hamlet with the gravedigger:
+
+  “So, if I prove a good repast to the spectators, the
+  ship pays the shot;”
+
+and the Hamlet melancholy:
+
+  “I am merrier to die than them art to live;”
+
+and the Hamlet riddle still unsolved:
+
+  “I tell thee, fellow, there are none want eyes to direct
+  them the way I am going; but such as wink, and will
+  not use them.”
+
+When the messenger comes to bring him to the king, Posthumus cries:
+
+  “Thou bringest good news, I am called to be made
+  free,”
+
+for there are “no bolts for the dead.”
+
+Those who wish to see how Shakespeare's mind worked will compare
+Posthumus' speech to Iachimo, when he has learned the truth, with
+Othello's words when he is convinced of his own fatal error and of
+Desdemona's chastity. The two speeches are twins; though the persons
+uttering them should be of totally different characters. The explanation
+of this astounding similarity will be given when we come to “Othello.”
+
+It is characteristic of Posthumus that he should strike Imogen in her
+page's dress, not recognizing her; he is ever too quick--a mere creature
+of impulse. More characteristic still is the way he forgives Iachimo,
+just as Vincentio forgave Angelo:
+
+    “Kneel not to me:
+  The power that I have on you, is to spare you,
+  The malice towards you, to forgive you. Live,
+  And deal with others better.”
+
+In judging his fellow-men this is Shakespeare's harshest word.
+Posthumus, then, is presented to us in the beginning of the play as
+perfect, a model to young and old, of irreproachable virtue and of all
+wonderful qualities. In the course of the play, however, he shows
+himself very nimble-witted, credulous, and impulsive, quick to anger and
+quicker still to forgive; with thoughts all turned to sadness and to
+musing; a poet--ever in extremes; now hating his own rash errors to the
+point of demanding the heaviest punishment for them; now swearing that
+he will revenge himself on women by writing against them; a
+philosopher--he jests with his gaoler and consoles himself with
+despairing speculation in the very presence of the Arch-Fear. All these
+are manifestly characteristics of Hamlet, and Posthumus possesses no
+others.
+
+So far, then, from finding that Shakespeare never revealed himself in
+his dramas, I have shown that he pictured himself as the hero [Footnote:
+A hypercritic might contend that Jaques was not the hero of “As You Like
+It”; but the objection really strengthens my argument. Shakespeare makes
+of Jaques, who is merely a secondary character without influence on the
+action, the principal person in the play simply because in Jaques he
+satisfied his own need of self-revealing.] of six plays written at
+widely different times; in fact that, like Rembrandt, he painted his own
+portrait in all the critical periods of life: as a sensuous youth given
+over to love and poetry in Romeo; a few years later as a melancholy
+onlooker at life's pageant in Jaques; in middle age as the passionate,
+melancholy, aesthete-philosopher of kindliest nature in Hamlet and
+Macbeth; as the fitful Duke incapable of severity in “Measure for
+Measure,” and finally, when standing within the shadow, as Posthumus, an
+idealized yet feebler _replica_ of Hamlet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. SHAKESPEARE'S MEN OF ACTION: THE BASTARD, ARTHUR, AND
+KING RICHARD II.
+
+
+It is time now, I think, to test my theory by considering the converse
+of it. In any case, the attempt to see the other side, is pretty sure to
+make for enlightenment, and may thus justify itself. In the mirror which
+Shakespeare held up to human nature, we not only see Romeo, and Jaques,
+Hamlet, Macbeth and Posthumus; but also the leonine, frank face of the
+Bastard, the fiery, lean, impatient mask of Hotspur, and the cynical,
+bold eyes of Richard III. Even if it were admitted that Shakespeare
+preferred the type of the poet-philosopher, he was certainly able, one
+would say, to depict the man of action with extraordinary vigour and
+success. He himself then must have possessed a certain strength of
+character, certain qualities of decision and courage; he must have had,
+at least, “a good stroke in him,” as Carlyle phrased it. This is the
+universal belief, a belief sanctioned by Coleridge and Goethe, and
+founded apparently on plain facts, and yet, I think, it is mistaken,
+demonstrably untrue. It might even be put more plausibly than any of its
+defenders has put it. One might point out that Shakespeare's men of
+action are nearly all to be found in the historical plays which he wrote
+in early manhood, while the portrait of the philosopher-poet is the
+favourite study of his riper years. It would then be possible to suggest
+that Shakespeare grew from a bold roistering youth into a melancholy,
+thoughtful old age, touching both extremes of manhood in his own
+development. But even this comforting explanation will not stand: his
+earliest impersonations are all thinkers.
+
+Let us consider, again, how preference in a writer is established.
+Everyone feels that Sophocles prefers Antigone to Ismene; Ismene is a
+mere sketch of gentle feminine weakness; while Antigone is a great
+portrait of the _revoltée_, the first appearance indeed in
+literature of the “new woman,” and the place she fills in the drama, and
+the ideal qualities attributed to her girlhood--alike betray the
+personal admiration of the poet. In the same way Shakespeare's men of
+action are mere sketches in comparison with the intimate detailed
+portrait of the aesthete-philosopher-poet with his sensuous, gentle,
+melancholy temperament. Moreover, and this should be decisive,
+Shakespeare's men of action are all taken from history, or tradition, or
+story, and not from imagination, and their characteristics were supplied
+by the chroniclers and not invented by the dramatist. To see how far
+this is true I must examine Shakespeare's historical plays at some
+length Such an examination did not form a part of my original purpose.
+It is very difficult, not to say impossible, to ascertain exactly how
+far history and verbal tradition helped Shakespeare in his historical
+portraits of English worthies. Jaques, for instance, is his own creation
+from top to toe; every word given to him therefore deserves careful
+study; but how much of Hotspur is Shakespeare's, and how much of the
+Bastard? Without pretending, however, to define exactly the sources or
+the limits of the master's inspiration, there are certain indications in
+the historical plays which throw a flood of light on the poet's nature,
+and certain plain inferences from his methods which it would be folly
+not to draw.
+
+Let us begin with “King John,” as one of the easiest and most helpful to
+us at this stage, and remembering that Shakespeare's drama was evidently
+founded on the old play entitled “The Troublesome Raigne of King John,”
+ let us from our knowledge of Shakespeare's character forecast what his
+part in the work must have been. A believer in the theory I have set
+forth would guess at once that the strong, manly character of the
+Bastard was vigorously sketched even in the old play, and just as surely
+one would attribute the gentle, feminine, pathetic character of Arthur
+to Shakespeare. And this is precisely what we find: Philip Fauconbridge
+is excellently depicted in the old play; he is called:
+
+  “A hardy wildehead, tough and venturous,”
+
+and he talks and acts the character to the life. In “The Troublesome
+Raigne,” as in “King John,” he is proud of his true father, the
+lion-hearted Richard, and careless of the stain of his illegitimate
+birth; he cries:
+
+    “The world 's in my debt,
+  There's something owing to Plantaginet.
+  I, marrie Sir, let me alone for game
+  He act some wonders now I know my name;
+  By blessed Marie He not sell that pride
+  For England's wealth and all the world beside.”
+
+Who does not feel the leaping courage and hardihood of the Bastard in
+these lines? Shakespeare seizes the spirit of the character and renders
+it, but his emendations are all by way of emphasis: he does not add a
+new quality; his Bastard is the Bastard of “The Troublesome Raigne.” But
+the gentle, pathetic character of Arthur is all Shakespeare's. In the
+old play Arthur is presented as a prematurely wise youth who now urges
+the claims of his descent and speaks boldly for his rights, and now begs
+his vixenish mother to
+
+    “Wisely winke at all
+  Least further harmes ensue our hasty speech.”
+
+Again, he consoles her with the same prudence:
+
+  “Seasons will change and so our present griefe
+  May change with them and all to our reliefe.”
+
+This Arthur is certainly nothing like Shakespeare's Arthur. Shakespeare,
+who had just lost his only son Hamnet, [Footnote: Some months before
+writing “King John” Shakespeare had visited Stratford for the first time
+after ten years absence and had then perhaps learned to know and love
+young Hamnet.] in his twelfth year, turns Arthur from a young man into a
+child, and draws all the pathos possible from his weakness and
+suffering; Arthur's first words are of “his powerless hand,” and his
+advice to his mother reaches the very fount of tears:
+
+    “Good my mother, peace!
+  I would that I were low laid in my grave;
+  I am not worth this coil that's made for me.”
+
+When taken prisoner his thought is not of himself:
+
+  “O, this will make my mother die with grief.”
+
+He is a woman-child in unselfish sympathy.
+
+The whole of the exquisitely pathetic scene between Hubert and Arthur
+belongs, as one might have guessed, to Shakespeare, that is, the whole
+pathos of it belongs to him.
+
+In the old play Arthur thanks Hubert for his care, calls him “curteous
+keeper,” and, in fact, behaves as the conventional prince. He has no
+words of such affecting appeal as Shakespeare puts into Arthur's mouth:
+
+                        “I would to heaven
+  I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.”
+
+This love and longing for love is the characteristic of Shakespeare's
+Arthur; he goes on:
+
+  “Are you sick, Hubert? You look pale to-day.
+  In sooth, I would you were a little sick,
+  That I might sit all night and watch with you:
+  I warrant, I love you more than you do me.”
+
+A girl could not be more tender, more anxious for love's assurance. In
+“The Troublesome Raigne,” when Hubert tells Arthur that he has bad news
+for him, tidings of “more hate than death,” Arthur faces the unknown
+with a man's courage; he asks:
+
+  “What is it, man? if needes be don,
+  Act it, and end it, that the paine were gon.”
+
+It might be the Bastard speaking, so hardy-reckless are the words. When
+this Arthur pleads for his eyesight, he does it in this way:
+
+  “I speake not only for eyes priviledge,
+  The chiefe exterior that I would enjoy:
+  But for thy perill, farre beyond my paine,
+  Thy sweete soules losse more than my eyes vaine lack.”
+
+Again at the end he says:
+
+  “Delay not, Hubert, my orisons are ended,
+  Begin I pray thee, reave me of my sight.”
+
+And when Hubert relents because his “conscience bids him desist,” Arthur
+says:
+
+  “Hubert, if ever Arthur be in state
+  Looke for amends of this received gift.”
+
+In all this there is neither realization of character nor even sincere
+emotion. But Shakespeare's Arthur is a masterpiece of soul-revealing,
+and moves us to pity at every word:
+
+             “Will you put out mine eyes?
+  These eyes that never did, nor never shall,
+  So much as frown on you?”
+
+And then the child's imaginative horror of being bound:
+
+  “For heaven's sake, Hubert, let me not be bound.
+  Nay, hear me, Hubert: drive these men away,
+  And I will sit as quiet as a lamb;
+  I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word.”
+
+When Hubert relents, Shakespeare's Arthur does not promise reward, he
+simply breathes a sigh of exquisite affection:
+
+  “O, now you look like Hubert: all this while
+  You were disguised.”
+
+And finally, when Hubert promises never to hurt him, his words are:
+
+  “O heaven! I thank you, Hubert.”
+
+Arthur's character we owe entirely to Shakespeare, there is no hint of
+his weakness and tenderness in the original, no hint either of the
+pathos of his appeal--these are the inventions of gentle Shakespeare,
+who has manifestly revealed his own exceeding tenderness and sweetness
+of heart in the person of the child Prince. Of course, there are faults
+in the work; faults of affectation and word-conceit hardly to be
+endured. When Hubert says he will burn out his eyes with hot irons,
+Arthur replies:
+
+“Ah, none, but in this iron age, would do it! The iron of itself, though
+heat red-hot,”
+
+and so forth. ... Nor does this passage of tinsel stand alone. When the
+iron cools and Hubert says he can revive it, Arthur replies with
+pinchbeck conceits:
+
+“An if you do you will but make it blush, And glow with shame at your
+proceedings,”
+
+and so forth. The faults are bad enough; but the heavenly virtues carry
+them all off triumphantly. There is no creation like Arthur in the whole
+realm of poetry; he is all angelic love and gentleness, and yet neither
+mawkish nor unnatural; his fears make him real to us, and the horror of
+his situation allows us to accept his exquisite pleading as possible. We
+need only think of Tennyson's May Queen, or of his unspeakable Arthur,
+or of Thackeray's prig Esmond, in order to understand how difficult it
+is in literature to make goodness attractive or even credible. Yet
+Shakespeare's art triumphs where no one else save Balzac and Tourgenief
+has achieved even a half-success.
+
+I cannot leave this play without noticing that Shakespeare has shown in
+it a hatred of murder just as emphatically as he has revealed his love
+of gentleness and pity in the creation of Arthur. In spite of the
+loyalty which the English nobles avow in the second scene of the fourth
+act, which is a quality that always commends itself to Shakespeare,
+Pembroke is merely their mouthpiece in requesting the King to
+“enfranchise Arthur.” As soon as John tells them that Arthur is dead
+they throw off their allegiance and insult the monarch to his face. Even
+John is startled by their indignation, and brought as near remorse as is
+possible for him:
+
+    “I repent;
+  There is no sure foundation set on blood;
+  No certain life achieved by others' death--”
+
+--which reads like a reflection of Shakespeare himself. When the Bastard
+asks the nobles to return to their allegiance, Salisbury finds an
+astonishing phrase to express their loathing of the crime:
+
+  “The King hath dispossess'd himself of us;
+  We will not line his thin bestained cloak
+  With our pure honours, _nor attend the foot
+  That leaves the print of blood where'er it walks_.”
+
+In all literature there is no more terrible image: Shakespeare's horror
+of bloodshed has more than Aeschylean intensity. When the dead body of
+Arthur is found each of the nobles in turn expresses his abhorrence of
+the deed, and all join in vowing instant revenge. Even the Bastard calls
+it
+
+  “A damned and bloody work,
+  The graceless action of a heavy hand,”
+
+and a little later the thought of the crime brings even this tough
+adventurer to weakness:
+
+  “I am amazed, methinks, and lose my way
+  Among the thorns and dangers of this world.”
+
+--a phrase that suits the weakness of Richard II. or Henry VI. or
+Shakespeare himself better than it suits the hardy Bastard. Even as a
+young man Shakespeare hated the cruelty of ambition and the savagery of
+war as much as he loved all the ceremonies of chivalry and observances
+of gentle courtesy.
+
+Very similar inferences are to be drawn from a study of Shakespeare's
+“King Richard II.,” which in some respects is his most important
+historical creation. Coleridge says: “I know of no character drawn by
+our great poet with such unequalled skill as that of Richard II.” Such
+praise is extravagant; but it would have been true to say that up to
+1593 or 1594, when Shakespeare wrote “King Richard II.,” he had given us
+no character so complex and so interesting as this Richard. Coleridge
+overpraised the character-drawing probably because the study of
+Richard's weakness and irresolution, and the pathos resulting from such
+helplessness, must have seemed very like an analysis of his own nature.
+
+Let us now examine “Richard II.,” and see what light it casts on
+Shakespeare's qualities. There was an old play of the same title, a play
+which is now lost, but we can form some idea of what it was like from
+the description in Forman's Diary. Like most of the old history-plays it
+ranged over twenty years of Richard's reign, whereas Shakespeare's
+tragedy is confined to the last year of Richard's life. It is probable
+that the old play presented King Richard as more wicked and more
+deceitful than Shakespeare imagines him. We know that in the “Confessio
+Amantis,” Gower, the poet, cast off his allegiance to Richard: for he
+cancelled the dedication of the poem to Richard, and dedicated it
+instead to Henry. William Langland, too, the author of the “Vision of
+Piers Plowman,” turned from Richard at the last, and used his deposition
+as a warning to ill-advised youth. It may be assumed, then, that
+tradition pictured Richard as a vile creature in whom weakness nourished
+crime. Shakespeare took his story partly from Holinshed's narrative, and
+partly either from the old play or from the traditional view of
+Richard's character. When he began to write the play he evidently
+intended to portray Richard as even more detestable than history and
+tradition had presented him. In Holinshed Richard is not accused of the
+murder of Gloster, whereas Shakespeare directly charges him with it, or
+rather makes Gaunt do so, and the accusation is not denied, much less
+disproved. At the close of the first act we are astonished by the
+revelation of Richard's devilish heartlessness. The King hearing that
+his uncle, John of Gaunt, is “grievous sick,” cries out:
+
+  “Now put it, God, in his physician's mind,
+  To help him to his grave immediately!
+  The lining of his coffers shall make coats
+  To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.
+  Come, gentlemen, let's all go visit him:
+  Pray God we may make haste and come too late.”
+
+This mixture of greed and cold cruelty decked out with blasphemous
+phrase is viler, I think, than anything attributed by Shakespeare to the
+worst of his villains. But surely some hint of Richard's incredible
+vileness should have come earlier in the play, should have preceded at
+least his banishment of Bolingbroke, if Shakespeare had really meant to
+present him to us in this light.
+
+In the first scene of the second act, when Gaunt reproves him, Richard
+turns on him in a rage, threatening. In the very same scene York
+reproves Richard for seizing Gaunt's money and land, and Richard
+retorts:
+
+  “Think what you will: we seize into our hands
+  His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.”
+
+But when York blames him to his face and predicts that evil will befall
+him and leaves him, Richard in spite of this at once creates:
+
+  “Our uncle York, Lord Governor of England;
+  For he is just, and always loved us well.”
+
+This Richard of Shakespeare is so far, I submit, almost
+incomprehensible. When reproved by Gaunt and warned, Richard rages and
+threatens; when blamed by York much more severely, Richard rewards York:
+the two scenes contradict each other. Moreover, though his callous
+selfishness, greed and cruelty are apparently established, in the very
+next scene of this act our sympathy with Richard is called forth by the
+praise his queen gives him. She says:
+
+    “I know no cause
+  Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,
+  Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest
+  As my sweet Richard.”
+
+And from this scene to the end of the play Shakespeare enlists all our
+sympathy for Richard. Now, what is the reason of this right-about-face
+on the part of the poet?
+
+It appears to me that Shakespeare began the play intending to present
+the vile and cruel Richard of tradition. But midway in the play he saw
+that there was no emotion, no pathos, to be got out of the traditional
+view. If Richard were a vile, scheming, heartless murderer, the loss of
+his crown and life would merely satisfy our sense of justice, but this
+outcome did not satisfy Shakespeare's desire for emotion, and
+particularly his desire for pathos, [Footnote: In the last scene of the
+last act of “Lear,” Albany says:
+  “This judgement of the heavens, that makes us tremble
+  Touches us not with pity.”]
+and accordingly he veers round, says nothing more of Richard's
+vileness, lays stress upon his weakness and sufferings, discovers, too,
+all manner of amiable qualities in him, and so draws pity from us for
+his dethronement and murder.
+
+The curious thing is that while Shakespeare is depicting Richard's
+heartlessness, he does his work badly; the traits, as I have shown, are
+crudely extravagant and even contradictory; but when he paints Richard's
+gentleness and amiability, he works like a master, every touch is
+infallible: he is painting himself.
+
+It was natural for Shakespeare to sympathize deeply with Richard; he was
+still young when he wrote the play, young enough to remember vividly how
+he himself had been led astray by loose companions, and this formed a
+bond between them. At this time of his life this was Shakespeare's
+favourite subject: he treated it again in “Henry IV.,” which is at once
+the epilogue to “Richard II.” and a companion picture to it; for the
+theme of both plays is the same--youth yielding to unworthy
+companions--though the treatment in the earlier play is incomparably
+feebler than it became in “King Henry IV.” Bushy, Bagot, and Green, the
+favourites of Richard, are not painted as Shakespeare afterwards painted
+Falstaff and his followers. But partly because he had not yet attained
+to such objective treatment of character, Shakespeare identified himself
+peculiarly with Richard; and his painting of Richard is more intimate,
+more subtle, more self-revealing and pathetic than anything in “Henry
+IV.”
+
+As I have already said, from the time when Richard appoints York as
+Regent, and leaves England, Shakespeare begins to think of himself as
+Richard, and from this moment to the end no one can help sympathizing
+with the unhappy King. At this point, too, the character-drawing
+becomes, of a sudden, excellent. When Richard lands in England, he is
+given speech after speech, and all he says and does afterwards throws
+light, it seems to me, on Shakespeare's own nature. Let us mark each
+trait First of all Richard is intensely, frankly emotional: he “weeps
+for joy” to be in England again; “weeping, smiling,” he greets the earth
+of England, and is full of hope. “The thief, the traitor,” Bolingbroke,
+will not dare to face the light of the sun; for “every man that
+Bolingbroke has in his pay,” he cries exultantly, God hath given Richard
+a “glorious angel; ... Heaven still guards the right.” A moment later he
+hears from Salisbury that the Welshmen whom he had relied upon as allies
+are dispersed and fled. At once he becomes “pale and dead.” From the
+height of pride and confidence he falls to utter hopelessness.
+
+  “All souls that will be safe fly from my side;
+  For time hath set a blot upon my pride.”
+
+Aumerle asks him to remember who he is, and at once he springs from
+dejection to confidence again. He cries:
+
+  “Awake, thou sluggard majesty! thou sleepest.
+  Is not the king's name forty thousand names?”
+
+The next moment Scroop speaks of cares, and forthwith fitful Richard is
+in the dumps once more. But this time his weakness is turned to
+resignation and sadness, and the pathos of this is brought out by the
+poet:
+
+  “Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we?
+  Greater he shall not be; if he serve God
+  We'll serve him, too, and be his fellow so.
+  Revolt our subjects? that we cannot mend;
+  They break their faith to God, as well as us.
+  Cry woe, destruction, ruin, loss, decay;
+  The worst is death, and death will have his day.”
+
+Who does not hear Hamlet speaking in this memorable last line? Like
+Hamlet, too, this Richard is quick to suspect even his friends' loyalty.
+He guesses that Bagot, Bushy, and Green have made peace with
+Bolingbroke, and when Scroop seems to admit this, Richard is as quick as
+Hamlet to unpack his heart with words:
+
+  “O villains, vipers, damned without redemption!
+  Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man!
+  Snakes,”
+
+and so forth.
+
+But as soon as he learns that his friends are dead he breaks out in a
+long lament for them which ranges over everything from worms to kings,
+and in its melancholy pessimism is the prototype of those meditations
+which Shakespeare has put in the mouth of nearly all his favourite
+characters. Who is not reminded of Hamlet's great monologue when he
+reads:
+
+    “For within the hollow crown,
+  That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
+  Keeps Death his court: and there the antic sits
+  Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;
+  Allowing him a breath, a little scene
+  To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks;
+  Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
+  As if this flesh, which walls about our life,
+  Were brass impregnable; and, humour'd thus,
+  Comes at the last, and with a little pin[1]
+  Bores through his castle wall, and--farewell, King!”
+
+[Footnote 1: In Hamlet's famous soliloquy the pin is a “bodkin.”]
+
+Let us take another two lines of this soliloquy:
+
+  “For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
+  And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
+
+In the second scene of the third act of “Titus Andronicus” we find Titus
+saying to his daughter:
+
+  “I'll to thy closet; and go read with thee
+  Sad stories chancèd in the times of old.”
+
+Again, in the “Comedy of Errors,” Ægeon tells us that his life was
+prolonged:
+
+  “To tell sad stories of my own mishaps.”
+
+The similarity of these passages shows that in the very spring of life
+and heyday of the blood Shakespeare had in him a certain romantic
+melancholy which was developed later by the disappointments of life into
+the despairing of Macbeth and Lear.
+
+When the Bishop calls upon Richard to act, the King's weathercock mind
+veers round again, and he cries:
+
+  “This ague fit of fear is over-blown,
+  An easy task it is to win our own.”
+
+But when Scroop tells him that York has joined with Bolingbroke, he
+believes him at once, gives up hope finally, and turns as if for comfort
+to his own melancholy fate:
+
+  “Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth
+  Of that sweet way I was in to despair!”
+
+That “sweet way” of despair is Romeo's way, Hamlet's, Macbeth's and
+Shakespeare's way.
+
+In the next scene Richard meets his foes, and at first plays the king.
+Shakespeare tells us that he looks like a king, that his eyes are as
+“bright as an eagle's”; and this poetic admiration of state and place
+seems to have got into Richard's blood, for at first he declares that
+Bolingbroke is guilty of treason, and asserts that:
+
+  “My master, God omnipotent,
+  Is mustering in his clouds, on our behalf,
+  Armies of pestilence.”
+
+Of course, he gives in with fair words the next moment, and the next
+rages against Bolingbroke; and then comes the great speech in which the
+poet reveals himself so ingenuously that at the end of it the King he
+pretends to be, has to admit that he has talked but idly. I cannot help
+transcribing the whole of the passage, for it shows how easily
+Shakespeare falls out of this King's character into his own:
+
+  “What must the King do now? Must he submit?
+  The King shall do it. Must he be depos'd?
+  The King shall be contented: must he lose
+  The name of king? O! God's name, let it go:
+  I'll give my jewels for a set of beads;
+  My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
+  My gay apparel for an alms-man's gown;
+  My figur'd goblets for a dish of wood;
+  My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff;
+  My subjects for a pair of carved saints;
+  And my large kingdom for a little grave,
+  A little, little grave, an obscure grave:--
+  Or I'll be buried in the King's highway,
+  Some way of common trade, where subjects' feet
+  May hourly trample on their sovereign's head:
+  For on my heart they tread, now whilst I live;
+  And, buried once, why not upon my head?--
+  Aumerle, thou weep'st; my tender-hearted cousin!--
+  We'll make foul weather with despised tears;
+  Our sighs, and they, shall lodge the summer corn,
+  And make a dearth in this revolting land.
+  Or shall we play the wantons with our woes,
+  And make some pretty match with shedding tears?
+  As thus:--To drop them still upon one place,
+  Till they have fretted us a pair of graves
+  Within the earth; and, therein laid,--There lies
+  Two kinsmen digg'd their graves with weeping eyes.
+  Would not this ill do well?--Well, well, I see
+  I talk but idly, and you mock at me.--
+  Most mighty prince, my lord Northumberland,
+  What says King Bolingbroke? will his majesty
+  Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?
+  You make a leg, and Bolingbroke says ay.”
+
+Every one will admit that the poet himself speaks here, at least, from
+the words “I'll give my jewels” to the words “Would not this ill do
+well?” But the melancholy mood, the pathetic acceptance of the
+inevitable, the tender poetic embroidery now suit the King who is
+fashioned in the poet's likeness.
+
+The next moment Richard revolts once more against his fate:
+
+  “Base court, where kings grow base,
+  To come at traitors' calls, and do them grace.”
+
+And when Bolingbroke kneels to him he plays upon words, as Gaunt did a
+little earlier in the play misery making sport to mock itself. He says:
+
+  “Up, cousin, up; your heart is up, I know,
+  Thus high at least, although your knee be low”--
+
+and then he abandons himself to do “what force will have us do.”
+
+The Queen's wretchedness is next used to heighten our sympathy with
+Richard, and immediately afterwards we have that curious scene between
+the gardener and his servant which is merely youthful Shakespeare, for
+such a gardener and such a servant never yet existed. The scene
+[Footnote: Coleridge gives this scene as an instance of Shakespeare's
+“wonderful judgement”; the introduction of the gardener, he says,
+“realizes the thing,” and, indeed, the introduction of a gardener would
+have this tendency, but not the introduction of this pompous, priggish
+philosopher togged out in old Adam's likeness. Here is the way this
+gardener criticises the King:
+
+  “All superfluous branches
+  We lop away, that bearing boughs may live;
+  Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
+  Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.”]
+
+shows the extravagance of Shakespeare's love of hierarchy, and shows
+also that his power of realizing character is as yet but slight. The
+abdication follows, when Richard in exquisite speech after speech
+unpacks his heavy heart. To the very last his irresolution comes to show
+as often as his melancholy. Bolingbroke is sharply practical:
+  “Are you contented to resign the crown?”
+
+Richard answers:
+
+  “Ay, no; no, ay;--for I must nothing be;
+  Therefore, no, no, for I resign to thee.”
+
+When he is asked to confess his sins in public, he moves us all to pity:
+
+  “Must I do so? and must I ravel out
+  My weaved up follies? Gentle Northumberland,
+  If thy offences were upon record,
+  Would it not shame thee, in so fair a troop,
+  To read a lecture of them?”
+
+His eyes are too full of tears to read his own faults, and sympathy
+brings tears to our eyes also. Richard calls for a glass wherein to see
+his sins, and we are reminded of Hamlet, who advises the players to hold
+the mirror up to nature. He jests with his grief, too, in quick-witted
+retort, as Hamlet jests:
+
+  “Rich. Say that again.
+  The shadow of my sorrow? Ha! let's see:--
+  'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
+  And these external manners of lament
+  Are merely shadows to the unseen grief,
+  That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.”
+
+Hamlet touches the self-same note:
+
+  “'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
+  Nor customary suits of solemn black,
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  But I have that within which passeth show;
+  These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”
+
+In the fifth act, the scene between the Queen and Richard is used simply
+to move our pity. She says he is “most beauteous,” but all too mild, and
+he answers her:
+
+    “I am sworn brother, sweet,
+  To grim necessity; and he and I
+  Will keep a league till death.”
+
+He bids her take,
+
+  “As from my death-bed, my last living leave,”
+
+and for her consolation he turns again to the telling of romantic
+melancholy stories:
+
+  “In winter's tedious nights, sit by the fire
+  With good old folks; and let them tell thee tales
+  Of woeful ages long ago betid:
+  And, ere thou bid good night, to quit their grief,
+  Tell thou the lamentable fall of me,
+  And send the hearers weeping to their beds,
+  For why; the senseless brands will sympathize
+  The heavy accent of thy moving tongue.”
+
+I cannot copy this passage without drawing attention to the haunting
+music of the third line.
+
+The scene in which York betrays his son to Bolingbroke and prays the
+king not to pardon but “cut off” the offending member, is merely a
+proof, if proof were wanted, of Shakespeare's admiration of kingship and
+loyalty, which in youth, at least, often led him to silliest
+extravagance.
+
+The dungeon scene and Richard's monologue in it are as characteristic of
+Shakespeare as the similar scene in “Cymbeline” and the soliloquy of
+Posthumus:
+
+  “_K. Rich_., I have been studying how I may compare
+  This prison where I live unto the world:
+  And for because the world is populous,
+  And here is not a creature but myself,
+  I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out,
+  My brain I'll prove the female to my soul
+  My soul the father; and these two beget
+  A generation of still breeding thoughts,
+  And these same thoughts people this little world,
+  In humours like the people of this world,
+  For no thought is contented....”
+
+Here we have the philosopher playing with his own thoughts; but soon the
+Hamlet-melancholy comes to tune the meditation to sadness, and
+Shakespeare speaks to us directly:
+
+  “Thus play I in one person many people,
+  And none contented: sometimes am I king;
+  Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
+  And so I am: then crushing penury
+  Persuades me I was better when a king;
+  Then am I king'd again; and by and by
+  Think, that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
+  And straight am nothing; but whate'er I be,
+  Nor I nor any man that but man is
+  With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
+  With being nothing.”
+
+Later, one hears Kent's lament for Lear in Richard's words:
+
+                    “How these vain weak nails
+  May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
+  Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls.”
+
+To Richard music is “sweet music,” as it is to all the characters that
+are _merely_ Shakespeare's masks, and the scene in which Hamlet
+asks Guildenstern to “play upon the pipe” is prefigured for us in
+Richard's self-reproach:
+
+  “And here have I the daintiness of ear,
+  To check time broke in a disordered string;
+  But for the concord of my state and time,
+  Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.”
+
+In the last three lines of this monologue which I am now about to quote,
+I can hear Shakespeare speaking as plainly as he spoke in Arthur's
+appeals; the feminine longing for love is the unmistakable note:
+
+  “Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
+  For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
+  Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.”
+
+And at the last, by killing the servant who assaults him, this Richard
+shows that he has the “something desperate” in him of which Hamlet
+boasted.
+
+The murderer's praise that this irresolute-weak and loving Richard is
+“as full of valour as of royal blood” is nothing more than an excellent
+instance of Shakespeare's self-illusion. He comes nearer the fact in
+“Measure for Measure,” where the Duke, his other self, is shown to be
+“an unhurtful opposite” too gentle-kind to remember an injury or punish
+the offender, and he rings the bell at truth's centre when, in “Julius
+Caesar,” his mask Brutus admits that he
+
+  “... carries anger as the flint bears fire
+  Who much enforcèd shows a hasty spark
+  And straight is cold again.”
+
+If a hasty blow were proof of valour then Walter Scott's Eachin in “The
+Fair Maid of Perth” would be called brave. But courage to be worth the
+name must be founded on stubborn resolution, and all Shakespeare's
+incarnations, and in especial this Richard, are as unstable as water.
+
+The whole play is summed up in York's pathetic description of Richard's
+entrance into London:
+
+    “No man cried, God save him;
+  No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home:
+  But dust was thrown upon his sacred head;
+  Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off--
+  His face still combating with tears and smiles,
+  The badges of his grief and patience--
+  That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd
+  The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,
+  And barbarism itself have pitied him.”
+
+This passage it seems to me both in manner and matter is as truly
+characteristic of Shakespeare as any that can be found in all his works:
+his loving pity for the fallen, his passionate sympathy with “gentle
+sorrow” were never more perfectly expressed.
+
+Pity, indeed, is the note of the tragedy, as it was in the Arthur-scenes
+in “King John,” but the knowledge of Shakespeare derived from “King
+John” is greatly widened by the study of “King Richard II.” In the
+Arthur of “King John” we found Shakespeare's exquisite pity for
+weakness, his sympathy with suffering, and, more than all, his
+girlish-tender love and desire of love. In “Richard II.,” the weakness
+Shakespeare pities is not physical weakness, but mental irresolution and
+incapacity for action, and these Hamlet-weaknesses are accompanied by a
+habit of philosophic thought, and are enlivened by a nimble wit and
+great lyrical power. In Arthur Shakespeare is bent on revealing his
+qualities of heart, and in “Richard II.” his qualities of mind, and that
+these two are but parts of the same nature is proved by the fact that
+Arthur shows great quickness of apprehension and felicity of speech,
+while Richard once or twice at least displays a tenderness of heart and
+longing for love worthy of Arthur.
+
+It appears then that Shakespeare's nature even in hot, reckless youth
+was most feminine and affectionate, and that even when dealing with
+histories and men of action he preferred to picture irresolution and
+weakness rather than strength, and felt more sympathy with failure
+than with success.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. SHAKESPEARE'S MEN OF ACTION (_continued_).
+
+HOT-SPUR, HENRY V., RICHARD III.
+
+The conclusions we have already reached, will be borne out and
+strengthened in unexpected ways by the study of Hotspur--Shakespeare's
+master picture of the man of action. The setting sun of chivalry falling
+on certain figures threw gigantic shadows across Shakespeare's path, and
+of these figures no one deserved immortality better than Harry Percy.
+Though he is not introduced in “The Famous Victories of Henry V.,” the
+old play which gave Shakespeare his roistering Prince and the first
+faint hint of Falstaff, Harry Percy lived in story and in oral
+tradition. His nickname itself is sufficient evidence of the impression
+he had made on the popular fancy. And both Prince Henry when mocking
+him, and his wife when praising him, bear witness to what were, no
+doubt, the accepted peculiarities of his character. Hotspur lived in the
+memory of men, we may be sure, with thick, hasty speech, and hot,
+impatient temper, and it is easy, I think, even at this late date, to
+distinguish Shakespeare's touches on the traditional portrait. It is for
+the reader to say whether Shakespeare blurred the picture, or bettered
+it.
+
+Hotspur's first words to the King in the first act are admirable; they
+bring the brusque, passionate soldier vividly before us; but I am sure
+Shakespeare had the fact from history or tradition.
+
+  “My liege, I did deny no prisoners.
+  But, I remember, when the fight was done,
+  When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
+  Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
+  Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dressed,
+  Fresh as a bridegroom.”
+
+Hotspur's picture of this “popinjay” with pouncet-box in hand, and
+“perfumed like a milliner,” is splendid self-revelation:
+
+    “he made me mad,
+  To see him shine so brisk and smell so sweet,
+  And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman.”
+
+But immediately afterwards Hotspur's defence of Mortimer shows the poet
+Shakespeare rather than the rude soldier who hates nothing more than
+“mincing poetry.” The beginning is fairly good:
+
+  “_Hot_.       Revolted Mortimer!
+  He never did fall off, my sovereign liege,
+  But by the chance of war: to prove that true,
+  Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds,
+  Those mouthed wounds which valiantly he took,
+  When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank.”
+
+This “gentle Severn's sedgy bank” is too poetical for Hotspur; but what
+shall be said of his description of the river?
+
+  “Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,
+  Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
+  And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank
+  Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.”
+
+Shakespeare was still too young, too much in love with poetry to confine
+himself within the nature of Hotspur. But the character of Hotspur was
+so well known that Shakespeare could not long remain outside it. When
+the King cuts short the audience with the command to send back the
+prisoners, we find the passionate Hotspur again:
+
+  “And if the devil come and roar for them,
+  I will not send them.--I will after straight,
+  And tell him so: for I will ease my heart,
+  Although it be with hazard of my head.”
+
+The last line strikes a false note; such a reflection throws cold water
+on the heat of passion, and that is not intended, for though reproved by
+his father Hotspur storms on:
+
+      “Speak of Mortimer!
+  'Zounds! I will speak of him; and let my soul
+  Want mercy, if I do not join with him....”
+
+The next long speech of Hotspur is mere poetic slush; he begins:
+
+  “Nay, then, I cannot blame his cousin king,
+  That wish'd him on the barren mountains starve....”
+
+and goes on for thirty lines to reprove the conspirators for having put
+down “Richard, that sweet lovely rose,” and planted “this thorn,
+Bolingbroke.” This long speech retards the action, obscures the
+character of Hotspur, and only shows Shakespeare poetising without a
+flash of inspiration. Then comes Hotspur's famous speech about honour:
+
+  “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
+  To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon;
+  Or dive into the bottom of the deep ...”
+
+And immediately afterwards a speech in which his uncontrollable
+impatience and the childishness which always lurks in anger, find
+perfect expression. To soothe him, Worcester says he shall keep his
+prisoners; Hotspur bursts out:
+
+    “Nay, I will: that's flat.
+  He said, he would not ransom Mortimer;
+  Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
+  But I will find him when he lies asleep,
+  And in his ear I'll holla--'Mortimer!' Nay,
+  I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
+  Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him,
+  To keep his anger still in motion.”
+
+No wonder Lord Worcester reproves him, and his father chides him as “a
+wasp-stung and impatient fool,” who will only talk and not listen. But
+again Hotspur breaks forth, and again his anger paints him to the life:
+
+  “Why, look you, I am whipped and scourged with rods,
+  Nettled and stung with pismires, when I hear
+  Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.
+  In Richard's time,--what do you call the place?--
+  A plague upon 't--it is in Glostershire;--
+  'Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept,--...”
+
+The very ecstasy of impatience and of puerile passionate temper has
+never been better rendered.
+
+His soliloquy, too, in the beginning of scene iii, when he reads the
+letter which throws the cold light of reason on his enterprise, is
+excellent, though it repeats qualities we already knew in Hotspur, and
+does not reveal new ones:
+
+  '“The purpose you undertake is dangerous';--why,
+  that's certain: 'tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to
+  drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle
+  danger, we pluck this flower safety.... What a frosty-spirited
+  rogue is this!... O, I could divide myself and
+  go to buffets, for moving such a dish of skimmed milk
+  with so honourable an action! Hang him! Let him tell
+  the King: we are prepared. I will set forward to-night.”
+
+But the topmost height of self-revealing is reached in the scene with
+his wife which immediately follows this. Lady Percy enters, and Hotspur
+greets her:
+
+  “How now, Kate? I must leave you within these two hours.”
+
+The lady's reply is too long and too poetical. Hotspur interrupts her by
+calling the servant and giving him orders. Then Lady Percy questions,
+and Hotspur avoids a direct answer, and little by little Shakespeare
+works himself into the characters till even Lady Percy lives for us:
+
+  “_Lady_. Come, come, you paraquito, answer me
+  Directly unto this question that I ask.
+  In faith, I'll break thy little finger, Harry,
+  An if thou wilt not tell me true.
+  _Hot_.                       Away,
+  Away, you trifler!--Love?--I love thee not,
+  I care not for thee, Kate; this is no world
+  To play with mammets and to tilt with lips....”
+
+It shows a certain immaturity of art that Hotspur should introduce the
+theme of “love,” and not Lady Percy; but, of course, Lady Percy seizes
+on the word:
+
+  “_Lady_. Do you not love me? do you not, indeed,
+  Well, do not then; for since you love me not,
+  I will not love myself. Do you not love me?
+  Nay, tell me, if you speak in jest or no?
+  _Hot_. Come, wilt thou see me ride?
+  And when I am o' horseback, I will swear
+  I love thee infinitely....”
+
+All this is superb; Hotspur's coarse contempt of love deepens our sense
+of his soldier-like nature and eagerness for action; but though the
+qualities are rendered magically the qualities themselves are few:
+Shakespeare still harps upon Hotspur's impatience; but even a soldier is
+something more than hasty temper, and disdain of love's dalliance. But
+the portrait is not finished yet. The first scene in the third act
+between Hotspur and Glendower is on this same highest level; Hotspur's
+impatience of Glendower's bragging at length finds an unforgetable
+phrase:
+
+  “_Glend_. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
+  _Hot_. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
+  But will they come when you do call for them?”
+
+Then Hotspur disputes over the division of England; he wants a larger
+share than that allotted to him; the trait is typical, excellent; but
+the next moment Shakespeare effaces it. As soon as Glendower yields,
+Hotspur cries:
+
+  “I do not care; I'll give thrice so much land
+  Away to any well-deserving friend;
+  But in the way of bargain, mark ye me,
+  I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair....”
+
+This large generosity is a trait of Shakespeare and not of Hotspur; the
+poet cannot bear to lend his hero a tinge of meanness, or of avarice,
+and yet the character needs a heavy shadow or two, and no shadow could
+be more appropriate than this, for greed of land has always been a
+characteristic of the soldier-aristocrat.
+
+Shakespeare is perfectly willing to depict Hotspur as scorning the arts.
+When Glendower praises poetry, Hotspur vows he'd “rather be a kitten and
+cry mew ... than a metre ballad-monger. ...” Nothing sets his teeth on
+edge “so much as mincing poetry”: and a little later he prefers the
+howling of a dog to music. When he is reproved by Lord Worcester for
+“defect of manners, want of government, ... pride, haughtiness,
+disdain,” his reply is most characteristic:
+
+  “Well, I am schooled: good manners be your speed,
+  Here come our wives, and let us take our leave.”
+
+He is too old to learn, and his self-assurance is not to be shaken; but
+though he hates schooling he will school his wife:
+
+  “Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,
+  A good mouth-filling oath; and leave, 'in sooth,'
+  And such protest of pepper-gingerbread
+  To velvet guards and Sunday citizens.”
+
+This is merely a repetition of the trait shown in his first speech when
+he sneered at the popinjay-lord for talking in “holiday and lady terms.”
+ But not only does Shakespeare repeat well-known traits in Hotspur, he
+also uses him as a mere mouthpiece again and again, as he used him at
+the beginning in the poetic description of the Severn. The fourth act
+opens with a speech of Hotspur to Douglas, which is curiously
+illustrative of this fault:
+
+  “_Hot._. Well said, my noble Scot, if speaking truth
+  In this fine age were not thought flattery,
+  Such attribution should the Douglas have,
+  As not a soldier of this season's stamp
+  Should go so general current through the world.
+  By God, I cannot flatter; I defy
+  The tongues of soothers; but a braver place
+  In my heart's love hath no man than yourself.
+  Nay, task me to my word; approve me, lord.”
+
+In the first five lines of this skimble-skamble stuff I hear Shakespeare
+speaking in his cheapest way; with the oath, however, he tries to get
+into the character again, and succeeds indifferently.
+
+Immediately afterwards Hotspur is shocked by the news that his father is
+sick and has not even sent the promised assistance; struck to the heart
+by the betrayal, the hot soldier should now reveal his true character;
+one expects him to curse his father, and rising to the danger, to cry
+that he is stronger without traitors and faint-heart friends. But
+Shakespeare the philosopher is chiefly concerned with the effect of such
+news upon a rebel camp, and again he speaks through Hotspur:
+
+  “Sick now! droop now! this sickness doth infect
+  The very life-blood of our enterprise;
+  'Tis catching hither, even to our camp.”
+
+Then Shakespeare pulls himself up and tries to get into Hotspur's
+character again by representing to himself the circumstance:
+
+  “He writes me here, that inward sickness--
+  And that his friends by deputation could not
+  So soon be drawn; nor did he think it meet--”
+   and so forth to the question: “...What say you to it?”
+   “_Wor_. Your father's sickness is a maim to us.
+  _Hot_. A perilous gash, a very limb lopped off:--”
+
+Shakespeare sees that he cannot go on exaggerating the injury--that is
+not Hotspur's line, is indeed utterly false to Hotspur's nature; and so
+he tries to stop himself and think of Hotspur:
+
+  “And yet, in faith, it's not; his present want
+  Seems more than we shall find it: were it good
+  To set the exact wealth of all our states
+  All at one cast? to set so rich a main
+  On the nice hazard of one doubtful hour?
+  It were not good; for therein should we read
+  The very bottom and the soul of hope,
+  The very list, the very utmost bound
+  Of all our fortunes.”
+
+After the first two lines, which Hotspur might have spoken, we have the
+sophistry of the thinker poetically expressed, and not one word from the
+hot, high-couraged soldier. Indeed, in the last four lines from the
+bookish “we read” to the end, we have the gentle poet in love with
+desperate extremities. The passage must be compared with Othello's--
+
+  “Here is my journey's end, here is my butt,
+  And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.”
+
+But at length when Worcester adds fear to danger Hotspur half finds
+himself:
+
+  “_Hot_,      You strain too far.
+  I rather of his absence make this use:--
+  It lends a lustre, and more great opinion,
+  A larger dare to our great enterprise,
+  Than if the earl were here; for men must think,
+  If we, without his help can make a head
+  To push against the kingdom; with his help
+  We shall o'erturn it topsy-turvy down.--
+  Yet all goes well, yet all our joints are whole.”
+
+And this is all. The scene is designed, the situation constructed to
+show us Hotspur's courage: here, if anywhere, the hot blood should
+surprise us and make of danger the springboard of leaping hardihood. But
+this is the best Shakespeare can reach--this fainting, palefaced “Yet
+all goes well, yet all our joints are whole.” The inadequacy, the
+feebleness of the whole thing is astounding. Milton had not the courage
+of the soldier, but he had more than this: he found better words for his
+Satan after defeat than Shakespeare found for Hotspur before the battle:
+
+  “What though the field be lost?
+  All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
+  And study of revenge, immortal hate,
+  And courage never to submit or yield,
+  And what is else not to be overcome;
+  That glory never shall his wrath or might
+  Extort from me.”
+
+When Shakespeare has to render Hotspur's impatience he does it superbly,
+when he has to render Hotspur's courage he fails lamentably.
+
+In the third scene of this fourth act we have another striking instance
+of Shakespeare's shortcoming. Sir Walter Blount meets the rebels “with
+gracious offers from the King,” whereupon Hotspur abuses the King
+through forty lines; this is the kind of stuff:
+  “My father and my uncle and myself
+  Did give him that same royalty he wears;
+  And when he was not six and twenty strong,
+  Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low,
+  A poor unminded outlaw sneaking home,
+  My father gave him welcome to the shore; ...”
+ and so on and on, like Hamlet, he unpacks his heart with words, till
+Blount cries:
+
+“Tut, I came not to hear this.”
+
+Hotspur admits the reproof, but immediately starts off again:
+
+  “_Hot_. Then to the point.
+  In short time after he deposed the king;
+  Soon after that, deprived him of his life,”
+
+and so forth for twenty lines more, till Blount pulls him up again with
+the shrewd question:
+
+  “Shall I return this answer to the king?”
+
+Hotspur replies:
+
+  “Not so, Sir Walter; we'll withdraw awhile.
+  Go to the king.....
+  And in the morning early shall mine uncle
+  Bring him our purposes; and so farewell.”
+
+And yet this Hotspur who talks interminably when he would do much better
+to keep quiet, assures us a little later that he has not well “the gift
+of tongue,” and again declares he's glad a messenger has cut him short,
+for “I profess not talking.”
+
+The truth is the real Hotspur did not talk much, but Shakespeare had the
+gift of the gab, if ever a man had, and Hotspur was a mouthpiece. It is
+worth noting that though the dramatist usually works himself into a
+character gradually, Hotspur is best presented in the earlier scenes:
+Shakespeare began the work with the Hotspur of history and tradition
+clear in his mind; but as he wrote he grew interested in Hotspur and
+identified himself too much with his hero, and so almost spoiled the
+portrait. This is well seen in Hotspur's end; Prince Henry has said he'd
+crop his budding honours and make a garland for himself out of them, and
+this is how the dying Hotspur answers him:
+
+  “O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth!
+  I better brook the loss of brittle life
+  Than those proud titles thou hast won of me;
+  They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh:--
+  But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool,
+  And time, that takes survey of all the world,
+  Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,
+  But that the earthy and cold hand of death
+  Lies on my tongue:--no, Percy, thou art dust,
+  And food for ----”
+
+Of course, Prince Henry concludes the phrase, and continues the
+Hamlet-like philosophic soliloquy:
+
+  “_P. Henry_. For worms, brave Percy: fare thee well,
+    great heart!--
+  Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
+  When that this body did contain a spirit,
+  A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
+  But now two paces of the vilest earth
+  Is room enough: ...”
+
+I have tried to do justice to this portrait of Hotspur, for Shakespeare
+never did a better picture of a man of action, indeed, as we shall soon
+see, he never did as well again. But take away from Hotspur the
+qualities given to him by history and tradition, the hasty temper, and
+thick stuttering speech, and contempt of women, and it will be seen how
+little Shakespeare added. He makes Hotspur hate “mincing poetry,” and
+then puts long poetic descriptions in his mouth; he paints the soldier
+despising “the gift of tongue” and forces him to talk historic and
+poetic slush in and out of season; he makes the aristocrat greedy and
+sets him quarrelling with his associates for more land, and the next
+moment, when the land is given him, Hotspur abandons it without further
+thought; he frames an occasion calculated to show off Hotspur's courage,
+and then allows him to talk faint-heartedly, and finally, when Hotspur
+should die mutely, or with a bitter curse, biting to the last,
+Shakespeare's Hotspur loses himself in mistimed philosophic reflection
+and poetic prediction. Yet such is Shakespeare's magic of expression
+that when he is revealing the qualities which Hotspur really did
+possess, he makes him live for us with such intensity of life that no
+number of false strokes can obliterate the impression. It is only the
+critic working _sine ira et studio_ who will find this portrait
+blurred by the intrusion of the poet's personality.
+
+It is the companion picture of Prince Henry that shows as in a glass
+Shakespeare's poverty of conception when he is dealing with the
+distinctively manly qualities. In order to judge the matter fairly we
+must remember that Shakespeare did not create Prince Henry any more than
+he created Hotspur. In the old play entitled “The Famous Victories of
+Henry V.,” and in the popular mouth, Shakespeare found roistering Prince
+Hal. The madcap Prince, like Harry Percy, was a creature of popular
+sympathy; his high spirits and extravagances, the vigorous way in which
+he had sown his wild oats, had taken the English fancy, the historic
+personage had been warmed to vivid life by the popular emotion.
+
+Shakespeare was personally interested in this princely hero. As we have
+seen, he dims Hotspur's portrait by intrusion of his own peculiarities;
+and in the case of Harry Percy, this temptation will be stronger.
+
+The subject of the play, a young man of noble gifts led astray by loose
+companions, was a favourite subject with Shakespeare at this time; he
+had treated it already in “Richard II.”; and he handled it here again
+with such zest that we are almost forced to believe in the tradition
+that Shakespeare himself in early youth had sown wild oats in unworthy
+company. Helped by a superb model, and in full sympathy with his theme,
+Shakespeare might be expected to paint a magnificent picture. But Prince
+Henry is anything but a great portrait; he is at first hardly more than
+a prig, and later a feeble and colourless replica of Hotspur. It is very
+curious that even in the comedy scenes with Falstaff Shakespeare has
+never taken the trouble to realize the Prince: he often lends him his
+own word-wit, and now and then his own high intelligence, but he never
+for a moment discovers to us the soul of his hero. He does not even tell
+us what pleasure Henry finds in living and carousing with Falstaff. Did
+the Prince choose his companions out of vanity, seeking in the Eastcheap
+tavern a court where he might throne it? Or was it the infinite humour
+of Falstaff which attracted him? Or did he break bounds merely out of
+high spirits, when bored by the foolish formalities of the palace?
+Shakespeare, one would have thought, would have given us the key to the
+mystery in the very first scene. But this scene, which paints Falstaff
+to the soul, tells us nothing of the Prince; but rather blurs a figure
+which everyone imagines he knows at least in outline. Prince Henry's
+first speech is excellent as description; Falstaff asks him the time
+of day; he replies:
+
+  “Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack, and
+  unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches
+  after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly
+  which thou wouldst truly know....”
+
+This helps to depict Falstaff, but does not show us the Prince, for
+good-humoured contempt of Falstaff is universal; it has nothing
+individual and peculiar in it.
+
+Then comes the speech in which the Prince talks of himself in Falstaff's
+strain as one of “the moon's men” who “resolutely snatch a purse of gold
+on Monday night,” and “most dissolutely spend it on Tuesday morning.” A
+little later he plays with Falstaff by asking: “Where shall we take a
+purse to-morrow, Jack?” It looks as if the Prince were ripe for worse
+than mischief. But when Falstaff wants to know if he will make one of
+the band to rob on Gadshill, he cries out, as if indignant and
+surprised:
+
+  _P. Hen_. Who, I rob? la thief? Not I, by my faith.
+
+  _Fal_. There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship
+  in thee, nor thou earnest not of the blood royal,
+  if thou darest not stand for ten shillings.
+
+  _P. Hen_. Well then, once in my days I'll be a madcap.
+
+  _Fal_. Why, that's well said.
+
+  _P. Hen_. Well, come what will, I'll tarry at home.
+
+He is only persuaded at length by Poins's proposal to rob the robbers.
+It may be said that these changes of the Prince are natural in the
+situation: but they are too sudden and unmotived; they are like the
+nodding of the mandarin's head--they have no meaning; and surely, after
+the Prince talks of himself as one of “the moon's men,” it would be more
+natural of him, when the direct proposal to rob is made, not to show
+indignant surprise, which seems forced or feigned; but to talk as if
+repenting a previous folly. The scene, in so far as the Prince is
+concerned, is badly conducted. When he yields to Poins and agrees to rob
+Falstaff, his words are: “Yea, but I doubt they will be too hard for
+us,”--a phrase which hardly shows wild spirits or high courage, or even
+the faculty of judging men, and the soliloquy which ends the scene
+lamely enough is not the Prince's, but Shakespeare's, and unfortunately
+Shakespeare the poet, and not Shakespeare the dramatist:
+
+  “_P. Hen_. I know you all and will awhile uphold
+  The unyoked humour of your idleness.
+  Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
+  Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
+  To smother up his beauty from the world,
+  That, when he please again to be himself,
+  Being wanted, he may be more wondered at,
+  By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
+  Of vapours, that did seem to strangle him. ...”
+
+If we could accept this stuff we should take Prince Henry for the prince
+of prigs; but it is impossible to accept it, and so we shrug our
+shoulders with the regret that the madcap Prince of history is not
+illuminated for us by Shakespeare's genius. In this “First Part of Henry
+IV.,” when the Prince is not calling names with Falstaff, or playing
+prig, he either shows us a quality of Harry Percy or of Shakespeare
+himself. Everyone remembers the scene when Falstaff, carrying Percy's
+corpse, meets the Princes, and tells them he has killed Percy:
+
+  _P. John_. This is the strangest tale that e'er I heard.
+  _P. Hen_. This is the strangest fellow, brother John.--
+                  Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back:
+                  For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
+                  I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.”
+
+Both in manner and in matter these last two lines are pure Shakespeare,
+and Shakespeare speaks to us, too, when Prince Henry gives up Douglas to
+his pleasure “ransomless and free.” But not only does the poet lend the
+soldier his own sentiments and lilt of phrase, he also presents him to
+us as a shadowy replica of Hotspur, even during Hotspur's lifetime. We
+have already noticed Hotspur's admirable answer when Glendower brags
+that he can call spirits from the vasty deep:
+
+  “_Hot_. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
+  But will they come, when you do call for them?”
+
+The same love of truth is given to Prince Henry in the previous act:
+
+  “_Fal_. Owen, Owen,--the same;--and his son-in-law,
+  Mortimer; and old Northumberland; and that sprightly
+  Scot of Scots, Douglas, that runs o' horseback up a hill
+  perpendicular,--
+
+  _P. Hen_. He that rides at high speed, and with his
+  pistol kills a sparrow flying.
+
+  _Fal_. You have hit it.
+
+  _P. Hen_. So did he never the sparrow.”
+
+But this frank contempt of lying is not the only or the chief
+characteristic possessed by Hotspur and Harry Percy in common. Hotspur
+disdains the Prince:
+
+  “_Hot_. Where is his son,
+  The nimble-footed mad-cap Prince of Wales,
+  And his comrádes that daffed the world aside
+  And bid it pass?”
+
+and the Prince mimics and makes fun of Hotspur:
+
+  “_P. Hen._ He that kills me some six or seven dozen
+  of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands and says to his
+  wife, 'Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.'”
+
+Then Hotspur brags of what he will do when he meets his rival:
+
+  “_Hot._       Once ere night
+  I will embrace him with a soldier's arm,
+  That he shall shrink under my courtesy.”
+
+And in precisely the same strain Prince Henry talks to his father:
+
+  “_P. Hen._      The time will come
+  That I shall make this northern youth exchange
+  His glorious deeds for my indignities.”
+
+It is true that Prince Henry on more than one occasion praises Hotspur,
+while Hotspur is content to praise himself, but the differentiation is
+too slight to be significant: such as it is, it is well seen when the
+two heroes meet.
+
+  “_Hot._ My name is Harry Percy.
+  _P. Hen._               Why, then I see
+  A very valiant rebel of that name.”
+
+but Prince Henry immediately doffs this kingly mood to imitate Hotspur.
+He goes on:
+
+  “I am the Prince of Wales, and think not, Percy,
+  To share with me in glory any more;
+  Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,
+  Nor can our England brook a double reign
+  Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales ...”
+
+And so the bombast rolls, and one brags against the other like systole
+and diastole which balance each other in the same heart. But the worst
+of the matter is, that Prince Henry and Hotspur, as we have already
+noticed, have both the same soul and the same inspiring motive in love
+of honour. They both avow this again and again, though Hotspur finds the
+finer expression for it when he cries that he will “pluck bright honour
+from the pale-faced moon.”
+
+To the student of the play it really looks as if Shakespeare could not
+imagine any other incentive to noble or heroic deeds but this love of
+glory: for nearly all the other serious characters in the play sing of
+honour in the same key. King Henry IV. envies Northumberland
+
+  “A son who is the theme of honour's tongue,”
+
+and declares that Percy hath got “never-dying honour against renownéd
+Douglas.” The Douglas, too, can find no other word with which to praise
+Hotspur--“thou art the king of honour”: even Vernon, a mere secondary
+character, has the same mainspring: he says to Douglas:
+
+  “If well-respected honour bid me on,
+  I hold as little counsel with weak fear
+  As you or any Scot that this day lives.”
+
+Falstaff himself declares that nothing “pricks him on but honour,” and
+bragging Pistol admits that “honour is cudgelled” from his weary limbs.
+The French, too, when they are beaten by Henry V. all bemoan their shame
+and loss of honour, and have no word of sorrow for their ruined
+homesteads and outraged women and children. The Dauphin cries:
+
+  “Reproach and everlasting shame
+  Sits mocking in our plumes.”
+
+And Bourbon echoes him:
+
+  “Shame and eternal shame, nothing but shame.”
+
+It is curious that Bourbon falls upon the same thought which animated
+Hotspur. Just before the decisive battle Hotspur cries:
+
+  “O, gentlemen! the time of life is short;
+  To spend that shortness basely were too long.”
+
+And when the battle turns against the French, Bourbon exclaims:
+
+  “The devil take order now! I'll to the throng:
+  Let life be short; else shame will be too long.”
+
+As Jaques in “As You Like It” says of the soldier: they are “jealous in
+honour” and all seek “the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's
+mouth.”
+
+It is only in Shakespeare that men have no other motive for brave deeds
+but love of honour, no other fear but that of shame with which to
+overcome the dread of death. We shall see later that the desire of fame
+was the inspiring motive of his own youth.
+
+In the “Second Part of King Henry IV.” there is very little told us of
+Prince Henry; he only appears in the second act, and in the fourth and
+fifth; and in all he is the mouthpiece of Shakespeare and not the
+roistering Prince: yet on his first appearance there are traces of
+characterization, as when he declares that his “appetite is not
+princely,” for he remembers “the poor creature, small beer,” whereas in
+the last act he is merely the poetic prig. Let us give the best scene
+first:
+
+  “_P. Hen_. Shall I tell thee one thing, Poins?
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  _P. Hen_. Marry, I tell thee,--it is not meet that I should
+  be sad, now my father is sick: albeit I could tell to thee--as
+  to one it pleases me, for fault of a better, to call my
+  friend--I could be sad, and sad, indeed, too.
+
+  _Poins_. Very hardly upon such a subject.
+  _P. Hen._ By this hand, thou think'st me as far in the
+  devil's book as thou and Falstaff for obduracy and persistency:
+  let the end try the man. But I tell thee, my
+  heart bleeds inwardly that my father is so sick; and keeping
+  such vile company as thou art hath in reason taken
+  from me all ostentation of sorrow.
+
+  _Poins_. The reason?
+
+  _P. Hen_. What would'st thou think of me if I should
+  weep?
+
+  _Poins_. I would think thee a most princely hypocrite.
+
+  _P. Hen_. It would be every man's thought; and thou
+  art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks; never
+  a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better
+  than thine: every man would think me an hypocrite indeed.
+  And what accites your most worshipful thought to
+  think so?
+
+  _Poins_. Why, because you have been so lewd, and so
+  much engraffed to Falstaff.”
+
+By far the best thing in this page--the contempt for every man's thought
+as certain to be mistaken--is, I need hardly say, pure Shakespeare.
+Exactly the same reflection finds a place in “Hamlet”; the
+student-thinker tells us of a play which in his opinion, and in the
+opinion of the best judges, was excellent, but which was only acted
+once, for it “pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general.”
+ Very early in life Shakespeare made the discovery, which all men of
+brains make sooner or later, that the thoughts of the million are
+worthless, and the judgment and taste of the million are execrable.
+
+There is nothing worthy to be called character-drawing in this scene;
+but there's just a hint of it in the last remark of Poins. According to
+his favourite companion the Prince was very “lewd,” and yet Shakespeare
+never shows us his lewdness in action; does not “moralize” it as Jaques
+or Hamlet would have been tempted to do. It is just mentioned and passed
+over lightly. It is curious, too, that Shakespeare's _alter ego_,
+Jaques, was also accused of lewdness by the exiled Duke; Vincentio, too,
+another incarnation of Shakespeare, was charged with lechery by Lucio;
+but in none of these cases does Shakespeare dwell on the failing.
+Shakespeare seems to have thought reticence the better part in regard to
+certain sins of the flesh. But it must be remarked that it is only when
+his heroes come into question that he practises this restraint: he is
+content to tell us casually that Prince Henry was a sensualist; but he
+shows us Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet engaged at lips' length. To put it
+briefly, Shakespeare attributes lewdness to his impersonations, but will
+not emphasize the fault by instances. Nor will Shakespeare allow his
+“madcap Prince” even to play “drawer” with hearty goodwill. While
+consenting to spy on Falstaff in the tavern, the Prince tells Poins that
+“from a Prince to a prentice” is “a low transformation,” and scarcely
+has the fun commenced when he is called to the wars and takes his leave
+in these terms:
+
+  “_P. Hen._ By Heaven, Poins, I feel me much to blame,
+  So idly to profane the precious time
+  When tempest of commotion, like the south
+  Borne with black vapour, doth begin to melt
+  And drop upon our bare, unarmed heads.”
+
+The first two lines are priggish, and the last three mere poetic
+balderdash. But it is in the fourth act, when Prince Henry is watching
+by the bedside of his dying father, that Shakespeare speaks through him
+without disguise:
+
+  “Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow
+  Being so troublesome a bedfellow?
+  O polished perturbation! golden care!
+  That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide
+  To many a watchful night!--Sleep with it now,
+  Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet
+  As he whose brow with homely biggin bound
+  Snores out the watch of night.”
+
+In the third act we have King Henry talking in precisely the same way:
+
+  “O sleep, O gentle sleep,
+  Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?...
+       - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
+  Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
+  In cradle of the rude imperious surge.”...
+
+The truth is that in both these passages, as in a hundred similar ones,
+we find Shakespeare himself praising sleep as only those tormented by
+insomnia can praise it.
+
+When his father reproaches him with “hunger for his empty chair,” this
+is how Prince Henry answers:
+
+  “O pardon me, my liege, but for my tears,
+  The moist impediments unto my speech,
+  I had forestalled this dear and deep rebuke.
+  Ere you with grief had spoke and I had heard
+  The course of it so far.”...
+
+It might be Alfred Austin writing to Lord Salisbury--“the moist
+impediments,” forsooth--and the daredevil young soldier goes on like
+this for forty lines.
+
+The only memorable thing in the fifth act is the new king's contemptuous
+dismissal of Falstaff: I think it appalling at least in matter:
+
+  “I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
+  How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
+  I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,
+  So surfeit-swelled, so old and so profane;
+  But being awake I do despise my dream.
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Reply not to me with a fool-born jest,
+  Presume not that I am the thing I was;
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Till then, I banish thee on pain of death,
+  As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
+  Not to come near our person by ten mile.”
+
+In the old play, “The Famous Victories,” the sentence of banishment is
+pronounced; but this bitter contempt for the surfeit-swelled, profane
+old man is Shakespeare's. It is true that he mitigates the severity of
+the sentence in characteristic generous fashion: the King says:
+
+  “For competence of life I will allow you
+  That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
+  And as we hear you do reform yourselves,
+  We will, according to your strength and qualities,
+  Give you advancement.”
+
+There is no mention in the old play of this “competence of life.” But in
+spite of this generous forethought the sentence is painfully severe, and
+Shakespeare meant every word of it, for immediately afterwards the Chief
+Justice orders Falstaff and his company to the Fleet prison; and in
+“King Henry V.” we are told that the King's condemnation broke
+Falstaff's heart and made the old jester's banishment eternal. To find
+Shakespeare more severe in judgement than the majority of spectators and
+readers is so astonishing, so singular a fact, that it cries for
+explanation. I think there can be no doubt that the tradition which
+tells us that Shakespeare in his youth played pranks in low company
+finds further corroboration here. He seems to have resented his own
+ignominy and the contemptuous estimate put upon him by others somewhat
+extravagantly.
+
+  “Presume not that I am the thing I was;”
+
+--is a sentiment put again and again in Prince Henry's mouth; he is
+perpetually assuring us of the change in himself, and the great results
+which must ensue from it. It is this distaste for his own loose past and
+“his misleaders,” which makes Shakespeare so singularly severe towards
+Falstaff. As we have seen, he was the reverse of severe with Angelo in
+“Measure for Measure,” though in that case there was better ground for
+harshness. “Measure for Measure,” it is true, was written six or seven
+years later than “Henry IV.,” and the tragedy of Shakespeare's life
+separates the two plays. Shakespeare's ethical judgement was more
+inclined to severity in youth and early manhood than it was later when
+his own sufferings had deepened his sympathies, and he had been made
+“pregnant to good pity,” to use his own words, “by the art of knowing
+and feeling sorrows.” But he would never have treated old Jack Falstaff
+as harshly as he did had he not regretted the results, at least, of his
+own youthful errors. It looks as if Shakespeare, like other weak men,
+were filled with a desire to throw the blame on his “misleaders.” He
+certainly exulted in their punishment.
+
+It is difficult for me to write at length about the character of the
+King in “Henry V.,” and fortunately it is not necessary. I have already
+pointed out the faults in the painting of Prince Henry with such
+fullness that I may be absolved from again dwelling on similar weakness
+where it is even more obvious than it was in the two parts of “Henry
+IV.” But something I must say, for the critics in both Germany and
+England are agreed that “'Henry V.' must certainly be regarded as
+Shakespeare's ideal of manhood in the sphere of practical achievement.”
+ Without an exception they have all buttered this drama with extravagant
+praise as one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, though in reality it is one
+of the worst pieces of work he ever did, almost as bad as “Titus
+Andronicus” or “Timon” or “The Taming of the Shrew.” Unfortunately for
+the would-be judges, Coleridge did not guide their opinions of “Henry
+V.”; he hardly mentioned the play, and so they all write the absurdest
+nonsense about it, praising because praise of Shakespeare has come to be
+the fashion, and also no doubt because his bad work is more on the level
+of their intelligence than his good work.
+
+It can hardly be denied that Shakespeare identified himself as far as he
+could with Henry V. Before the King appears he is praised extravagantly,
+as Posthumus was praised, but the eulogy befits the poet better than the
+soldier. The Archbishop of Canterbury says:
+
+         ... “When he speaks,
+  The air, a charter'd libertine, is still,
+  And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears
+  To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences.”
+
+the Bishop of Ely goes even further in excuse:
+
+  ...“The prince obscured his contemplation
+  Under the veil of wildness.”
+
+And this is how the soldier-king himself talks:
+
+  “My learned lord, we pray you to proceed
+  And justly and religiously unfold
+  Why the law Salique that they have in France
+  Or should, or should not bar us in our claim;
+  And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,
+  That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading ...”
+
+All this is plainly Shakespeare and Shakespeare at his very worst; and
+there are hundreds of lines like these, jewelled here and there by an
+unforgetable phrase, as when the Archbishop calls the bees: “The singing
+masons building roofs of gold.” The reply made by the King when the
+Dauphin sends him the tennis balls has been greatly praised for
+manliness and modesty; it begins:
+
+  “We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
+  His present and your pains we thank you for:
+  When we have match'd our rackets to these balls,
+  We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set
+  Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.”
+
+The first line is most excellent, but Shakespeare found it in the old
+play, and the bragging which follows is hardly bettered by the pious
+imprecation.
+
+Nor does the scene with the conspirators seem to me any better. The
+soldier-king would not have preached at them for sixty lines before
+condemning them. Nor would he have sentenced them with this
+extraordinary mixture of priggishness and pious pity:
+
+  “_K. Hen_. God quit you in his mercy. Hear your
+  sentence.
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Touching our person seek we no revenge;
+  But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,
+  Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws
+  We do deliver you. Get you therefore hence,
+  Poor miserable wretches, to your death,
+  The task whereof, God of His mercy give
+  You patience to endure, and true repentance
+  Of all your dear offences!”
+
+This “poor miserable wretches” would go better with a generous pardon,
+and such forgiving would be more in Shakespeare's nature. Throughout
+this play the necessity of speaking through the soldier-king embarrasses
+the poet, and the infusion of the poet's sympathy and emotion makes the
+puppet ridiculous. Henry's speech before Harfleur has been praised on
+all hands; not by the professors and critics merely, but by those who
+deserve attention. Carlyle finds deathless valour in the saying: “Ye,
+good yeomen, whose limbs were made in England,” and not deathless valour
+merely, but “noble patriotism” as well; “a true English heart breathes,
+calm and strong through the whole business ... this man (Shakespeare)
+too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that.” I find no valour in
+it, deathless or otherwise; but the make-believe of valour, the
+completest proof that valour was absent. Here are the words:
+
+  “_K. Hen_. Once more unto the breach, dear friends,
+  once more;
+  Or close the wall up with our English dead.
+  In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
+  As modest stillness and humility:
+  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
+  Then imitate the action of the tiger;
+  Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
+  Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
+  Then lend the eye a terrible aspect,
+  Let it pry through the portage of the head
+  Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
+  As fearfully as doth a galled rock
+  O'erhang and jutty his confounded base....”
+
+And so on for another twenty lines. Now consider this stuff: first comes
+the reflection, more suitable to the philosopher than the man of action,
+“in peace there's nothing so becomes a man...”; then the soldier-king
+wishes his men to “imitate” the tiger's looks, to “disguise fair
+nature,” and “lend the eye a terrible aspect.” But the man who feels the
+tiger's rage tries to control the aspect of it: he does not put on the
+frown--that's Pistol's way. The whole thing is mere poetic description
+of how an angry man looks and not of how a brave man feels, and that it
+should have deceived Carlyle, surprises me. The truth is that as soon as
+Shakespeare has to find, I will not say a magical expression for
+courage, but even an adequate and worthy expression, he fails
+absolutely. And is the patriotism in “Ye, good yeomen, whose limbs were
+made in England” a “noble patriotism”? or is it the simplest, the
+crudest, the least justifiable form of patriotism? There is a noble
+patriotism founded on the high and generous things done by men of one's
+own blood, just as there is the vain and empty self-glorification of
+“limbs made in England,” as if English limbs were better than those made
+in Timbuctoo.
+
+In the third scene of the fourth act, just before the battle, Henry
+talks at his best, or rather Shakespeare's best: and we catch the true
+accent of courage. Westmoreland wishes
+
+        ...“That we now had here
+  But one ten thousand of those men in England
+  That do no work to-day!”
+
+but Henry lives on a higher plane:
+
+                       “No, my fair cousin:
+  If we are marked to die, we are enow
+  To do our country loss; and if to live,
+  The fewer men the greater share of honour.”
+
+But this high-couraged sentiment is taken almost word for word from
+Holinshed. The rest of the speech shows us Shakespeare, as a splendid
+rhetorician, glorifying glory; now and then the rhetoric is sublimated
+into poetry:
+
+  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
+  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
+  Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
+  This day shall gentle his condition.”
+
+Shakespeare's chief ambition about this time was to get a coat of arms
+for his father, and so gentle his condition. In all the play not one
+word of praise for the common archers, who won the battle; no mention
+save of the gentle.
+
+Again and again in Henry V. the dissonance of character between the poet
+and his soldier-puppet jars upon the ears, and this dissonance is
+generally characteristic. For example, in the third act Shakespeare,
+through King Henry, expressly charges his soldiers that “there be
+nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of
+the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language; for when lenity
+and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest
+winner.” Wise words, not yet learned even by statesmen; drops of
+wisdom's life-blood from the heart of gentle Shakespeare. But an act
+later, when the battle is over, on the mere news that the French have
+reinforced their scattered men, Henry V., with tears in his eyes for the
+Duke of York's death, gives orders to kill the prisoners:
+
+  “Then every soldier kill his prisoners;
+  Give the word through.”
+
+The puppet is not even human: mere wood!
+
+In the fifth act King Henry takes on the voice and nature of buried
+Hotspur. He woos Katherine exactly as Hotspur talked to his wife: he
+cannot “mince” it in love, he tells her, in Hotspur's very words; but is
+forthright plain; like Hotspur he despises verses and dancing; like
+Hotspur he can brag, too; finds it as “easy” to conquer kingdoms as to
+speak French; can “vault into his saddle with his armour on his back”;
+he is no carpet-soldier; he never “looks in his glass for love of
+anything he sees there,” and to make the likeness complete he disdains
+those “fellows of infinite tongue, that can rhyme themselves into
+ladies' favours ... a speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad.”
+ But if Shakespeare had had any vital sympathy for soldiers and men of
+action he would not have degraded Henry V. in this fashion, into a
+feeble replica of the traditional Hotspur. In those narrow London
+streets by the river he must have rubbed shoulders with great
+adventurers; he knew Essex; had bowed to Raleigh at the Court; must have
+heard of Drake: inclination was lacking, not models. He might even have
+differentiated between Prince Henry and Hotspur without going outside
+his history-books; but a most curious point is that he preferred to
+smooth away their differences and accentuate the likeness. As a mere
+matter of fact Hotspur was very much older than Prince Henry, for he
+fought at Otterbourne in 1388, the year of the prince's birth; but
+Shakespeare purposely and explicitly makes them both youths. The King,
+speaking of Percy to Prince Henry, says:
+
+  “And being no more in debt to years than thou.”...
+
+It would have been wiser, I cannot but think, and more dramatic for
+Shakespeare to have left the hot-headed Percy as the older man who, in
+spite of years, is too impatient-quick to look before he leaps, while
+giving the youthful Prince the calm reflection and impersonal outlook
+which necessarily belong to a great winner of kingdoms. The dramatist
+could have further differentiated the rivals by making Percy greedy; he
+should not only have quarrelled with his associates over the division of
+the land, but insisted on obtaining the larger share, and even then have
+grumbled as if aggrieved; the soldier aristocrat has always regarded
+broad acres as his especial reward. On the other hand, Prince Henry
+should have been open-handed and carelessly-generous, as the patron of
+Falstaff was likely to be. Further, Hotspur might have been depicted as
+inordinately proud of his name and birth; the provincial aristocrat
+usually is, whereas Henry, the Prince, would surely have been too
+certain of his own qualities to need adventitious aids to pride. Percy
+might have been shown to us raging over imaginary slights; Worcester
+says he was “governed by a spleen”; while the Prince should have been
+given that high sense of honour and insatiate love of fame which were
+the poles of chivalry. Finally, the dramatist might have painted
+Hotspur, the soldier, as disdainful of women and the arts of music
+and poetry, while gracing Prince Henry with a wider culture and sympathy.
+
+If I draw attention to such obvious points it is only to show how
+incredibly careless Shakespeare was in making the conqueror a poor copy
+of the conquered. He was drawn to Hotspur a little by his quickness and
+impatience; but he was utterly out of sympathy with the fighter, and
+never took the trouble even to think of the qualities which a leader of
+men must possess.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. SHAKESPEARE'S MEN OF ACTION (_concluded_): KING HENRY VI. AND RICHARD III.
+
+
+I think it hardly necessary to extend this review of Shakespeare's
+historical plays by subjecting the Three Parts of “King Henry VI.” and
+“Richard III.” to a detailed and minute criticism. Yet if I passed them
+over without mention it would probably be assumed that they made against
+my theory, or at least that I had some more pertinent reason for not
+considering them than their relative unimportance. In fact, however,
+they help to buttress my argument, and so at the risk of being tedious I
+shall deal with them, though as briefly as possible. Coleridge doubted
+whether Shakespeare had had anything to do with the “First Part of Henry
+VI.,” but his fellow-actors, Heminge and Condell, placed the Three Parts
+of “King Henry VI.” in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's
+plays, and our latest criticism finds good reasons to justify this
+contemporary judgement. Mr. Swinburne writes: “The last battle of Talbot
+seems to me as undeniably the master's work as the scene in the Temple
+Gardens, or the courtship of Margaret by Suffolk”; and it would be easy
+to prove that much of what the dying Mortimer says is just as certainly
+Shakespeare's work as any of the passages referred to by Mr. Swinburne.
+Like most of those who are destined to reach the heights, Shakespeare
+seems to have grown slowly, and even at twenty-eight or thirty years of
+age his grasp of character was so uncertain, his style so little formed,
+so apt to waver from blank verse to rhyme, that it is difficult to
+determine exactly what he did write. We may take it, I think, as certain
+that he wrote more than we who have his mature work in mind are inclined
+to ascribe to him.
+
+The “Second Part of King Henry VI.” is a poetic revision of the old play
+entitled “The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses
+of Yorke and Lancaster,” and so forth. It is now generally agreed that
+Shakespeare's hand can be traced in the old drama, and with especial
+certainty in the comic scenes wherein Cade and his followers play the
+chief parts. Notwithstanding this, the revision was most thorough. Half
+the lines in the “Second Part of Henry VI.” are new, and by far the
+greater number of these are now ascribed to Shakespeare on good grounds.
+But some of the changes are for the worse, and as my argument does not
+stand in need of corroboration, I prefer to assume nothing, and shall
+therefore confine myself to pointing out that whoever revised “The
+Contention” did it, in the main, as we should have expected our youthful
+Shakespeare to do it. For example, when Humphrey of Gloster is accused
+of devising “strange torments for offenders,” he answers in the old
+play:
+
+  “Why, 'tis well known that whilst I was Protector,
+  Pitie was all the fault that was in me,”
+
+and the gentle reviser adds to this:
+
+  “For I should melt at an offender's tears,
+  And lowly words were ransom for their fault.”
+
+Besides, the reviser adds a great deal to the part of the weak King with
+the evident object of making his helplessness pathetic. He gives Henry,
+too, his sweetest phrases, and when he makes him talk of bewailing
+Gloster's case “with sad unhelpful tears” we catch the very cadence of
+Shakespeare's voice. But he does not confine his emendations to
+the speeches of one personage: the sorrows of the lovers interest him as
+their affection interested him in the “First Part of Henry VI.,” and the
+farewell words of Queen Margaret to Suffolk are especially
+characteristic of our gentle poet:
+
+  “Oh, go not yet; even thus two friends condemned
+  Embrace and kiss and take ten thousand leaves,
+  Leather a hundred times to part than die.
+  Yet now farewell; and farewell life with thee.”
+
+This reminds me almost irresistibly of Juliet's words when parting with
+Romeo, and of Imogen's words when Posthumus leaves her. Throughout the
+play Henry is the poet's favourite, and in the gentle King's lament for
+Gloster's death we find a peculiarity of Shakespeare's art. It was a
+part of the cunning of his exquisite sensibility to invent a new word
+whenever he was deeply moved, the intensity of feeling clothing itself
+aptly in a novel epithet or image. A hundred examples of this might be
+given, such as “The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; and so we find here
+“paly lips.” The passage is:
+
+  “Fain would I go to chafe his paly lips
+  With twenty thousand kisses and to drain
+  Upon his face an ocean of salt tears,
+  To tell my love unto his dumb deaf trunk
+  And with my finger feel his hand unfeeling.”
+
+It must be noticed, too, that in this “Second Part” the reviser begins
+to show himself as something more than the sweet lyric poet. He
+transposes scenes in order to intensify the interest, and where enemies
+meet, like Clifford and York, instead of making them rant in mere blind
+hatred, he allows them to show a generous admiration of each other's
+qualities; in sum, we find here the germs of that dramatic talent which
+was so soon to bear such marvellous fruit. No better example of
+Shakespeare's growth in dramatic power and humour could be found than
+the way he revises the scenes with Cade. It is very probable, as I have
+said, that the first sketch was his; when one of Cade's followers
+declares that Cade's “breath stinks,” we are reminded that Coriolanus
+spoke in the same terms of the Roman rabble. But though it is his own
+work, Shakespeare evidently takes it up again with the keenest interest,
+for he adds inimitable touches. For instance, in the first scene, where
+the two rebels, George Bevis and John Holland, talk of Cade's rising and
+his intention to set a “new nap upon the commonwealth,” George's remark:
+
+  “Oh, miserable age! virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen”--
+
+an addition, and may be compared with Falstaff's:
+
+  “there is no virtue extant.”
+
+John answers:
+
+  “The nobility think scorn to go in leather aprons,”
+
+which is in the first sketch.
+
+But George's reply--
+
+  “Nay, more; the King's Council are no good workmen”--
+
+is only to be found in the revised version. The heightened humour of
+that “Oh, miserable age! virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen,”
+ assures us that the reviser was Shakespeare.
+
+What is true of the “Second Part” is true in the main of the “Third Part
+of King Henry VI.” Shakespeare's revisions are chiefly the revisions of
+a lyric poet, and he scatters his emendations about without much regard
+for character. In the Third Part, as in the Second, however, he
+transposes scenes, gives deeper life to the marionettes, and in various
+ways quickens the dramatic interest. This Third Part resembles “King
+John” in some respects and a similar inference can be drawn from it. As
+in “King John” we have the sharply contrasted figures of the Bastard and
+Arthur, so in this “Third Part” there are two contrasted characters,
+Richard Duke of Gloster and King Henry VI., the one a wild beast whose
+life is action, and who knows neither fear, love, pity, nor touch of any
+scruple; the other, a saint-like King whose worst fault is gentle
+weakness. In “The True Tragedie of Richard,” the old play on which this
+“Third Part” was founded, the character of Richard is powerfully
+sketched, even though the human outlines are sometimes confused by his
+devilish malignity. Shakespeare takes this character from the old play,
+and alters it but very slightly. Indeed, the most splendid piece of
+character-revealing in his Richard is to be found in the old play:
+
+  “I had no father, I am like no father,
+  I have no brother, I am like no brother;
+  And this word _Love_b, which greybeards call divine,
+  Be resident in men like one another,
+  And not in me:--I am myself alone.”
+
+The Satanic energy of this outburst proclaims its author, Marlowe.
+
+[Footnote: Mr. Swinburne was the first, I believe, to attribute this
+passage to Marlowe; he praises the verses, too, as they deserve; but as
+I had written the above before reading his work, I let it stand.]
+Shakespeare copies it word for word, only omitting with admirable art
+the first line. Indeed, though he alters the speeches of Richard and
+improves them, he does nothing more; he adds no new quality; his Richard
+is the Richard of “The True Tragedie.” But King Henry may be regarded as
+Shakespeare's creation. In the old play the outlines of Henry's
+character are so feebly, faintly sketched that he is scarcely
+recognizable, but with two or three touches Shakespeare makes the saint
+a living man. This King is happier in prison than in his palace; this is
+how he speaks to his keeper, the Lieutenant of the Tower:
+
+  “Nay, be thou sure, I'll well requite thy kindness,
+  For that it made my imprisonment a pleasure;
+  Ay, such a pleasure as encagèd birds
+  Conceive, when, after many moody thoughts,
+  At last by notes of household harmony
+  They quite forget their loss of liberty.”
+
+Just as the bird runs a little before he springs from the earth and
+takes flight, so Shakespeare often writes, as in this instance, an
+awkward weak line or two before his song-wings move with freedom. But
+the last four lines are peculiarly his; his the thought; his, too, the
+sweetness of the words “encagèd birds” and “household harmony.”
+
+Finally, Henry is not only shown to us as gentle and loving, but as a
+man who prefers quiet and the country to a King's Court and state. Even
+in eager, mounting youth this was Shakespeare's own choice: Prince
+Arthur in “King John” longs to be a shepherd: and this crowned saint has
+the same desire. From boyhood to old age Shakespeare preferred the “life
+removed”:
+
+  “O God, methinks it were a happy life
+  To be no better than a homely swain;
+  To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
+  To carve out dials quaintly point by point,
+  Thereby to see the minutes how they run;
+  How many make the hour full complete;
+  How many hours bring about the day;
+  How many days will finish up the year;
+  How many years a mortal man may live.
+     - -     - -     - -     - -     - -
+  So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
+  Passed over to the end they were created,
+  Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.”
+
+All this it seems to me is as finely characteristic of the gentle
+melancholy of Shakespeare's youth as Jaques' bitter words are of the
+deeper melancholy of his manhood:
+
+  “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,
+  And then from hour to hour we rot and rot
+  And thereby hangs a tale.”
+
+The “Third Part of Henry VI.” leads one directly to “Richard III.” It
+was Coleridge's opinion that Shakespeare “wrote hardly anything of this
+play except the character of Richard. He found the piece a stock play
+and re-wrote the parts which developed the hero's character; he
+certainly did not write the scenes in which Lady Anne yielded to the
+usurper's solicitations.” In this instance Coleridge's positive opinion
+deserves to be weighed respectfully. At the time when “Richard III.” was
+written Shakespeare was still rather a lyric than a dramatic poet, and
+Coleridge was a good judge of the peculiarities of his lyric style. Of
+course, Professor Dowden, too, is in doubt whether “Richard III.” should
+be ascribed to Shakespeare. He says: “Its manner of conceiving and
+presenting character has a certain resemblance, not elsewhere to be
+found in Shakespeare's writings, to the ideal manner of Marlowe. As in
+the plays of Marlowe, there is here one dominant figure distinguished by
+a few strongly marked and inordinately developed qualities.”
+
+This faulty reasoning only shows how dangerous it is for a professor to
+copy his teacher slavishly: in “Coriolanus,” too, we have the “one
+dominant figure,” and all the rest of it. The truth seems to be that in
+the “Third Part of Henry VI.” Shakespeare had been working with Marlowe,
+or, at least, revising Marlowe's work; in either case he was so steeped
+in Marlowe's spirit that he took, as we have seen, the most splendid
+piece of Richard's self-revealing directly from the older poet.
+Moreover, the words of deepest characterization in Shakespeare's
+“Richard III.,”
+
+  “Richard loves Richard--that is, I am I,”
+
+are manifestly a weak echo of the tremendous
+
+  “I am myself alone”
+
+of Marlowe's Richard. At least to this extent, then, Shakespeare used
+Marlowe in depicting Richard's character. But this trait, important as
+it was did not carry him far, and he was soon forced to draw on his own
+experience of life. Already he seems to have noticed that one
+characteristic of men of action is a blunt plainness of speech; their
+courage is shown in their frankness, and, besides, words stand for
+realities with them, and are, therefore, used with sincerity.
+Shakespeare's Richard III. uses plain speech as a hypocritical mask, but
+already Shakespeare is a dramatist and in his clever hands Richard's
+plain speaking is so allied with his incisive intelligence that it
+appears to be now a mask, now native shamelessness, and thus the
+characterization wins in depth and mystery. Every now and then, too,
+this Richard sees things which no Englishman has been capable of seeing,
+except Shakespeare himself. The whole of Plato's “Gorgias” is comprised
+in the two lines:
+
+  “Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
+  Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”
+
+The declaration of the second murderer that conscience “makes a man a
+coward ... it beggars any man that keeps it; it is turned out of all
+towns and cities for a dangerous thing; and every man that means to live
+well endeavours to trust to himself and to live without it,” should be
+regarded as the complement of what Falstaff says of honour; in both the
+humour of Shakespeare's characteristic irony is not to be mistaken.
+
+The whole play, I think, must be ascribed to Shakespeare; all the
+memorable words in it are indubitably his, and I cannot believe that any
+other hand drew for us that marvellous, masterful courtship of Anne
+which Coleridge, naturally enough, was unwilling to appreciate. The
+structure of the play, however, shows all the weakness of Marlowe's
+method: the interest is concentrated on the protagonist; there is not
+humour enough to relieve the gloomy intensity, and the scenes in which
+Richard does not figure are unattractive and feeble.
+
+One has only to think of the two characters--Richard II. and Richard
+III.--and to recall their handling in order to get a deep impression of
+Shakespeare's nature. He cannot present the vile Richard II. at all; he
+has no interest in him; but as soon as he thinks of Richard's youth and
+remembers that he was led astray by others, he begins to identify
+himself with him, and at once Richard's weakness is made amiable and his
+sufferings affecting. In measure as Shakespeare lets himself go and
+paints himself more and more freely, his portraiture becomes
+astonishing, till at length the imprisoned Richard gives himself up to
+melancholy philosophic musing, without a tinge of bitterness or envy or
+hate, and every one with eyes to see, is forced to recognize in him a
+younger brother to Hamlet and Posthumus. “Richard III.” was produced in
+a very different way. It was Marlowe's daemonic power and intensity that
+first interested Shakespeare in this Richard; under the spell of
+Marlowe's personality Shakespeare conceived the play, and especially the
+scene between Richard and Anne; but the original impulse exhausted
+itself quickly, and then Shakespeare fell back on his own experience and
+made Richard keen of insight and hypocritically blunt of speech--a sort
+of sketch of Iago. A little later Shakespeare either felt that the
+action was unsuitable to the development of such a character, or more
+probably he grew weary of the effort to depict a fiend; in any case, the
+play becomes less and less interesting, and even the character of
+Richard begins to waver. There is one astonishing instance of this
+towards the end of the drama. On the eve of the decisive battle Richard
+starts awake from his terrifying dreams, and now, if ever, one would
+expect from him perfect sincerity of utterance. This is what we find:
+
+        “There is no creature loves me;
+  And if I die no soul shall pity me;
+  Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
+  Find in myself no pity to myself?”
+
+The first two lines bespeak a loving, gentle nature, Shakespeare's
+nature, the nature of a Henry VI. or an Arthur, a nature which Richard
+III. would certainly have despised, and the last two lines are merely an
+objective ethical judgement wholly out of place and very clumsily
+expressed.
+
+To sum up, then, for this is not the place to consider Shakespeare's
+share in “Henry VIII.,” I find that in the English historical plays the
+manly characters, Hotspur, Harry V., the great Bastard, and Richard
+III., are all taken from tradition or from old plays, and Shakespeare
+did nothing more than copy the traits which were given to him; on the
+other hand, the weak, irresolute, gentle, melancholy characters are his
+own, and he shows extraordinary resource in revealing the secret
+workings of their souls. Even in early manhood, and when handling
+histories and men of action, Shakespeare cannot conceal his want of
+sympathy for the practical leaders of men; he neither understands them
+deeply nor loves them; but in portraying the girlish Arthur and the
+Hamlet-like Richard II., and in drawing forth the pathos of their
+weakness, he is already without a rival or second in all literature.
+
+I am anxious not to deform the truth by exaggeration; a caricature of
+Shakespeare would offend me as a sacrilege, even though the caricature
+were characteristic, and when I find him even in youth one-sided, a poet
+and dreamer, I am minded to tell less than the truth rather than more.
+He was extraordinarily sensitive, I say to myself, and lived in the
+stress of great deeds; he treated Henry V., a man of action if ever
+there was one, as an ideal, and lavished on him all his admiration, but
+it will not do: I cannot shut my eyes to the fact; the effort is worse
+than useless. He liked Henry V. because of his misled youth and his
+subsequent rise to highest honour, and not because of his practical
+genius. Where in his portrait gallery is the picture of a Drake, or even
+of a Raleigh? The adventurer was the characteristic product of that
+jostling time; but Shakespeare turned his head away; he was not
+interested in him. In spite of himself, however, he became passionately
+interested in the pitiful Richard II. and his untimely fate.
+Notwithstanding the praise of the critics, his King Henry V. is a wooden
+marionette; the intense life of the traditional madcap Prince has died
+out of him; but Prince Arthur lives deathlessly, and we still hear his
+childish treble telling Hubert of his love.
+
+Those who disagree with me will have to account for the fact that, even
+in the historical plays written in early manhood, all his portraits of
+men of action are mere copies, while his genius shines in the portraits
+of a gentle saint like Henry VI., of a weakling like Richard II., or of
+a girlish youth like Arthur--all these favourite studies being alike in
+pathetic helplessness and tender affection.
+
+It is curious that no one of the commentators has noticed this
+extraordinary one-sidedness of Shakespeare. In spite of his miraculous
+faculty of expression, he never found wonderful phrases for the virile
+virtues or virile vices. For courage, revenge, self-assertion, and
+ambition we have finer words in English than any that Shakespeare
+coined. In this field Chapman, Milton, Byron, Carlyle, and even Bunyan
+are his masters.
+
+Of course, as a man he had the instinct of courage, and an admiration of
+courage; his intellect, too, gave him some understanding of its range.
+Dr. Brandes declares that Shakespeare has only depicted physical
+courage, the courage of the swordsman; but that is beside the truth: Dr.
+Brandes has evidently forgotten the passage in “Antony and Cleopatra,”
+ when Caesar contemptuously refuses the duel with Antony and speaks of
+his antagonist as an “old ruffian.” Enobarbus, too, sneers at Antony's
+proposed duel:
+
+  “Yes, like enough, high-battled Caesar will
+  Unstate his happiness, and be staged to the show
+  Against a sworder.”
+
+Unhelped by memory, Dr. Brandes might have guessed that Shakespeare
+would exhaust the obvious at first glance. But the soul of courage to
+Shakespeare is, as we have seen, a love of honour working on quick
+generous blood--a feminine rather than a masculine view of the matter.
+
+Carlyle has a deeper sense of this aboriginal virtue. With the fanatic's
+trust in God his Luther will go to Worms “though it rain devils”; and
+when in his own person Carlyle spoke of the small, honest minority
+desperately resolved to maintain their ideas though opposed by a huge
+hostile majority of fools and the insincere, he found one of the finest
+expressions for courage in all our literature. The vast host shall be to
+us, he cried, as “stubble is to fire.” It may be objected that this is
+the voice of religious faith rather than of courage pure and simple, and
+the objection is valid so far as it goes; but this genesis of courage is
+peculiarly English, and the courage so formed is of the highest. Every
+one remembers how Valiant-for-Truth fights in Bunyan's allegory: “I
+fought till my sword did cleave to my hand; and when they were joined
+together, as if a sword grew out of my arm, and when the blood ran
+through my fingers, then I fought with most courage.” The mere
+expression gives us an understanding of the desperate resolution of
+Cromwell's Ironsides.
+
+But if desperate courage is not in Shakespeare, neither are its
+ancillary qualities--cruelty, hatred, ambition, revenge. Whenever he
+talks on these themes, he talks from the teeth outwards, as one without
+experience of their violent delights. His Gloucester rants about
+ambition without an illuminating or even a convincing word. Hatred and
+revenge Shakespeare only studied superficially, and cruelty he shudders
+from like a woman.
+
+It is astounding how ill-endowed Shakespeare was on the side of
+manliness. His intellect was so fine, his power of expression so
+magical, the men about him, his models, so brave--founders as they were
+of the British empire and sea-tyranny--that he is able to use his
+Hotspurs and Harrys to hide from the general the poverty of his
+temperament. But the truth will out: Shakespeare was the greatest of
+poets, a miraculous artist, too, when he liked; but he was not a hero,
+and manliness was not his _forte_: he was by nature a neuropath and
+a lover.
+
+He was a master of passion and pity, and it astonishes one to notice how
+willingly he passed always to that extreme of sympathy where nothing but
+his exquisite choice of words and images saved him from falling into the
+silly. For example, in “Titus Andronicus,” with its crude, unmotived
+horrors, Titus calls Marcus a murderer, and when Marcus replies: “Alas,
+my lord, I have but killed a fly,” Titus answers:
+
+  “But how, if that fly had a father and mother?
+  How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
+  And buzz lamenting doings in the air?
+  Poor harmless fly!
+  That with his pretty buzzing melody,
+  Came here to make us merry! and thou hast killed him.”
+
+Even in his earliest plays in the noontide of lusty youth, when the heat
+of the blood makes most men cruel, or at least heedless of others'
+sorrows, Shakespeare was full of sympathy; his gentle soul wept with the
+stricken deer and suffered through the killing of a fly. Just as Ophelia
+turned “thought and affliction, passion, hell itself” to “favour and to
+prettiness,” so Shakespeare's genius turned the afflictions and passions
+of man to pathos and to pity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. SHAKESPEARE AS LYRIC POET: “TWELFTH NIGHT”
+
+
+Shakespeare began the work of life as a lyric poet. It was to be
+expected therefore that when he took up playwriting he would use the
+play from time to time as an opportunity for a lyric, and in fact this
+was his constant habit. From the beginning to the end of his career he
+was as much a lyric poet as a dramatist. His first comedies are feeble
+and thin in character-drawing and the lyrical sweetness is everywhere
+predominant. His apprenticeship period may be said to have closed with
+his first tragedy, “Romeo and Juliet.” I am usually content to follow
+Mr. Furnival's “Trial Table of the order of Shakspere's Plays,” in which
+“Richard II.,” “Richard III.,” and “King John” are all placed later than
+“Romeo and Juliet,” and yet included in the first period that stretches
+from 1585 to 1595. But “Romeo and Juliet” seems to me to be far more
+characteristic of the poet's genius than any of these histories; it is
+not only a finer work of art than any of them, and therefore of higher
+promise, but in its lyrical sweetness far more truly representative of
+Shakespeare's youth than any of the early comedies or historical plays.
+Whatever their form may be, nearly all Shakespeare's early works are
+love-songs, “Venus and Adonis,” “Lucrece,” “Love's Labour's Lost,” “The
+Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and he may be said to have ended his
+apprenticeship with the imperishable tragedy of first love “Romeo and
+Juliet.”
+
+In the years from 1585 to 1595 Shakespeare brought the lyric element
+into something like due subordination and managed to free himself almost
+completely from his early habit of rhyming. Mr. Swinburne has written of
+Shakespeare's use of rhymed verse with a fullness of knowledge and
+sympathy that leaves little to be desired. He compares it aptly to the
+use of the left hand instead of the right, and doubts cogently whether
+Shakespeare ever attained such mastery of rhyme as Marlowe in “Hero and
+Leander.” But I like to think that Shakespeare's singing quickly became
+too sincere in its emotion and too complex in its harmonies to tolerate
+the definite limits set by rhyme. In any case by 1595 Shakespeare had
+learned to prefer blank verse to rhyme, at least for play-writing; he
+thus made the first great step towards a superb knowledge of his
+instrument.
+
+The period of Shakespeare's maturity defines itself sharply; it
+stretches from 1595 to 1608 and falls naturally into two parts; the
+first part includes the trilogy “Henry IV.” and “Henry V.” and his
+golden comedies; the second, from 1600 to 1608, is entirely filled with
+his great tragedies. The characteristic of this period so far as regards
+the instrument is that Shakespeare has come to understand the proper
+function of prose. He sees first that it is the only language suited to
+broad comedy, and goes on to use it in moments of sudden excitement, or
+when dramatic truth to character seems to him all important. At his best
+he uses blank verse when some emotion sings itself to him, and prose as
+the ordinary language of life, the language of surprise, laughter,
+strife, and of all the commoner feelings. During these twelve or
+fourteen years the lyric note is not obtrusive; it is usually
+subordinated to character and suited to action.
+
+His third and last period begins with “Pericles” and ends with the
+“Tempest”; it is characterized, as we shall see later, by bodily
+weakness and by a certain contempt for the dramatic fiction. But the
+knowledge of the instrument once acquired never left Shakespeare. It is
+true that the lyric note becomes increasingly clear in his late
+comedies; but prose too is used by him with the same mastery that he
+showed in his maturity.
+
+In the first period Shakespeare was often unable to give his puppets
+individual life; in maturity he was interested in the puppets themselves
+and used them with considerable artistry; in the third period he had
+grown a little weary of them and in “The Tempest” showed himself
+inclined, just as Goethe in later life was inclined, to turn his
+characters into symbols or types.
+
+The place of “Twelfth Night” is as clearly marked in Shakespeare's works
+as “Romeo and Juliet” or “The Tempest.” It stands on the dividing line
+between his light, joyous comedies and the great tragedies; it was all
+done at the topmost height of happy hours, but there are hints in it
+which we shall have to notice later, which show that when writing it
+Shakespeare had already looked into the valley of disillusion which he
+was about to tread. But “Twelfth Night” is written in the spirit of “As
+You Like It” or “Much Ado,” only it is still more personal-ingenuous and
+less dramatic than these; it is, indeed, a lyric of love and the joy of
+living.
+
+There is no intenser delight to a lover of letters than to find
+Shakespeare singing, with happy unconcern, of the things he loved
+best--not the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth, whose intellect speaks
+in critical judgements of men and of life, and whose heart we are fain
+to divine from slight indications; nor Shakespeare the dramatist, who
+tried now and again to give life to puppets like Coriolanus and Iago,
+with whom he had little sympathy; but Shakespeare the poet, Shakespeare
+the lover, Shakespeare whom Ben Jonson called “the gentle,” Shakespeare
+the sweet-hearted singer, as he lived and suffered and enjoyed. If I
+were asked to complete the portrait given to us by Shakespeare of
+himself in Hamlet-Macbeth with one single passage, I should certainly
+choose the first words of the Duke in “Twelfth Night.” I must transcribe
+the poem, though it will be in every reader's remembrance; for it
+contains the completest, the most characteristic, confession of
+Shakespeare's feelings ever given in a few lines:
+
+  “If music be the food of love, play on;
+  Give me excess of it, that surfeiting
+  The appetite may sicken, and so die.
+  That strain again;--it had a dying fall:
+  Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
+  That breathes upon a bank of violets,
+  Stealing and giving odour.--Enough! no more
+  'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”
+
+Every one will notice that Shakespeare as we know him in Romeo is here
+depicted again with insistence on a few salient traits; here, too, we
+have the poet of the Sonnets masquerading as a Duke and the protagonist
+of yet another play. There is still less art used in characterizing this
+Duke than there is in characterizing Macbeth; Shakespeare merely lets
+himself go and sings his feelings in the most beautiful words. This is
+his philosophy of music and of love:
+
+  “Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
+  The appetite may sicken, and so die”;
+
+and then:
+
+  “Enough, no more; 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”
+
+--the quick revulsion of the delicate artist-voluptuary who wishes to
+keep unblunted in memory the most exquisite pang of pleasure.
+
+Speech after speech discovers the same happy freedom and absolute
+abandonment to the “sense of beauty.” Curio proposes hunting the hart,
+and at once the Duke breaks out:
+
+  “Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.
+  O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
+  Methought she purged the air of pestilence.
+  That instant was I turned into a hart,
+  And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
+  E'er since pursue me.”--
+
+Valentine then comes to tell him that Olivia is still mourning for her
+brother, and the Duke seizes the opportunity for another lyric:
+
+  “O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame
+  To pay this debt of love but to a brother,
+  How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
+  Hath killed the flock of all affections else
+  That live in her; when liver, brain, and heart,
+  These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled--
+  Her sweet perfections--with one self King!--
+  Away before me to sweet beds of flowers,
+  Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.”
+
+The last two lines show clearly enough that Shakespeare was not troubled
+with any thought of reality as he wrote: he was transported by Fancy
+into that enchanted country of romance where beds of flowers are couches
+and bowers, canopies of love. But what a sensuality there is in him!
+
+                 “When liver, brain, and heart,
+  These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled--
+  Her sweet perfections--with one self King!--”
+
+Of course, too, this Duke is inconstant, and swings from persistent
+pursuit of Olivia to love of Viola without any other reason than the
+discovery of Viola's sex. In the same way Romeo turns from Rosaline to
+Juliet at first sight. This trait has been praised by Coleridge and
+others as showing singular knowledge of a young man's character, but I
+should rather say that inconstancy was a characteristic of sensuality
+and belonged to Shakespeare himself, for Orsino, like Romeo, has no
+reason to change his love; and the curious part of the matter is that
+Shakespeare does not seem to think that the quick change in Orsino
+requires any explanation at all. Moreover, the love of Duke Orsino for
+Olivia is merely the desire of her bodily beauty--the counterpart of the
+sensual jealousy of Othello. Speaking from Shakespeare's very heart, the
+Duke says:
+
+  “Tell her, my love, more noble than the world,
+  Prizes not quantity of dirty lands;
+  The parts that Fortune hath bestowed upon her,
+  Tell her, I hold as giddily as Fortune;
+  But 'tis that miracle and queen of gems
+  That nature pranks her in attracts my soul.”
+
+So the body wins the soul according to this Orsino, who is, I repeat
+again, Shakespeare in his most ingenuous and frankest mood; the contempt
+of wealth--“dirty lands”--and the sensuality--“that miracle and queen of
+gems”--are alike characteristic. A few more touches and the portrait of
+this Duke will be complete; he says to the pretended Cesario when
+sending him as ambassador to Olivia:
+
+  “Cesario, Thou knowest no less but all; I have unclasped
+  To thee the book even of my secret soul; Therefore, good youth,”--
+
+and so forth.
+
+It is a matter of course that this Duke should tell everything to his
+friend; a matter of course, too, that he should love books and bookish
+metaphors. Without being told, one knows that he delights in all
+beautiful things--pictures with their faërie false presentment of forms
+and life; the flesh-firm outline of marble, the warmth of ivory and the
+sea-green patine of bronze--was not the poop of the vessel beaten gold,
+the sails purple, the oars silver, and the very water amorous?
+
+This Duke shows us Shakespeare's most intimate traits even when the
+action does not suggest the self-revelation. When sending Viola to woo
+Olivia for him he adds:
+
+    “Some four or five, attend him;
+  All if you will; for I myself am best
+  When least in company.”
+
+Like Vincentio, that other mask of Shakespeare, this Duke too loves
+solitude and “the life removed”; he is “best when least in company.”
+
+If there is any one who still doubts the essential identity of Duke
+Orsino and Shakespeare, let him consider the likeness in thought and
+form between the Duke's lyric effusions and the Sonnets, and if that
+does not convince him I might use a hitherto untried argument. When a
+dramatist creates a man's character he is apt to make him, as the French
+say, too much of a piece--too logical. But, in this instance, though
+Shakespeare has given the Duke only a short part, he has made him
+contradict himself with the charming ease that belongs peculiarly to
+self-revealing. The Duke tells us:
+
+  “For such as I am all true lovers are,
+  --Unstaid and skittish in all motions else,
+  Save in the constant image of the creature
+  That is beloved.”
+
+The next moment he repeats this:
+
+  “For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
+  Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
+  More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won,
+  Than women's are.”
+
+And the moment after he asserts:
+
+  “There is no woman's sides
+  Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
+  As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart
+  So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
+  Alas! their love may be called appetite,
+  No motion of the liver, but the palate,
+  That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt!”
+
+Hamlet contradicts himself, too: at one moment he declares that his soul
+is immortal, and at the next is full of despair. But Hamlet is so
+elaborate a portrait, built up of so many minute touches, that
+self-contradiction is a part, and a necessary part, of his many-sided
+complexity. But the Duke in “Twelfth Night” reveals himself as it were
+accidentally; we know little more of him than that he loves music and
+love, books and flowers, and that he despises wealth and company;
+accordingly, when he contradicts himself, we may suspect that
+Shakespeare is letting himself speak freely without much care for the
+coherence of characterization. And the result of this frankness is that
+he has given a more intimate, a more confidential, sketch of himself in
+Duke Orsino of “Twelfth Night” than he has given us in any play except
+perhaps “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.”
+
+I hardly need to prove that Shakespeare in his earliest plays, as in his
+latest, in his Sonnets as in his darkest tragedy, loved flowers and
+music. In almost every play he speaks of flowers with affection and
+delight. One only needs to recall the song in “A Midsummer's Night's
+Dream,” “I know a bank,” or Perdita's exquisite words:
+
+                                 “Daffodils,
+  That come before the swallow dares, and take
+  The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
+  But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
+  Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
+  That die unmarried ere they can behold
+  Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady
+  Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and
+  The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,
+  The flower-de-luce being one”;
+
+or Arviragus' praise of Imogen:
+
+    “Thou shalt not lack
+  The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor
+  The azured harebell like thy veins; no, nor
+  The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander
+  Outsweetened not thy breath.”
+
+Shakespeare praises music so frequently and so enthusiastically that we
+must regard the trait as characteristic of his deepest nature. Take this
+play which we are handling now. Not only the Duke, but both the
+heroines, Viola and Olivia, love music. Viola can sing “in many sorts of
+music,” and Olivia admits that she would rather hear Viola solicit love
+than “music from the spheres.” Romeo almost confounds music with love,
+as does Duke Orsino:
+
+  “How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,
+  Like softest music to attending ears!”
+
+And again:
+
+    “And let rich music's tongue
+  Unfold the imagin'd happiness that both
+  Receive in either by this dear encounter.”
+
+It is a curious and characteristic fact that Shakespeare gives almost
+the same words to Ferdinand in the “Tempest” that he gave ten years
+earlier to the Duke in “Twelfth Night.” In both passages music goes with
+passion to allay its madness:
+
+  “This music crept by me upon the waters,
+  Allaying both their fury and my passion
+  With its sweet air”
+
+and Duke Orsino says:
+
+  “That old and antique song we heard last night,
+  Methought it did relieve my passion much.”
+
+This confession is so peculiar; shows, too, so exquisitely fine a
+sensibility, that its repetition makes me regard it as Shakespeare's.
+The most splendid lyric on music is given to Lorenzo in the “Merchant of
+Venice,” and it may be remarked in passing that Lorenzo is not a
+character, but, like Claudio, a mere name and a mouthpiece of
+Shakespeare's feeling. Shakespeare was almost as well content, it
+appears, to play the lover as to play the Duke. I cannot help
+transcribing the magical verses, though they must be familiar to every
+lover of our English tongue:
+
+  “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
+  Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
+  Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
+  Become the touches of sweet harmony.
+  Sit, Jessica: Look how the floor of heaven
+  Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
+  There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
+  But in his motion like an angel sings,
+  Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.
+  Such harmony is in immortal souls;
+  But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
+  Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”
+
+The first lines of this poem are conceived in the very spirit of the
+poems of “Twelfth Night,” and in the last lines Shakespeare puts to use
+that divine imagination which lifts all his best verse into the higher
+air of life, and reaches its noblest in Prospero's solemn-sad lyric.
+
+Shakespeare's love of music is so much a part of himself that he
+condemns those who do not share it; this argument, too, is given to
+Lorenzo:
+
+  “The man that hath no music to himself,
+  Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
+  Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
+  The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
+  And his affections dark as Erebus:
+  Let no such man be trusted.”
+
+That this view was not merely the expression of a passing mood is shown
+by the fact that Shakespeare lends no music to his villains; but Timon
+gives welcome to his friends with music, just as Hamlet welcomes the
+players with music and Portia calls for music while her suitors make
+their eventful choice. Titania and Oberon both seek the aid of music to
+help them in their loves, and the war-worn and time-worn Henry IV. prays
+for music to bring some rest to his “weary spirit”; in much the same
+mood Prospero desires music when he breaks his wand and resigns his
+magical powers.
+
+Here, again, in “Twelfth Night” in full manhood Shakespeare shows
+himself to us as Romeo, in love with flowers and music and passion.
+True, this Orsino is a little less occupied with verbal quips, a little
+more frankly sensual, too, than Romeo; but then Romeo would have been
+more frankly sensual had he lived from twenty-five to thirty-five. As an
+older man, too, Orsino has naturally more of Hamlet-Shakespeare's
+peculiar traits than Romeo showed; the contempt of wealth and love of
+solitude are qualities hardly indicated in Romeo, while in Orsino as in
+the mature Shakespeare they are salient characteristics. To sum up:
+Hamlet-Macbeth gives us Shakespeare's mind; but in Romeo-Orsino he has
+discovered his heart and poetic temperament to us as ingenuously, though
+not, perhaps, so completely, as he does in the Sonnets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. SHAKESPEARE'S HUMOUR: FALSTAFF
+
+
+Shakespeare's portraits of himself are not to be mistaken; the changes
+in him caused by age bring into clearer light the indestructible
+individuality, and no difference of circumstance or position has any
+effect upon this distinctive character: whether he is the lover, Romeo;
+the murderer, Macbeth; the courtier, Hamlet; or the warrior, Posthumus;
+he is always the same--a gentle yet impulsive nature, sensuous at once
+and meditative; half poet, half philosopher, preferring nature and his
+own reveries to action and the life of courts; a man physically
+fastidious to disgust, as is a delicate woman, with dirt and smells and
+common things; an idealist daintily sensitive to all courtesies,
+chivalries, and distinctions. The portrait is not yet complete--far from
+it, indeed; but already it is manifest that Shakespeare's nature was so
+complex, so tremulously poised between world-wide poles of poetry and
+philosophy, of what is individual and concrete on the one hand and what
+is abstract and general on the other, that the task of revealing himself
+was singularly difficult. It is not easy even to describe him as he
+painted himself: it may be that, wishing to avoid a mere catalogue of
+disparate qualities, I have brought into too great prominence the gentle
+passionate side of Shakespeare's nature; though that would be difficult
+and in any case no bad fault; for this is the side which has hitherto
+been neglected or rather overlooked by the critics.
+
+My view of Shakespeare can be made clearer by examples. I began by
+taking Hamlet the philosopher as Shakespeare's most profound and complex
+study, and went on to prove that Hamlet is the most complete portrait
+which Shakespeare has given of himself, other portraits being as it were
+sides of Hamlet or less successful _replicas_ of him; and finally I
+tried to complete the Hamlet by uniting him with Duke Orsino, Orsino the
+poet-lover being, so to speak, Shakespeare's easiest and most natural
+portrait. In Hamlet, if one may dare to say so, Shakespeare has
+discovered too much of himself: Hamlet is at one and the same time
+philosopher and poet, critic and courtier, lover and cynic--the extremes
+that Shakespeare's intellect could cover--and he fills every part so
+easily that he might almost be a bookish Admirable Crichton, a type of
+perfection rather than an individual man, were it not for his feminine
+gentleness and forgivingness of nature, and particularly for the
+brooding melancholy and disbelief which darkened Shakespeare's outlook
+at the time. But though the melancholy scepticism was an abiding
+characteristic of Shakespeare, to be found in his Richard II. as in his
+Prospero, it did not overshadow all his being as it does Hamlet's. There
+was a summer-time, too, in Shakespeare's life, and in his nature a
+capacity for sunny gaiety and a delight in life and love which came to
+full expression in the golden comedies, “Much Ado,” “As You Like It” and
+“Twelfth Night.” The complement to Hamlet the sad philosopher-sceptic is
+the sensuous happy poet-lover Orsino, and when we take these seeming
+antitheses and unite them we have a good portrait of Shakespeare. But
+these two, Hamlet and Orsino, are in reality one; every quality of
+Orsino is to be found or divined in Hamlet, and therefore the easiest
+and surest way to get at Shakespeare is to take Hamlet and deepen those
+peculiarities in him which we find in Orsino.
+
+Some critics are sure to say that I have now given a portrait of
+Coleridge rather than a portrait of Shakespeare. This is not altogether
+the fact, though I for one see no shame in acknowledging the likeness.
+Coleridge had a “smack of Hamlet” in him, as he himself saw; indeed, in
+his rich endowment as poet and philosopher, and in his gentleness and
+sweetness of disposition, he was more like Shakespeare than any other
+Englishman whom I can think of; but in Coleridge the poet soon
+disappeared, and a little later the philosopher in him faded into the
+visionary and sophist; he became an upholder of the English Church and
+found reasons in the immutable constitution of the universe for aprons
+and shovel-hats. Shakespeare, on the other hand, though similarly
+endowed, was far more richly endowed: he had stronger passions and
+greater depth of feeling; the sensuousness of Keats was in him; and this
+richness of nature not only made him a greater lyric poet than Coleridge
+and a far saner thinker, but carried him in spite of a constitutional
+dislike of resolve and action to his astounding achievement.
+
+But even when we thus compare Shakespeare with Coleridge, as we compare
+trees of the same species, showing that as the roots of the one go
+deeper and take a firmer hold of earth, so in exact measure the crest
+rises into higher air, still there is something lacking to our
+comparison. Even when we hold Hamlet-Orsino before us as the best
+likeness of the master-poet, our impression of him is still incomplete.
+
+There remains a host of creations from Launce to Autolycus, and from
+Dame Quickly to Maria, which proves that Shakespeare was something more
+than the gentle lover-thinker-poet whom we have shown. It is
+Shakespeare's humour that differentiates him not only from Coleridge and
+Keats, but also from the world-poets, Goethe, Dante, and Homer. It is
+this unique endowment that brings him into vital touch with reality and
+common life, and hinders us from feeling his all-pervading ideality as
+disproportioned or one-sided. Strip him of his humour and he would have
+been seen long ago in his true proportions. His sympathies are not more
+broad and generous than Balzac's; his nature is too delicate, too
+sensitive, too sensuous; but his humour blinds us to the truth. Of
+course his comic characters, like his captains and men of action, are
+due originally to his faculty of observation; but while his observation
+of the fighting men is always superficial and at times indifferent, his
+humorous observation is so intensely interested and sympathetic that its
+creations are only inferior in artistic value to his portraits of the
+poet-philosopher-lover.
+
+The intellect in him had little or nothing to go upon in the case of the
+man of action; he never loved the Captain or watched him at work; it is
+his mind and second-hand knowledge that made Henry V. and Richard III.;
+and how slight and shallow are these portraits in comparison with the
+portrait of a Parolles or a Sir Toby Belch, or the ever-famous Nurse,
+where the same intellect has played about the humorous trait and
+heightened the effect of loving observation. The critics who have
+ignorantly praised his Hotspur and Bastard as if he had been a man of
+deeds as well as a man of words have only obscured the truth that
+Shakespeare the poet-philosopher, the lover _quand même_, only
+reached a sane balance of nature through his overflowing humour. He
+whose intellect and sensibilities inspired him with nothing but contempt
+and loathing for the mass of mankind, the aristocrat who in a dozen
+plays sneers at the greasy caps and foul breaths of the multitude, fell
+in love with Dogberry, and Bottom, Quickly and Tearsheet, clod and
+clown, pimp and prostitute, for the laughter they afforded. His humour
+is rarely sardonic; it is almost purged of contempt; a product not of
+hate but of love; full of sympathy; summer-lightning humour, harmless
+and beautiful.
+
+Sometimes the sympathy fails and the laughter grows grim, and these
+lapses are characteristic. He hates false friends and timeservers, the
+whole tribe of the ungrateful, the lords of Timon's acquaintance and his
+artists; he loathes Shylock, whose god is greed and who battens on
+others' misfortunes; he laughs at the self-righteous Malvolio and not
+with him, and takes pleasure in unmasking the pretended ascetic and
+Puritan Angelo; but for the frailties of the flesh he has an ever-ready
+forgiveness. Like the greatest of ethical teachers, he can take the
+publican and the sinner to his heart, but not the hypocrite or the
+Pharisee or the money-lender.
+
+It does not come within the scope of this essay to attempt a detailed
+criticism of Shakespeare's comic characters; it will be enough for my
+purpose to show that even in his masterpiece of humour, the incomparable
+Falstaff, he betrays himself more than once: more than once we shall
+find Shakespeare, the poet, or Shakespeare, the thinker, speaking
+through Falstaff's mouth. Yet to criticize Falstaff is difficult, and if
+easy, it would still be an offence to those capable of gratitude. I
+would as soon find fault with Ariel's most exquisite lyric, or the
+impeccable loveliness of the “Dove Sono,” as weigh the rich words of the
+Lord of Comedy in small balances of reason. But such considerations must
+not divert me from my purpose; I have undertaken to discover the very
+soul of Shakespeare, and I must, therefore, trace him in Falstaff as in
+Hamlet.
+
+Falstaff enters and asks the Prince the time. The Prince answers that
+unless “hours were cups of sack and so forth, he can't understand why
+Falstaff should care about anything so superfluous as time.” Falstaff
+replies: “Indeed you come near me now, Hal; for we that take purses go
+by the moon and the seven stars and not by Phoebus, he, 'that wandering
+knight so fair.'” Here we have a sort of lyrical strain in Falstaff and
+then a tag of poetry which gives food for thought; but his next speech
+is unmistakable:
+
+  “Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade,
+  minions of the moon; and let men say we be men of
+  good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our
+  noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose
+  countenance we--steal.”
+
+This is Shakespeare speaking, and Shakespeare alone: the phrases sing to
+us in the unmistakable music of the master-poet, though the fall at the
+last to “--steal,” seems to be an attempt to get into the character of
+Falstaff. It is, of course, difficult to make the first words of a
+person sharply characteristic; a writer is apt to work himself into a
+new character gradually; it is only the sensitive self-consciousness of
+our time that demands an absolute fidelity in characterization from the
+first word to the last. Yet this scene is so excellent and natural, that
+the uncertainty in the painting of Falstaff strikes me as peculiar. But
+this first speech is not the only speech of Falstaff in which
+Shakespeare betrays himself; again and again we catch the very accent of
+the poet. It is not Falstaff but Shakespeare who says that “the poor
+abuses of the time want countenance”; and later in the play, when the
+character of Falstaff is fully developed, it is Shakespeare, the
+thinker, who calls Falstaff's ragged regiment “the cankers of a calm
+world and a long peace.” In just the same way Hamlet speaks of the
+expedition of Fortinbras:
+
+  “This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,
+  That inward breaks.”
+
+But though the belief that Shakespeare sometimes falls out of the
+character and slips phrases of his own into Falstaff's mouth is
+well-founded, it should nevertheless be put aside as a heresy, for the
+true faith is that the white-bearded old footpad who cheered on his
+fellow-ruffians with
+
+  “Strike.... Bacon-fed knaves! they hate us youth:
+  down with them! fleece them!”
+
+and again:
+  “On, bacons, on! What, ye knaves! young men
+  must live!”
+
+is the most splendid piece of humorous portraiture in the world's
+fiction.
+
+Who but Falstaff would have found his self-justification in his
+youth?--_splendide mendax_! and yet the excuse is as true to his
+sack-heated blood when he uses it on Gadshill as it was true also to
+fact when he first used it forty years before. And who but Falstaff
+would have had the words of repentance always on his lips and never in
+his heart? I ascribe these illuminating flashes to Falstaff, and not to
+Shakespeare, for no imagination in the world has yet accomplished such a
+miracle; as a miracle of representment Falstaff is astonishing enough,
+as a miracle of creation he is simply unthinkable. I would almost as
+soon believe that Falstaff made Shakespeare as that Shakespeare made
+Falstaff without a living model. All hail to thee, inimitable,
+incomparable Jack! Never before or since has poet been blessed with such
+a teacher, as rich and laughterful, as mendacious and corrupting as life
+itself.
+
+I must not be taken to mean that the living original of Falstaff was as
+richly humorous, as inexhaustibly diverting as the dramatic counterfeit
+who is now a citizen and chief personage in that world of literature
+which outlasts all the fleeting shows of the so-called real world. It
+seems to me to be possible for a good reader to notice not only
+Shakespeare's lapses and faults in the drawing of this character, but
+also to make a very fair guess at his heightening touches, and so arrive
+at last at the humorous old lewdster who furnished the living model for
+the inimitable portrait. The first scene in which Falstaff appears
+talking with Prince Henry will supply examples to illustrate my meaning.
+
+Falstaff's very first speech after he asks Hal the time of day gives us
+the key; he ends it with:
+
+  “And I pr'ythee, sweet wag, when thou art king,--as,
+  God save thy grace--majesty, I should say, for grace
+  thou wilt have none,--”
+
+Here he is interrupted and breaks off, but a minute or two later he
+comes back again to his argument, and curiously enough uses exactly the
+same words:
+
+  “But, I pr'ythee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows
+  standing in England when thou art king? and resolution
+  thus fobbed as it is with the rusty curb of old father
+  Antick, the law?”
+
+Now, this question and the hope it expresses that justice would be put
+to shame in England on Prince Henry's accession to the throne is taken
+from a speech of the Prince in the old play, “The Famous Victories of
+Henry the Fifth.” Shakespeare would have done better to leave it out,
+for Falstaff has far too good brains to imagine that all thieves could
+ever have his licence and far too much conceit ever to desire so unholy
+a consummation. And Shakespeare must have felt that the borrowed words
+were too shallow-common, for he immediately falls back on his own brains
+for the next phrase and gives us of his hoarded best. The second part of
+the question, “resolution thus fobbed,” and so forth, is only another
+statement of the famous couplet in “Richard III.”:
+
+  “Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
+  Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”
+
+These faults show that Shakespeare is at first unsure of his personage;
+he fumbles a little; yet the vivacity, the roaring life, is certainly a
+quality of the original Falstaff, for it attends him as constantly as
+his shadow; the pun, too, is his, and the phrase “sweet wag” is probably
+taken from his mouth, for he repeats it again, “sweet wag,” and again
+“mad wag.” The shamelessness, too, and the lechery are marks of him, and
+the love of witty word-warfare, and, above all, the pretended
+repentance:
+
+  “O, thou hast damnable iteration, and art, indeed,
+  able to corrupt a saint. Thou hast done much harm
+  upon me, Hal,--God forgive thee for it. Before I knew
+  thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man
+  should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.
+  I must give over this life, and I will give it over; by the
+  Lord, an I do not, I am a villain; I'll be damned for
+  never a king's son in Christendom.”
+
+In this first scene between Falstaff and Prince Henry, Shakespeare is
+feeling his way, so to speak, blindfold to Falstaff, with gropings of
+memory and dashes of poetry that lead him past the mark. In this first
+scene, as we noticed, he puts fine lyric phrases in Falstaff's mouth;
+but he never repeats the experiment; Falstaff and high poetry are
+anti-podes--all of which merely proves that at first Shakespeare had not
+got into the skin of his personage. But the real Falstaff had probably
+tags of verse in memory and lilts of song, for Shakespeare repeats this
+trait. Here we reach the test: Whenever a feature is accentuated by
+repetition, we may guess that it belongs to the living model. There was
+assuredly a strong dash of Puritanism in the real Falstaff, for when
+Shakespeare comes to render this, he multiplies the brush-strokes with
+perfect confidence; Falstaff is perpetually repenting.
+
+After the first scene Shakespeare seems to have made up his mind to keep
+closely to his model and only to permit himself heightening touches.
+
+In order to come closer to the original, I will now take another passage
+later in the play, when Shakespeare is drawing Falstaff with a sure
+hand:
+
+  “_Fal_. A plague of all cowards, I say, and a vengeance
+  too! marry and amen!--Give me a cup of sack, boy.--
+  Ere I lead this life long, I'll sew netherstocks, and mend
+  them, and foot them, too. A plague of all cowards!--
+  give me a cup of sack, rogue.--Is there no virtue extant?
+                                     [_Drinks_.]”
+
+Here is surely the true Falstaff; he will not lead this life long; this
+is the soul of him; but the exquisite heightening phrase, “Is there no
+virtue extant?” is pure Shakespeare, Shakespeare generalizing as we saw
+him generalizing in just the same way in the scene where Cade is talked
+of in the Second Part of “King Henry VI.” The form too is Shakespeare's.
+Who does not remember the magic line in “The Two Noble Kinsmen “?
+
+  “She is all the beauty extant.”
+
+And the next speech of Falstaff is just as illuminating:
+
+   “_Fal_. You rogue, here's lime in this sack, too; there is
+   nothing but roguery to be found in villainous man: yet a coward
+   is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it--a villainous
+   coward.--Go thy ways, old Jack; die when thou wilt, if manhood,
+   good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I
+   a shotten herring. There live not three good men unhanged in
+   England, and one of them is fat and grows old: God help the
+   while! A bad world I say----”
+
+At the beginning the concrete fact, then generalization, and then merely
+a repetition of the traits marked in the first scene, with the addition
+of bragging. Evidently Shakespeare has the model in memory as he writes.
+I say “evidently,” for Falstaff is the only character in Shakespeare
+that repeats the same words with damnable iteration, and in whom the
+same traits are shown again and again and again. When Shakespeare is
+painting himself in Richard II. he depicts irresolution again and again
+as he depicts it also in Hamlet; but neither Hamlet nor Richard repeats
+the same words, nor is any trait in either of them accentuated so
+grossly as are the principal traits of Falstaff's character. The
+features in Falstaff which are so harped upon, are to me the features of
+the original model. Shakespeare did not know Falstaff quite as well as
+he knew himself; so he has to confine himself to certain qualities which
+he had observed, and stick, besides, to certain tags of speech, which
+were probably favourites with the living man.
+
+In another important particular, too, Falstaff is unlike any other comic
+character in Shakespeare: he tells the truth about himself in a magical
+way. The passage I allude to is the first speech made by Falstaff in the
+Second Part of “Henry IV.”; it shows us Shakespeare getting into the
+character again--after a certain lapse of time:
+
+  “_Fal_. Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me; the
+  brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able
+  to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than I
+  invent or is invented on me: I am not only witty in myself,
+  but the cause that wit is in other men--”
+
+Just as in the first act Shakespeare introducing Falstaff makes him talk
+poetically, so here there is a certain exaltation and lyrical swing
+which betrays the poet-creator. “Foolish-compounded,” too, shows
+Shakespeare's hand, but the boast, I feel sure, was a boast often made
+by the original, and thus brings Shakespeare into intimate union with
+the character; for after this introduction Falstaff goes on to talk pure
+Falstaff, unmixed with any slightest dash of poetry.
+
+Who was the original of Falstaff? Is a guess possible? It seems to me it
+must have been some lover of poetry--perhaps Chettle, the Chettle who
+years before had published Greene's attack upon Shakespeare and who
+afterwards made amends for it. In Dekker's tract, “A Knight's
+Conjuring,” Chettle figures among the poets in Elysium: “In comes
+Chettle sweating and blowing by reason of his fatnes; to welcome whom,
+because hee was of olde acquaintance, all rose up, and fell presentlie
+on their knees, to drinck a health to all the louers of Hellicon.” Here
+we have a fat man greeted with laughter and mock reverence by the
+poets--just such a model as Shakespeare needed, but the guess is mere
+conjecture: we don't know enough about Chettle to be at all sure. Yet
+Chettle was by way of being a poet, and Falstaff uses tags of
+verse--still, as I say, it is all pure guesswork. The only reason I put
+his name forward is that some have talked of Ben Jonson as Falstaff's
+original merely because he was fat. I cannot believe that gentle
+Shakespeare would ever have treated Jonson with such contempt; but
+Chettle seems to have been a butt by nature.
+
+That Falstaff was taken from one model is to me certain. Shakespeare
+very seldom tells us what his characters look like; whenever he gives us
+a photograph, so to speak, of a person, it is always taken from life and
+extraordinarily significant. We have several portraits of Falstaff: the
+Prince gives a picture of the “old fat man,...” that trunk of humours
+“... that old white-bearded Satan”; the Chief Justice gives us another
+of his “moist eye, white beard, increasing belly and double chin.”
+ Falstaff himself has another: “a goodly portly man, i' faith and a
+corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble
+carriage.” Such physical portraiture alone would convince me that there
+was a living model for Falstaff. But there are more obvious arguments:
+the other humorous characters of Shakespeare are infinitely inferior to
+Falstaff, and the best of them are merely sides of Falstaff or poor
+reflections of him. Autolycus and Parolles have many of his traits, but
+they are not old, and taken together, they are only a faint
+_replica_ of the immortal footpad.
+
+Listening with my heart in my ears, I catch a living voice, a round, fat
+voice with tags of “pr'ythee,” “wag,” and “marry,” and behind the
+inimitable dramatic counterfeit I see a big man with a white head and
+round belly who loved wine and women and jovial nights, a Triton among
+the minnows of boon companions, whose shameless effrontery was backed by
+cunning, whose wit though common was abundant and effective through long
+practice--a sort of licensed tavern-king, whose mere entrance into a
+room set the table in a roar. Shakespeare was attracted by the
+many-sided racy ruffian, delighted perhaps most by his easy mastery of
+life and men; he studied him with infinite zest, absorbed him wholly,
+and afterwards reproduced him with such richness of sympathy, such magic
+of enlarging invention that he has become, so to speak, the symbol of
+laughter throughout the world, for men of all races the true Comic Muse.
+
+In any case I may be allowed one last argument. The Falstaff of “The
+Merry Wives of Windsor” is not the Falstaff of the two parts of “King
+Henry IV.”; it is but a shadow of the great knight that we see, an echo
+of him that we hear in the later comedy. Falstaff would never have
+written the same letter to Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page; there was too much
+fancy in him, too much fertility, too much delight in his own mind- and
+word-wealth ever to show himself so painfully stinted and barren. Nor is
+it credible that Falstaff would ever have fallen three times running
+into the same trap; Falstaff made traps; he did not fall into them. We
+know, too, that Falstaff would not fight “longer than he saw reason”;
+his instinct of self-preservation was largely developed; but he could
+face a sword; he drew on Pistol and chased him from the room; he was not
+such a pitiful coward as to take Ford's cudgelling. Finally, the
+Falstaff whom we all know could never have been befooled by the Welshman
+and his child-fairies. And this objection Shakespeare himself felt, for
+he meets it by making Falstaff explain how near he came to discovering
+the fraud, and how wit is made “a Jack-a-Lent when 'tis upon ill
+employment.” But the fact that some explanation is necessary is an
+admission of the fault. Falstaff must indeed have laid his brains in the
+sun before he could have been taken in by foppery so gross and palpable.
+This is not the same man who at once recognized the Prince and Poins
+through their disguise as drawers. Yet there are moments when the
+Falstaff of “The Merry Wives” resumes his old nature. For example, when
+he is accused by Pistol of sharing in the proceeds of the theft, he
+answers with all the old shameless wit:
+
+  “Reason, you rogue, reason; think'st thou I'll endanger
+  my soul gratis?”
+
+and, again, when he has been cozened and beaten, he speaks almost in the
+old way:
+
+  “I never prospered since I forswore myself at primero.
+  Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my
+  prayers, I would repent.”
+
+But on the whole the Falstaff of “The Merry Wives” is but a poor thin
+shadow of the Falstaff of the two parts of “Henry IV.”
+
+Had “The Merry Wives” been produced under ordinary conditions, one would
+have had to rack one's brains to account for its feebleness. Not only is
+the genial Lord of Humour degraded in it into a buffoon, but the
+amusement of it is chiefly in situation; it is almost as much a farce as
+a comedy. For these and other reasons I believe in the truth of the
+tradition that Elizabeth was so pleased with the character of Falstaff
+that she ordered Shakespeare to write another play showing the fat
+knight in love, and that in obedience to this command Shakespeare wrote
+“The Merry Wives” in a fortnight. For what does a dramatist do when he
+is in a hurry to strike while the iron is hot and to catch a Queen's
+fancy before it changes? Naturally he goes to his memory for his
+characters, to that vivid memory of youth which makes up by precision of
+portraiture for what it lacks in depth of comprehension. And this is the
+distinguishing characteristic of “The Merry Wives,” particularly in the
+beginning. Even without “the dozen white luces” in his coat, one would
+swear that this Justice Shallow, with his pompous pride of birth and his
+stilted stupidity, is a portrait from life, some Sir Thomas Lucy or
+other, and Justice Shallow is not so deeply etched in as his cousin,
+Master Slender--“a little wee face, with a little yellow beard,--a
+cane-coloured beard.” Such physical portraiture, as I have said, is very
+rare and very significant in Shakespeare. This photograph is slightly
+malevolent, too, as of one whose malice is protected by a Queen's
+commission. Those who do not believe traditions when thus
+circumstantially supported would not believe though one rose from the
+dead to witness to them. “The Merry Wives” is worthful to me as the only
+piece of Shakespeare's journalism that we possess; here we find him
+doing task-work, and doing it at utmost speed. Those who wish to measure
+the difference between the conscious, deliberate work of the artist and
+the hurried slap-dash performance of the journalist, have only to
+compare the Falstaff of “The Merry Wives” with the Falstaff of the two
+parts of “Henry IV.” But if we take it for granted that “The Merry
+Wives” was done in haste and to order, can any inference be fairly drawn
+from the feebleness of Falstaff and the unreality of his love-making? I
+think so; it seems to me that, if Falstaff had been a creation,
+Shakespeare must have reproduced him more effectively. His love-making
+in the second part of “Henry IV.” is real enough. But just because
+Falstaff was taken from life, and studied from the outside, Shakespeare
+having painted him once could not paint him again, he had exhausted his
+model and could only echo him.
+
+The heart of the matter is that, whereas Shakespeare's men of action,
+when he is not helped by history or tradition, are thinly conceived and
+poorly painted, his comic characters--Falstaff, Sir Toby Belch, and
+Dogberry; Maria, Dame Quickly, and the Nurse, creatures of observation
+though they be, are only inferior as works of art to the portraits of
+himself which he has given us in Romeo, Hamlet, Macbeth, Orsino, and
+Posthumus. It is his humour which makes Shakespeare the greatest of
+dramatists, the most complete of men.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY ATTEMPTS TO PORTRAY HIMSELF
+AND HIS WIFE: BIRON, ADRIANA, VALENTINE
+
+In the preceding chapters I have considered those impersonations of
+Shakespeare which revealed most distinctly the salient features of his
+character. I now regard this part of my work as finished: the outlines
+at least of his nature are established beyond dispute, and I may
+therefore be permitted to return upon my steps, and beginning with the
+earliest works pass in review most of the other personages who discover
+him, however feebly or profoundly. Hitherto I have rather challenged
+contradiction than tried to conciliate or persuade; it was necessary to
+convince the reader that Shakespeare was indeed Hamlet-Orsino, plus an
+exquisite sense of humour; and as the proofs of this were almost
+inexhaustible, and as the stability of the whole structure depended on
+the firmness of the foundations, I was more than willing to call forth
+opposition in order once for all to strangle doubt. But now that I have
+to put in the finer traits of the portrait I have to hope for the
+goodwill at least of my readers. Even then my task is not easy. The
+subtler traits of a man's character often elude accurate description, to
+say nothing of exact proof; the differences in tone between a
+dramatist's own experiences of life and his observation of the
+experiences of others are often so slight as to be all but unnoticeable.
+In the case of some peculiarities I have only a mere suggestion to go
+upon, in that of others a bare surmise, a hint so fleeting that it may
+well seem to the judicious as if the meshes of language were too coarse
+to catch such evanescent indication.
+
+Fortunately in this work I am not called on to limit myself to that
+which can be proved beyond question, or to the ordinary man. I think my
+reader will allow me, or indeed expect me, now to throw off constraint
+and finish my picture as I please.
+
+In this second book then I shall try to correct Shakespeare's portraits
+of himself by bringing out his concealed faults and vices--the
+shortcomings one's vanity slurs over and omits. Above all I shall try to
+notice anything that throws light upon his life, for I have to tell here
+the story of his passion and his soul's wreck. At the crisis of his life
+he revealed himself almost without affectation; in agony men forget to
+pose. And this more intimate understanding of the man will enable us to
+reconstruct, partially at least, the happenings of his life, and so
+trace not only his development, but the incidents of his life's journey
+from his school days in 1575 till he crept home to Stratford to die
+nearly forty years later.
+
+The chief academic critics, such as Professor Dowden and Dr. Brandes,
+take pains to inform us that Biron in “Love's Labour's Lost” is nothing
+but an impersonation of Shakespeare. This would show much insight on the
+part of the Professors were it not that Coleridge as usual has been
+before them, and that Coleridge's statement is to be preferred to
+theirs. Coleridge was careful to say that the whole play revealed many
+of Shakespeare's characteristic features, and he added finely, “as in a
+portrait taken of him in his boyhood.” This is far truer than Dowden's
+more precise statement that “Berowne is the exponent of Shakespeare's
+own thought.” For though, of course, Biron is especially the mouthpiece
+of the poet, yet Shakespeare reveals himself in the first speech of the
+King as clearly as he does in any speech of Biron:
+
+  “Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
+  Live registered upon our brazen tombs,
+  And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
+  When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
+  The endeavour of this present breath may buy
+  That honour which shall 'bate his scythe's keen edge,
+  And make us heirs of all eternity.”
+
+The King's criticism, too, of Armado in the first scene is more finely
+characteristic of Shakespeare than Biron's criticism of Boyet in the
+last act. In this, his first drama, Shakespeare can hardly sketch a
+sympathetic character without putting something of himself into it.
+
+I regard “Love's Labour's Lost” as Shakespeare's earliest comedy, not
+only because the greater part of it is in rhymed verse, but also because
+he was unable in it to individualize his serious personages at all; the
+comic characters, on the other hand, are already carefully observed and
+distinctly differenced. Biron himself is scarcely more than a charming
+sketch: he is almost as interested in language as in love, and he plays
+with words till they revenge themselves by obscuring his wit; he is
+filled with the high spirits of youth; in fact, he shows us the form and
+pressure of the Renaissance as clearly as the features of Shakespeare.
+It is, however, Biron-Shakespeare, who understands that the real world
+is built on broader natural foundations than the King's womanless
+Academe, and therefore predicts the failure of the ascetic experiment.
+Another trait in Biron that brings us close to Shakespeare is his
+contempt for book-learning;
+
+  “Small have continual plodders ever won
+  Save bare authority from others' books.
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Too much to know is to know nought but fame;
+  And every godfather can give a name.”
+
+Again and again he returns to the charge:
+
+                  “To study now it is too late,
+  Climb o'er the house to unlock the little gate.”
+
+The summing up is triumphant:
+
+  “So, study evermore is overshot.”
+
+In fine, Biron ridicules study at such length and with such earnestness
+and pointed phrase that it is manifest the discussion was intensely
+interesting to Shakespeare himself. But we should have expected
+Shakespeare's _alter ego_ to be arguing on the other side; for
+again and again we have had to notice that Shakespeare was a confirmed
+lover of books; he was always using bookish metaphors, and Hamlet was a
+student by nature. This attitude on the part of Biron, then, calls for
+explanation, and it seems to me that the only possible explanation is to
+be found in Shakespeare's own experience. Those who know England as she
+was in the days of Elizabeth, or as she is to-day, will hardly need to
+be told that when Shakespeare first came to London he was regarded as an
+unlettered provincial (“with little Latin and less Greek”), and had to
+bear the mocks and flouts of his beschooled fellows, who esteemed
+learning and gentility above genius. In his very first independent play
+he answered the scorners with scorn. But this disdain of study was not
+Shakespeare's real feeling; and his natural loyalty to the deeper truth
+forced him to make Biron contradict and excuse his own argument in a way
+which seems to me altogether charming; but is certainly undramatic:
+
+  “--Though I have for barbarism spoke more
+  Than for that angel knowledge you can say.”
+
+Undramatic the declaration is because it is at war with the length and
+earnestness with which Biron has maintained his contempt for learning;
+but here undoubtedly we find the true Shakespeare who as a youth speaks
+of “that angel, knowledge,” just as in “Cymbeline” twenty years later he
+calls reverence, “that angel of the world.”
+
+When we come to his “Life” we shall see that Shakespeare, who was thrown
+into the scrimmage of existence as a youth, and had to win his own way
+in the world, had, naturally enough, a much higher opinion of books and
+book-learning than Goethe, who was bred a student and knew life only as
+an amateur:
+
+  “Einen Blick in's Buch hinein und zwei in's Leben
+  Das muss die rechte Form dem Geiste geben.”
+
+Shakespeare would undoubtedly have given “two glances” to books and one
+to life, had he been free to choose; but perhaps after all Goethe was
+right in warning us that life is more valuable to the artist than any
+transcript of it.
+
+To return to our theme; Biron is not among Shakespeare's successful
+portraits of himself. As might be expected in a first essay, the drawing
+is now over-minute, now too loose. When Biron talks of study, he
+reveals, as we have seen, personal feelings that are merely transient;
+on the other hand, when he talks about Boyet he talks merely to hear
+“the music of his own vain tongue.” He is, however, always nimble-witted
+and impulsive; “quick Biron” as the Princess calls him, a gentleman of
+charming manners, of incomparable fluent, graceful, and witty speech,
+which qualities afterwards came to blossom in Mercutio and Gratiano. The
+faults in portraiture are manifestly due to inexperience: Shakespeare
+was still too youthful-timid to paint his chief features boldly, and it
+is left for Rosaline to picture Biron for us as Shakespeare doubtless
+desired to appear:
+
+              “A merrier man,
+  Within the limits of becoming mirth,
+  I never spent an hour's talk withal.
+  His eye begets occasion for his wit;
+  For every object that the one doth catch,
+  The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
+  Which his fair tongue, conceit's expositor,
+  Delivers in such apt and gracious words
+  That agèd ears play truant at his tales,
+  And younger hearings are quite ravishèd,
+  So sweet and voluble is his discourse.”
+
+Every touch of this self-painted portrait deserves to be studied: it is
+the first photograph of our poet which we possess--a photograph, too,
+taken in early manhood. Shakespeare's wit we knew, his mirth too, and
+that his conversation was voluble and sweet enough to ravish youthful
+ears and enthrall the aged we might have guessed from Jonson's report.
+But it is delightful to hear of his mirth-moving words and to know that
+he regarded himself as the best talker in the world. But just as the
+play at the end turns from love-making and gay courtesies to thoughts of
+death and “world-without-end” pledges, so Biron's merriment is only the
+effervescence of youth, and love brings out in him Shakespeare's
+characteristic melancholy:
+
+  “By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to
+  rhyme, and to be melancholy.”
+
+Again and again, as in his apology to Rosaline and his appeal at the end
+of the play to “honest plain words,” he shows a deep underlying
+seriousness. The soul of quick talkative mirthful Biron is that he loves
+beauty whether of women or of words, and though he condemns “taffeta
+phrases,” he shows his liking for the “silken terms precise” in the very
+form of his condemnation.
+
+Of course all careful readers know that the greater seriousness of the
+last two acts of “Love's Labour's Lost,” and the frequent use of blank
+verse instead of rhymed verse in them, are due to the fact that
+Shakespeare revised the play in 1597, some eight or nine years probably
+after he had first written it. Every one must have noticed the
+repetitions in Biron's long speech at the end of the fourth act, which
+show the original garment and the later, finer embroidery. As I shall
+have to return to this revision for other reasons, it will be enough
+here to remark that it is especially the speeches of Biron which
+Shakespeare improved in the second handling
+
+Dr. Brandes, or rather Coleridge, tells us that in Biron and his
+Rosaline we have the first hesitating sketch of the masterly Benedick
+and Beatrice of “Much Ado about Nothing”; but in this I think Coleridge
+goes too far. Unformed as Biron is, he is Shakespeare in early youth,
+whereas in Benedick the likeness is not by any means so clear. In fact,
+Benedick is merely an admirable stage silhouette and needs to be filled
+out with an actor's personality. Beatrice, on the other hand, is a woman
+of a very distinct type, whereas Rosaline needs pages of explanation,
+which Coleridge never dreamed of. A certain similarity rather of
+situation than of character seems to have misled Coleridge in this
+instance. Boyet jests with Maria and Rosaline just as Biron does, and
+just as Benedick jests with Beatrice: all these scenes simply show how
+intensely young Shakespeare enjoyed a combat of wits, spiced with the
+suggestiveness that nearly always shows itself when the combatants are
+of different sexes.
+
+It is almost certain that “Love's Labour's Lost” was wholly conceived
+and constructed as well as written by Shakespeare; no play or story has
+yet been found which might, in this case, have served him as a model.
+For the first and probably the last time he seems to have taken the
+entire drama from his imagination, and the result from a playwright's
+point of view is unfortunate; “Love's Labour's Lost” is his slightest
+and feeblest play. It is scarcely ever seen on the stage--is, indeed,
+practically unactable. This fact goes to confirm the view already put
+forth more than once in these pages, that Shakespeare was not a good
+playwright and took little or no interest in the external incidents of
+his dramas. The plot and action of the story, so carefully worked out by
+the ordinary playwright and so highly esteemed by critics and
+spectators, he always borrows, as if he had recognized the weakness of
+this first attempt, and when he sets himself to construct a play, it has
+no action, no plot--is, indeed, merely a succession of fantastic
+occurrences that give occasion for light love-making and brilliant talk.
+Even in regard to the grouping of characters the construction of his
+early plays is puerile, mechanical; in “Love's Labour's Lost” the King
+with his three courtiers is set against the Princess and her three
+ladies; in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” there is the faithful Valentine
+opposed to the inconstant Proteus, and each of them has a comic servant;
+and when later his plays from this point of view were not manufactured
+but grew, and thus assumed the beautiful irregular symmetry of life, the
+incidents were still neglected. Neither the poet nor the philosopher in
+Shakespeare felt much of the child's interest in the story; he chose his
+tales for the sake of the characters and the poetry, and whether they
+were effective stage-tales or not troubled him but little. There is
+hardly more plot or action in “Lear” than in “Love's Labour's Lost.”
+
+It is probable that “The Comedy of Errors” followed hard on the heels of
+“Love's Labour's Lost.” It practically belongs to the same period: it
+has fewer lines of prose in it than “Love's Labour's Lost”; but, on the
+other hand, the intrigue-spinning is clever, and the whole play shows a
+riper knowledge of theatrical conditions. Perhaps because the intrigue
+is more interesting, the character-drawing is even feebler than that of
+the earlier comedy: indeed, so far as the men go there is hardly
+anything worth calling character-drawing at all. Shakespeare speaks
+through this or that mask as occasion tempts him: and if the women are
+sharply, crudely differentiated, it is because Shakespeare, as I shall
+show later, has sketched his wife for us in Adriana, and his view of her
+character is decided enough if not over kind. Still, any and every
+peculiarity of character deserves notice, for in these earliest works
+Shakespeare is compelled to use his personal experience, to tell us of
+his own life and his own feelings, not having any wider knowledge to
+draw upon. Every word, therefore, in these first comedies, is important
+to those who would learn the story of his youth and fathom the
+idiosyncrasies of his being. When AEgeon, in the opening scenes, tells
+the Duke about the shipwreck in which he is separated from his wife and
+child, he declares that he himself “would gladly have embraced immediate
+death.” No reason is given for this extraordinary contempt of living. It
+was the “incessant weepings” of his wife, the “piteous plainings of the
+pretty babes,” that forced him, he says, to exert himself. But wives
+don't weep incessantly in danger, nor are the “piteous plainings of the
+pretty babes” a feature of shipwreck; I find here a little picture of
+Shakespeare's early married life in Stratford--a snapshot of memory.
+AEgeon concludes his account by saying that his life was prolonged in
+order
+
+  “To tell sad stories of my own mishaps”
+
+--which reminds one of similar words used later by Richard II. This
+personal, melancholy note is here forced and false, for Aegeon surely
+lives in hope of finding his wife and child and not in order to tell of
+his misfortunes. Aegeon is evidently a breath of Shakespeare himself,
+and not more than a breath, because he only appears again when the play
+is practically finished. Deep-brooding melancholy was the customary
+habit of Shakespeare even in youth.
+
+Just as in “Love's Labour's Lost” we find Shakespeare speaking first
+through the King and then more fully through the hero, Biron, so here he
+first speaks through Aegeon and then at greater length through the
+protagonist Antipholus of Syracuse. Antipholus is introduced to us as
+new come to Ephesus, and Shakespeare is evidently thinking of his own
+first day in London when he puts in his mouth these words:
+
+  “Within this hour it will be dinner-time:
+  Till that, I'll view the manners of the town,
+  Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings,
+  And then return and sleep within mine inn;
+  For with long travel I am stiff and weary.”
+
+Though “stiff and weary” he is too eager-young to rest; he will see
+everything--even “peruse the traders”--how the bookish metaphor always
+comes to Shakespeare's lips!--before he will eat or sleep. The utterly
+needless last line, with its emphatic description--“stiff and
+weary”--corroborates my belief that Shakespeare in this passage is
+telling us what he himself felt and did on his first arrival in London.
+In the second scene of the third act Antipholus sends his servant to the
+port:
+
+  “I will not harbour in this town to-night
+  If any bark put forth.”
+
+From the fact that Shakespeare represented Antipholus to himself as
+wishing to leave Ephesus by sea, it is probable that he pictured him
+coming to Ephesus in a ship. But when Shakespeare begins to tell us what
+he did on reaching London he recalls his own desires and then his own
+feelings; he was “stiff and weary” on that first day because he rode, or
+more probably walked, into London; one does not become “stiff and weary”
+ on board ship. This is another snapshot at that early life of
+Shakespeare, and his arrival in London, which one would not willingly
+miss. And surely it is the country-bred lad from Stratford who, fearing
+all manner of town-tricks, speaks in this way:
+
+  “They say this town is full of cozenage;
+  As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
+  Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
+  Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
+  Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
+  And many such-like liberties of sin:
+       - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  I greatly fear my money is not safe.”
+
+This Antipholus is most ingenuous-talkative; without being questioned he
+tells about his servant:
+
+  “A trusty villain, sir; that very oft,
+  When I am dull with care and melancholy,
+  Lightens my humour with his merry jests.”
+
+And as if this did not mark his peculiar thoughtful temperament
+sufficiently, he tells the merchant:
+
+                  “I will go lose myself,
+  And wander up and down to view the city.”
+
+And when the merchant leaves him, commending him to his own content, he
+talks to himself in this strain:
+
+  “He that commends me to mine own content,
+  Commends me to the thing I cannot get,
+         - -       - -        - -        - -       - -
+  So I, to find a mother and a brother,
+  In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.”
+
+A most curious way, it must be confessed, to seek for any one; but
+perfectly natural to the refined, melancholy, meditative, book-loving
+temperament which was already Shakespeare's. In this “unhappy” and
+“mother” I think I hear an echo of Shakespeare's sorrow at parting from
+his own mother.
+
+This Antipholus, although very free and open, has a reserve of dignity,
+as we see in the second scene of the second act, when he talks with his
+servant, who, as he thinks, has played with him:
+
+  “Because that I familiarly sometimes
+  Do use you for my fool, and chat with you,
+  Your sauciness will jest upon my love,
+  And make a common of my serious hours.
+  When the sun shines let foolish gnats make sport,
+  But creep in crannies when he hides his beams.”
+
+The self-esteem seems a little exaggerated here; but, after all, it is
+only natural; the whole scene is taken from Shakespeare's experience:
+the man who will chat familiarly with his servant, and jest with him as
+well, must expect to have to pull him up at times rather sharply.
+Antipholus proceeds to play with his servant in a fencing match of
+wit--a practice Shakespeare seems to have delighted in. But it is when
+Antipholus falls in love with Luciana that he shows us Shakespeare at
+his most natural as a lover. Luciana has just taken him to task for not
+loving her sister Adriana, who, she thinks, is his wife. Antipholus
+answers her thus:
+
+  “Sweet mistress,--what your name is else, I know not,
+  Nor by what wonder you do hit of mine,--
+  Less in your knowledge and your face you show not,
+  Than our earth's wonder; more than earth divine,
+  Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;
+  Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit,
+  Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
+  The folded meaning of your words' deceit. ...”
+
+He declares, in fact, that he loves her and not her sister:
+
+  “Sing, siren, for thyself and I will dote:
+  Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,
+  And as a bed I'll take them and there lie;
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  It is thyself, mine own self's better part,
+  Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart.”
+
+And as if this were not enough he goes on:
+
+  “My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,
+  My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim.”
+
+The word-conceits were a fashion of the time; but in spite of the verbal
+affectation, the courting shows the cunning of experience, and has,
+besides, a sort of echo of sincere feeling. How Shakespeare delights in
+making love! It reminds one of the first flutings of a thrush in early
+spring; over and over again he tries the notes with delighted iteration
+till he becomes a master of his music and charms the copses to silence
+with his song: and so Shakespeare sings of love again and again till at
+length we get the liquid notes of passion and the trills of joy all
+perfected in “Romeo and Juliet”; but the voice is the voice we heard
+before in “Venus and Adonis” and “The Comedy of Errors.”
+
+Antipholus' other appearances are not important. He merely fills his
+part till in the last scene he assures Luciana that he will make good
+his earlier protestations of love; but so far as he has any character at
+all, or distinctive individuality, he is young Shakespeare himself and
+his experiences are Shakespeare's.
+
+Now a word or two about Adriana. Shakespeare makes her a jealous,
+nagging, violent scold, who will have her husband arrested for debt,
+though she will give money to free him. But the comedy of the play would
+be better brought out if Adriana were pictured as loving and constant,
+inflicting her inconvenient affection upon the false husband as upon the
+true. Why did Shakespeare want to paint this unpleasant bitter-tongued
+wife?
+
+When Adriana appears in the first scene of the second act she is at once
+sketched in her impatience and jealousy. She wants to know why her
+husband should have more liberty than she has, and declares that none
+but asses will be bridled so. Then she will strike her servant. In the
+first five minutes of this act she is sketched to the life, and
+Shakespeare does nothing afterwards but repeat and deepen the same
+strokes: it seems as if he knew nothing about her or would depict
+nothing of her except her jealousy and nagging, her impatience and
+violence. We have had occasion to notice more than once that when
+Shakespeare repeats touches in this way, he is drawing from life, from
+memory, and not from imagination. Moreover, in this case, he shows us at
+once that he is telling of his wife, because she defends herself against
+the accusation of age, which no one brings against her, though every one
+knows that Shakespeare's wife was eight years older than himself.
+
+  “His company must do his minions grace,
+  Whilst I at home starve for a merry look.
+  Hath homely age the alluring beauty took
+  From my poor cheek? then he hath wasted it ...
+    ... My decayed fair
+  A sunny look of his would soon repair:
+  But, poor unruly deer, he breaks the pale,
+  And feeds from home; poor I am but his stale.”
+
+The appeal is pathetic; but Luciana will not see it. She cries:
+
+  “Self-harming jealousy! fie, beat it hence!”
+
+In the second scene of this second act Adriana goes on nagging in almost
+the same way.
+
+In the second scene of the third act there is a phrase from the hero,
+Antipholus of Syracuse, about Adriana which I find significant:
+
+  “She that doth call me husband, even my soul
+  Doth for a wife abhor!”
+
+There is no reason in the comedy for such strong words. Most men would
+be amused or pleased by a woman who makes up to them as Adriana makes up
+to Antipholus. I hear Shakespeare in this uncalled-for, over-emphatic
+“even my soul doth for a wife abhor.”
+
+In the fifth act Adriana is brought before the Abbess, and is proved to
+be a jealous scold. Shakespeare will not be satisfied till some
+impartial great person of Adriana's own sex has condemned her. Adriana
+admits that she has scolded her husband in public and in private, too;
+the Abbess replies:
+
+  “And thereof came it that the man was mad.”
+
+And she adds:
+
+  “The venom clamours of a jealous woman
+  Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.”
+
+Again, a needlessly emphatic condemnation. But Adriana will not accept
+the reproof: she will have her husband at all costs. The whole scene
+discovers personal feeling. Adriana is the portrait that Shakespeare
+wished to give us of his wife.
+
+The learned commentators have seemingly conspired to say as little about
+“The Two Gentlemen of Verona” as possible. No one of them identifies the
+protagonist, Valentine, with Shakespeare, though all of them identified
+Biron with Shakespeare, and yet Valentine, as we shall see, is a far
+better portrait of the master than Biron. This untimely blindness of the
+critics is, evidently, due to the fact that Coleridge has hardly
+mentioned “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and they have consequently been
+unable to parrot his opinions.
+
+“The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is manifestly a later work than “Love's
+Labour's Lost”; there is more blank verse and less rhyme in it, and a
+considerable improvement in character-drawing. Julia, for example, is
+individualized and lives for us in her affection and jealousy; her talks
+with her maid Lucetta are taken from life; they are indeed the first
+sketch of the delightful talks between Portia and Nerissa, and mark an
+immense advance upon the wordy _badinage_ of the Princess and her
+ladies in “Love's Labour's Lost,” where there was no attempt at
+differentiation of character. It seems indubitable to me that “The Two
+Gentlemen of Verona” is also later than “The Comedy of Errors,” and just
+as far beyond doubt that it is earlier than “A Midsummer Night's Dream,”
+ in spite of Dr. Furnival's “Trial Table.”
+
+The first three comedies, “Love's Labour's Lost,” “The Comedy of
+Errors,” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” are all noteworthy for the
+light they throw on Shakespeare's early life.
+
+In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” Shakespeare makes similar youthful
+mistakes in portraiture to those we noticed in “Love's Labour's Lost”;
+mistakes which show that he is thinking of himself and his own
+circumstances. At the beginning of the play the only difference between
+Proteus and Valentine is that one is in love, and the other, heart-free,
+is leaving home to go to Milan. In this first scene Shakespeare speaks
+frankly through both Proteus and Valentine, just as he spoke through
+both the King and Biron in the first scene of “Love's Labour's Lost,”
+ and through both AEgeon and Antipholus of Syracuse in “The Comedy of
+Errors.” But whilst the circumstances in the earliest comedy are
+imaginary and fantastic, the circumstances in “The Two Gentlemen of
+Verona” are manifestly, I think, taken from the poet's own experience.
+In the dialogue between Valentine and Proteus I hear Shakespeare
+persuading himself that he should leave Stratford. Some readers may
+regard this assumption as far-fetched, but it will appear the more
+plausible, I think, the more the dialogue is studied. Valentine begins
+the argument:
+
+  “Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits,”--
+
+he will “see the wonders of the world abroad” rather than live “dully
+sluggardiz'd at home,” wearing out “youth with shapeless idleness.” But
+all these reasons are at once superfluous and peculiar. The audience
+needs no persuasion to believe that a young man is eager to travel and
+go to Court. Shakespeare's quick mounting spirit is in the lines, and
+the needlessness of the argument shows that we have here a personal
+confession. Valentine, then, mocks at love, because it was love that
+held Shakespeare so long in Stratford, and when Proteus defends it, he
+replies:
+
+  “Even so by Love the young and tender wit
+  Is turned to folly; blasting in the bud,
+  Losing his verdure even in the prime,
+  And all the fair effects of future hopes.”
+
+Here is Shakespeare's confession that his marriage had been a failure,
+not only because of his wife's mad jealousy and violent temper, which we
+have been forced to realize in “The Comedy of Errors,” but also because
+love and its home-keeping ways threatened to dull and imprison the eager
+artist spirit. In the last charming line I find not only the music of
+Shakespeare's voice, but also one of the reasons--perhaps, indeed, the
+chief because the highest reason--which drew him from Stratford to
+London. And what the “future hope” was, he told us in the very first
+line of “Love's Labour's Lost.” The King begins the play with”
+
+  “Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives.”
+
+Now all men don't hunt after fame; it was Shakespeare who felt that Fame
+pieced out Life's span and made us “heirs of all eternity”; it was young
+Shakespeare who desired fame so passionately that he believed all other
+men must share his immortal longing, the desire in him being a forecast
+of capacity, as, indeed, it usually is. If any one is inclined to think
+that I am here abusing conjecture let him remember that Proteus, too,
+tells us that Valentine is hunting after honour.
+
+When Proteus defends love we hear Shakespeare just as clearly as when
+Valentine inveighs against it:
+
+  “Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
+  The eating canker dwells, so eating love
+  Inhabits in the finest wits of all.”
+
+Shakespeare could not be disloyal to that passion of desire in him which
+he instinctively felt was, in some way or other, the necessary
+complement of his splendid intelligence. We must take the summing-up of
+Proteus when Valentine leaves him as the other half of Shakespeare's
+personal confession:
+
+  “He after honour hunts, I after love:
+  He leaves his friends to dignify them more;
+  I leave myself, my friends, and all for love.
+  Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me,--
+  Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,
+  War with good counsel, set the world at naught;
+  Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought.”
+
+Young Shakespeare hunted as much after love as after honour, and these
+verses show that he has fully understood what a drag on him his foolish
+marriage has been. That all this is true to Shakespeare appears from the
+fact that it is false to the character of Proteus. Proteus is supposed
+to talk like this in the first blush of passion, before he has won
+Julia, before he even knows that she loves him. Is that natural? Or is
+it not rather Shakespeare's confession of what two wasted years of
+married life in Stratford had done for him? It was ambition--desire of
+fame and new love--that drove the tired and discontented Shakespeare
+from Anne Hathaway's arms to London.
+
+When his father tells Proteus he must to Court on the morrow, instead of
+showing indignation or obstinate resolve to outwit tyranny, he
+generalizes in Shakespeare's way, exactly as Romeo and Orsino generalize
+in poetic numbers:
+
+  “O, how this spring of love resembleth
+  The uncertain glory of an April day.”
+
+Another reason for believing that this play deals with Shakespeare's own
+experiences is to be found in the curious change that takes place in
+Valentine. In the first act Valentine disdains love: he prefers to
+travel and win honour; but as soon as he reaches Milan and sees Silvia,
+he falls even more desperately in love than Proteus. What was the
+object, then, in making him talk so earnestly against love in the first
+act? It may be argued that Shakespeare intended merely to contrast the
+two characters in the first act; but he contrasts them in the first act
+on this matter of love, only in the second act to annul the distinction
+himself created. Moreover, and this is decisive, Valentine rails against
+love in the first act as one who has experienced love's utmost rage:
+
+    “To be
+  In love: when scorn is bought with groans; coy looks,
+  With heart-sore sighs; one fading moment's mirth,
+  With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights.”
+
+The man who speaks like this is not the man who despises love and
+prefers honour, but one who has already given himself to passion with an
+absolute abandonment. Such inconsistencies and flaws in workmanship are
+in themselves trivial, but, from my point of view, significant; for
+whenever Shakespeare slips in drawing character, in nine cases out of
+ten he slips through dragging in his own personality or his personal
+experience, and not through carelessness, much less incompetence; his
+mistakes, therefore, nearly always throw light on his nature or on his
+life's story. From the beginning, too, Valentine like Shakespeare is a
+born lover.
+
+As soon, moreover, as he has gone to the capital and fallen in love he
+becomes Shakespeare's avowed favourite. He finds Silvia's glove and
+cries:
+
+  “Sweet ornament that decks a thing divine--”
+
+the exclamation reminding us of how Romeo talks of Juliet's glove. Like
+other men, Shakespeare learned life gradually, and in youth poverty of
+experience forces him to repeat his effects.
+
+Again, when Valentine praises his friend Proteus to the Duke, we find a
+characteristic touch of Shakespeare. Valentine says:
+
+  “His years but young; but his experience old;
+  His head unmellowed; but his judgement ripe.”
+
+In “The Merchant of Venice” Bellario, the learned doctor of Padua,
+praises Portia in similar terms:
+
+“I never knew so young a body with so old a head.”
+
+But it is when Valentine confesses his love that Shakespeare speaks
+through him most clearly:
+
+  “Ay, Proteus, but that life is altered now,
+  I have done penance for contemning love;
+       - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  For in revenge of my contempt of love
+  Love hath chased sleep from my enthralled eyes
+  And made them watchers of my own heart's sorrow.
+  O gentle Proteus, Love's a mighty lord,”--
+
+and so on.
+
+Every word in this confession is characteristic of the poet and
+especially the fact that his insomnia is due to love. Valentine then
+gives himself to passionate praise of Silvia, and ends with the “She is
+alone” that recalls “She is all the beauty extant” of “The Two Noble
+Kinsmen.” Valentine the lover reminds us of Romeo as the sketch
+resembles the finished picture; when banished, he cries:
+
+“And why not death, rather than living torment? To die is to be banished
+from myself; And Silvia is myself: banished from her, Is self from self;
+a deadly banishment. What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What
+joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by
+And feed upon the shadow of perfection. Except I be by Silvia in the
+night There is no music in the nightingale,”
+
+and so forth. I might compare this with what Romeo says of his
+banishment, and perhaps infer from this two-fold treatment of the theme
+that Shakespeare left behind in Stratford some dark beauty who may have
+given Anne Hathaway good cause for jealous rage. It must not be
+forgotten here that Dryasdust tells us he was betrothed to another girl
+when Anne Hathaway's relations forced him to marry their kinswoman.
+
+A moment later and this lover Valentine uses the very words that we
+found so characteristic in the mouth of the lover Orsino in Twelfth
+Night”:
+
+  “O I have fed upon this woe already,
+  And now excess of it will make me surfeit.”
+
+Valentine, indeed, shows us traits of nearly all Shakespeare's later
+lovers, and this seems to me interesting, because of course all the
+qualities were in the youth, which were later differenced into various
+characters. His advice to the Duke, who pretends to be in love, is far
+too ripe, too contemptuous-true, to suit the character of such a votary
+of fond desire as Valentine was; it is mellow with experience and
+man-of-the-world wisdom, and the last couplet of it distinctly
+fore-shadows Benedick:
+
+  “Flatter and praise, commend, extol their graces;
+  Though ne'er so black, say they have angels' faces.
+  That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man
+  If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.”
+
+But this is only an involuntary _aperçu_ of Valentine, as indeed
+Benedick is only an intellectual mood of Shakespeare. And here Valentine
+is contrasted with Proteus, who gives somewhat different advice to
+Thurio, and yet advice which is still more characteristic of Shakespeare
+than Valentine-Benedick's counsel. Proteus says:
+
+  “You must lay lime to tangle her desires
+  By wailful sonnets, whose composéd rhymes
+  Should be full fraught with serviceable vows.”
+
+In this way the young poet sought to give expression to different views
+of life, and so realize the complexity of his own nature.
+
+The other traits of Valentine's character that do not necessarily belong
+to him as a lover are all characteristic traits of Shakespeare. When he
+is playing the banished robber-chief far from his love, this is how
+Valentine consoles himself:
+
+  “This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
+  I better brook than flourishing peopled towns:
+  Here can I sit alone unseen of any,
+  And to the nightingale's complaining notes
+  Tune my distresses and record my woes.”
+
+This idyllic love of nature, this marked preference for the country over
+the city, however peculiar in a highway robber, are characteristics of
+Shakespeare from youth to age. Not only do his comedies lead us
+continually from the haunts of men to the forest and stream, but also
+his tragedies. He turns to nature, indeed, in all times of stress and
+trouble for its healing unconsciousness, its gentle changes that can be
+foreseen and reckoned upon, and that yet bring fresh interests and
+charming surprises; and in times of health and happiness he pictures the
+pleasant earth and its diviner beauties with a passionate intensity.
+Again and again we shall have to notice his poet's love for
+“unfrequented woods,” his thinker's longing for “the life removed.”
+
+At the end of the drama Valentine displays the gentle forgivingness of
+disposition which we have already had reason to regard as one of
+Shakespeare's most marked characteristics. As soon as “false, fleeting
+Proteus” confesses his sin Valentine pardons him with words that echo
+and re-echo through Shakespeare's later dramas:
+
+                   “Then I am paid,
+  And once again I do receive thee honest.
+  Who by repentance is not satisfied
+  Is nor of heaven nor earth; for these are pleased;
+  By patience the Eternal's wrath's appeased.”
+
+He even goes further than this, and confounds our knowledge of human
+nature by adding:
+
+  “And that my love may appear plain and free
+  All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.”
+
+And that the meaning may be made more distinct than words can make it,
+he causes Julia to faint on hearing the proposal. One cannot help
+recalling the passage in “The Merchant of Venice” when Bassanio and
+Gratiano both declare they would sacrifice their wives to free Antonio,
+and a well-known sonnet which seems to prove that Shakespeare thought
+more of a man's friendship for a man than of a man's love for a woman.
+But as I shall have to discuss this point at length when I handle the
+Sonnets, I have, perhaps, said enough for the moment. Nor need I
+consider the fact here that the whole of this last scene of the last act
+was manifestly revised or rewritten by Shakespeare _circa_
+1598--years after the rest of the play.
+
+I think every one will admit now that Shakespeare revealed himself in
+“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and especially in Valentine, much more
+fully than in Biron and in “Love's Labour's Lost” The three earliest
+comedies prove that from the very beginning of his career Shakespeare's
+chief aim was to reveal and realize himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. SHAKESPEARE AS ANTONIO, THE MERCHANT
+
+
+No one, so far as I know, has yet tried to identify Antonio, the
+Merchant of Venice, with Shakespeare, and yet Antonio is Shakespeare
+himself, and Shakespeare in what to us, children of an industrial
+civilization, is the most interesting attitude possible. Here in Antonio
+for the first time we discover Shakespeare in direct relations with real
+life, as real life is understood in the twentieth century. From Antonio
+we shall learn what Shakespeare thought of business men and business
+methods--of our modern way of living. Of course we must be on our guard
+against drawing general conclusions from this solitary example, unless
+we find from other plays that Antonio's attitude towards practical
+affairs was indeed Shakespeare's. But if this is the case, if
+Shakespeare has depicted himself characteristically in Antonio, how
+interesting it will be to hear his opinion of our money-making
+civilization. It will be as if he rose from the dead to tell us what he
+thinks of our doings. He has been represented by this critic and by that
+as a master of affairs, a prudent thrifty soul; now we shall see if this
+monstrous hybrid of tradesman-poet ever had any foundation in fact.
+
+The first point to be settled is: Did Shakespeare reveal himself very
+ingenuously and completely in Antonio, or was the “royal merchant” a
+mere pose of his, a mood or a convention? Let us take Antonio's first
+words, the words, too, which begin the play:
+
+  “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
+  It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
+  But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
+  What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
+  I am to learn;
+  And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
+  That I have much ado to know myself.”
+
+It is this very sadness that makes it easy for us to know Shakespeare,
+even when he disguises himself as a Venetian merchant. A little later
+and Jaques will describe and define the disease as “humorous
+melancholy”; but here it is already a settled habit of mind.
+
+Antonio then explains that his sadness has no cause, and incidentally
+attributes his wealth to fortune and not to his own brains or endeavour.
+The modern idea of the Captain of Industry who enriches others as well
+as himself, had evidently never entered into Shakespeare's head.
+Salarino says Antonio is “sad to think upon his merchandise”; but
+Antonio answers:
+
+  “Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it.
+  My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
+  Nor to one place: nor is my whole estate
+  Upon the fortune of this present year:
+  Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.”
+
+This tone of modest gentle sincerity is Shakespeare's habitual tone from
+about his thirtieth year to the end of his life: it has the accent of
+unaffected nature. In bidding farewell to Salarino Antonio shows us the
+exquisite courtesy which Shakespeare used in life. Salarino, seeing
+Bassanio approaching, says:
+
+  “I would have stayed till I had made you merry,
+  If worthier friends had not prevented me.”
+
+Antonio answers:
+
+  “Your worth is very dear in my regard.
+  I take it, your own business calls on you,
+  And you embrace the occasion to depart.”
+
+More characteristic still is the dialogue between Gratiano and Antonio
+in the same scene. Gratiano, the twin-brother surely of Mercutio, tells
+Antonio that he thinks too much of the things of this world, and warns
+him:
+
+  “They lose it that do buy it with much care.”
+
+Antonio replies:
+
+  “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
+  A stage, where every man must play a part,
+  And mine a sad one.”
+
+Every one who has followed me so far will admit that this is
+Shakespeare's most usual and most ingenuous attitude towards life; “I do
+not esteem worldly possessions,” he says; “life itself is too transient,
+too unreal to be dearly held.” Gratiano's reflection, too, is
+Shakespeare's, and puts the truth in a nutshell:
+
+  “They lose it that do buy it with much care.”
+
+We now come to the most salient peculiarity in this play. When Bassanio,
+his debtor, asks him for more money, Antonio answers:
+
+  “My purse, my person, my extremes! means,
+  Lie all unlocked to your occasions.”
+
+And, though Bassanio tells him his money is to be risked on a romantic
+and wild adventure, Antonio declares that Bassanio's doubt does him more
+wrong than if his friend had already wasted all he has, and the act
+closes by Antonio pressing Bassanio to use his credit “to the
+uttermost.” Now, this contempt of money was, no doubt, a pose, if not a
+habit of the aristocratic society of the time, and Shakespeare may have
+been aping the tone of his betters in putting to show a most lavish
+generosity. But even if his social superiors encouraged him in a
+wasteful extravagance, it must be admitted that Shakespeare betters
+their teaching. The lord was riotously lavish, no doubt, because he had
+money, or could get it without much trouble; but, put in Antonio's
+position, he would not press his last penny on his friend, much less
+strain his credit “to the uttermost” for him as Antonio does for
+Bassanio. Here we have the personal note of Shakespeare: “Your
+affection,” says the elder man to the younger, “is all to me, and
+money's less than nothing in the balance. Don't let us waste a word on
+it; a doubt of me were an injury!” But men will do that for affection
+which they would never do in cool blood, and therefore one cannot help
+asking whether Shakespeare really felt and practised this extreme
+contempt of wealth? For the moment, if we leave his actions out of the
+account, there can be, I think, no doubt about his feelings. His dislike
+of money makes him disfigure reality. No merchant, it may fairly be
+said, either of the sixteenth century or the twentieth, ever amassed or
+kept a fortune with Antonio's principles. In our day of world-wide
+speculation and immense wealth it is just possible for a man to be a
+millionaire and generous; but in the sixteenth century, when wealth was
+made by penurious saving, by slow daily adding of coin to coin,
+merchants like this Antonio were unheard of, impossible.
+
+Moreover all the amiable characters in this play regard money with
+unaffected disdain; Portia no sooner hears of Shylock's suit than she
+cries:
+
+  “Pay him six thousand, and deface the bond;
+  Double six thousand, and then treble that,
+  Before a friend of this description
+  Shall lose a hair through Bassanio's fault.”
+
+And if we attribute this outburst to her love we must not forget that,
+when it comes to the test in court, and she holds the Jew in her hand
+and might save her gold, she again reminds him:
+
+  “Shylock, there's thrice thy money offered thee.”
+
+A boundless generosity is the characteristic of Portia, and Bassanio,
+the penniless fortune-hunter, is just as extravagant; he will pay the
+Jew's bond twice over, and,
+
+    “If that will not suffice,
+  I will be bound to pay it ten times o'er,
+  On forfeit of my hands, my head, my heart.”
+
+It may, of course, be urged that these Christians are all prodigal in
+order to throw Shylock's avarice and meanness into higher light; but
+that this disdain of money is not assumed for the sake of any artistic
+effect will appear from other plays. At the risk of being accused of
+super-subtlety, I must confess that I find in Shylock himself traces of
+Shakespeare's contempt of money; Jessica says of him:
+
+    “I have heard him swear
+  To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen,
+  That he would rather have Antonio's flesh
+  Than twenty times the value of the sum
+  That he did owe him.”
+
+Even Shylock, it appears, hated Antonio more than he valued money, and
+this hatred, though it may have its root in love of money, half redeems
+him in our eyes. Shakespeare could not imagine a man who loved money
+more than anything else; his hated and hateful usurer is more a man of
+passion than a Jew.
+
+The same prodigality and contempt of money are to be found in nearly all
+Shakespeare's plays, and, curiously enough, the persons to show this
+disdain most strongly are usually the masks of Shakespeare himself. A
+philosophic soliloquy is hardly more characteristic of Shakespeare than
+a sneer at money. It should be noted, too, that this peculiarity is not
+a trait of his youth chiefly, as it is with most men who are
+free-handed. It rather seems, as in the case of Antonio, to be a
+reasoned attitude towards life, and it undoubtedly becomes more and more
+marked as Shakespeare grows older. Contempt of wealth is stronger in
+Brutus than in Antonio; stronger in Lear than in Brutus, and stronger in
+Timon than in Lear.
+
+But can we be at all certain that Antonio's view of life in this respect
+was Shakespeare's? It may be that Shakespeare pretended to this
+generosity in order to loosen the purse-strings of his lordly patrons.
+Even if his motive for writing in this strain were a worthy motive, who
+is to assure us that he practised the generosity he preached? When I
+come to his life I think I shall be able to prove that Shakespeare was
+excessively careless of money; extravagant, indeed, and generous to a
+fault. Shakespeare did not win to eminence as a dramatist without
+exciting the envy and jealousy of many of his colleagues and
+contemporaries, and if these sharp-eyed critics had found him in drama
+after drama advocating lavish free-handedness while showing meanness or
+even ordinary prudence in his own expenditure, we should probably have
+heard of it as we heard from Greene how he took plays from other
+playwrights. But the silence of his contemporaries goes to confirm the
+positive testimony of Ben Jonson, that he was of “an open and free
+nature,”--openhanded always, and liberal, we may be sure, to a fault. In
+any case, the burden of proof lies with those who wish us to believe
+that Shakespeare was “a careful and prudent man of business,” for in a
+dozen plays the personages who are his heroes and incarnations pour
+contempt on those who would lock “rascal counters” from their friends,
+and, in default of proof to the contrary, we are compelled to assume
+that he practised the generosity which he so earnestly and sedulously
+praised. At least it will be advisable for the moment to assume that he
+pictured himself as generous Antonio, without difficulty or conscious
+self-deception.
+
+But this Antonio has not only the melancholy, courtesy and boundless
+generosity of Shakespeare; he has other qualities of the master which
+need to be thrown into relief.
+
+First of all, Antonio has that submission to misfortune, that
+resignation in face of defeat and suffering which we have already seen
+as characteristics of Richard II. The resignation might almost be called
+saintly, were it not that it seems to spring rather from the natural
+melancholy and sadness of Shakespeare's disposition; “the world is a
+hard, all-hating world,” he seems to say, “and misery is the natural lot
+of man; defeat comes to all; why should I hope for any better fortune?”
+ At the very beginning of the trial he recognizes that he is certain to
+lose; Bassanio and Gratiano appeal to the Duke for him; but he never
+speaks in his own defence; he says of his opponent at the outset:
+
+                        “I do oppose
+  My patience to his fury, and am arm'd
+  To suffer, with a quietness of spirit,
+  The very tyranny and rage of his.”
+
+and again he will not contend, but begs the Court,
+
+  “.... with all brief and plain conveniency
+  Let me have judgement and the Jew his will.”
+
+Even when Bassanio tries to cheer him,
+
+                    “What, man, courage yet!
+  The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones and all,
+  Ere thou shalt lose for me one drop of blood.”
+
+Antonio answers:
+
+  “I am a tainted wether of the flock,
+  Meetest for death: the weakest kind of fruit
+  Drops earliest to the ground: and so let me:
+  You cannot better be employed, Bassanio,
+  Than to live still and write mine epitaph.”
+
+He will not be saved: he gives himself at once to that “sweet way of
+despair” which we have found to be the second Richard's way and
+Shakespeare's way.
+
+Just as we noticed, when speaking of Posthumus in “Cymbeline,” that
+Shakespeare's hero and _alter ego_ is always praised by the other
+personages of the drama, so this Antonio is praised preposterously by
+the chief personages of the play, and in the terms of praise we may see
+how Shakespeare, even in early manhood, liked to be considered. He had
+no ambition to be counted stalwart, or bold, or resolute like most young
+males of his race, much less “a good hater,” as Dr. Johnson confessed
+himself: he wanted his gentle qualities recognized, and his intellectual
+gifts; Hamlet wished to be thought a courtier, scholar, gentleman; and
+here Salarino says of Antonio:
+
+  “A kinder gentleman treads not the earth,”
+
+and he goes on to tell how Antonio, when parting from Bassanio, had
+“eyes big with tears”:
+
+  “Turning his face, he put his hand behind him,
+  And with affection wondrous sensible
+  He wrung Bassanio's hand; and so they parted.”
+
+This Antonio is as tender-hearted and loving as young Arthur. And
+Lorenzo speaks of Antonio to Portia just as Salarino spoke of him:
+
+  “_Lor_. But if you knew to whom you show this honour.
+  How true a gentleman you send relief,
+  How dear a lover of my lord your husband,
+  I know you would be prouder of the work
+  Than customary bounty can enforce you.”
+
+and finally Bassanio sums Antonio up in enthusiastic superlatives:
+
+  “The dearest friend to me, the kindest man,
+  The best-condition'd and unwearied spirit
+  In doing courtesies, and one in whom
+  The ancient Roman honour more appears
+  Than any that draws breath in Italy.”
+
+It is as a prince of friends and most courteous gentleman that Antonio
+acts his part from the beginning to the end of the play with one notable
+exception to which I shall return in a moment. It is astonishing to find
+this sadness, this courtesy, this lavish generosity and contempt of
+money, this love of love and friendship and affection in any man in
+early manhood; but these qualities were Shakespeare's from youth to old
+age.
+
+I say that Antonio was most courteous to all with one notable exception,
+and that exception was Shylock.
+
+It has become the custom on the English stage for the actor to try to
+turn Shylock into a hero; but that was assuredly not Shakespeare's
+intention. True, he makes Shylock appeal to the common humanity of both
+Jew and Christian.
+
+  “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew
+  hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
+  fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
+  subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
+  warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
+  a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you
+  tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not
+  die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
+
+But if Shakespeare was far in advance of his age in this intellectual
+appreciation of the brotherhood of man; yet as an artist and thinker and
+poet he is particularly contemptuous of the usurer and trader in other
+men's necessities, and therefore, when Antonio meets Shylock, though he
+wants a favour from him, he cannot be even decently polite to him. He
+begins by saying in the third scene of the first act:
+
+  “Although I neither lend nor borrow
+  By taking nor by giving of excess,
+  Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend,
+  I'll break a custom.”
+
+The first phrase here reminds me of Polonius: “neither a borrower nor a
+lender be.” When Shylock attempts to defend himself by citing the way
+Jacob cheated Laban, Antonio answers contemptuously “The devil can cite
+Scripture for his purpose.” Shylock then goes on:
+
+  “Signor Antonio, many a time and oft,
+  In the Rialto you have rated me
+  About my moneys and my usances:
+  Still, I have borne it with a patient shrug,
+  For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
+  You call me mis-believer, cut-throat dog,
+  And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
+  And all for use of that which is mine own.
+  Well then, it now appears you need my help:
+  Go to, then; you come to me, and you say,
+  'Shylock, we would have moneys:' you say so
+  You that did void your rheum upon my beard
+  And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
+  Over your threshold: moneys is your suit.
+  What should I say to you? Should I not say
+  'Hath a dog money? is it possible
+  A cur can lend three thousand ducats?'”
+
+Antonio answers this in words which it would be almost impossible to
+take for Shakespeare's because of their brutal rudeness, were it not, as
+we shall see later, that Shakespeare loathed the Jew usurer more than
+any character in all his plays. Here are the words:
+
+  “_Ant_. I am as like to call thee so again,
+  To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
+  If thou will lend this money, lend it not
+  As to thy friends; for when did friendship take
+  A breed for barren metal of his friend?
+  But lend it rather to thine enemy
+  Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face
+  Exact the penalty.”
+
+Then Shylock makes peace, and proposes his modest penalty. Bassanio
+says:
+
+  “You shall not seal to such a bond for me:
+  I'll rather dwell in my necessity.”
+
+Antonio is perfectly careless and content: he says:
+
+  “Content, i' faith: I'll seal to such a bond,
+  And say there is much kindness in the Jew.”
+
+Antonio's heedless trust of other men and impatience are qualities most
+foreign to the merchant; but are shown again and again by Shakespeare's
+impersonations.
+
+Perhaps it will be well here to prove once for all that Shakespeare did
+really hate the Jew. In the first place he excites our sympathy again
+and again for him on the broad grounds of common humanity; but the
+moment it comes to a particular occasion he represents him as hateful,
+even where a little thought would have taught him that the Jew must be
+at his best. It is a peculiarity of humanity which Shakespeare should
+not have overlooked, that all pariahs and outcasts display intense
+family affection; those whom the world scouts and hates are generally at
+their noblest in their own homes. The pressure from the outside, Herbert
+Spencer would say, tends to bring about cohesion among the members of
+the despised caste. The family affection of the Jew, his kindness to his
+kindred, have become proverbial. But Shakespeare admits no such kindness
+in Shylock: when his daughter leaves Shylock one would think that
+Shakespeare would picture the father's desolation and misery, his sorrow
+at losing his only child; but here there is no touch of sympathy in
+gentle Shakespeare:
+
+   “.... I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in
+   her ear! would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her
+   coffin!”
+
+But there is even better proof than this: when Shylock is defeated in
+his case and leaves the Court penniless and broken, Shakespeare allows
+him to be insulted by a gentleman. Shylock becomes pathetic in his
+defeat, for Shakespeare always sympathized with failure, even before he
+came to grief himself:
+
+  “_Shy_. Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
+  You take my house when you do take the prop
+  That doth sustain my house; you take my life
+  When you do take the means whereby I live.”
+
+  “_Por_. What mercy can you render him, Antonio?
+
+  _Gra_. A halter gratis; nothing else for God's sake.”
+
+And then Antonio offers to “quit the fine for one-half his goods.”
+ Utterly broken now, Shylock says:
+
+  “I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;
+  I am not well: send the deed after me,
+  And I will sign it.
+
+  _Duke_. Get thee gone, but do it.
+
+  _Gra<i/>. In christening shalt thou have two godfathers:
+  Had I been judge, thou should'st have had ten more,
+  To bring thee to the gallows, not the font.”
+
+A brutal insult from a gallant gentleman to the broken Jew: it is the
+only time in all Shakespeare when a beaten and ruined man is so
+insulted.
+
+Antonio, it must be confessed, is a very charming sketch of Shakespeare
+when he was about thirty years of age, and it is amusing to reflect that
+it is just the rich merchant with all his wealth at hazard whom he picks
+out to embody his utter contempt of riches. The “royal merchant,” as he
+calls him, trained from youth to barter, is the very last man in the
+world to back such a venture as Bassanio's--much less would such a man
+treat money with disdain. But Shakespeare from the beginning of the play
+put himself quite naively in Antonio's place, and so the astounding
+antinomy came to expression.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE SONNETS: PART I.
+
+
+Ever since Wordsworth wrote that the sonnets were the key to
+Shakespeare's heart, it has been taken for granted (save by those who
+regard even the sonnets as mere poetical exercises) that Shakespeare's
+real nature is discovered in the sonnets more easily and more surely
+than in the plays. Those readers who have followed me so far in
+examining his plays will hardly need to be told that I do not agree with
+this assumption. The author whose personality is rich and complex enough
+to create and vitalize a dozen characters, reveals himself more fully in
+his creations than he can in his proper person. It was natural enough
+that Wordsworth, a great lyric poet, should catch Shakespeare's accent
+better in his sonnets than in his dramas; but that is owing to
+Wordsworth's limitations. And if the majority of later English critics
+have agreed with Wordsworth, it only shows that Englishmen in general
+are better judges of lyric than of dramatic work. We have the greatest
+lyrics in the world; but our dramas, with the exception of
+Shakespeare's, are not remarkable. And in that modern extension of the
+drama, the novel, we are distinctly inferior to the French and Russians.
+This inferiority must be ascribed to the new-fangled prudery of language
+and thought which emasculates all our later fiction; but as that prudery
+is not found in our lyric verse it is evident that here alone the
+inspiration is full and rich enough to overflow the limits of epicene
+convention.
+
+Whether the reader agrees with me or not on this point, it may be
+accepted that Shakespeare revealed himself far more completely in his
+plays than as a lyric poet. Just as he chose his dramatic subjects with
+some felicity to reveal his many-sided nature, so he used the sonnets
+with equal artistry to discover that part of himself which could hardly
+be rendered objectively. Whatever is masculine in a man can be depicted
+superbly on the stage, but his feminine qualities--passionate
+self-abandonment, facile forgivingness, self-pity--do not show well in
+the dramatic struggle. What sort of a drama would that be in which the
+hero would have to confess that when in the vale of years he had fallen
+desperately in love with a girl, and that he had been foolish enough to
+send a friend, a young noble, to plead his cause, with the result that
+the girl won the friend and gave herself to him? The protagonist would
+earn mocking laughter and not sympathy, and this Shakespeare no doubt
+foresaw. Besides, to Shakespeare, this story, which is in brief the
+story of the sonnets, was terribly real and intimate, and he felt
+instinctively that he could not treat it objectively; it was too near
+him, too exquisitely painful for that.
+
+At some time or other life overpowers the strongest of us, and that
+defeat we all treat lyrically; when the deepest depth in us is stirred
+we cannot feign, or depict ourselves from the outside dispassionately;
+we can only cry our passion, our pain and our despair; this once we use
+no art, simple truth is all we seek to reach. The crisis of
+Shakespeare's life, the hour of agony and bloody sweat when his weakness
+found him out and life's handicap proved too heavy even for his
+strength--that is the subject of the sonnets.
+
+Now what was Shakespeare's weakness? his besetting temptation? “Love is
+my sin,” he says; “Love of love and her soft hours” was his weakness:
+passion the snare that meshed his soul. No wonder Antony cries:
+
+  “Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?”
+
+for his gipsy led Shakespeare from shame to shame, to the verge of
+madness. The sonnets give us the story, the whole terrible, sinful,
+magical story of Shakespeare's passion.
+
+As might have been expected, Englishmen like Wordsworth, with an intense
+appreciation of lyric poetry, have done good work in criticism of the
+sonnets, and one Englishman has read them with extraordinary
+understanding. Mr. Tyler's work on the sonnets ranks higher than that of
+Coleridge on the plays. I do not mean to say that it is on the same
+intellectual level with the work of Coleridge, though it shows wide
+reading, astonishing acuteness, and much skill in the marshalling of
+argument. But Mr. Tyler had the good fortune to be the first to give to
+the personages of the sonnets a local habitation and a name, and that
+unique achievement puts him in a place by himself far above the mass of
+commentators. Before his book appeared in 1890 the sonnets lay in the
+dim light of guess-work. It is true that Hallam had adopted the
+hypothesis of Boaden and Bright, and had identified William Herbert,
+Earl of Pembroke, with the high-born, handsome youth for whom
+Shakespeare, in the sonnets, expressed such passionate affection; but
+still, there were people who thought that the Earl of Southampton filled
+the requirements even better than William Herbert, and as I say, the
+whole subject lay in the twilight of surmise and supposition.
+
+Mr. Tyler, working on a hint of the Rev. W. A. Harrison, identified
+Shakespeare's high-born mistress, the “dark lady” of the sonnets, with
+Mistress Mary Fitton, a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth.
+
+These, then, are the personages of the drama, and the story is very
+simple: Shakespeare loved Mistress Fitton and sent his friend, the young
+Lord Herbert, to her on some pretext, but with the design that he should
+commend Shakespeare to the lady. Mistress Fitton fell in love with
+William Herbert, wooed and won him, and Shakespeare had to mourn the
+loss of both friend and mistress.
+
+It would be natural to speak of this identification of Mr. Tyler's as
+the best working hypothesis yet put forward; but it would be unfair to
+him; it is more than this. Till his book appeared, even the date of the
+sonnets was not fixed; many critics regarded them as an early work, as
+early indeed, as 1591 or 1592; he was the first person to prove that the
+time they cover extends roughly from 1598 to 1601. Mr. Tyler then has
+not only given us the names of the actors, but he has put the tragedy in
+its proper place in Shakespeare's life, and he deserves all thanks for
+his illuminating work.
+
+I bring to this theory fresh corroboration from the plays. Strange to
+say, Mr. Tyler has hardly used the plays, yet, as regards the story told
+in the sonnets, the proof that it is a real and not an imaginary story
+can be drawn from the plays. I may have to point out, incidentally, what
+I regard as mistakes and oversights in Mr. Tyler's work; but in the main
+it stands four-square, imposing itself on the reason and satisfying at
+the same time instinct and sympathy.
+
+Let us first see how far the story told in the sonnets is borne out by
+the plays. For a great many critics, even to-day, reject the story
+altogether, and believe that the sonnets were nothing but poetic
+exercises.
+
+The sonnets fall naturally into two parts: from 1 to 126 they tell how
+Shakespeare loved a youth of high rank and great personal beauty; sonnet
+127 is an _envoi_; from 128 to 152 they tell of Shakespeare's love
+for a “dark lady.” What binds the two series together is the story told
+in both, or at least told in one and corroborated in the other, that
+Shakespeare first sent his friend to the lady, most probably to plead
+his cause, and that she wooed his friend and gave herself to him. Now
+this is not a common or easily invented story. No one would guess that
+Shakespeare could be so foolish as to send his friend to plead his love
+for him. That's a mistake that no man who knows women would be likely to
+make: but the unlikelihood of the story is part of the evidence of its
+truth--_credo quia incredibile_ has an element of persuasion in it.
+
+No one has yet noticed that the story of the sonnets is treated three
+times in Shakespeare's plays. The first time the story appears it is
+handled so lightly that it looks to me as if he had not then lived
+through the incidents which he narrates. In the “Two Gentlemen of
+Verona” Proteus is asked by the Duke to plead Thurio's cause with
+Silvia, and he promises to do so; but instead, presses his own suit and
+is rejected. The incident is handled so carelessly (Proteus not being
+Thurio's friend) that it seems to me to have no importance save as a
+mere coincidence. When the scene between Proteus and Silvia was written
+Shakespeare had not yet been deceived by his friend. Still in “The Two
+Gentlemen of Verona” there is one speech which certainly betrays
+personal passion. It is in the last scene of the fifth act, when
+Valentine surprises Proteus offering violence to Silvia.
+
+  “_Val.(coming forward)_ Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil
+                touch,--
+  Thou friend of an ill fashion!
+
+  _Pro_.         Valentine!
+
+  _Val. Thou common friend, that's without faith or love,--
+  For such is a friend now;_--treacherous man!
+  Thou hast beguiled my hopes: nought but mine eye
+  Could have persuaded me. Now I dare not say
+  I have one friend alive: thou would'st disprove me.
+  Who should be trusted when one's own right hand
+  Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
+  I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
+  But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
+  _The private wound is deepest: time most accurst
+  'Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!_”
+
+The first lines which I have italicised are too plain to be misread;
+when they were written Shakespeare had just been cheated by his friend;
+they are his passionate comment on the occurrence--“For such is a friend
+now”--can hardly be otherwise explained. The last couplet, too, which I
+have also put in italics, is manifestly a reflection on his betrayal: it
+is a twin rendering of the feeling expressed in sonnet 40:
+
+  “And yet love knows it is a greater grief
+  To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.”
+
+It contrasts “foe and friend,” just as the sonnet contrasts “love and
+hate.”
+
+Mr. Israel Gollancz declares that “several critics are inclined to
+attribute this final scene to another hand,” and to his mind “it bears
+evident signs of hasty composition.” No guess could be wider from the
+truth. The scene is most manifestly pure Shakespeare--I take the
+soliloquy of Valentine, with which the scene opens, as among
+Shakespeare's most characteristic utterances--but the whole scene is
+certainly later than the rest of the play. The truth probably is that
+after his friend had deceived him, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” was
+played again, and that Shakespeare rewrote this last scene under the
+influence of personal feeling. The 170 lines of it are full of phrases
+which might be taken direct from the sonnets. Here 's such a couplet:
+
+  “O, 'tis the curse in love, and still approved,
+  When women cannot love where they're beloved.”
+
+The whole scene tells the story a little more frankly than we find it in
+the sonnets, as might be expected, seeing that Shakespeare's rival was a
+great noble and not to be criticised freely. This fact explains to me
+Valentine's unmotived renunciation of Silvia; explains, too, why he is
+reconciled to his friend with such unseemly haste. Valentine's last
+words in the scene are illuminating:
+
+  “'Twere pity two such friends should be long foes.”
+
+The way this scene in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is told throws more
+light on Shakespeare's feelings at the moment of his betrayal than the
+sonnets themselves. Under the cover of fictitious names Shakespeare
+ventured to show the disgust and contempt he felt for Lord Herbert's
+betrayal more plainly than he cared, or perhaps dared, to do when
+speaking in his own person.
+
+There is another play where the same incident is handled in such fashion
+as to put the truth of the sonnet-story beyond all doubt.
+
+In “Much Ado about Nothing” the incident is dragged in by the ears, and
+the whole treatment is most remarkable. Every one will remember how
+Claudio tells the Prince that he loves Hero, and asks his friend's
+assistance: “your highness now may do me good.” There's no reason for
+Claudio's shyness: no reason why he should call upon the Prince for help
+in a case where most men prefer to use their own tongues; but Claudio is
+young, and so we glide over the inherent improbability of the incident.
+The Prince at once promises to plead for Claudio with Hero and with her
+father:
+
+  “And thou shalt have her. Was't not to this end
+  That thou began'st to twist so fine a story?”
+
+Now comes the peculiar handling of the incident. Claudio knows the
+Prince is wooing Hero for him, therefore when Don John tells him that
+the Prince “is enamoured on Hero,” he should at once infer that Don John
+is mistaken through ignorance of this fact; but instead of that he falls
+suspicious, and questions:
+
+  “How know you he loves her?
+
+  _D. John_. I heard him swear his affection.
+
+  _Bor_. So did I too, and he swore he would marry her
+  to-night.”
+
+There is absolutely nothing even in this corroboration by Borachio to
+shake Claudio's trust in the Prince: neither Don John nor Borachio knows
+what he knows, that the Prince is wooing for him (Claudio) and at his
+request. He should therefore smile at the futile attempt to excite his
+jealousy. But at once he is persuaded of the worst, as a man would be
+who had already experienced such disloyalty: he cries:
+
+  “'Tis certain so; the prince woos for himself.”
+
+And then we should expect to hear him curse the prince as a traitorous
+friend, and dwell on his own loyal service by way of contrast, and so
+keep turning the dagger in the wound with the thought that no one but
+himself was ever so repaid for such honesty of love. But, no! Claudio
+has no bitterness in him, no reproachings; he speaks of the whole matter
+as if it had happened months and months before, as indeed it had; for
+“Much Ado about Nothing” was written about 1599. Reflection had already
+shown Shakespeare the unreason of revolt, and he puts his own thought in
+the mouth of Claudio:
+
+  “'Tis certain so; the prince woos for himself.
+  Friendship is constant in all other things
+  Save in the office and affairs of love:
+  Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
+  Let every eye negotiate for itself,
+  And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch,
+  Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
+  _This is an accident of hourly proof,
+  Which I mistrusted not_. Farewell, therefore, Hero.”
+
+The Claudio who spoke like this in the first madness of love lost and
+friendship cheated would be a monster. Here we have Shakespeare speaking
+in all calmness of something that happened to himself a considerable
+time before. The lines I have put in italics admit no other
+interpretation: they show Shakespeare's philosophic acceptance of things
+as they are; what has happened to him is not to be assumed as singular
+but is the common lot of man--“an accident of hourly proof”--which he
+blames himself for not foreseeing. In fact, Claudio's temper here is as
+detached and impartial as Benedick's. Benedick declares that Claudio
+should be whipped:
+
+  “_D. Pedro_. To be whipped! What's his fault?
+
+  _Benedick_. The flat transgression of a schoolboy, who
+  being overjoyed with finding a bird's nest, shows it his
+  companion and he steals it.”
+
+That is the view of the realist who knows life and men, and plays the
+game according to the rules accepted. Shakespeare understood this side
+of life as well as most men. But Don Pedro is a prince--a Shakespearean
+prince at that--full of all loyalties and ideal sentiments; he answers
+Benedick from Shakespeare's own heart:
+
+  “Wilt thou make a trust a transgression?
+  The transgression is in the stealer.”
+
+It is curious that Shakespeare doesn't see that Claudio must feel this
+truth a thousand times more keenly than the Prince. As I have said,
+Claudio's calm acceptance of the fact is a revelation of Shakespeare's
+own attitude, an attitude just modified by the moral reprobation put in
+the mouth of the Prince. The recital itself shows that the incident was
+a personal experience of Shakespeare, and as one might expect in this
+case it does not accelerate but retard the action of the drama; it is,
+indeed, altogether foreign to the drama, an excrescence upon it and not
+an improvement but a blemish. Moreover, the reflective, disillusioned,
+slightly pessimistic tone of the narrative is alien and strange to the
+optimistic temper of the play; finally, this garb of patient sadness
+does not suit Claudio, who should be all love and eagerness, and
+diminishes instead of increasing our sympathy with his later actions.
+Whoever considers these facts will admit that we have here Shakespeare
+telling us what happened to himself, and what he really thought of his
+friend's betrayal.
+
+  “The transgression is in the stealer.”
+
+That is Shakespeare's mature judgement of Lord Herbert's betrayal.
+
+The third mention of this sonnet-story in a play is later still: it is
+in “Twelfth Night.” The Duke, as we have seen, is an incarnation of
+Shakespeare himself, and, indeed, the finest incarnation we have of his
+temperament. In the fourth scene of the first act he sends Viola to
+plead his cause for him with Olivia, much in the same way, no doubt, as
+Shakespeare sent Pembroke to Miss Fitton. The whole scene deserves
+careful reading.
+
+                                   “Cesario,
+  Thou know'st no less but all; I have unclasp'd
+  To thee the book even of my secret soul:
+  Therefore, good youth, address thy gait unto her
+  Be not denied access, stand at her doors,
+  And tell them, there thy fixed foot shall grow
+  Till thou have audience.
+
+  _Vio_.        Sure, my noble lord,
+  If she be so abandon'd to her sorrow
+  As it is spoke, she never will admit me.
+
+  _Duke_. Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds
+  Rather than make unprofited return.
+
+  _Vio_. Say I do speak with her, my lord, what then?
+
+  _Duke_. O, then unfold the passion of my love,
+  Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith:
+  It shall become thee well to act my woes;
+  _She will attend it better in thy youth
+  Than in a nuncio's of more grave aspect._
+
+  _Vio_. I think not so, my lord.
+
+  _Duke_.                     Dear lad, believe it;
+  For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
+  That say thou art a man: Diana's lip
+  Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
+  Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound;
+  And all is semblative a woman's part.
+  I know thy constellation is right apt
+  For this affair. Some four or five attend him;
+  All if you will; for I myself am best
+  When least in company.”
+
+I do not want to find more here than is in the text: the passage simply
+shows that this idea of sending some one to plead his love was
+constantly in Shakespeare's mind in these years. The curious part of the
+matter is that he should pick a youth as ambassador, and a youth who is
+merely his page. He can discover no reason for choosing such a boy as
+Viola, and so simply asserts that youth will be better attended to,
+which is certainly not the fact. Lord Herbert's youth was in his mind:
+but he could not put the truth in the play that when he chose his
+ambassador he chose him for his high position and personal beauty and
+charm, and not because of his youth. The whole incident is treated
+lightly as something of small import; the bitterness in “Much Ado” has
+died out: “Twelfth Night” was written about 1601, a year or so later
+than “Much Ado.”
+
+I do not want to labour the conclusion I have reached; but it must be
+admitted that I have found in the plays, and especially in “The Two
+Gentlemen of Verona” and “Much Ado,” the same story which is told in the
+sonnets; a story lugged into the plays, where, indeed, its introduction
+is a grave fault in art and its treatment too peculiar to be anything
+but personal. Here in the plays we have, so to speak, three views of the
+sonnet-story; the first in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” when the
+betrayal is fresh in Shakespeare's memory and his words are embittered
+with angry feeling:
+
+  “Thou common friend that's without faith or love.”
+
+The second view is taken in “Much Ado About Nothing” when the pain of
+the betrayal has been a little salved by time. Shakespeare now moralizes
+the occurrence. He shows us how it would be looked upon by a philosopher
+(for that is what the lover, Claudio, is in regard to his betrayal) and
+by a soldier and man of the world, Benedick, and by a Prince.
+Shakespeare selects the prince to give effect to the view that the fault
+is in the transgressor and not in the man who trusts. The many-sided
+treatment of the story shows all the stages through which Shakespeare's
+mind moved, and the result is to me a more complete confession than is
+to be found in the sonnets. Finally the story is touched upon in
+“Twelfth Night,” when the betrayal has faded into oblivion, but the poet
+lets out the fact that his ambassador was a youth, and the reason he
+gives for this is plainly insufficient. If after these three recitals
+any one can still believe that the sonnet-story is imaginary, he is
+beyond persuasion by argument.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE SONNETS: PART II.
+
+Now that we have found the story of the sonnets repeated three times in
+the plays, it may be worth our while to see if we can discover in the
+plays anything that throws light upon the circumstances or personages of
+this curious triangular drama. At the outset, I must admit that save in
+these three plays I can find no mention whatever of Shakespeare's
+betrayer, Lord Herbert. He was “a false friend,” the plays tell us, a
+“common friend without faith or love,” “a friend of an ill fashion”;
+young, too, yet trusted; but beyond this summary superficial
+characterization there is silence. _Me judice_ Lord Herbert made no
+deep or peculiar impression on Shakespeare; an opinion calculated to
+give pause to the scandal-mongers. For there can be no doubt whatever
+that Shakespeare's love, Mistress Fitton, the “dark lady” of the
+sonnet-series from 128 to 152 is to be found again and again in play
+after play, profoundly modifying the poet's outlook upon life and art.
+Before I take in hand this identification of Miss Fitton and her
+influence upon Shakespeare, let me beg the reader to bear in mind the
+fact that Shakespeare was a sensualist by nature, a lover, which is as
+rare a thing as consummate genius. The story of his idolatrous passion
+for Mary Fitton is the story of his life. This is what the commentators
+and critics hitherto have failed to appreciate. Let us now get at the
+facts and see what light the dramas throw upon the chief personage of
+the story, Mistress Fitton. The study will probably teach us that
+Shakespeare was the most impassioned lover and love-poet in all
+literature.
+
+History tells us that Mary Fitton became a maid of honour to Queen
+Elizabeth in 1595 at the age of seventeen. From a letter addressed by
+her father to Sir Robert Cecil on January 29th, 1599, it is fairly
+certain that she had already been married at the age of sixteen; the
+union was probably not entirely valid, but the mere fact suggests a
+certain recklessness of character, or overpowering sensuality, or both,
+and shows that even as a girl Mistress Fitton was no shrinking, timid,
+modest maiden. Wrapped in a horseman's cloak she used to leave the
+Palace at night to meet her lover, Lord William Herbert. Though twice
+married, she had an illegitimate child by Herbert, and two later by Sir
+Richard Leveson.
+
+This extraordinary woman is undoubtedly the sort of woman Shakespeare
+depicted as the “dark lady” of the sonnets. Nearly every sonnet of the
+twenty-six devoted to his mistress contains some accusation against her;
+and all these charges are manifestly directed against one and the same
+woman. First of all she is described in sonnet 131 as “tyrannous”; then
+in sonnet 133 as “faithless”; in sonnet 137 as “the bay where all men
+ride ... the wide world's commonplace”; in sonnet 138 as “false”; in
+139, she is “coquettish”; 140, “proud”; “false to the bonds of love”;
+“black as hell... dark as night”--in both looks and character; “full of
+foul faults “; “cruel”; “unworthy,” but of “powerful” personality;
+“unkind--inconstant... unfaithful... forsworn.”
+
+Now, the first question is: Can we find this “dark lady” of the sonnets
+in the plays? The sonnets tell us she was of pale complexion with black
+eyes and hair; do the plays bear out this description? And if they do
+bear it out do they throw any new light upon Miss Fitton's character?
+Did Miss Fitton seem proud and inconstant, tyrannous and wanton, to
+Shakespeare when he first met her, and before she knew Lord Herbert?
+
+The earliest mention of the poet's mistress in the plays is to be found,
+I think, in “Romeo and Juliet.” “Romeo and Juliet” is dated by Mr.
+Furnival 1591-1593; it was first mentioned in 1595 by Meres; first
+published in 1597. I think in its present form it must be taken to date
+from 1597. Romeo, who as we have already seen, is an incarnation of
+Shakespeare, is presented to us in the very first scene as in love with
+one Rosaline. This in itself tells me nothing; but the proof that
+Shakespeare stands in intimate relation to the girl called Rosaline
+comes later, and so the first introductory words have a certain
+significance for me. Romeo himself tells us that “she hath Dian's wit,”
+ one of Shakespeare's favourite comparisons for his love, and speaks of
+her chastity, or rather of her unapproachableness; he goes on:
+
+  “O she is rich in beauty, only poor
+  That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store.”
+
+which reminds us curiously of the first sonnets. In the second scene
+Benvolio invites Romeo to the feast of Capulet, where his love, “the
+fair Rosaline,” is supping, and adds:
+
+  “Compare her face with some that I shall shew,
+  And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.”
+
+Romeo replies that there is none fairer than his love, and Benvolio
+retorts:
+
+  “Tut! You saw her fair, none else being by.”
+
+This bantering is most pointed if we assume that Rosaline was dark
+rather than fair.
+
+In the second act Mercutio comes upon the scene, and, mocking Romeo's
+melancholy and passion, cries:
+
+  “I conjure thee, by Rosaline's bright eyes,
+  By her high forehead and her scarlet lip....”
+
+This description surprises me. Shakespeare rarely uses such physical
+portraiture of his personages, and Mercutio is a side of Shakespeare
+himself; a character all compact of wit and talkativeness, a character
+wholly invented by the poet.
+
+A little later my suspicion is confirmed. In the fourth scene of the
+second act Mercutio talks to Benvolio about Romeo; they both wonder
+where he is, and Mercutio says:
+
+  “Ah, that same pale-hearted wench, that Rosaline,
+  Torments him so that he will sure run mad.”
+
+And again, a moment later, Mercutio laughs at Romeo as already dead,
+“stabbed with a white wench's black eye.” Now, here is confirmation of
+my suspicion. It is most unusual for Shakespeare to give the physical
+peculiarities of any of his characters; no one knows how Romeo looked,
+or Juliet or even Hamlet or Ophelia; and here he repeats the
+description.
+
+The only other examples we have as yet found in Shakespeare of such
+physical portraiture is the sketching of Falstaff in “Henry IV.” and the
+snapshot of Master Slender in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” as a “little
+wee face, with a little yellow beard,--a cane-coloured beard.” Both
+these photographs, as we noticed at the time, were very significant, and
+Slender's extraordinarily significant by reason of its striking and
+peculiar realism. Though an insignificant character, Slender
+is photographed for us by Shakespeare's contempt and hatred, just as this
+Rosaline is photographed by his passionate love, photographed again and
+again.
+
+Shakespeare's usual way of describing the physical appearance of a man
+or woman, when he allowed himself to do it at all, which was seldom, was
+what one might call the ideal or conventional way. A good example is to
+be found in Hamlet's description of his father; he is speaking to his
+mother:
+
+  “Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,
+    An eye like Mars, to threaten and command,
+  A station like the herald Mercury
+    New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.”
+
+In the special case I am considering Rosaline is less even than a
+secondary character; she is not a personage in the play at all. She is
+merely mentioned casually by Benvolio and then by Mercutio, and even
+Mercutio is not the protagonist; yet his mention of her is strikingly
+detailed, astonishingly realistic, in spite of its off-hand brevity. We
+have a photographic snapshot, so to speak, of this girl: she “torments”
+ Romeo; she is “hard-hearted”; a “white wench” with “black eyes”; twice
+in four lines she is called now “pale,” now “white”--plainly her
+complexion had no red in it, and was in startling contrast to her black
+eyes and hair. Manifestly this picture is taken from life, and it is
+just as manifestly the portrait of the “dark lady” of the sonnets.
+
+As if to make assurance doubly sure, there is another description of
+this same Rosaline in another play, so detailed and striking, composed
+as it is of contrasting and startling peculiarities that I can only
+wonder that its full significance has not been appreciated ages ago. To
+have missed its meaning only proves that men do not read Shakespeare
+with love's fine wit.
+
+The repetition of the portrait is fortunate for another reason: it tells
+us when the love story took place. The allusion to the “dark lady” in
+“Romeo and Juliet” is difficult to date exactly; the next mention of her
+in a play can be fixed in time with some precision. “Love's Labour's
+Lost” was revised by Shakespeare for production at Court during the
+Christmas festivities of 1597. When the quarto was published in 1598 it
+bore on its title-page the words, “A pleasant conceited comedy called
+'Love's Labour's Lost.' As it was presented before Her Highnes this last
+Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakespeare.” It is in
+the revised part that we find Shakespeare introducing his dark love
+again, and this time, too, curiously enough, under the name of Rosaline.
+Evidently he enjoyed the mere music of the word. Biron is an incarnation
+of Shakespeare himself, as we have already seen, and the meeting of
+Biron and his love, Rosaline, in the play is extremely interesting for
+us as Shakespeare in this revised production, one would think, would
+wish to ingratiate himself with his love, more especially as she would
+probably be present when the play was produced. Rosaline is made to
+praise Biron, before he appears, as a merry man and a most excellent
+talker; but when they meet they simply indulge in a tourney of wit, in
+which Rosaline more than holds her own, showing indeed astounding
+self-assurance, spiced with a little contempt of Biron; “hard-hearted”
+ Mercutio called it. Every word deserves to be weighed:
+
+  “_Biron_. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
+
+  _Ros_. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
+
+  _Biron_. I know you did.
+
+  _Ros_. How needless was it, then, to ask the question!
+
+  _Biron_. You must not be so quick.
+
+  _Ros_. 'Tis long of you that spur me with such questions.
+
+  _Biron_. Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.
+
+  _Ros_. Not till it leave the rider in the mire.
+
+  _Biron_. What time o' day?
+
+  _Ros_. The hour that fools should ask.
+
+  _Biron_. Now fair befall your mask!
+
+  _Ros_. Fair fall the face it covers!
+
+  _Biron_. And send you many lovers!
+
+  _Ros_. Amen, so you be none.
+
+  _Biron_. Nay, then will I be gone.”
+
+Clearly this Rosaline, too, has Dian's wit and is not in love with
+Biron, any more than the Rosaline of “Romeo and Juliet” was in love with
+Romeo.
+
+The next allusion is even more characteristic. Biron and Longaville and
+Boyet are talking; Longaville shows his admiration for one of the
+Princess's women, “the one in the white” he declares, is a most sweet
+lady....”
+
+  _Biron_. What is her name in the cap?
+
+  _Boyet_. Rosaline, by good hap.
+
+  _Biron_. Is she wedded or no?
+
+  _Boyet_. To her will, sir, or so.
+
+  _Biron_. You are welcome, sir: adieu.”
+
+This, “To her will, sir, or so,” is exactly in the spirit of the
+sonnets: every one will remember the first two lines of sonnet 135:
+
+“Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy _Will_, And _Will_ to
+boot, and _Will_ in overplus;”
+
+That, “To her will, sir, or so,” I find astonishingly significant, for
+not only has it nothing to do with the play and is therefore unexpected,
+but the character-drawing is unexpected, too; maids are not usually
+wedded to their will in a double sense, and no other of these maids of
+honour is described at all.
+
+A little later Biron speaks again of Rosaline in a way which shocks
+expectation. First of all, he rages at himself for being in love at all.
+“And I, forsooth in love! I, that have been love's whip!” Here I pause
+again, it seems to me that Shakespeare is making confession to us, just
+as when he admitted without reason that Jaques was lewd. Be that as it
+may, he certainly goes on in words which are astounding, so utterly
+unforeseen are they, and therefore the more characteristic:
+
+  “Nay, to be perjured, which is worst of all;
+  And, among three, to love the worst of all;”
+
+The first line of this couplet, that he is perjured in loving Rosaline
+may be taken as applying to the circumstances of the play; but
+Shakespeare also talks of himself in sonnet 152 as “perjured,” for he
+only swears in order to misuse his love, or with a side glance at the
+fact that he is married and therefore perjured when he swears love to
+one not his wife. It is well to keep this “perjured” in memory.
+
+But it is the second line which is the more astonishing; there Biron
+tells us that among the three of the Princess's women he loves “the
+worst of all.” Up to this moment we have only been told kindly things of
+Rosaline and the other ladies; we had no idea that any one of them was
+bad, much less that Rosaline was “the worst of all.” The suspicion grows
+upon us, a suspicion which is confirmed immediately afterwards, that
+Shakespeare is speaking of himself and of a particular woman; else we
+should have to admit that his portraiture of Rosaline's character was
+artistically bad, and bad without excuse, for why should he lavish all
+this wealth of unpleasant detail on a mere subsidiary character? He goes
+on, however, to make the fault worse; he next speaks of his love
+Rosaline as--
+
+    “A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
+  With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes;
+    Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed;
+  Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard:
+    And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!
+  To pray for her! Go to! it is a plague.”
+
+It is, of course, a blot upon the play for Biron to declare that his
+love is a wanton of the worst. It is not merely unexpected and
+uncalled-for; it diminishes our sympathy with Biron and his love, and
+also with the play. But we have already found the rule trustworthy that
+whenever Shakespeare makes a mistake in art it is because of some strong
+personal feeling and not for want of wit, and this rule evidently holds
+good here. Shakespeare-Biron is picturing the woman he himself loves;
+for not only does he describe her as a wanton to the detriment of the
+play; but he pictures her precisely, and this Rosaline is the only
+person in the play of whom we have any physical description at all.
+Moreover, he has given such precise and repeated photographs of no other
+character in any of his plays:
+
+  “A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
+  With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes.”
+
+This is certainly the same Rosaline we found depicted in “Romeo and
+Juliet”; but the portraiture here, both physical and moral, is more
+detailed and peculiar than it was in the earlier play. Shakespeare now
+knows his Rosaline intimately. The mere facts that here again her
+physical appearance is set forth with such particularity, and that the
+“hard-heartedness” which Mercutio noted in her has now become
+“wantonness” is all-important, especially when we remember that Miss
+Fitton was probably listening to the play. Even at Christmas, 1597,
+Shakespeare's passion has reached the height of a sex-duel. Miss Fitton
+has tortured him so that he delights in calling her names to her face in
+public when the play would have led one to expect ingratiating or
+complimentary courtesies. It does not weaken this argument to admit that
+the general audience would not perhaps have understood the allusions.
+
+It is an almost incredible fact that not a single one of his hundreds of
+commentators has even noticed any peculiarity in this physical
+portraiture of Rosaline; Shakespeare uses this realism so rarely one
+would have thought that every critic would have been astounded by it;
+but no, they all pass over it without a word, Coleridge, Mr. Tyler, all
+of them.
+
+The fourth act of “Love's Labour's Lost” begins with a most
+characteristic soliloquy of Biron:
+
+  “_Biron_. The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing
+  myself: they have pitched a toil; I am toiling in a
+  pitch--pitch that defiles: defile! a foul word.”
+
+Here Biron is manifestly playing on the “pitch-balls” his love has for
+eyes, and also on the “foul faults” Shakespeare speaks of in the sonnets
+and in Othello. Biron goes on:
+
+  “O, but her eye--by this light, but for her eye, I
+  would not love her; yes, for her two eyes. Well, I do
+  nothing in the world but lie, and lie in my throat. By
+  heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and
+  to be melancholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and
+  here my melancholy. Well, she hath one o' my sonnets
+  already: the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady
+  hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady!”
+
+This proves to me that some of Shakespeare's sonnets were written in
+1597. True, Mr. Tyler would try to bind all the sonnets within the three
+years from 1598 to 1601, the three years which Shakespeare speaks about
+in sonnet 104:
+
+                       “Three winters cold
+  Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
+  Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd
+  In process of the seasons have I seen.
+  Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
+  Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.”
+
+Lord Herbert first came to Court in the spring of 1598, and so sonnet
+104 may have represented the fact precisely so far as Herbert was
+concerned; but I am not minded to take the poet so literally. Instead of
+beginning in the spring of 1598, some of the sonnets to the lady were
+probably written in the autumn of 1597, or even earlier, and yet
+Shakespeare would be quite justified in talking of three years, if the
+period ended in 1601. A poet is not to be bound to an almanack's
+exactitude.
+
+In the fourth act of “Love's Labour's Lost,” when Biron confesses his
+love for “the heavenly Rosaline,” the King banters him in the spirit of
+the time:
+
+  “_King_. By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.
+
+  _Biron_. Is ebony like her? O wood divine!
+  A wife of such wood were felicity.
+  O, who can give an oath? Where is a book?
+  That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack,
+  If that she learn not of her eye to look:
+  No face is fair that is not full so black.”
+
+Here we have Shakespeare again describing his mistress for us, though he
+has done it better earlier in the play; he harps upon her dark beauty
+here to praise it, just as he praised it in sonnet 127; it is passion's
+trick to sound the extremes of blame and praise alternately.
+
+In the time of Elizabeth it was customary for poets and courtiers to
+praise red hair and a fair complexion as “beauty's ensign,” and so
+compliment the Queen. The flunkeyism, which is a characteristic of all
+the Germanic races, was peculiarly marked in England from the earliest
+times, and induced men, even in those “spacious days,” not only to
+overpraise fair hair, but to run down dark hair and eyes as ugly. The
+King replies:
+
+  “O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
+    The hue of dungeons and the school of night;
+  And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well.”
+
+Biron answers:
+
+  “Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.
+    O, if in black my lady's brow be deck'd
+  It mourns that painting and usurping hair
+    Should ravish doters with a false aspect;
+  And therefore is she born to make black fair.
+    Her favour turns the fashion of the days,
+  For native blood is counted painting now;
+    And therefore red that would avoid dispraise,
+  Paints itself black, to imitate her brow.”
+
+Our timid poet is bold enough, when cloaked under a stage-name, to
+uphold the colour of his love's hair against the Queen's; the mere fact
+speaks volumes to those who know their Shakespeare.
+
+Sonnet 127 runs in almost the same words; though now the poet speaking
+in his own person is less bold:
+
+  “In the old age black was not counted fair,
+    Or, if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
+  But now is black beauty's successive heir,
+    And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
+  For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
+    Fairing the soul with art's false borrow'd face,
+  Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
+    But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
+  Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
+    Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
+  At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
+  Slandering creation with a false esteem:
+  Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe
+  That every tongue says beauty should look so.”
+
+
+There can be no doubt that in this Rosaline of “Romeo and Juliet” and of
+“Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare is describing the “dark lady” of the
+second sonnet-series, and describing her, against his custom in
+play-writing, even more exactly than he described her in the lyrics.
+
+There is a line at the end of this act which is very characteristic when
+considered with what has gone before; it is clearly a confession of
+Shakespeare himself, and a perfect example of what one might call the
+conscience that pervades all his mature work:
+
+  “Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn.”
+
+We were right, it seems, in putting some stress on that “perjured” when
+we first met it.
+
+In the second scene of the fifth act, which opens with a talk between
+the Princess and her ladies, our view of Rosaline is confirmed.
+Katherine calls Rosaline light, and jests upon this in lewd fashion;
+declares, too, that she is “a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,” in fact,
+tells her that she is
+
+  “A light condition in a beauty dark.”
+
+All these needless repetitions prove to me that Shakespeare is
+describing his mistress as she lived and moved. Those who disagree with
+me should give another instance in which he has used or abused the same
+precise portraiture. But there is more in this light badinage of the
+girls than a description of Rosaline. When Rosaline says that she will
+torture Biron before she goes, and turn him into her vassal, the
+Princess adds,
+
+  “None are so surely caught when they are catch'd
+  As wit turned fool.”
+
+Rosaline replies,
+
+  “The blood of youth burns not with such excess
+  As gravity's revolt to wantonness.”
+
+This remark has no pertinence or meaning in Rosaline's mouth. Biron is
+supposed to be young in the play, and he has never been distinguished
+for his gravity, but for his wit and humour: the Princess calls him
+“quick Biron.” The two lines are clearly Shakespeare's criticism of
+himself. When he wrote the sonnets he thought himself old, and certainly
+his years (thirty-four) contrasted badly with those of Mary Fitton who
+was at this time not more than nineteen.
+
+Late in 1597 then, before William Herbert came upon the scene at all,
+Shakespeare knew that his mistress was a wanton:
+
+  “Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed;
+  Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.”
+
+Shakespeare has painted his love for us in these plays as a most
+extraordinary woman: in person she is tall, with pallid complexion and
+black eyes and black brows, “a gipsy,” he calls her; in nature
+imperious, lawless, witty, passionate--a “wanton”; moreover, a person of
+birth and position. That a girl of the time has been discovered who
+united all these qualities in herself would bring conviction to almost
+any mind; but belief passes into certitude when we reflect that this
+portrait of his mistress is given with greatest particularity in the
+plays, where in fact it is out of place and a fault in art. When
+studying the later plays we shall find this gipsy wanton again and
+again; she made the deepest impression on Shakespeare; was, indeed, the
+one love of his life. It was her falseness that brought him to
+self-knowledge and knowledge of life, and turned him from a
+light-hearted writer of comedies and histories into the author of the
+greatest tragedies that have ever been conceived. Shakespeare owes the
+greater part of his renown to Mary Fitton.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. THE SONNETS: PART III.
+
+
+The most interesting question in the sonnets, the question the vital
+importance of which dwarfs all others, has never yet been fairly tackled
+and decided. As soon as English critics noticed, a hundred years or so
+ago, that the sonnets fell into two series, and that the first, and
+longer, series was addressed to a young man, they cried, “shocking!
+shocking!” and registered judgement with smug haste on evidence that
+would not hang a cat. Hallam, “the judicious,” held that “it would have
+been better for Shakespeare's reputation if the sonnets had never been
+written,” and even Heine, led away by the consensus of opinion, accepted
+the condemnation, and regretted “the miserable degradation of humanity”
+ to be found in the sonnets. But before giving ourselves to the novel
+enjoyment of moral superiority over Shakespeare, it may be worth while
+to ask, is the fact proved? is his guilt established?
+
+No one, I think, who has followed me so far will need to be told that I
+take no interest in white-washing Shakespeare: I am intent on painting
+him as he lived and loved, and if I found him as vicious as Villon, or
+as cruel as a stoat, I would set it all down as faithfully as I would
+give proof of his generosity or his gentleness.
+
+Before the reader can fairly judge of Shakespeare's innocence or guilt,
+he must hold in mind two salient peculiarities of the man which I have
+already noted; but which must now be relieved out into due prominence so
+that one will make instinctive allowance for them at every moment, his
+sensuality and his snobbishness.
+
+His sensuality is the quality, as we have seen, which unites the
+creatures of his temperament with those of his intellect, his poets with
+his thinkers, and proves that Romeo and Jaques, the Duke of “Twelfth
+Night” and Hamlet, are one and the same person. If the matter is fairly
+considered it will be found that this all-pervading sensuality is the
+source, or at least a natural accompaniment of his gentle kindness and
+his unrivalled sympathy.
+
+Shakespeare painted no portrait of the hero or of the adventurer; found
+no new word for the virile virtues or virile vices, but he gave immortal
+expression to desire and its offspring, to love, jealousy, and despair,
+to every form of pathos, pleading and pity, to all the gentler and more
+feminine qualities. Desire in especial has inspired him with phrases
+more magically expressive even than those gasped out by panting Sappho
+when lust had made her body a lyre of deathless music. Her lyric to the
+belovèd is not so intense as Othello's:
+
+                      “O, thou weed
+  Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
+  That the sense aches at thee”;
+
+or as Cleopatra's astonishing:
+
+              “There is gold, and here
+  My bluest veins to kiss”;
+
+--the revelation of a lifetime devoted to vanity and sensuality,
+sensuality pampered as a god and adored with an Eastern devotion.
+
+I do not think I need labour this point further; as I have already
+noticed, Orsino, the Duke of “Twelfth Night,” sums up Shakespeare's
+philosophy of love in the words:
+
+  “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
+  The appetite may sicken, and so die.”--
+
+Shakespeare told us the truth about himself when he wrote in sonnet 142,
+“Love is my sin.” We can expect from him new words or a new method in
+the painting of passionate desire.
+
+The second peculiarity of Shakespeare which we must establish firmly in
+our minds before we attempt to construe the sonnets is his extraordinary
+snobbishness.
+
+English snobbishness is like a London fog, intenser than can be found in
+any other country; it is so extravagant, indeed, that it seems different
+in kind. One instance of this: when Mr. Gladstone was being examined
+once in a case, he was asked by counsel, Was he a friend of a certain
+lord? Instead of answering simply that he was, he replied that he did
+not think it right to say he was a friend of so great a noble: “he had
+the honour of his acquaintance.” Only in England would the man who could
+make noblemen at will be found bowing before them with this humility of
+soul.
+
+In Shakespeare's time English snobbishness was stronger than it is
+to-day; it was then supported by law and enforced by penalties. To speak
+of a lord without his title was regarded as defamation, and was punished
+as such more than once by the Star Chamber. Shakespeare's position, too,
+explains how this native snobbishness in him was heightened to
+flunkeyism. He was an aristocrat born, as we have seen, and felt in
+himself a kinship for the courtesies, chivalries, and generosities of
+aristocratic life. This tendency was accentuated by his calling. The
+middle class, already steeped in Puritanism, looked upon the theatre as
+scarcely better than the brothel, and showed their contempt for the
+players in a thousand ways. The groundlings and common people, with
+their “greasy caps” and “stinking breath” were as loathsome to
+Shakespeare as the crop-headed, gain-loving citizens who condemned him
+and his like pitilessly. He was thrown back, therefore, upon the young
+noblemen who had read the classics and loved the arts. His works show
+how he admires them. He could paint you Bassanio or Benedick or Mercutio
+to the life. Everybody has noticed the predilection with which he lends
+such characters his own poetic spirit and charm. His lower orders are
+all food for comedy or farce: he will not treat them seriously.
+
+His snobbishness carries him to astounding lengths. One instance: every
+capable critic has been astonished by the extraordinary fidelity to fact
+he shows in his historical plays; he often takes whole pages of an
+earlier play or of Plutarch, and merely varying the language uses them
+in his drama. He is punctiliously careful to set down the fact, whatever
+it may be, and explain it, even when it troubles the flow of his story;
+but as soon as the fact comes into conflict with his respect for
+dignitaries, he loses his nice conscience. He tells us of Agincourt
+without ever mentioning the fact that the English bowmen won the battle;
+he had the truth before him; the chronicler from whom he took the story
+vouched for the fact; but Shakespeare preferred to ascribe the victory
+to Henry and his lords. Shakespeare loved a lord with a passionate
+admiration, and when he paints himself it is usually as a duke or
+prince.
+
+Holding these truths in our mind, Shakespeare's intense sensitiveness
+and sensuality, and his almost inconceivable snobbishness, we may now
+take up the sonnets.
+
+The first thing that strikes one in the sonnets is the fact that, though
+a hundred and twenty-five of them are devoted to a young man, and
+Shakespeare's affection for him, and only twenty-six to the woman, every
+one of those to the woman is characterized by a terrible veracity of
+passion, whereas those addressed to the youth are rather conventional
+than convincing. He pictures the woman to the life; strong, proud, with
+dark eyes and hair, pale complexion--a wanton with the rare power of
+carrying off even a wanton's shame. He finds a method new to literature
+to describe her. He will have no poetic exaggeration; snow is whiter
+than her breasts; violets sweeter than her breath:
+
+  “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
+  As any she belied with false compare.”
+
+His passion is so intense that he has no desire to paint her seduction
+as greater than it was. She has got into his blood, so to speak, and
+each drop of it under the microscope would show her image. Take any
+sonnet at haphazard, and you will hear the rage of his desire.
+
+But what is the youth like?--“the master-mistress” of his passion, to
+give him the title which seems to have convinced the witless of
+Shakespeare's guilt. Not one word of description is to be found
+anywhere; no painting epithet--nothing. Where is the cry of this
+terrible, shameless, outrageous passion that mastered Shakespeare's
+conscience and enslaved his will? Hardly a phrase that goes beyond
+affection--such affection as Shakespeare at thirty-four might well feel
+for a gifted, handsome aristocrat like Lord Herbert, who had youth,
+beauty, wealth, wit to recommend him. Herbert was a poet, too: a patron
+unparagoned! “If Southampton gave me a thousand pounds,” Shakespeare may
+well have argued, “perhaps Lord Herbert will get me made Master of the
+Revels, or even give me a higher place.” An aristocratic society tends
+to make parasites even of the strong, as Dr. Johnson's famous letter to
+Lord Chesterfield proves. But let us leave supposition and come to the
+sonnets themselves, which are addressed to the youth. The first sonnet
+begins:
+
+  “From fairest creatures we desire increase,
+  That thereby beauty's rose might never die.”
+
+This is a very good argument indeed when addressed to a woman; but when
+addressed to a man by a man it rings strained and false. Yet it is the
+theme of the first seventeen sonnets. It is precisely the same argument
+which Shakespeare set forth in “Venus and Adonis” again and again:
+
+  “Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty;
+  Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty.”
+   “And so, in spite of death, thou dost survive,
+  In that thy likeness still is left alive ...”
+ (173-4.)
+
+  “Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets,
+  But gold that's put to use more gold begets.”
+ (767-8.)
+
+At the end of the third sonnet we find the same argument:
+
+  “But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
+  Die single, and thine image dies with thee.”
+
+Again, in the fourth, sixth, and seventh sonnets the same plea is urged.
+In the tenth sonnet the poet cries:
+
+  “Make thee another self, for love of me,
+  That beauty still may live in thine or thee.”
+
+And again at the end of the thirteenth sonnet:
+
+  “You had a father; let your son say so.”
+
+Every one of these sonnets contains simply the argument which is set
+forth with equal force and far superior pertinence in “Venus and
+Adonis.”
+
+That is, Shakespeare makes use of the passion he has felt for a woman to
+give reality to the expression of his affection for the youth. No better
+proof could be imagined of the fact that he never loved the youth with
+passion.
+
+In sonnet 18 Shakespeare begins to alter his note. He then tells the
+youth that he will achieve immortality, not through his children, but
+through Shakespeare's verses. Sonnet 19 is rounded with the same
+thought:
+
+  “Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
+  My love shall in my verse ever live young.”
+
+Sonnet 20 is often referred to as suggesting intimacy:
+
+  “A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted,
+  Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
+  A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
+  With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion;
+  An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling
+  Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
+  A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,
+  Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
+  And for a woman wert thou first created;
+  Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
+  And by addition me of thee defeated,
+  By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
+    But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure
+    Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.”
+
+The sextet of this sonnet absolutely disproves guilty intimacy, and is,
+I believe, intended to disprove it; Shakespeare had already fathomed the
+scandal-loving minds of his friends, and wanted to set forth the noble
+disinterestedness of his affection.
+
+Sonnet 22 is more sincere, though not so passionate; it neither
+strengthens nor rebuts the argument. Sonnet 23 is the sonnet upon which
+all those chiefly rely who wish to condemn Shakespeare. Here it is:
+
+  “As an unperfect actor on the stage,
+  Who with his fear is put beside his part,
+  Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
+  Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart;
+  So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
+  The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
+  And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
+  O'ercharged with burthen of mine own love's might.
+  O, let my looks be then the eloquence
+  And dumb presagers of my speaking breast;
+  Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
+  More than that tongue that more hath more express'd.
+    O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
+    To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.”
+
+We can interpret the phrases, “the perfect ceremony of love's rite” and
+“look for recompense” as we will; but it must be admitted that even when
+used to the uttermost they form an astonishingly small base on which to
+raise so huge and hideous a superstructure.
+
+But we shall be told that the condemnation of Shakespeare is based, not
+upon any sonnet or any line; but upon the way Shakespeare speaks as soon
+as he discovers that his mistress has betrayed him in favour of his
+friend. One is inclined to expect that he will throw the blame on the
+friend, and, after casting him off, seek to win again the affections of
+his mistress. Nine men out of ten would act in this way. But the sonnets
+tell us with iteration and most peculiar emphasis that Shakespeare does
+not condemn the friend. As soon as he hears of the traitorism he cries
+(sonnet 33):
+
+  “Full many a glorious morning have I seen
+  Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
+  Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
+  Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy;
+  Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
+  With ugly rack on his celestial face,
+  And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
+  Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
+  Even so my sun one early morn did shine
+  With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
+  But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,
+  The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
+    Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
+    Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.”
+
+It is the loss of his friend he regrets, rather than the loss of his
+mistress; she is not mentioned save by comparison with “basest clouds.”
+ Yet even when read by Gradgrind and his compeers the thirteenth line of
+this sonnet is utterly inconsistent with passion.
+
+In the next sonnet the friend repents, and weeps the “strong offence,”
+ and Shakespeare accepts the sorrow as salve that “heals the wound”; his
+friend's tears are pearls that “ransom all ill deeds.” The next sonnet
+begins with the line:
+
+  “No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done”;
+
+Shakespeare will be an “accessory” to his friend's “theft,” though he
+admits that the robbery is still sour. Then come four sonnets in which
+he is content to forget all about the wrong he has suffered, and simply
+exhausts himself in praise of his friend. Sonnet 40 begins:
+
+  “Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;
+  What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
+  No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call;  All mine was
+thine, before thou hadst this more.”
+
+This is surely the very soul of tender affection; but it is significant
+that even here the word “true” is emphasized and not “love”; he goes on:
+
+  “I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
+  Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
+  And yet love knows it is a greater grief
+  To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury.”
+
+Never before was a man so gentle-kind; we might be listening to the
+lament of a broken-hearted woman who smiles through her tears to
+reassure her lover; yet there is no attempt to disguise the fact that
+Herbert has done “wrong.” The next sonnet puts the poet's feeling as
+strongly as possible.
+
+  “Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits,
+  When I am sometime absent from thy heart,
+  Thy beauty and thy years full well befits,
+  For still temptation follows where thou art.
+  Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
+  Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd;
+  And when a woman woos, what woman's son
+  Will sourly leave her till she have prevail'd?
+  Ay me! but yet thou might'st my seat forbear,
+  And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
+  Who lead thee in their riot even there
+  Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth;
+  Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
+  Thine by thy beauty being false to me.”
+
+The first lines show that Shakespeare is pretending; he attempts not
+only to minimize the offence, but to find it charming. A mother who
+caught her young son kissing a girl would reproach him in this fashion;
+to her his faults would be the “pretty wrongs that liberty commits.” But
+this is not the way passion speaks, and here again the sextet condemns
+Herbert in the plainest terms. At length we have the summing-up:
+
+  “That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
+  And yet it may be said I lov'd her dearly;
+  That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,
+  A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
+  Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
+  Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her;
+  And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
+  Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.
+  If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
+  And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
+  Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
+  And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
+  But here's the joy; my friend and I are one;
+  Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.”
+
+This sonnet, with its affected word-play and wire-drawn consolation,
+leaves one gaping: Shakespeare's verbal affectations had got into his
+very blood. To my mind the whole sonnet is too extravagant to be
+sincere; it is only to be explained by the fact that Shakespeare's
+liking for Herbert was heightened by snobbishness and by the hope of
+patronage. None of it rings true except the first couplet. Yet the
+argument of it is repeated, strange to say, and emphasized in the
+sonnets addressed to the “dark lady” whom Shakespeare loved. Sonnet 144
+is clear enough:
+
+  “Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
+  Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
+  The better angel is a man, right fair,
+  The worser spirit a woman, colour'd ill.
+  To win me soon to hell, my female evil
+  Tempteth my better angel from my side,
+  And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
+  Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
+  And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
+  Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
+  But being both from me, both to each friend,
+  I guess one angel in another's hell:
+    Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
+    Till my bad angel fire my good one out.”
+
+As soon as his mistress comes on the scene Shakespeare's passionate
+sincerity cannot be questioned. The truth is the intensity of his
+passion leads him to condemn and spite the woman, while the absence of
+passion allows him to pretend affection for the friend. Sonnet 133,
+written to the woman, is decisive:
+
+  “Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
+  For that deep wound it gives my friend and me!
+  Is't not enough to torture me alone,
+  But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be?
+  Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
+  And my next self thou harder hast engross'd:
+  Of him, myself, and thee, I am forsaken;
+  A torment thrice threefold thus to be cross'd.
+  Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward,
+  But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail;
+  Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard;
+  Thou canst not then use rigour in my gaol:
+    And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,
+    Perforce am thine, and all that is in me.”
+
+The last couplet is to me “perforce” conclusive. But let us take it that
+these sonnets prove the contention of the cry of critics that
+Shakespeare preferred friendship to love, and held his friend dearer
+than his mistress, and let us see if the plays corroborate the sonnets
+on this point. We may possibly find that the plays only strengthen the
+doubt which the sonnets implant in us.
+
+“The Merchant of Venice” has always seemed to me important as helping to
+fix the date of the sonnets. Antonio, as I have shown, is an
+impersonation of Shakespeare himself. It seems to me Shakespeare would
+have found it impossible to write of Antonio's self-sacrificing love for
+Bassanio after he himself had been cheated by his friend. This play then
+must have been written shortly before his betrayal, and should give us
+Shakespeare's ordinary attitude. Many expressions in the play remind us
+of the sonnets, and one in especial of sonnet 41. In the sixth scene of
+the second act, Jessica, when escaping from her father's house, uses
+Shakespeare's voice to say:
+
+  “But love is blind and lovers cannot see
+  The pretty follies that themselves commit.”
+
+Here we have “the pretty follies” which is used again as “pretty wrongs”
+ in sonnet 41. Immediately afterwards Lorenzo, another mask of
+Shakespeare, praises Jessica as “wise, fair, and true,” just as in
+sonnet 105 Shakespeare praises his friend as “kind, fair, and true,”
+ using again words which his passion for a woman has taught him.
+
+The fourth act sets forth the same argument we find in the sonnets. When
+it looks as if Antonio would have to give his life as forfeit to the
+Jew, Bassanio exclaims:
+
+  “Antonio, I am married to a wife
+  Which is as dear to me as life itself;
+  But life itself, my wife and all the world
+  Are not with me esteem'd above thy life.
+  I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all
+  Here to this devil to deliver you.”
+
+This is the language of passionate exaggeration, one might say.
+Antoniois suffering in Bassanio's place, paying the penalty, so to
+speak, for Bassanio's happiness. No wonder Bassanio exaggerates his
+grief and the sacrifice he would be prepared to make. But Gratiano has
+no such excuse for extravagant speech, and yet Gratiano follows in the
+self-same vein:
+
+  “I have a wife whom, I protest, I love:
+  I would she were in heaven, so she could
+  Entreat some power to change this currish Jew.”
+
+The peculiarity of this attitude is heightened by the fact that the two
+wives, Portia and Nerissa, both take the ordinary view. Portia says:
+
+  “Your wife would give you little thanks for that
+  If she were by to hear you make the offer.”
+
+And Nerissa goes a little further:
+
+  “Tis well you offer it behind her back,
+   The wish would make else an unquiet house.”
+
+The blunder is monstrous; not only is the friend prepared to sacrifice
+all he possesses, including his wife, to save his benefactor, but the
+friend's friend is content to sacrifice his wife too for the same
+object. Shakespeare then in early manhood was accustomed to put
+friendship before love; we must find some explanation of what seems to
+us so unnatural an attitude.
+
+In the last scene of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” which is due to a
+later revision, the sonnet-case is emphasized. And at this time
+Shakespeare has suffered Herbert's betrayal. As soon as the false friend
+Proteus says he is sorry and asks forgiveness, Valentine, another
+impersonation of Shakespeare, replies:
+
+    “Then I am paid;
+  And once again I do receive thee honest:
+  Who by repentance is not satisfied,
+  Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas'd;
+  By penitence the Eternal's wrath's appeased;
+  And that my love may appear plain and free,
+  All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.”
+
+This incarnation of Shakespeare speaks of repentance in Shakespeare's
+most characteristic fashion, and then coolly surrenders the woman he
+loves to his friend without a moment's hesitation, and without even
+considering whether the woman would be satisfied with the transfer. The
+words admit of no misconstruction; they stand four-square, not to be
+shaken by any ingenuity of reason, and Shakespeare supplies us with
+further corroboration of them.
+
+“Coriolanus” was written fully ten years after “The Merchant of Venice,”
+ and long after the revision of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” And yet
+Shakespeare's attitude at forty-three is, in regard to this matter, just
+what it was at thirty-three. When Aufidius finds Coriolanus in his
+house, and learns that he has been banished from Rome and is now
+prepared to turn his army against his countrymen, he welcomes him as
+“more a friend than e'er an enemy,” and this is the way he takes to show
+his joy:
+
+                        “Know thou first,
+  I loved the maid I married: never man
+  Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
+  Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
+  Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
+  Bestride my threshold.”
+
+Here's the same attitude; the same extravagance; the same insistence on
+the fact that the man loves the maid and yet has more delight in the
+friend. What does it mean? When we first find it in “The Merchant of
+Venice” it must give the reader pause; in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”
+ it surprises us; in the sonnets, accompanied as it is by every
+flattering expression of tender affection for the friend, it brings us
+to question; but its repetition in “Coriolanus” must assure us that it
+is a mere pose. Aufidius was not such a friend of Coriolanus that we can
+take his protestation seriously. The argument is evidently a stock
+argument to Shakespeare: a part of the ordinary furniture of his mind:
+it is like a fashionable dress of the period--the wearer does not notice
+its peculiarity.
+
+The truth is, Shakespeare found in the literature of his time, and in
+the minds of his contemporaries, a fantastically high appreciation of
+friendship, coupled with a corresponding disdain for love as we moderns
+understand it. In “Wit's Commonwealth,” published in 1598, we find: “The
+love of men to women is a thing common and of course, but the friendship
+of man to man, infinite and immortal.” Passionate devotion to friendship
+is a sort of mark of the Renaissance, and the words “love” and “lover”
+ in Elizabethan English were commonly used for “friend” and “friendship.”
+ Moreover, one must not forget that Lyly, whose euphuistic speech
+affected Shakespeare for years, had handled this same incident in his
+“Campaspe,” where Alexander gives up his love to his rival, Apelles.
+Shakespeare, not to be outdone in any loyalty, sets forth the same
+fantastical devotion in the sonnets and plays. He does this, partly
+because the spirit of the time infected him, partly out of sincere
+admiration for Herbert, but oftener, I imagine, out of self-interest. It
+is pose, flunkeyism and the hope of benefits to come and not passion
+that inspired the first series of sonnets.
+
+Whoever reads the scene carefully in “Much Ado About Nothing,” cannot
+avoid seeing that Shakespeare at his best not only does not minimize his
+friend's offence, but condemns it absolutely:
+
+  “The transgression is in the stealer.”
+
+And in the sonnets, too, in spite of himself, the same true feeling
+pierces through the snobbish and affected excuses.
+
+  “Ay me! but yet them might'st my seat forbear,
+  And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
+  Who lead thee in their riot even there
+  Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth,
+    Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
+    Thine, by thy beauty being false to me.”
+
+Shakespeare was a sycophant, a flunkey if you will, but nothing worse.
+
+Further arguments suggest themselves. Shakespeare lived, as it were, in
+a glass house with a score of curious eyes watching everything he did
+and with as many ears pricked for every word he said; but this foul
+accusation was never even suggested by any of his rivals. In especial
+Ben Jonson was always girding at Shakespeare, now satirically, now
+good-humouredly. Is it not manifest that if any such sin had ever been
+attributed to him, Ben Jonson would have given the suspicion utterance?
+There is a passage in his “Bartholomew Fair” which I feel sure is meant
+as a skit upon the relations we find in the Sonnets. In Act V, scene
+iii, there is a puppet-show setting forth “the ancient modern history of
+Hero and Leander, otherwise called the Touchstone of true Love, with as
+true a trial of Friendship between Damon and Pythias, two faithful
+friends o' the Bankside.” Hero is a “wench o' the Bankside,” and Leander
+swims across the Thames to her. Damon and Pythias meet at her lodgings,
+and abuse each other violently, only to finish as perfect good friends.
+
+    “_Damon_. Whore-master in thy face;
+  Thou hast lain with her thyself, I'll prove it in this place.
+
+    _Leatherhead_. They are whore-masters both, sir, that's
+       a plain case.
+
+    _Pythias_. Thou lie like a rogue.
+
+    _Leatherhead_. Do I lie like a rogue?
+
+    _Pythias_. A pimp and a scab.
+
+    _Leatherhead_. A pimp and a scab!
+  I say, between you you have both but one drab.
+
+    _Pythias and Damon_. Come, now we'll go together to
+       breakfast to Hero.
+
+    _Leatherhead_. Thus, gentles, you perceive without any
+       denial
+  'Twixt Damon and Pythias here friendship's true trial.”
+
+Rare Ben Jonson would have been delighted to set forth the viler charge
+if it had ever been whispered.
+
+Then again, it seems to me certain that if Shakespeare had been the sort
+of man his accusers say he was, he would have betrayed himself in his
+plays. Consider merely the fact that young boys then played the girls'
+parts on the stage. Surely if Shakespeare had had any leaning that way,
+we should have found again and again ambiguous or suggestive expressions
+given to some of these boys when aping girls; but not one. The
+temptation was there; the provocation was there, incessant and prolonged
+for twenty-five years, and yet, to my knowledge, Shakespeare has never
+used one word that malice could misconstrue. Yet he loved suggestive and
+lewd speech.
+
+Luckily, however, there is stronger proof of Shakespeare's innocence
+than even his condemnation of his false friend, proof so strong, that if
+all the arguments for his guilt were tenfold stronger than they are,
+this proof would outweigh them all and bring them to nought. Nor should
+it be supposed, because I have only mentioned the chief arguments for
+and against, that I do not know all those that can be urged on either
+side. I have confined myself to the chief ones simply because by merely
+stating them, their utter weakness must be admitted by every one who can
+read Shakespeare, by every one who understands his impulsive
+sensitiveness, and the facility with which affectionate expressions came
+to his lips. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that while the sonnets
+were being written he was in rivalry with Chapman for this very patron's
+favour, and this rivalry alone would explain a good deal of the fervour,
+or, should I say, the affected fervour he put into the first series of
+sonnets; but now for the decisive and convincing argument for
+Shakespeare's innocence.
+
+Let us first ask ourselves how it is that real passion betrays itself
+and proves its force. Surely it is by its continuance; by its effect
+upon the life later. I have assumed, or inferred, as my readers may
+decide, that Shakespeare's liking for Herbert was chiefly snobbish, and
+was deepened by the selfish hope that he would find in him a patron even
+more powerful and more liberally disposed than Lord Southampton. He
+probably felt that young Herbert owed him a great deal for his
+companionship and poetical advice; for Herbert was by way of being a
+poet himself. If my view is correct, after Shakespeare lost Lord
+Herbert's affection, we should expect to hear him talking of man's
+forgetfulness and ingratitude, and that is just what Lord Herbert left
+in him, bitterness and contempt. Never one word in all his works to show
+that the loss of this youth's affection touched him more nearly. As we
+have seen, he cannot keep the incident out of his plays. Again and again
+he drags it in; but in none of these dramas is there any lingering
+kindness towards the betrayer. And as soon as the incident was past and
+done with, as soon as the three or four years' companionship with Lord
+Herbert was at an end, not one word more do we catch expressive of
+affection. Again and again Shakespeare rails at man's ingratitude, but
+nothing more. Think of it. Pembroke, under James, came to great power;
+was, indeed, made Lord Chamberlain, and set above all the players, so
+that he could have advanced Shakespeare as he pleased with a word: with
+a word could have made him Master of the Revels, or given him a higher
+post. He did not help him in any way. He gave books every Christmas to
+Ben Jonson, but we hear of no gift to Shakespeare, though evidently from
+the dedication to him of the first folio, he remained on terms of
+careless acquaintance with Shakespeare. Ingratitude is what Shakespeare
+found in Lord Pembroke; ingratitude is what he complains of in him. What
+a different effect the loss of Mary Fitton had upon Shakespeare. Just
+consider what the plays teach us when the sonnet-story is finished. The
+youth vanishes; no reader can find a trace of him, or even an allusion
+to him. But the woman comes to be the centre, as we shall see, of
+tragedy after tragedy. She flames through Shakespeare's life, a fiery
+symbol, till at length she inspires perhaps his greatest drama, “Antony
+and Cleopatra,” filling it with the disgrace of him who is “a strumpet's
+fool,” the shame of him who has become “the bellows and the fan to cool
+a harlot's lust.”
+
+The passion for Mary Fitton was the passion of Shakespeare's whole life.
+The adoration of her, and the insane desire of her, can be seen in every
+play he wrote from 1597 to 1608. After he lost her, he went back to her;
+but the wound of her frailty cankered and took on proud flesh in him,
+and tortured him to nervous breakdown and to madness. When at length he
+won to peace, after ten years, it was the peace of exhaustion. His love
+for his “gipsy-wanton” burned him out, as one is burnt to ashes at the
+stake, and his passion only ended with his life.
+
+There is no room for doubt in my mind, no faintest suspicion. Hallam and
+Heine, and all the cry of critics, are mistaken in this matter.
+Shakespeare admired Lord Herbert's youth and boldness and beauty, hoped
+great things from his favour and patronage; but after the betrayal, he
+judged him inexorably as a mean traitor, “a stealer” who had betrayed “a
+twofold trust”; and later, cursed him for his ingratitude, and went
+about with wild thoughts of bloody revenge, as we shall soon see in
+“Hamlet” and “Othello,” and then dropped him into oblivion without a
+pang.
+
+It is bad enough to know that Shakespeare, the sweetest spirit and
+finest mind in all literature, should have degraded himself to pretend
+such an affection for the profligate Herbert as has given occasion for
+misconstruction. It is bad enough, I say, to know that Shakespeare could
+play flunkey to this extent; but after all, that is the worst that can
+be urged against him, and it is so much better than men have been led to
+believe that there may be a certain relief in the knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST-FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: BRUTUS
+
+
+The play of “Julius Caesar” was written about 1600 or 1601. As “Twelfth
+Night” was the last of the golden comedies, so “Julius Caesar” is the
+first of the great tragedies, and bears melancholy witness to us that
+the poet's young-eyed confidence in life and joy in living are dying, if
+not dead. “Julius Caesar” is the first outcome of disillusion. Before it
+was written Shakespeare had been deceived by his mistress, betrayed by
+his friend; his eyes had been opened to the fraud and falsehood of life;
+but, like one who has just been operated on for cataract, he still sees
+realities as through a mist, dimly. He meets the shock of traitorous
+betrayal as we should have expected Valentine or Antonio or Orsino to
+meet it--with pitying forgiveness. Suffering, instead of steeling his
+heart and drying up his sympathies, as it does with most men, softened
+him, induced him to give himself wholly to that “angel, Pity.” He will
+not believe that his bitter experience is universal; in spite of
+Herbert's betrayal, he still has the courage to declare his belief in
+the existence of the ideal. At the very last his defeated Brutus cries:
+
+  “My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
+  I found no man but he was true to me.”
+
+The pathos of this attempt still to believe in man and man's truth is
+over the whole play. But the belief was fated to disappear. No man who
+lives in the world can boast of loyalty as Brutus did; even Jesus had a
+Judas among the Twelve. But when Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” he
+still tried to believe, and this gives the play an important place in
+his life's story.
+
+Before I begin to consider the character of Brutus I should like to draw
+attention to three passages which place Brutus between the melancholy
+Jaques of “As You Like It,” whose melancholy is merely temperamental,
+and the almost despairing Hamlet. Jaques says:
+
+  “Invest me in my motley; give me leave
+  To speak my mind, and I will through and through
+  Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
+  If they will patiently receive my medicine.”
+
+This is the view of early manhood which does not doubt its power to cure
+all the evils which afflict mortality. Then comes the later, more
+hopeless view, to which Brutus gives expression:
+
+  “Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this;
+  Brutus had rather be a villager
+  Than to repute himself a son of Rome
+  Under these hard conditions as this time
+  Is like to lay upon us.”
+
+And later still, and still more bitter, Hamlet's:
+
+  “The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
+  That ever I was born to set it right!”
+
+But Shakespeare is a meliorist even in Hamlet, and believes that the
+ailments of man can all be set right.
+
+The likenesses between Brutus and Hamlet are so marked that even the
+commentators have noticed them. Professor Dowden exaggerates the
+similarities. “Both (dramas),” he writes, “are tragedies of thought
+rather than of passion; both present in their chief characters the
+spectacle of noble natures which fail through some weakness or
+deficiency rather than through crime; upon Brutus as upon Hamlet a
+burden is laid which he is not able to bear; neither Brutus nor Hamlet
+is fitted for action, yet both are called to act in dangerous and
+difficult affairs.” Much of this is Professor Dowden's view and not
+Shakespeare's. When Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” he had not reached
+that stage in self-understanding when he became conscious that he was a
+man of thought rather than of action, and that the two ideals tend to
+exclude each other. In the contest at Philippi Brutus and his wing win
+the day; it is the defeat of Cassius which brings about the ruin;
+Shakespeare evidently intended to depict Brutus as well “fitted for
+action.”
+
+Some critics find it disconcerting that Shakespeare identified himself
+with Brutus, who failed, rather than with Caesar, who succeeded. But
+even before he himself came to grief in his love and trust, Shakespeare
+had always treated the failures with peculiar sympathy. He preferred
+Arthur to the Bastard, and King Henry VI. to Richard III., and Richard
+II. to proud Bolingbroke. And after his agony of disillusion, all his
+heroes are failures for years and years: Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear,
+Troilus, Antony, and Timon--all fail as he himself had failed.
+
+There is some matter for surprise in the fact that Brutus is an ideal
+portrait of Shakespeare. Disillusion usually brings a certain bitter
+sincerity, a measure of realism, into artistic work; but its first
+effect on Shakespeare was to draw out all the kindliness in him; Brutus
+is Shakespeare at his sweetest and best. Yet the soul-suffering of the
+man has assuredly improved his art: Brutus is a better portrait of him
+than Biron, Valentine, Romeo, or Antonio, a more serious and bolder
+piece of self-revealing even than Orsino. Shakespeare is not afraid now
+to depict the deep underlying kindness of his nature, his essential
+goodness of heart. A little earlier, and occupied chiefly with his own
+complex growth, he could only paint sides of himself; a little later,
+and the personal interest absorbed all others, so that his dramas became
+lyrics of anguish and despair. Brutus belongs to the best time,
+artistically speaking, to the time when passion and pain had tried the
+character without benumbing the will or distracting the mind: it is a
+masterpiece of portraiture, and stands in even closer relation to Hamlet
+than Romeo stands to Orsino. As Shakespeare appears to us in Brutus at
+thirty-seven, so he was when they bore him to his grave at
+fifty-two--the heart does not alter greatly.
+
+Let no one say or think that in all this I am drawing on my imagination;
+what I have said is justified by all that Brutus says and does from one
+end of the play to the other. According to his custom, Shakespeare has
+said it all of himself very plainly, and has put his confession into the
+mouth of Brutus on his very first appearance (Act i. sc. 2):
+
+                                 “Cassius
+  Be not deceived: if I have veiled my look
+  I turn the trouble of my countenance
+  Merely upon myself. Vexed I am
+  Of late with passions of some difference,
+  Conceptions only proper to myself,
+  Which gives some soil, perhaps, to my behaviours,
+  But let not therefore my good friends be grieved,--
+  Among which number, Cassius, be you one,--
+  Nor construe any further in neglect,
+  Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
+  Forgets the shows of love to other men.”
+
+What were these “different passions,” complex personal passions, too,
+which had vexed Brutus and changed his manners even to his friends?
+There is no hint of them in Plutarch, no word about them in the play. It
+was not “poor Brutus,” but poor Shakespeare, racked by love and
+jealousy, tortured by betrayal, who was now “at war with himself.”
+
+I assume the identity of Brutus with Shakespeare before I have
+absolutely proved it because it furnishes the solution to the
+difficulties of the play. As usual, Coleridge has given proof of his
+insight by seeing and stating the chief difficulty, without, however,
+being able to explain it, and as usual, also, the later critics have
+followed him as far as they can, and in this case have elected to pass
+over the difficulty in silence. Coleridge quotes some of the words of
+Brutus when he first thinks of killing Caesar, and calls the passage a
+speech of Brutus, but it is in reality a soliloquy of Brutus, and must
+be considered in its entirety. Brutus says:
+
+  “It must be by his death: and for my part,
+  I know no personal cause to spurn at him
+  But for the general. He would be crowned:--
+  How that might change his nature, there's the question?
+  It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
+  And that craves wary walking. Crown him?--that;
+  And then, I grant, we put a sting in him
+  That at his will he may do danger with.
+  The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
+  Remorse from power: and to speak truth of Caesar,
+  I have known his affections swayed
+  More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
+  That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
+  Whereto the climber-upwards turns his face;
+  But when he once attains the topmost round,
+  He then unto the ladder turns his back,
+  Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
+  By which he did ascend. So Caesar may:
+  Then, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel
+  Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
+  Fashion it thus: that, what he is, augmented,
+  Would run to these and these extremities:
+  And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,
+  Which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous;
+  And kill him in the shell.”
+
+Coleridge's comment on this deserves notice. He wrote: “This speech is
+singular; at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare's motive,
+his _rationale_, or in what point of view he meant Brutus'
+character to appear. For surely ... nothing can seem more discordant
+with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the
+intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here
+attributed to him--to him, the stern Roman republican; namely, that he
+would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome,
+would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be!
+How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause--none in
+Caesar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he
+not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the
+Senate? Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things
+forward. True;--and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What
+character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?”
+
+All this is sound criticism, and can only be answered by the truth that
+Shakespeare from the beginning of the play identified himself with
+Brutus, and paid but little attention to the historic Brutus whom he had
+met in Plutarch. Let us push criticism a little further, and we shall
+see that this is the only possible way to read the riddle. We all know
+why Plutarch's Brutus killed Caesar; but why does Shakespeare's Brutus
+kill the man he so esteems? Because Caesar may change his nature when
+king; because like the serpent's egg he may “grow mischievous”? But when
+he speaks “truth” of Caesar he has to admit Caesar's goodness. The
+“serpent's egg” reason then is inapplicable. Besides, when speaking of
+himself on the plains of Philippi, Shakespeare's Brutus explicitly
+contradicts this false reasoning:
+
+                       “I know not how
+  But I do find it cowardly and vile,
+  _For fear of what might fall_, so to prevent
+  The term of life.”
+
+It would seem, therefore, that Brutus did not kill Caesar, as one
+crushes a serpent's egg, to prevent evil consequences. It is equally
+manifest that he did not do it for “the general,” for if ever “the
+general” were shown to be despicable and worthless it is in this very
+play, where the citizens murder Cinna the poet because he has the same
+name as Cinna the conspirator, and the lower classes are despised as the
+“rabblement,” “the common herd,” with “chapped hands,” “sweaty
+night-caps,” and “stinking breath.”
+
+It is Dr. Brandes' idea and not Shakespeare's that Brutus is a “man of
+uncompromising character and principle.” That is the Brutus of Plutarch,
+who finds in his stern republican love of the common good an ethical
+motive for killing the ambitious Caesar. But Shakespeare had no
+understanding of the republican ideal, and no sympathy with the public;
+accordingly, his Brutus has no adequate reason for contriving Caesar's
+death. Shakespeare followed Plutarch in freeing Brutus from the
+suspicion of personal or interested motive, but he didn't see that by
+doing this he made his Brutus a conspirator without a cause, a murderer
+without a motive. The truth is our gentle poet could never find a
+convincing ground for cold-blooded murder. It will be remembered that
+Macbeth only murders, as the deer murders, out of fear, and the fact
+that his Brutus can find no justification of any sort for killing
+Caesar, confirms our view of Shakespeare's gentle kindness. The
+“uncompromising character and principle” of the severe republican we
+find in Plutarch, sit uneasily on Shakespeare's Brutus; it is apparent
+that the poet had no conception of what we call a fanatic. His
+difficulties arise from this limitation of insight. He begins to write
+the play by making Brutus an idealized portrait of himself; he,
+therefore, dwells on Brutus' perfect nobility, sincerity, and
+unselfishness, but does not realize that the more perfect he makes
+Brutus, the more clear and cogent Brutus' motive must be for undertaking
+Caesar's assassination.
+
+In this confusion Shakespeare's usually fine instinct is at fault, and
+he blunders from mistake to mistake. His idealizing tendency makes him
+present Brutus as perfect, and at the same time he uses the historical
+incident of the anonymous letters, which goes to show Brutus as
+conceited and vain. If these letters influenced Brutus--and they must be
+taken to have done so, or else why were they introduced?--we have a noble
+and unselfish man murdering out of paltry vanity. In Plutarch,
+where Brutus is depicted as an austere republican, the incident of the
+letters only throws a natural shade of doubt on the rigid principles by
+which alone he is supposed to be guided. We all feel that rigid
+principles rest on pride, and may best be led astray through pride. But
+Shakespeare's Brutus is pure human sweetness, and the letters are worse
+than out of place when addressed to him. Shakespeare should never have
+used this incident; it is a blot on his conception.
+
+All through the first acts of the play Brutus is incredible, for he is
+in an impossible position. Shakespeare simply could not find any valid
+reason why his _alter ego_, Brutus, should kill Caesar. But from
+the moment the murder is committed to the end of the play Brutus-
+Shakespeare is at peace with himself. And as soon as the dramatist lets
+himself go and paints Brutus with entire freedom and frankness, he rises
+to the height of tragic pathos, and we can all recognize the original of
+the portrait. At first Brutus is merely ideal; his perfect
+unsuspiciousness--he trusts even Antony; his transparent honesty--he
+will have no other oath among the conspirators
+
+  “Than honesty to honesty engaged”;
+
+his hatred of bloodshed--he opposes Cassius, who proposes to murder
+Antony; all these noble qualities may be contrasted with the subtler
+shortcomings which make of Hamlet so vital a creation. Hamlet is
+suspicious even of Ophelia; Hamlet is only “indifferent honest”; Hamlet
+makes his friends swear to keep the ghost's appearance a profound
+secret; Hamlet lives from the beginning, while Brutus at first is a mere
+bundle of perfections individualized only by that personal intimate
+confession which I have already quoted, which, however, has nothing to
+do with the play. But later in the drama Shakespeare begins to lend
+Brutus his own weaknesses, and forthwith Brutus lives. His insomnia is
+pure Shakespeare:
+
+  “Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
+  I have not slept.”
+
+The character of Brutus is superbly portrayed in that wonderful scene
+with Cassius in the fourth act. With all the superiority of conscious
+genius he treats his confederate as a child or madman, much as Hamlet
+treats Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
+
+  “Shall I be frighted when a madman stares?”
+
+Cassius is mean, too, whereas Brutus is kindly and generous to a degree:
+
+  “For I can raise no money by vile means:
+  By heaven, I had rather coin my heart,
+  And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring
+  From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash
+  By any indirection....
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous,
+  To lock such rascal counters from his friends,
+  Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts,
+  Dash him to pieces.”
+
+And, above all, as soon as Cassius appeals to his affection, Brutus is
+disarmed:
+
+  “O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb
+  That carries anger, as the flint bears fire;
+  Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark,
+  And straight is cold again.”
+
+This is the best expression of Shakespeare's temper; the “hasty spark”
+ is Hamlet's temper, as we have seen, and Macbeth's, and Romeo's.
+
+And now everything that Brutus does or says is Shakespeare's best. In a
+bowl of wine he buries “all unkindness.” His affection for Cassius is
+not a virtue to one in especial. The scene in the fourth act, in which
+he begs the pardon of his boy Lucius, should be learned by heart by
+those who wish to understand our loving and lovable Shakespeare. This
+scene, be it remarked, is not in Plutarch, but is Shakespeare's own
+invention. His care for the lad's comfort, at a time when his own life
+is striking the supreme hour, is exquisitely pathetic. Then come his
+farewell to Cassius and his lament over Cassius' body; then the second
+fight and the nobly generous words that hold in them, as flowers their
+perfume, all Shakespeare's sweetness of nature:
+
+  “My heart doth joy, that yet in all my life
+  I found no man, but he was true to me.”
+
+And then night hangs upon the weary, sleepless eyes, and we are all
+ready to echo Antony's marvellous valediction:
+
+  “This was the noblest Roman of them all;
+      - -     - -     - -     - -     - -     - -
+   His life was gentle; and the elements
+   So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
+   And say to all the world, 'This was a man!'”
+
+But this Brutus was no murderer, no conspirator, no narrow republican
+fanatic, but simply gentle Shakespeare discovering to us his own sad
+heart and the sweetness which suffering had called forth in him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: HAMLET.
+
+
+“A beautiful, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve
+which makes the hero, sinks beneath a burden which it can neither bear
+nor throw off; every duty is holy to him,--this too hard. The impossible
+is required of him,--not the impossible in itself, but the impossible to
+him. How he winds, turns, agonizes, advances and recoils, ever reminded,
+ever reminding himself, and at last almost loses his purpose from his
+thoughts, without ever again recovering his peace of
+mind....”--“_Hamlet_” by _Goethe_.
+
+Goethe's criticism of Hamlet is so much finer than any English criticism
+that I am glad to quote it. It will serve, I think, as a standard to
+distinguish the best criticism of the past from what I shall set forth
+in the course of this analysis. In this chapter I shall try to show what
+new light our knowledge of Shakespeare throws on the play, and
+conversely what new light the play throws on its maker.
+
+The first moment of disillusion brought out, as we have seen in Brutus,
+all the kindness in Shakespeare's nature. He will believe in men in
+spite of experience; but the idealistic pose could not be kept up:
+sooner or later Shakespeare had to face the fact that he had been
+befooled and scorned by friend and mistress--how did he meet it? Hamlet
+is the answer: Shakespeare went about nursing dreams of revenge and
+murder. Disillusion had deeper consequences; forced to see other men as
+they were, he tried for a moment to see himself as he was. The outcome
+of that objective vision was Hamlet--a masterpiece of self-revealing.
+
+Yet, when he wrote “Hamlet,” nothing was clear to him; the significance
+of the catastrophe had only dawned upon him; he had no notion how
+complete his soul-shipwreck was, still less did he dream of painting
+himself realistically in all his obsequious flunkeyism and ungovernable
+sensuality. He saw himself less idealistically than heretofore, and,
+trying to look at himself fairly, honestly, he could not but accuse
+himself of irresolution at the very least; he had hung on with Herbert,
+as the sonnets tell us, hoping to build again the confidence which had
+been ruined by betrayal, hoping he knew not what of gain or place, to
+the injury of his own self-respect; while brooding all the time on quite
+impossible plans of revenge, impossible, for action had been “sicklied
+o'er with the pale cast of thought.” Hamlet could not screw his courage
+to the sticking point, and so became a type for ever of the philosopher
+or man of letters who, by thinking, has lost the capacity for action.
+
+Putting ourselves in Shakespeare's place for the moment we see at once
+why he selected this story for treatment at this time. He knew, none
+better, that no young aristocrat would have submitted patiently to the
+wrong he had suffered from Lord Herbert; he created Laertes to show how
+instant and determined such a man would be in taking murderous revenge;
+but he still felt that what others would regard as faults, his
+irresolution and shrinking from bloodshed were in themselves nobler, and
+so, whilst half excusing, half realizing himself, he brought forth a
+masterpiece. This brooding on revenge, which is the heart and
+explanation of his great play, shows us how little Shakespeare cared for
+Herbert, how completely he had condemned him. The soliloquy on this
+point in “Hamlet” is the most characteristic thing in the drama:
+
+       “This is most brave,
+  That I, the son of a dear father murder'd
+  Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
+  Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
+  And fall a-cursing like a very drab.”
+
+Shakespeare is thinking of Herbert's betrayal; “here I am,” he says,
+“prompted to revenge by reason and custom, yet instead of acting I fall
+a-cursing like a drab.” But behind his irresolution is his hatred of
+bloodshed: he could whip out his sword and on a sudden kill Polonius,
+mistaking him for the king (Herbert), but he could not, in cold blood,
+make up his mind to kill and proceed to execution. Like his own Hubert,
+Shakespeare had to confess:
+
+  “Within this bosom never enter'd yet
+  The dreadful motion of a murderous thought.”
+
+He had none of the direct, passionate, conscienceless resolution of
+Laertes. He whips himself to anger against the king by thinking of
+Herbert in the king's place; but lackey-like has to admit that mere
+regard for position and power gives him pause: Lord Herbert was too far
+above him:
+
+  “There's such divinity doth hedge a king,
+  That treason can but peep to what it would.”
+
+Shakespeare's personal feeling dominates and inspires the whole play.
+One crucial instance will prove this. Why did Hamlet hate his mother's
+lechery? Most men would hardly have condemned it, certainly would not
+have suffered their thoughts to dwell on it beyond the moment; but to
+Hamlet his mother's faithlessness was horrible, shameful, degrading,
+simply because Hamlet-Shakespeare had identified her with Miss Fitton,
+and it was Miss Fitton's faithlessness, it was her deception he was
+condemning in the bitterest words he could find. He thus gets into a
+somewhat unreal tragedy, a passionate intensity which is otherwise
+wholly inexplicable. This is how he talks to his mother:
+
+                                 “Have you eyes?
+  Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
+  And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes ...
+  ...      ...      ...    What devil was't
+  That thus cozen'd you at hoodman-blind?
+  Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
+  Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
+  Or but a sickly part of one true sense
+  Could not so mope.
+  O, shame! where is thy blush?”
+
+If anyone can imagine that this is the way a son thinks of a mother's
+slip he is past my persuading. In all this Shakespeare is thinking of
+himself in comparison with Herbert; and his advice to his mother is
+almost as self-revealing, showing, as it does, what he would wish to say
+to Miss Fitton:
+
+  “Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
+  And do not spread the compost on the weeds
+  To make them ranker....
+  Assume a virtue if you have it not....”
+
+In his description of the king and queen we get Shakespeare's view of
+Lord Herbert and Miss Fitton: the king (Herbert) is “mildew'd” and foul
+in comparison with his modest poet-rival--“A satyr to Hyperion.”
+
+Hamlet's view of his mother (Miss Fitton), though bitterer still, is yet
+the bitterness of disappointed love: he will have her repent, refrain
+from the adultery, and be pure and good again. When the Queen asks:
+
+  “What shall I do?”
+
+Hamlet answers:
+
+  “Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
+  Let the king tempt you again to bed;
+  Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
+  And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
+  Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers....”
+
+Maddened with jealousy he sees the act, scourges himself with his own
+lewd imagining as Posthumus scourges himself. No one ever felt this
+intensity of jealous rage about a mother or a sister. The mere idea is
+absurd; it is one's own passion-torture that speaks in such words as I
+have here quoted.
+
+Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia, too, and his advice to her are all the
+outcome of Shakespeare's own disappointment:
+
+  “Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
+  breeder of sinners?”
+
+We all expect from Hamlet some outburst of divine tenderness to Ophelia;
+but the scenes with the pure and devoted girl whom he is supposed to
+love are not half realized, are nothing like so intense as the scenes
+with the guilty mother. It is jealousy that is blazing in Shakespeare at
+this time, and not love; when Hamlet speaks to the Queen we hear
+Shakespeare speaking to his own faithless, guilty love. Besides, Ophelia
+is not even realized; she is submissive affection, an abstraction, and
+not a character. Shakespeare did not take interest enough in her to give
+her flesh and blood.
+
+Shakespeare's jealousy and excessive sensuality come to full light in
+the scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, when they are about to witness the
+play before the king: he persists in talking smut to her, which she
+pretends not to understand. The lewdness, we all feel, is out of place
+in “Hamlet,” horribly out of place when Hamlet is talking to Ophelia,
+but Shakespeare's sensuality has been stung to ecstasy by Miss Fitton's
+frailty, and he cannot but give it voice. As soon as Ophelia goes out of
+her mind she, too, becomes coarse--all of which is but a witness to
+Shakespeare's tortured animality. Yet Goethe can talk of Hamlet's “pure
+and most moral nature.” A goat is hardly less pure, though Hamlet was
+moral enough in the high sense of the word.
+
+There are one or two minor questions still to be considered, and the
+chief of these is how far, even in this moment of disillusion, did our
+Shakespeare see himself as he was? Hamlet says:
+
+  “I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more
+  offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
+
+imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such
+fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves,
+all; believe none of us.”
+
+All this is mere rhetoric, and full of clever self-excusing. Hamlet is
+not very revengeful or very ambitious; he is weakly-irresolute, and
+excessively sensual, with all the faults that accompany these frailties.
+Even at this moment, when he must know that he is not very revengeful,
+that forgiveness were easier to him, Shakespeare will pose to himself,
+and call himself revengeful: he is such an idealist that he absolutely
+refuses to see himself as he is. In later dramas we shall find that he
+grows to deeper self-knowledge. Hamlet is but the half-way house to
+complete understanding.
+
+Fortunately we have each of us an infallible touchstone by which we can
+judge of our love of truth. Any of us, man or woman, would rather be
+accused of a mental than a physical shortcoming. Do we see our bodily
+imperfections as they are? Can we describe ourselves pitilessly with
+snub nose, or coarse beak, bandy legs or thin shanks; gross paunch or
+sedgy beard? Shakespeare in Hamlet can hardly bear even to suggest his
+physical imperfections. Hamlet lets out inadvertently that he was fat,
+but he will not say so openly. His mother says to Hamlet:
+
+  “You are fat and scant of breath.”
+
+Many people, especially actors, have been so determined to see Hamlet as
+slight and student-like, that they have tried to criticize this phrase,
+and one of them, Mr. Beerbohm Tree, even in our day, went so far as to
+degrade the text to “faint and scant of breath.” But the fatness is
+there, and comes to view again in another phrase of Hamlet:
+
+  “O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
+  Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”
+
+No thin man ever spoke of his flesh in that way. Shakespeare was
+probably small, too. We know that he used to play Adam in “As You Like
+it,” and in the play Orlando has to take Adam up and carry him off the
+stage, a thing no actor would attempt if the Adam had been a big man.
+Shakespeare was probably of middle height, or below it, and podgy. I
+always picture him to myself as very like Swinburne. Yet even in Hamlet
+he would make himself out to be a devil of a fellow: “valiant Hamlet,” a
+swordsman of the finest, a superb duellist, who can touch Laertes again
+and again, though lacking practice. At the last push of fate Shakespeare
+will pose and deceive himself.
+
+It is curiously characteristic of Shakespeare that when Hamlet broods on
+retaliation he does not brood like a brave man, who gloats on
+challenging his enemy to a fair fight, and killing him by sheer force or
+resolution; his passion, his revenge, is almost that of an Italian
+bravo. Not once does Hamlet think of forcing the king (Herbert) to
+a duel; he goes about with ideas of assassination, and not of combat.
+
+  “Now might I do it pat”
+
+he cries as he sees the king praying; and he does not do it because he
+would thus send the king's soul to Heaven--shrill wordy intensity to
+excuse want of nerve. Whenever we get under the skin, it is
+Shakespeare's femininity which startles us.
+
+One cannot leave this great picture of Hamlet-Shakespeare without
+noticing one curious fact, which throws a flood of light on the
+relations of literary art to life. Shakespeare, as we have seen, is
+boiling with jealous passion, brooding continually on murderous revenge,
+and so becomes conscious of his own irresolution. He dwells on this, and
+makes this irresolution the chief feature of Hamlet's character, and yet
+because he is writing about himself he manages to suggest so many other
+qualities, and such amiable and noble ones, that we are all in love with
+Hamlet, in spite of his irresolution, erotic mania and bloody thoughts.
+
+In later dramas Shakespeare went on to deal with the deeper and more
+elemental things in his nature, with jealousy in “Othello,” and
+passionate desire in “Antony and Cleopatra”; but he never, perhaps, did
+much better work than in this drama where he chooses to magnify a
+secondary and ancillary weakness into the chief defect of his whole
+being. The pathos of the drama is to be found in the fact that
+Shakespeare realizes he is unable to take personal vengeance on Herbert.
+“Hamlet” is a drama of pathetic weakness, strengthened by a drama of
+revenge and jealousy. In these last respects it is a preparatory study
+for “Othello.”
+
+In “Hamlet” Shakespeare let out some of the foul matter which Herbert's
+mean betrayal had bred in him. Even in “Hamlet,” however, his passion
+for Mary Fitton, and his jealousy of her, constitute the real theme. We
+shall soon see how this passion coloured all the rest of his life and
+art, and at length brought about his ruin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: PART II “OTHELLO”
+
+
+There is perhaps no single drama which throws such light on Shakespeare
+and his method of work as “Othello”: it is a long conflict between the
+artist in him and the man, and, in the struggle, both his artistic
+ideals and his passionate soul come to clearest view. From it we see
+that Shakespeare's nature gave itself gradually to jealousy and revenge.
+The fire of his passion burned more and more fiercely for years; was
+infinitely hotter in 1604, when “Othello” was written, than it had been
+when “Julius Caesar” was written in 1600. This proves to me that
+Shakespeare's connection with Mary Fitton did not come to an end when he
+first discovered her unfaithfulness. The intimacy continued for a dozen
+years. In Sonnet 136 he prays her to allow him to be one of her lovers.
+That she was liberal enough to consent appears clearly from the growth
+of passion in his plays. It is certain, too, that she went on deceiving
+him with other lovers, or his jealousy would have waned away, ebbing
+with fulfilled desire. But his passion increases in intensity from 1597
+to 1604, whipped no doubt to ecstasy by continual deception and wild
+jealousy. Both lust and jealousy swing to madness in “Othello,” But
+Shakespeare was so great an artist that, when he took the story from
+Cinthio, he tried to realize it without bringing in his own personality:
+hence a conflict between his art and his passion.
+
+At first sight “Othello” reminds one of a picture by Titian or Veronese;
+it is a romantic conception; the personages are all in gala dress; the
+struggle between Iago and the Moor is melodramatic; the whole picture
+aglow with a superb richness of colour. It is Shakespeare's finest play,
+his supreme achievement as a playwright. It is impossible to read
+“Othello” without admiring the art of it. The beginning is so easy: the
+introduction of the chief characters so measured and impressive that
+when the action really begins, it develops and increases in speed as by
+its own weight to the inevitable end; inevitable--for the end in this
+case is merely the resultant of the shock of these various
+personalities. But if the action itself is superbly ordered, the
+painting of character leaves much to be desired, as we shall see. There
+is one notable difference between “Othello” and those dramas, “Hamlet,”
+ “Macbeth,” and “Cymbeline,” wherein Shakespeare has depicted himself as
+the protagonist. In the self-revealing dramas not only does Shakespeare
+give his hero licence to talk, in and out of season, and thus hinder the
+development of the story, but he also allows him to occupy the whole
+stage without a competitor. The explanation is obvious enough. Dramatic
+art is to be congratulated on the fact that now and then Shakespeare
+left himself for a little out of the play, for then not only does the
+construction of the play improve, but the play grows in interest through
+the encounter of evenly-matched antagonists. The first thing we notice
+in “Othello” is that Iago is at least as important a character as the
+hero himself. “Hamlet,” on the other hand, is almost a lyric; there is
+no counterpoise to the student-prince.
+
+Now let us get to the play itself. Othello's first appearance in
+converse with Iago in the second scene of the first act does not seem to
+me to deserve the praise that has been lavished on it. Though Othello
+knows that “boasting is (not) an honour,” he nevertheless boasts himself
+of royal blood. We have noticed already Shakespeare's love of good
+blood, and belief in its wondrous efficacy; it is one of his permanent
+and most characteristic traits. The passage about royal descent might be
+left out with advantage; if these three lines are omitted, Othello's
+pride in his own nature--his “parts and perfect soul”--is far more
+strongly felt. But such trivial flaws are forgotten when Brabantio
+enters and swords are drawn.
+
+  “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.”
+
+is excellent in its contemptuous irony. A little later, however, Othello
+finds an expression which is intensely characteristic of a great man of
+action:
+
+    “Hold your hands,
+  Both you of my inclining, and the rest;
+  Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it
+  Without a prompter.”
+
+This last line and a half is addressed especially to Iago who is bent on
+provoking a fight, and is, I think, the best piece of character-painting
+in all “Othello”; the born general knows instinctively the moment to
+attack just as the trained boxer's hand strikes before he consciously
+sees the opening. When Othello speaks before the Duke, too, he reveals
+himself with admirable clearness and truth to nature. His pride is so
+deep-rooted, his self-respect so great, that he respects all other
+dignitaries: the Senators are his “very noble and approved good
+masters.” Every word weighed and effectual. Admirable, too, is the
+expression “round unvarnished tale.”
+
+But pride and respect for others' greatness are not qualities peculiar
+to the man of action; they belong to all men of ability. As soon as
+Othello begins to tell how he won Desdemona, he falls out of his
+character. Feeling certain that he has placed his hero before us in
+strong outlines, Shakespeare lets himself go, and at once we catch him
+speaking and not Othello. In “antres vast and deserts idle” I hear the
+poet, and when the verse swings to--
+
+                     “.... men whose heads
+  Do grow beneath their shoulders,”
+
+it is plain that Othello, the lord and lover of realities, has deserted
+the firm ground of fact. But Shakespeare pulls himself in almost before
+he has yielded to the charm of his own words, and again Othello speaks:
+
+                           “This to hear
+  Would Desdemona seriously incline,
+  But still the house-affairs would draw her thence,
+
+and so forth.
+
+The temptation, however, was overpowering, and again Shakespeare yields
+to it:
+
+  “And often did beguile her of her tears
+  When I did speak of some distressful stroke
+  That my youth suffered.”
+
+It is a characteristic of the man of action that he thinks lightly of
+reverses; he loves hard buffets as a swimmer high waves, and when he
+tells his life-story he does not talk of his “distress.” This
+“distressful stroke that my youth suffered” is manifestly pure
+Shakespeare--tender-hearted Shakespeare, who pitied himself and the
+distressful strokes his youth suffered very profoundly. The
+characterization of Othello in the rest of this scene is anything but
+happy. He talks too much; I miss the short sharp words which would show
+the man used to command, and not only does he talk too much, but he
+talks in images like a poet, and exaggerates:
+
+  “The tyrant Custom, most grave senators,
+  Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war
+  My thrice-driven bed of down.”
+
+Even the matter here is insincere; this is the poet's explanation of the
+Captain's preference for a hard bed and hard living: “has been
+accustomed to it,” says Shakespeare, not understanding that there are
+born hunter and soldier natures who absolutely prefer hardships to
+effeminate luxury. Othello's next speech is just as bad; he talks too
+much of things particular and private, and the farther he goes, the
+worse he gets, till we again hear the poet speaking, or rather mouthing:
+
+  “No, when light-winged toys
+  Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness
+  My speculative and officed instruments,
+  That my disports corrupt and taint my business,
+  Let housewives make a skillet of my helm,
+  And all indign and base adversities
+  Make head against my estimation.”
+
+Again when he says--
+
+  “Come, Desdemona: I have but an hour
+  Of love, of worldly matters and direction
+  To spend with thee; we must obey the time,”
+
+I find no sharp impatience to get to work such as Hotspur felt, but a
+certain reluctance to leave his love--a natural touch which indicates
+that the poet was thinking of himself and not of his puppet.
+
+The first scene of the second act shows us how Shakespeare, the
+dramatist, worked. Cassio is plainly Shakespeare the poet; any of his
+speeches taken at haphazard proves it. When he hears that Iago has
+arrived he breaks out:
+
+  “He has had most favourable and happy speed;
+  Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds,
+  The guttered rocks and congregated sands--
+  Traitors ensteeped to clog the guiltless keel--
+  As having sense of beauty, do omit
+  Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
+  The divine Desdemona.”
+
+And when Desdemona lands, Cassio's first exclamation is sufficient to
+establish the fact that he is merely the poet's mask:
+
+                               “O, behold,
+  The riches of the ship is come on shore!”
+
+And just as clearly as Cassio is Shakespeare, the lyric poet, so is
+Iago, at first, the embodiment of Shakespeare's intelligence. Iago has
+been described as immoral; he does not seem to me to be immoral, but
+amoral, as the intellect always is. He says to the women:
+
+  “Come on, come on; you're pictures out of doors,
+  Bells in your parlours, wild cats in your kitchens,
+  Saints in your injuries, devils being offended,
+  Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your
+  beds.”
+
+Iago sees things as they are, fairly and not maliciously; he is “nothing
+if not critical,” but his criticism has a touch of Shakespeare's erotic
+mania in it. Think of that “housewives in your beds”! He will not
+deceive himself, however; in spite of Cassio's admiration of Desdemona
+Iago does not imagine that Cassio is in love with her; “well kissed,” he
+says, “an excellent courtesy,” finding at once the true explanation.
+[Footnote: At the end of this scene Iago says:
+
+  “That Cassio loves her I do well believe it,”
+
+but that is merely one of the many inconsistencies in Shakespeare's
+drawing of Iago. There are others; at one time he talks of Cassio as a
+mere book soldier, at another equals him with Cæsar. Had Coleridge noted
+these contradictions he would have declared them to be a higher
+perfection than logical unity, and there is something to be said for the
+argument, though in these instances I think the contradictions are due
+to Shakespeare's carelessness rather than to his deeper insight.]
+
+But having taken up this intellectual attitude in order to create Iago,
+Shakespeare tries next to make his puppet concrete and individual by
+giving him revenge for a soul, but in this he does not succeed, for
+intellect is not maleficent. At moments Iago lives for us; “drown cats
+and blind puppies ... put money in your purse”--his brains delight us;
+but when he pursues Desdemona to her end, we revolt; such malignity is
+inhuman. Shakespeare was so little inclined to evil, knew so little of
+hate and revenge that his villain is unreal in his cruelty. Again and
+again the reader asks himself why Iago is so venomous. He hates Othello
+because Othello has passed him over and preferred Cassio; because he
+thinks he has had reason to be jealous of Othello, because-----but every
+one feels that these are reasons supplied by Shakespeare to explain the
+inexplicable; taken all together they are inadequate, and we are apt to
+throw them aside with Coleridge as the “motive hunting of motiveless
+malignity.” But such a thing as “motiveless malignity” is not in nature,
+Iago's villainy is too cruel, too steadfast to be human; perfect
+pitiless malignity is as impossible to man as perfect innate goodness.
+
+Though Iago and Othello hold the stage for nine-tenths of the play
+Shakespeare does not realize them so completely as he realizes Cassio,
+an altogether subordinate character. The drinking episode of Cassio was
+not found by Shakespeare in Cinthio, and is, I think, clearly the
+confession of Shakespeare himself, for though aptly invented to explain
+Cassio's dismissal it is unduly prolonged, and thus constitutes perhaps
+the most important fault in the construction of the play. Consider, too,
+how the moral is applied by Iago to England in especial, with which
+country neither Iago nor the story has anything whatever to do.
+
+Othello's appearance stilling the riot, his words to Iago and his
+dismissal of Cassio are alike honest work. The subsequent talk between
+Cassio and Iago about “reputation” is scarcely more than a repetition of
+what Falstaff said of “honour.”
+
+Coleridge has made a great deal of the notion that Othello was justified
+in describing himself as “not easily jealous”; but poor Coleridge's
+perverse ingenuity never led him further astray. The exact contrary
+must, I think, be admitted; Othello was surely very quick to suspect
+Desdemona; he remembers Iago's first suspicious phrase, ponders it and
+asks its meaning; he is as quick as Posthumus was to believe the worst
+of Imogen, as quick as Richard II. to suspect his friends Bagot and
+Green of traitorism, and this proneness to suspicion is the soul of
+jealousy. And Othello is not only quick to suspect but easy to
+convince--impulsive at once and credulous. His quick wits jump to the
+conclusion that Iago, “this honest creature!” doubtless
+
+  “Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds.”
+
+On hinted imputation he is already half persuaded, and persuaded as only
+a sensualist would be that it is lust which has led Desdemona astray:
+
+     “O curse of marriage!
+  That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
+  And not their appetites.”
+
+He is, indeed, so disposed to catch the foul infection that Iago cries:
+
+     “Trifles light as air
+  Are to the jealous confirmations strong
+  As proofs of holy writ.”
+
+And well he may, for before he uses the handkerchief or any evidence, on
+mere suspicion Othello is already racked with doubt, distraught with
+jealousy, maddened with passion; “his occupation's gone”; he rages
+against Iago and demands proof, Iago answers:
+
+                   “I do not like the office;
+  But, sith I am entered in this cause so far
+       - -     - -     - -     - -     - -     - -
+  I will go on.”
+
+This is the same paltry reason Richard III. and Macbeth adduced for
+adding to the number of their crimes, the truth being that Shakespeare
+could find no reason in his own nature for effective hatred.
+
+Othello gives immediate credence to Iago's dream, thinks it “a shrewd
+doubt”; he is a “credulous fool,” as Iago calls him, and it is only our
+sense of Iago's devilish cleverness that allows us to excuse Othello's
+folly. The strawberry-spotted handkerchief is not needed: the magic in
+its web is so strong that the mere mention of it blows his love away and
+condemns both Cassio and Desdemona to death. If this Othello is not
+easily jealous then no man is prone to doubt and quick to turn from love
+to loathing.
+
+The truth of the matter is that in the beginning of the play Othello is
+a marionette fairly well shaped and exceedingly picturesque; but as soon
+as jealousy is touched upon, the mask is thrown aside; Othello, the
+self-contained captain, disappears, the poet takes his place and at once
+shows himself to be the aptest subject for the green fever. The emotions
+then put into Othello's mouth are intensely realized; his jealousy is
+indeed Shakespeare's own confession, and it would be impossible to find
+in all literature pages of more sincere and terrible self-revealing.
+Shakespeare is not more at home in showing us the passion of Romeo and
+Juliet or the irresolution of Richard II. or the scepticism of Hamlet
+than in depicting the growth and paroxysms of jealousy; his overpowering
+sensuality, the sensuality of Romeo and of Orsino, has sounded every
+note of love's mortal sickness:
+
+    “_Oth._ I had been happy if the general camp,
+  Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
+  So I had nothing known.
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her!”
+
+We have here the proof that the jealousy of Othello was Shakespeare's
+jealousy; it is all compounded of sensuality. But, and this is the
+immediate point of my argument, the captain, Othello, is not presented
+to us as a sensualist to whom such a suspicion would be, of course, the
+nearest thought. On the contrary, Othello is depicted as sober
+[Footnote: Shakespeare makes Lodovico speak of Othello's “solid
+virtue”--“the nature whom passion could not shake.” Even Iago finds
+Othello's anger ominous because of its rarity:
+
+  “There's matter in't, indeed, if he be angry.”]
+and solid, slow to anger, and master of himself and his desires; he
+expressly tells the lords of Venice that he does not wish Desdemona to
+accompany him:
+
+  “To please the palate of my appetite
+  Nor to comply with heat--the young affects,
+  In me defunct--and proper satisfaction.”
+
+Shakespeare goes out of his way to put this unnecessary explanation in
+Othello's mouth; he will not have us think of him as passion's fool, but
+as passion's master; Othello is not to be even suspicious; he tells
+Iago:
+
+                       “'Tis not to make me jealous
+  To say--my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
+  Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well;
+  Where virtue is, these are more virtuous:
+  Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw
+  The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt;
+  For she had eyes and chose me.”
+
+It was all this, no doubt, that misled Coleridge. He did not realize
+that this Othello suddenly changes his nature; the sober lord of himself
+becomes in an instant very quick to suspect, and being jealous, is
+nothing if not sensual; he can think of no reason for Desdemona's fall
+but her appetite; the imagination of the sensual act throws him into a
+fit; it is this picture which gives life to his hate. The conclusion is
+not to be avoided; as soon as Othello becomes jealous he is transformed
+by Shakespeare's own passion. For this is the way Shakespeare conceived
+jealousy and the only way. The jealousy of Leontes in “The Winter's
+Tale” is precisely the same; Hermione gives her hand to Polixenes, and
+at once Leontes suspects and hates, and his rage is all of “paddling
+palms [1] and pinching fingers.” The jealousy of Posthumus, too, is of
+the same kind:
+
+                      “Never talk on 't;
+  She hath been colted by him.”
+
+[Footnote 1: Iago's expression, too; cf. “Othello,” II. 1, and “Hamlet,”
+ III. 4.]
+
+It is the imagining of the sensual act that drives him to incoherence
+and the verge of madness, as it drove Othello. In all these characters
+Shakespeare is only recalling the stages of the passion that desolated
+his life.
+
+The part that imagination usually plays in tormenting the jealous man
+with obscene pictures is now played by Iago; the first scene of the
+fourth act is this erotic self-torture put in Iago's mouth. As Othello's
+passion rises to madness, as the self-analysis becomes more and more
+intimate and personal, we have Shakespeare's re-lived agony clothing
+itself in his favourite terms of expression:
+
+                    “O! it comes o'er my memory,
+  As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
+  Boding to all,--he had my handkerchief.”
+
+The interest swings still higher; the scene in which Iago uses Cassio's
+conceit and laughter to exasperate further the already mad Othello is
+one of the notable triumphs of dramatic art. But just as the quick
+growth of his jealousy, and its terrible sensuality, have shown us that
+Othello is not the self-contained master of his passions that he
+pretends to be and that Shakespeare wishes us to believe, so this scene,
+in which the listening Othello rages in savagery, reveals to us an
+intense femininity of nature. For generally the man concentrates his
+hatred upon the woman who deceives him, and is only disdainful of his
+rival, whereas the woman for various reasons gives herself to hatred of
+her rival, and feels only angry contempt for her lover's traitorism. But
+Othello--or shall we not say Shakespeare?--discovers in the sincerest
+ecstasy of this passion as much of the woman's nature as of the man's.
+After seeing his handkerchief in Bianca's hands he asks:
+
+  “How shall I murder him, Iago?”
+
+Manifestly, Shakespeare is thinking of Herbert and his base betrayal.
+Othello would have Cassio thrown to the dogs, would have him “nine years
+a-killing”; and though he adds that Desdemona shall “rot and perish and
+be damned to-night,” immediately afterwards we see what an infinite
+affection for her underlies his anger:
+
+  “O, the world hath not a sweeter creature: she might
+  lie by an emperor's side and command him tasks.”
+
+And then Shakespeare uses his brains objectively, so to speak, to excuse
+his persistent tenderness, and at once he reveals himself and proves to
+us that he is thinking of Mary Fitton, and not of poor Desdemona:
+
+“Hang her! I do but say what she is.--So delicate with her needle!--An
+admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear.--Of
+so high and plenteous wit and invention.”
+
+Shakespeare himself speaks in this passage. For when has Desdemona shown
+high and plenteous wit or invention? She is hardly more than a symbol of
+constancy. It is Mary Fitton who has “wit and invention,” and is “an
+admirable musician.”
+
+The feminine tenderness in Shakespeare comes to perfect expression in
+the next lines; no woman has a more enduring affection:
+
+“_Iago_. She's the worse for all this.
+
+_Oth_. O! a thousand, a thousand times. And, then of so gentle a
+condition!
+
+_Iago_. Ay, too gentle.
+
+_Oth_. Nay, that's certain:--but yet the pity of it, Iago!--O,
+Iago, the pity of it, Iago!”
+
+The tenderness shrills to such exquisite poignancy that it becomes a
+universal cry, the soul's lament for traitorism: “The pity of it, Iago!
+O, Iago, the pity of it!” Othello's jealous passion is at its height in
+the scene with Desdemona when he gives his accusations precise words,
+and flings money to Emilia as the guilty confidante. And yet even here,
+where he delights to soil his love, his tenderness reaches its most
+passionate expression:
+
+    “O thou weed,
+  Who art so lovely fair, and smell'st so sweet,
+  That the sense aches at thee--would thou hadst ne'er
+    been born!”
+
+As soon as jealousy reaches its end, and passes into revenge,
+Shakespeare tries to get back into Othello the captain again. Othello's
+first speech in the bedchamber is clear enough in all conscience, but it
+has been so mangled by unintelligent actors such as Salvini that it
+cries for explanation. Every one will remember how Salvini and others
+playing this part stole into the room like murderers, and then bellowed
+so that they would have waked the dead. And when the foolish mummers
+were criticised for thus misreading the character, they answered boldly
+that Othello was a Moor, that his passion was Southern, and I know not
+what besides. It is clear that Shakespeare's Othello enters the room
+quietly as a justicer with a duty to perform: he keeps his resolution to
+the sticking-point by thinking of the offence; he says solemnly:
+
+  “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul--”
+
+and, Englishman-like, finds a moral reason for his intended action:
+
+  “Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.”
+
+But the reason fades and the resolution wavers in the passion for her
+“body and beauty,” and the tenderness of the lover comes to hearing
+again:
+
+  “[_Kissing her_.”] O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
+  Justice to break her sword!--one more, one more.--
+  Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
+  And love thee after.--One more, and this the last.
+  So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep,
+  But they are cruel tears; this sorrow's heavenly;
+  It strikes where it doth love.--She wakes.”
+
+So gentle a murderer was never seen save Macbeth, and the “heavenly
+sorrow” that strikes where it doth love is one of the best examples in
+literature of the Englishman's capacity for hypocritical self-deception.
+The subsequent dialogue shows us in Othello the short, plain phrases of
+immitigable resolution; in this scene Shakespeare comes nearer to
+realizing strength than anywhere else in all his work. But even here his
+nature shows itself; Othello has to be misled by Desdemona's weeping,
+which he takes to be sorrow for Cassio's death, before he can pass to
+action, and as soon as the murder is accomplished, he regrets:
+
+  “O, insupportable! O heavy hour!”
+
+His frank avowal, however, is excellently characteristic of the soldier
+Othello:
+
+  “'Twas I that killed her.”
+
+A moment later there is a perfect poetic expression of his love:
+
+                 “Nay, had she been true
+  If Heaven would make me such another world
+  Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
+  I'd not have sold her for it.”
+
+Then comes a revelation of sensuality and physical fastidiousness so
+peculiar that by itself it proves much of what I have said of
+Shakespeare:
+
+  “_Oth. ... Ay 'twas he that told me first;
+  An honest man he is, and hates the slime
+  That sticks on filthy deeds.”
+
+For a breathing-space now before he is convinced of his fatal error,
+Othello speaks as the soldier, but in spite of the fact that he has
+fulfilled his revenge, and should be at his sincerest, we have no word
+of profound self-revealing. But as soon as he realizes his mistake, his
+regret becomes as passionate as a woman's and magical in expression:
+
+     “Cold, cold, my girl!
+  Even like thy chastity.”
+
+Another proof that Shakespeare discards the captain, Othello, in order
+to give utterance to his own jealousy and love, is to be found in the
+similarity between this speech of Othello and the corresponding speech
+of Posthumus in “Cymbeline.” As soon as Posthumus is convinced of his
+mistake, he calls Iachimo “Italian fiend” and himself “most credulous
+fool,” “egregious murderer,” and so forth. He asks for “some upright
+justicer” to punish him as he deserves with “cord or knife or poison,”
+ nay, he will have “torturers ingenious.” He then praises Imogen as “the
+temple of virtue,” and again shouts curses at himself and finally calls
+upon his love:
+
+     “O Imogen!
+  My queen, my life, my wife! O Imogen,
+  Imogen, Imogen!”
+
+Othello behaves in precisely the same manner; he calls Iago that
+“demi-devil,” and himself “an honourable murderer”; and Iago calls him a
+“credulous fool.” Othello, too, cries for punishment; instead of
+“torturers ingenious,” he will have “devils” to “whip” him, and “roast
+him in sulphur.” He praises Desdemona as chaste, “ill-starred wench,”
+ “my girl,” and so forth; then curses himself lustily and ends his lament
+with the words:
+
+  “O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon! dead! O!”
+
+The same changes in mood, the same words even--the likeness is so close
+that it can only be explained as I have explained it; from beginning to
+end of “Cymbeline” Posthumus is Shakespeare, and as soon as jealousy,
+pity, remorse, or any tender emotion seizes Othello he becomes
+Shakespeare too, and speaks with Shakespeare's voice.
+
+From here on, it is all good work if not great work to Othello's last
+speech, which merits particular consideration. He begins as the captain,
+but soon passes into the poet; and then towards the end talks again in
+quick measure as the man of action. I quote the whole speech, [Footnote:
+This speech is curiously like the long speech of Richard II. which I
+have already noticed; at the beginning Shakespeare speaks as a king for
+a few lines, then naturally as a poet, and at the end pulls himself up
+and tries to resume the character.] putting into italics the phrases in
+which the poet betrays himself:
+
+  “_Oth_. Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
+  I have done the State some service, and they know it;
+  No more of that.--_I pray you_ in your letters,
+  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
+  Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
+  Nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak
+  _Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
+  Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
+  Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
+  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
+  Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
+  Albeit unuséd to the melting mood,
+  Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
+  Their medicinal gum._ Set you down this;
+  And say, besides, that in Aleppo once,
+  When a malignant and a turban'd Turk
+  Beat a Venetian, and traduced the State,
+  I took by the throat the circumcized dog
+  And smote him--thus.”
+
+All the memorable words here are the words of the gentle poet revealing
+his own nature ingenuously. The relief given by tears is exquisitely
+expressed, but the relief itself is a feminine experience; men usually
+find that tears humiliate them, and take refuge from their scalding
+shame in anger. The deathless phrases of the poet's grief must be
+contrasted with the braggart mouthings of the captain at the end in
+order to realize how impossible it was for Shakespeare to depict a man
+of deeds.
+
+In the first two acts Shakespeare has tried to present Othello with some
+sincerity and truth to the dramatic fiction. But as soon as jealousy
+touches Othello, he becomes the transparent vessel of Shakespeare's own
+emotion, and is filled with it as with his heart's blood. All the
+magical phrases in the play are phrases of jealousy, passion, and pity.
+The character of the captain in Othello is never deeply realized. It is
+a brave sketch, but, after all, only the merest sketch when compared
+with Hamlet or Macbeth. We know what they thought of life and death, and
+of all things in the world and over it; but what do we know of Othello's
+thoughts upon the deepest matters that concern man? Did he believe even
+in his stories to Desdemona?--in the men whose heads do grow beneath
+their shoulders? in his magic handkerchief? in what Iago calls his
+“fantastical lies”? This, I submit, is another important indication that
+Shakespeare drew Othello, the captain, from the outside; the jealous,
+tender heart of him is Shakespeare's, but take that away and we scarcely
+know more of him than the colour of his skin. What interests us in
+Othello is not his strength, but his weakness, Shakespeare's
+weakness--his passion and pity, his torture, rage, jealousy and remorse,
+the successive stages of his soul's Calvary!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART I. _Troilus and Cressida_
+
+                “He probed from hell to hell
+  Of human passions, but of love deflowered
+  His wisdom was not....”
+   --_Meredith's Sonnet on Shakespeare_.
+
+With “Hamlet” and his dreams of an impossible revenge Shakespeare got
+rid of some of the perilous stuff which his friend's traitorism had bred
+in him. In “Othello” he gave deathless expression to the madness of his
+jealous rage and so cleared his soul, to some extent, of that poisonous
+infection. But passion in Shakespeare survived hatred of the betrayer
+and jealousy of him; he had quickly finished with Herbert; but Mary
+Fitton lived still for him and tempted him perpetually--the lust of the
+flesh, the desire of the eye, insatiable, cruel as the grave. He will
+now portray his mistress for us dramatically--unveil her very soul, show
+the gipsy-wanton as she is. He who has always painted in high lights is
+now going to paint French fashion, in blackest shadows, for with the
+years his passion and his bitterness have grown in intensity. Mary
+Fitton is now “false Cressid.” Pandarus says of her in the first scene
+of the first act:
+
+  “An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's--well,
+  go to--there were no more comparison between
+  the women.”
+
+Mary Fitton's hair, we know, was raven-black, but the evidence
+connecting Shakespeare's mistress with “false Cressid” is stronger, as
+we shall see, than any particular line or expression.
+
+“Troilus and Cressida” is a wretched, invertebrate play without even a
+main current of interest. Of course there are fine phrases in it, as in
+most of the productions of Shakespeare's maturity; but the
+characterization is worse than careless, and at first one wonders why
+Shakespeare wrote the tedious, foolish stuff except to get rid of his
+own bitterness in the railing of Thersites, and in the depicting of
+Cressida's shameless wantonness. It is impossible to doubt that “false
+Cressid” was meant for Mary Fitton. The moment she appears the play
+begins to live; personal bitterness turns her portrait into a
+caricature; every fault is exaggerated and lashed with rage; it is not
+so much a drama as a scene where Shakespeare insults his mistress.
+
+Let us look at this phase of his passion in perspective. Almost as soon
+as he became acquainted with Miss Fitton, about Christmas 1597,
+Shakespeare wrote of her as a wanton; yet so long as she gave herself to
+him he appears to have been able to take refuge in his tenderness and
+endure her strayings. But passion in him grew with what it fed on, and
+after she faulted with Lord Herbert, we find him in a sonnet threatening
+her that his “pity-wanting pain” may induce him to write of her as she
+was. No doubt her pride and scornful strength revolted under this
+treatment and she drew away from him. Tortured by desire he would then
+praise her with some astonishing phrases; call her “the heart's blood of
+beauty, love's invisible soul,” and after some hesitation she would
+yield again. No sooner was the “ruined love” rebuilt than she would
+offend again, and again he would curse and threaten, and so the
+wretched, half-miserable, half-ecstatic life of passion stormed along,
+one moment in Heaven, the next in Hell.
+
+All the while Shakespeare was longing, or thought he was longing for
+truth and constancy, and at length he gave form and name to his desire
+for winnowed purity of love and perfect constancy, and this consoling
+but impalpable ideal he called Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia. But again
+and again Miss Fitton reconquered him and at length his accumulated
+bitterness compelled him to depict his mistress realistically. Cressida
+is his first attempt, the first dramatic portrait of the mistress who
+got into Shakespeare's blood and infected the current of his being, and
+the portrait is spoiled by the poet's hatred and contempt just as the
+whole drama is spoiled by a passion of bitterness that is surely the
+sign of intense personal suffering. Cressida is depicted as a vile
+wanton, a drab by nature; but it is no part even of this conception to
+make her soulless and devilish. On the contrary, an artist of
+Shakespeare's imaginative sympathy loves to put in high relief the grain
+of good in things evil and the taint of evil in things good that give
+humanity its curious complexity. Shakespeare observed this rule of
+dramatic presentation more consistently than any of his predecessors or
+contemporaries--more consistently, more finely far than Homer or
+Sophocles, whose heroes had only such faults as their creators thought
+virtues; why then did he forget nature so far as to picture “false
+Cressida” without a redeeming quality? He first shows her coquetting
+with Troilus, and her coquetry even is unattractive, shallow, and
+obvious; then she gives herself to Troilus out of passionate desire; but
+Shakespeare omits to tell us why she takes up with Diomedes immediately
+afterwards. We are to understand merely that she is what Ulysses calls a
+“sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and “daughter of the game.” But as
+passionate desire is not of necessity faithless we are distressed and
+puzzled by her soulless wantonness. And when she goes on to present
+Diomedes with the scarf that Troilus gave her, we revolt; the woman is
+too full of blood to be so entirely heartless. Here is the scene
+embittered by the fact that Troilus witnesses Cressida's betrayal:
+
+  “_Diomedes._ I had your heart before, this follows it.
+
+  _Troilus._ [_Aside._] I did swear patience.
+
+  _Cressida._ You shall not have it, Diomed, faith you shall not;
+  I'll give you something else.
+
+  _Diomedes._ I will have this: whose was it?
+
+  _Cressida._ It is no matter.
+
+  _Diomedes._ Come, tell me whose it was?
+
+  _Cressida_. 'Twas one that loved me better than you will,
+  But, now you have it, take it.”
+
+The scene is a splendid dramatic scene, a piece torn from life, so
+realistic that it convinces, and yet we revolt; we feel that we have not
+got to the heart of the mystery. There is so much evil in Cressida that
+we want to see the spark of goodness in her, however fleeting and
+ineffective the spark may be. But Shakespeare makes her attempt at
+justification a confession of absolute faithlessness:
+
+  “Troilus, farewell! one eye yet looks on thee,
+  But with my heart the other eye doth see.
+  Ah! poor our sex! This fault in us I find,
+  The error of our eye directs our mind.”
+
+This is plainly Shakespeare's reflection and not Cressida's apology, and
+if we contrast this speech with the dialogue given above, it becomes
+plain, I think, that the terrible scene with Diomedes is taken from
+life, or is at least Shakespeare's vision of the way Mary Fitton
+behaved. There's a magic in those devilish words of Cressida that
+outdoes imagination:
+
+  “'Twas one that loved me better than you will,
+  But, now you have it, take it.”
+
+And then:
+
+  “Sweet, honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly:”
+
+The very power of the characterization makes the traitress hateful. If
+Mary Fitton ever gave any gift of Shakespeare to Lord Herbert, the
+dramatist should have known that she no longer loved him, had in reality
+already forgotten him in her new passion; but to paint a woman as
+remembering a lover, indeed as still loving him, and yet as giving his
+gift to another, is an offence in art though it may be true to nature.
+It is a fault in art because it is impossible to motive it in a few
+lines. The fact of the gift is bad enough; without explanation it is
+horrible. For this and other reasons I infer that Shakespeare took the
+fact from his own experience: he had suffered, it seems to me, from some
+such traitorism on the part of his mistress, or he ascribed to Mary
+Fitton some traitorism of his own.
+
+In sonnet 122 he finds weighty excuse for having given away the
+table-book which his friend had given to him. His own confessed
+shortcoming might have taught him to exercise more lenient judgment
+towards his frail love.
+
+But when Shakespeare wrote “Troilus and Cressida” a passion of
+bitterness possessed him; he not only vilified Cressida but all the
+world, Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles, Ajax; he seems indeed to have taken
+more pleasure in the railing of Thersites than in any other part of the
+work except the scourging of Cressida. He shocks us by the picture of
+Achilles and his myrmidons murdering Hector when they come upon him
+unarmed.
+
+One or two incidental difficulties must be settled before we pass to a
+greater play.
+
+“Troilus and Cressida” has always been regarded as a sort of enigma.
+Professor Dowden asks: “With what intention and in what spirit did
+Shakespeare write this strange comedy? All the Greek heroes who fought
+against Troy are pitilessly exposed to ridicule?” And from this fact and
+the bitterness of “Timon” some German critics have drawn the inference
+that Shakespeare was incapable of comprehending Greek life, and that
+indeed he only realized his Romans so perfectly because the Roman was
+very like the Briton in his mastery of practical affairs, of the details
+of administration and of government. This is an excellent instance of
+German prejudice. No one could have been better fitted than Shakespeare
+to understand Greek civilization and Greek art with its supreme love of
+plastic beauty, but his master Plutarch gave him far better pictures of
+Roman life than of Greek life, partly because Plutarch lived in the time
+of Roman domination and partly because he was in far closer sympathy
+with the masters of practical affairs than with artists in stone like
+Phidias or artists in thought like Plato. The true explanation of
+Shakespeare's caricatures of Greek life, whether Homeric or Athenian, is
+to be found in the fact that he was not only entirely ignorant of it but
+prejudiced against it. And this prejudice in him had an obvious root.
+Chapman had just translated and published the first books of his Iliad,
+and Chapman was the poet whom Shakespeare speaks of as his rival in
+Sonnets 78-86. He cannot help smiling at the “strained touches” of
+Chapman's rhetoric and his heavy learning. Those who care to remember
+the first scene of “Love's Labour's Lost” will recall how Shakespeare in
+that early work mocked at learning and derided study. When he first
+reached London he was no doubt despised for his ignorance of Greek and
+Latin; he had had to bear the sneers and flouts of the many who
+appraised learning, an university training and gentility above genius.
+He took the first opportunity of answering his critics:
+
+  “Small have continual plodders ever won,
+  Save bare authority from others' books.”
+
+But the taunts rankled, and when the bitter days came of disappointment
+and disillusion he took up that Greek life which his rival had tried to
+depict in its fairest colours, and showed what he thought was the seamy
+side of it. But had he known anything of Greek life and Greek art it
+would have been his pleasure to outdo his rival by giving at once a
+truer and a fairer presentation of Greece than Chapman could conceive.
+It is the rivalry of Chapman that irritates Shakespeare into pouring
+contempt on Greek life in “Troilus and Cressida.” As Chapman was for the
+Greeks, Shakespeare took sides with the Trojans.
+
+But why do I assume that “Troilus and Cressida” is earlier than “Antony
+and Cleopatra?” Some critics, and among them Dr. Brandes, place it
+later, and they have some reason for their belief. The bitterness in
+“Troilus and Cressida,” they say rightly, is more intense; and as
+Shakespeare's disappointment with men and things appears to have
+increased from “Hamlet” to “Timon,” or from 1602 to 1607-8, they put the
+bitterer play later. Cogent as is this reasoning, I cannot believe that
+Shakespeare could have painted Cressida after having painted Cleopatra.
+The same model has evidently served for both women; but while Cleopatra
+is perhaps the most superb portrait of a courtesan in all literature,
+Cressida is a crude and harsh sketch such as a Dumas or a Pinero might
+have conceived.
+
+It is more than probable, I think, that “Troilus and Cressida” was
+planned and the love-story at least written about 1603, while
+Shakespeare's memory of one of his mistress's betrayals was still vivid
+and sharp. The play was taken up again four or five years later and the
+character of Ulysses deepened and strengthened. In this later revision
+the outlook is so piercing-sad, the phrases of such pregnancy, that the
+work must belong to Shakespeare's ripest maturity. Moreover, he has
+grown comparatively careless of characterization as in all his later
+work; he gives his wise sayings almost as freely to Achilles as to
+Ulysses.
+
+“Troilus and Cressida” is interesting because it establishes the opinion
+that Chapman was indeed the rival poet whom Shakespeare referred to in
+the sonnets, and especially because it shows us the poet's mistress
+painted in a rage of erotic passion so violent that it defeats itself,
+and the portrait becomes an incredible caricature--that way madness
+lies. “Troilus and Cressida” points to “Lear” and “Timon.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART II. _Antony and Cleopatra_
+
+
+We now come to the finest work of Shakespeare's maturity, to the drama
+in which his passion for Mary Fitton finds supreme expression.
+
+“Antony and Cleopatra” is an astonishing production not yet fairly
+appreciated even in England, and perhaps not likely to be appreciated
+anywhere at its full worth for many a year to come. But when we English
+have finally left that dark prison of Puritanism and lived for some time
+in the sun-light where the wayside crosses are hidden under climbing
+roses, we shall probably couple “Antony and Cleopatra” with “Hamlet” in
+our love as Shakespeare's supremest works. It was fitting that the same
+man who wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” the incomparable symphony of first
+love, should also write “Antony and Cleopatra,” the far more wonderful
+and more terrible tragedy of mature passion.
+
+Let us begin with the least interesting part of the play, and we shall
+see that all the difficulties in it resolve themselves as soon as we
+think of it as Shakespeare's own confession. Wherever he leaves
+Plutarch, it is to tell his own story.
+
+Some critics have reproached Shakespeare with the sensualism of “Romeo
+and Juliet”; no one, so far as I can remember, has blamed the Sapphic
+intensity of “Antony and Cleopatra,” where the lust of the flesh and
+desire of the eye reign triumphant. Professor Dowden indeed says: “The
+spirit of the play, though superficially it appear voluptuous, is
+essentially severe. That is to say, Shakespeare is faithful to the
+fact.” Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves, forsooth, and thus
+conventional virtue is justified by self-murder. So superficial and
+false a judgement is a quaint example of mid-Victorian taste: it reminds
+me of the horsehair sofa and the antimacassar. Would Professor Dowden
+have had Shakespeare alter the historical facts, making Antony conquer
+Caesar and Cleopatra triumph over death? Would this have been sufficient
+to prove to the professor that Shakespeare's morals are not his, and
+that the play is certainly the most voluptuous in modern literature?
+Well, this is just what Shakespeare has done. Throughout the play Caesar
+is a subordinate figure while Antony is the protagonist and engages all
+our sympathies; whenever they meet Antony shows as the larger, richer,
+more generous nature. In every act he conquers Caesar; leaving on us the
+gorgeous ineffaceable impression of a great personality whose superb
+temperament moves everyone to admiration and love; Caesar, on the other
+hand, affects one as a calculating machine.
+
+But Shakespeare's fidelity to the fact is so extraordinary that he gives
+Caesar one speech which shows his moral superiority to Antony. When his
+sister weeps on hearing that Antony has gone back to Cleopatra, Caesar
+bids her dry her tears,
+
+  ...
+  But let determined things to destiny
+  Hold unbewailed their way ...”
+
+This line alone suffices to show why Antony was defeated; the force of
+imperial Rome is in the great phrase; but Shakespeare will not admit his
+favourite's inferiority, and in order to explain Antony's defeat
+Shakespeare represents luck as being against him, luck or fate, and this
+is not the only or even the chief proof of the poet's partiality.
+Pompey, who scarcely notices Caesar when Antony is by, says of Antony:
+
+     “his soldiership
+  Is twice the other twain.”
+
+And, indeed, Antony in the play appears to be able to beat Caesar
+whenever he chooses or whenever he is not betrayed.
+
+All the personages of the play praise Antony, and when he dies the most
+magnificent eulogy of him is pronounced by Agrippa, Caesar's friend:
+
+     “A rarer spirit never
+  Did steer humanity; but you, Gods, will give us
+  Some faults to make us men.”
+
+Antony is even permitted at the last to console himself; he declares
+exultantly that in the other world the ghosts shall come to gaze at him
+and Cleopatra, and:
+
+  “Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops.”
+
+Shakespeare makes conquering Caesar admit the truth of this boast:
+
+  “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
+  A pair so famous.”
+
+To win in life universal admiration and love, and in death imperishable
+renown, is to succeed in spite of failure and suicide, and this is the
+lesson which Shakespeare read into Plutarch's story. Even Enobarbus is
+conquered at the last by Antony's noble magnanimity. But why does
+Shakespeare show this extraordinary, this extravagant liking for him who
+was “the bellows and the fan to cool a gipsy's lust,” for that Marc
+Antony who might have been the master of the world, and who threw away
+empire, life, and honour to be “a strumpet's fool?” There is only one
+possible explanation: Shakespeare felt the most intense, the most
+intimate sympathy with Antony because he, too, was passion's slave, and
+had himself experienced with his dark mistress, Mary Fitton, the
+ultimate degradation of lust. For this reason he took Plutarch's
+portrait of Antony, and, by emphasizing the kingly traits, transformed
+it. In the play, as Dr. Brandes sees, Antony takes on something of the
+“artist-nature.” It is Antony's greatness and weakness; the spectacle of
+a high intellect struggling with an overpowering sensuality; of a noble
+nature at odds with passionate human frailty, that endeared him to
+Shakespeare. The pomp of Antony's position, too, and his kingly
+personality pleased our poet. As soon as Shakespeare reached maturity,
+he began to depict himself as a monarch; from “Twelfth Night” on he
+assumed royal state in his plays, and surely in this figure of Antony he
+must for the moment have satisfied his longing for regal magnificence
+and domination. From the first scene to the last Antony is a king of men
+by right divine of nature.
+
+It is, however, plain that Antony's pride, his superb mastery of life,
+the touch of imperious brutality in him, are all traits taken from
+Plutarch, and are indeed wholly inconsistent with Shakespeare's own
+character. Had Shakespeare possessed these qualities his portraits of
+men of action would have been infinitely better than they are, while his
+portraits of the gentle thinker and lover of the arts, his Hamlets and
+his Dukes, would have been to seek.
+
+The personal note of every one of his great tragedies is that
+Shakespeare feels he has failed in life, failed lamentably. His Brutus,
+we feel, failed of necessity because of his aloofness from practical
+life; his Coriolanus, too, had to fail, and almost forgoes sympathy by
+his faults; but this Antony ought not to have failed: we cannot
+understand why the man leaves the sea-battle to follow Cleopatra's
+flight, who but an act or two before, with lesser reason, realized his
+danger and was able to break off from his enchantress. Yet the passion
+of desire that sways Antony is so splendidly portrayed; is, too, so
+dominant in all of us, that we accept it at once as explaining the
+inexplicable.
+
+In measure as Shakespeare ennobled Antony, the historical fact of
+ultimate defeat and failure allowed him to degrade Cleopatra. And this
+he did willingly enough, for from the moment he took up the subject he
+identified the Queen of Egypt with his own faithless mistress, Mary
+Fitton, whom he had already tried to depict as “false Cressid.” This
+identification of himself and his own experience of passion with the
+persons and passions of the story explains some of the faults of the
+drama; while being the source, also, of its singular splendour.
+
+In this play we have the finest possible example of the strife between
+Shakespeare's yielding poetic temperament and the severity of his
+intellect. He heaps praises on Antony, as we have seen, from all sides;
+he loved the man as a sort of superb _alter ego_, and yet his
+intellectual fairness is so extraordinary that it compelled him to
+create a character who should uphold the truth even against his heart's
+favourite. Dr. Brandes speaks of Enobarbus as a “sort of chorus”; he is
+far more than that; he is the intellectual conscience of the play, a
+weight, so to speak, to redress the balance which Shakespeare used this
+once and never again. What a confession this is of personal partiality!
+A single instance will suffice to prove my point: Shakespeare makes
+Antony cast the blame for the flight at Actium on Cleopatra, and manages
+almost to hide the unmanly weakness of the plaint by its infinitely
+pathetic wording:
+
+  “Whither hast them led me, Egypt?
+
+A little later Cleopatra asks:
+
+  “Is Antony or we in fault for this?”
+
+and at once Enobarbus voices the exact truth:
+
+  “Antony only, that would make his will
+  Lord of his reason. What though you fled
+    .       .       .       .       .       .
+    .       .       . why should he follow?”
+
+Again and again Antony reproaches Cleopatra, and again and again
+Enobarbus is used to keep the truth before us. Some of these reproaches,
+it seems to me, are so extravagant and so ill-founded that they discover
+the personal passion of the poet. For example, Antony insults Cleopatra:
+
+  “You have been a boggler ever.”
+
+And the proof forsooth is:
+
+  “I found you as a morsel cold upon
+  Dead Caesar's trencher.”
+
+But to have been Caesar's mistress was Cleopatra's chief title to fame.
+Shakespeare is here probably reviling Mary Fitton for being deserted by
+some early lover. Curiously enough, this weakness of Antony increases
+the complexity of his character, while the naturalistic passion of his
+words adds enormously to the effect of the play. Again and again in this
+drama Shakespeare's personal vindictiveness serves an artistic purpose.
+The story of “Troilus and Cressida” is in itself low and vile, and when
+loaded with Shakespeare's bitterness outrages probability; but the love
+of Antony and Cleopatra is so overwhelming that it goes to ruin and
+suicide and beyond, and when intensified by Shakespeare's personal
+feeling becomes a world's masterpiece.
+
+We have already seen that the feminine railing Shakespeare puts in the
+mouth of Antony increases the realistic effect, and just in the same way
+the low cunning, temper, and mean greed which he attributes to
+Cleopatra, transform her from a somewhat incomprehensible historical
+marionette into the most splendid specimen of the courtesan in the
+world's literature. Heine speaks of her contemptuously as a “kept
+woman,” but the epithet only shows how Heine in default of knowledge
+fell back on his racial gift of feminine denigration. Even before she
+enters we see that Shakespeare has not forgiven his dark scornful
+mistress; Cleopatra is the finest picture he ever painted of Mary
+Fitton; but Antony's friends tell us, at the outset, she is a “lustful
+gipsy,” a “strumpet,” and at first she merely plays on Antony's
+manliness; she sends for him, and when he comes, departs. A little later
+she sends again, telling her messenger:
+
+  “I did not send you: if you find him sad,
+  Say, I am dancing; if in mirth, report
+  That I am sudden sick: quick, and return.”
+
+And when Charmian, her woman, declares that the way to keep a man is to
+“cross him in nothing,” she replies scornfully:
+
+  “Thou teachest, like a fool, the way to lose him.”
+
+She uses a dozen taunts to prevent her lover from leaving her; but when
+she sees him resolved, she wishes him victory and success. And so
+through a myriad changes of mood and of cunning wiles we discover that
+love for Antony which is the anchor to her unstable nature.
+
+The scene with the eunuch Mardian is a little gem. She asks:
+
+                     “Hast thou affections?
+  _Mar_. Yes, gracious madam.
+  _Cleo_.                 Indeed?
+  _Mar_. Not in deed, madam; for I can do nothing.
+  But what indeed is honest to be done;
+  Yet have I fierce affections, and think
+  What Venus did with Mars.
+  _Cleo_.               O, Charmian!
+  Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?”
+
+She is with her lover again, and recalls his phrase for her, “my serpent
+of old Nile,” and feeds herself with love's “delicious poison.”
+
+No sooner does she win our sympathy by her passion for Antony than
+Shakespeare chills our admiration by showing her as the courtesan:
+
+  “_Cleo_.            Did I, Charmian,
+  Ever love Caesar so?
+
+  _Char_.             O, that brave Caesar!
+
+  _Cleo_. Be choked with such another emphasis!
+  Say, the brave Antony.
+
+  _Char_.                  The valiant Caesar!
+
+  _Cleo_. By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth
+  If thou with Caesar paragon again
+  My man of men.
+
+  _Char_.       By your most gracious pardon,
+  I sing but after you.
+
+  _Cleo_.        My salad days,
+  When I was green in judgement: cold in blood,
+  To say as I said then!”
+
+Already we see and know her, her wiles, her passion, her quick temper,
+her chameleon-like changes, her subtle charms of person and of word, and
+yet we have not reached the end of the first act. Next to Falstaff and
+to Hamlet, Cleopatra is the most astonishing piece of portraiture in all
+Shakespeare. Enobarbus gives the soul of her:
+
+  “_Ant_. She is cunning past man's thought.
+
+  _Eno_. Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing
+  but the finest part of pure love....
+
+  _Ant_. Would I had never seen her!
+
+  _Eno_. O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful
+  piece of work; which not to have been blest withal would
+  have discredited your travel.”
+
+Here Shakespeare gives his true opinion of Mary Fitton: then comes the
+miraculous expression:
+
+  “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
+  Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
+  The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry
+  Where most she satisfies.”
+
+Act by act Shakespeare makes the portrait more complex and more perfect.
+In the second act she calls for music like the dark lady of the Sonnets:
+
+  “Music--moody food of us that trade in love,”
+
+and then she'll have no music, but will play billiards, and not
+billiards either, but will fish and think every fish caught an Antony.
+And again she flies to memory:
+
+                  “That time--O times!--
+  I laughed him out of patience; and that night
+  I laughed him into patience; and next morn,
+  Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed;
+  Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst
+  I wore his sword Philippan.”
+
+The charm of it all, the deathless charm and the astounding veracity!
+The messenger enters, and she promises him for good news “gold and her
+bluest veins to kiss.” When she hears that Antony is well she pours more
+gold on him, but when he pauses in his recital she has a mind to strike
+him. When he tells that Caesar and Antony are friends, it is a fortune
+she'll give; but when she learns that Antony is betrothed to Octavia she
+turns to her women with “I am pale, Charmian,” and when she hears that
+Antony is married she flies into a fury, strikes the messenger down and
+hales him up and down the room by his hair. When he runs from her knife
+she sends for him:
+
+                      “I will not hurt him.
+  These hands do lack nobility, that they strike
+  A meaner than myself.”
+
+She has the fascination of great pride and the magic of manners. When
+the messenger returns she is a queen again, most courteous-wise:
+
+    “Come hither, sir.
+  Though it be honest, it is never good
+  To bring bad news.”
+
+She wants to know the features of Octavia, her years, her inclination,
+the colour of her hair, her height--everything.
+
+A most veracious full-length portrait, with the minute finish of a
+miniature; it shows how Shakespeare had studied every fold and foible of
+Mary Fitton's soul. In the third act Cleopatra takes up again the theme
+of Octavia's appearance, only to run down her rival, and so salve her
+wounded vanity and cheat her heart to hope. The messenger, too, who
+lends himself to her humour now becomes a proper man. Shakespeare seizes
+every opportunity to add another touch to the wonderful picture.
+
+Cleopatra appears next in Antony's camp at Actium talking with
+Enobarbus:
+
+  “_Cleo_. I will be even with thee, doubt it not.
+
+  _Eno_. But why, why, why?
+
+  _Cleo_. Thou hast forspoke my being in these wars,
+  And say'st it is not fit.”
+
+Each phrase of the dialogue reveals her soul, dark fold on fold.
+
+She is the only person who strengthens Antony in his quixotic-foolish
+resolve to fight at sea.
+
+  “_Cleo_. I have sixty sails, Caesar none better.”
+
+And then the shameful flight.
+
+I have pursued this bald analysis thus far, not for pleasure merely, but
+to show the miracle of that portraiture the traits of which can bear
+examination one by one. So far Cleopatra is, as Enobarbus calls her, “a
+wonderful piece of work,” a woman of women, inscrutable, cunning,
+deceitful, prodigal, with a good memory for injuries, yet as quick to
+forgiveness as to anger, a minion of the moon, fleeting as water yet
+loving-true withal, a sumptuous bubble, whose perpetual vagaries are but
+perfect obedience to every breath of passion. But now Shakespeare
+without reason makes her faithless to Antony and to love. In the second
+scene of the third act Thyreus comes to her with Caesar's message:
+
+    “_Thyr_. He knows that you embrace not Antony
+  As you did love but as you feared him.
+
+    _Cleo_.                        O!
+
+    _Thyr_. The scars upon your honour therefore he
+  Does pity as constrained blemishes,
+  Not as deserved.
+
+    _Cleo_.          He is a god, and knows
+  What is most right. Mine honour was not yielded,
+  But conquered merely.
+
+    _Eno_. [_Aside_.]         To be sure of that
+  I will ask Antony.--Sir, sir, thou'rt so leaky
+  That we must leave thee to thy sinking, for
+  Thy dearest quit thee.”
+
+And when Thyreus asks her to leave Antony and put herself under Caesar's
+protection, who “desires to give,” she tells him:
+
+                            “I am prompt
+  To lay my crown at his feet, and there to kneel.”
+
+Thyreus then asks for grace to lay his duty on her hand. She gives it to
+him with the words:
+
+                “Your Caesar's father oft,
+  When he hath mused of taking kingdoms in,
+  Bestowed his lips on that unworthy place
+  As it rained kisses.”
+
+It is as if Antony were forgotten, clean wiped from her mind. The whole
+scene is a libel upon Cleopatra and upon womanhood. When betrayed, women
+are faithless out of anger, pique, desire of revenge; they are faithless
+out of fear, out of ambition, for fancy's sake--for fifty motives, but
+not without motive. It would have been easy to justify this scene. All
+the dramatist had to do was to show us that Cleopatra, a proud woman and
+scorned queen, could not forget Antony's faithlessness in leaving her to
+marry Octavia; but she never mentions Octavia, never seems to remember
+her after she has got Antony back. This omission, too, implies a slur
+upon her. Nor does she kiss Caesar's “conquering hand” out of fear.
+Thyreus has told her it would please Caesar if she would make of his
+fortunes a staff to lean upon; she has no fear, and her ambitions are
+wreathed round Antony: Caesar has nothing to offer that can tempt her,
+as we shall see later. The scene is a libel upon her. The more one
+studies it, the clearer it becomes that Shakespeare wrote it out of
+wounded personal feeling. Cleopatra's prototype, Mary Fitton, had
+betrayed him again and again, and the faithlessness rankled. Cleopatra,
+therefore, shall be painted as faithless, without cause, as Cressid was,
+from incurable vice of nature. Shakespeare tried to get rid of his
+bitterness in this way, and if his art suffered, so much the worse for
+his art. Curiously enough, in this instance, for reasons that will
+appear later, the artistic effect is deepened.
+
+The conclusion of this scene, where Thyreus is whipped and Cleopatra
+overwhelmed with insults by Antony, does not add much to our knowledge
+of Cleopatra's character: one may notice, however, that it is the
+reproach of cold-heartedness that she catches up to answer. The scene
+follows in which she plays squire to Antony and helps to buckle on his
+armour. But this scene (invented by Shakespeare), which might bring out
+the sweet woman-weakness in her, and so reconcile us to her again, is
+used against her remorselessly by the poet. When Antony wakes and cries
+for his armour she begs him to “sleep a little”; the touch is natural
+enough, but coming after her faithlessness to her lover and her
+acceptance of Caesar it shows more than human frailty. It is plain that,
+intent upon ennobling Antony, Shakespeare is willing to degrade
+Cleopatra beyond nature. Then comes Antony's victory, and his passion at
+length finds perfect lyrical expression:
+
+    “O thou day o' the world,
+  Chain mine armed neck; leap thou, attire and all,
+  Through proof of harness to my heart, and there
+  Ride on the pants triumphing.”
+
+At once Cleopatra catches fire with that responsive flame of womanhood
+which was surely her chiefest charm:
+
+    “Lord of lords!
+  O infinite virtue! Com'st thou smiling from
+  The world's great snare uncaught?”
+
+What magic in the utterance, what a revelation of Cleopatra's character
+and of Shakespeare's! To Cleopatra's feminine weakness the world seems
+one huge snare which only cunning may escape.
+
+Another day, and final irremediable defeat drives her in fear to the
+monument and to that pretended suicide which is the immediate cause of
+Antony's despair:
+
+  “Unarm, Eros: the long day's task is done,
+  And we must sleep.”
+
+When Antony leaves the stage, Shakespeare's idealizing vision turns to
+Cleopatra. About this point, too, the historical fact fetters
+Shakespeare and forces him to realize the other side of Cleopatra. After
+Antony's death Cleopatra did kill herself. One can only motive and
+explain this suicide by self-immolating love. It is natural that at
+first Shakespeare will have it that Cleopatra's nobility of nature is
+merely a reflection, a light borrowed from Antony. She will not open the
+monument to let the dying man enter, but her sincerity and love enable
+us to forgive this:
+
+                  “I dare not, dear,--
+  Dear my lord, pardon,--I dare not,
+  Lest I be taken....”
+
+Here occurs a fault of taste which I find inexplicable. While Cleopatra
+and her women are drawing Antony up, he cries;
+
+  “O quick, or I am gone.”
+
+And Cleopatra answers:
+
+  “Here's sport, indeed!--How heavy weighs my lord!
+  Our strength has all gone into heaviness,
+  That makes the weight.”
+
+The “Here's sport, indeed”! seems to me a terrible fault, an inexcusable
+lapse of taste. I should like to think it a misprint or misreading, but
+it is unfortunately like Shakespeare in a certain mood, possible to him,
+at least, here as elsewhere.
+
+Cleopatra's lament over Antony's dead body is a piece of Shakespeare's
+self-revealing made lyrical by beauty of word and image. The allusion to
+his boy-rival, Pembroke, is unmistakable; for women are not contemptuous
+of youth:
+
+                “Young boys and girls
+  Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
+  And there is nothing left remarkable
+  Beneath the visiting moon.”
+
+When Cleopatra comes to herself after swooning, her anger is
+characteristic because wholly unexpected; it is one sign more that
+Shakespeare had a living model in his mind:
+
+                        “It were for me
+  To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;
+  To tell them that this world did equal theirs
+  Till they had stolen our jewel. All's but naught.”
+
+Her resolve to kill herself is borrowed:
+
+  “We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,
+  Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
+  And make death proud to take us.”
+
+But the resolution holds:
+
+                         “It is great
+  To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
+  Which shackles accidents and bolts up change.”
+
+It is this greatness of soul in Cleopatra which Shakespeare has now to
+portray. Caesar's messenger, Proculeius, whom Antony has told her to
+trust, promises her everything in return for her “sweet dependency.” On
+being surprised she tries to kill herself, and when disarmed shows again
+that characteristic petulant anger:
+
+  “Sir, I will eat no meat, I'll not drink, sir;
+  .  .  .  .  .  This mortal house I'll ruin,
+  Do Caesar what he can.”
+
+And her reasons are all of pride and hatred of disgrace. She'll not be
+“chastised with the sober eye of dull Octavia,” nor shown “to the
+shouting varletry of censuring Rome.” Her imagination is at work now,
+that quick forecast of the mind that steels her desperate resolve:
+
+                      “Rather on Nilus' mud
+  Lay me stark nak'd, and let the water-flies
+  Blow me into abhorring.”
+
+The heroic mood passes. She tries to deceive Caesar as to her wealth,
+and is shamed by her treasurer Seleucus. The scene is appalling; poor
+human nature stripped to the skin--all imperfections exposed; Cleopatra
+cheating, lying, raging like a drab; her words to Seleucus are merciless
+while self-revealing:
+
+                “O slave, of no more trust
+  Than love that's hired.”
+
+This scene deepens and darkens the impression made by her unmotived
+faithlessness to Antony. It is, however, splendidly characteristic and I
+think needful; but it renders that previous avowal of faithlessness to
+Antony altogether superfluous, the sole fault in an almost perfect
+portrait. For, as I have said already, Shakespeare's mistakes in
+characterization nearly always spring from his desire to idealize; but
+here his personal vindictiveness comes to help his art. The historical
+fact compels him now to give his harlot, Cleopatra, heroic attributes;
+in spite of Caesar's threats to treat her sons severely if she dares to
+take her own life and thus deprive his triumph of its glory, she outwits
+him and dies a queen, a worthy descendant, as Charmian says, of “many
+royal kings.” Nothing but personal bitterness could have prevented
+Shakespeare from idealizing such a woman out of likeness to humanity.
+But in this solitary and singular case his personal suffering bound him
+to realism though the history justified idealization. The high lights
+were for once balanced by the depths of shadow, and a masterpiece was
+the result.
+
+Shakespeare leaves out Caesar's threats to put Cleopatra's sons to
+death; had he used these menaces he would have made Caesar more natural
+in my opinion, given a touch of characteristic brutality to the
+calculating intellect; but he omitted them probably because he felt that
+Cleopatra's pedestal was high enough without that addition.
+
+The end is very characteristic of Shakespeare's temper. Caesar becomes
+nobly generous; he approves Cleopatra's wisdom in swearing falsehoods
+about her treasure; he will not reckon with her like “a merchant,” and
+Cleopatra herself puts on the royal robes, and she who has played wanton
+before us so long becomes a queen of queens. And yet her character is
+wonderfully maintained; no cunning can cheat this mistress of duplicity:
+
+  “He words me, girls, he words me that I should not
+  Be noble to myself.”
+
+She holds to her heroic resolve; she will never be degraded before the
+base Roman public; she will not see
+
+  “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.”
+
+It is, perhaps, worth noting here that Shakespeare lends Cleopatra, as
+he afterwards lent Coriolanus, his own delicate senses and neuropathic
+loathing for mechanic slaves with “greasy aprons” and “thick breaths
+rank of gross diet”; it is Shakespeare too and not Cleopatra who speaks
+of death as bringing “liberty.” In “Cymbeline,” Shakespeare's mask
+Posthumus dwells on the same idea. But these lapses are momentary; the
+superb declaration that follows is worthy of the queen:
+
+  “My resolution's placed, and I have nothing
+  Of woman in me: now from head to foot
+  I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
+  No planet is of mine.”
+
+The scene with the clown who brings the “pretty worm” is the solid
+ground of reality on which Cleopatra rests for a breathing space before
+rising into the blue:
+
+  “_Cleo_. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
+  Immortal longings in me. Now no more
+  The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.--
+  Yare, yare, good Iras! quick.--Methinks I hear
+  Antony call; I see him rouse himself
+  To praise my noble act; I hear him mock
+  The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
+  To excuse their after-wrath. Husband, I come,
+  Now to that name my courage prove my title!
+  I am fire and air; my other elements
+  I give to baser life.”
+
+The whole speech is miraculous in speed of mounting emotion, and when
+Iras dies first, this Cleopatra finds again the perfect word in which
+truth and beauty meet:
+
+  “This proves me base:
+  If she first meet the curled Antony
+  He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
+  Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch,
+           [_To the asp, which she applies to her breast_.]
+  With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
+  Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool,
+  Be angry, and despatch. O, could'st thou speak,
+  That I might hear thee call great Caesar, ass
+  Unpolicied!”
+
+The characteristic high temper of Mary Fitton breaking out again--“ass
+unpolicied”--and then the end:
+
+                       “Peace, peace!
+  Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
+  That sucks the nurse asleep?”
+
+The final touch is of soft pleasure:
+
+  “As sweet a balm, as soft as air, as gentle,--
+  Antony!--Nay, I will take thee too.
+               [_Applying another asp to her arm_.]
+  What should I stay--”
+
+For ever fortunate in her self-inflicted death Cleopatra thereby frees
+herself from the ignominy of certain of her actions: she is woman at
+once and queen, and if she cringes lower than other women, she rises,
+too, to higher levels than other women know. The historical fact of her
+self-inflicted death forced the poet to make false Cressid a
+Cleopatra--and his wanton gipsy-mistress was at length redeemed by a
+passion of heroic resolve. The majority of critics are still debating
+whether indeed Cleopatra is the “dark lady” of the sonnets or not.
+Professor Dowden puts forward the theory as a daring conjecture; but the
+identity of the two cannot be doubted. It is impossible not to notice
+that Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, who was a fair Greek, gipsy-dark like
+his sonnet-heroine. He says, too, of the “dark lady” of the sonnets:
+
+  “Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,
+    That in the very refuse of thy deeds
+  There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
+    That, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?”
+
+Enobarbus praises Cleopatra in precisely the same words:
+
+                       “Vilest things,
+  Become themselves in her.”
+
+Antony, too, uses the same expression:
+
+                     “Fie, wrangling queen!
+  Whom everything becomes--to chide, to laugh,
+  To weep; whose every passion fully strives
+  To make itself, in thee, fair and admired.”
+
+These professors have no distinct mental image of the “dark lady” or of
+Cleopatra, or they would never talk of “daring conjecture” in regard to
+this simple identification. The points of likeness are numberless.
+Ninety-nine poets and dramatists out of a hundred would have followed
+Plutarch and made Cleopatra's love for Antony the mainspring of her
+being, the _causa causans_ of her self-murder. Shakespeare does not
+do this; he allows the love of Antony to count with her, but it is
+imperious pride and hatred of degradation that compel his Cleopatra to
+embrace the Arch-fear. And just this same quality of pride is attributed
+to the “dark lady.” Sonnet 131 begins:
+
+  “Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
+  As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel.”
+
+Both are women of infinite cunning and small regard for faith or truth;
+hearts steeled with an insane pride, and violent tempers suited with
+scolding slanderous tongues. Prolonged analysis is not needed. A point
+of seeming difference between them establishes their identity. Cleopatra
+is beautiful, “a lass unparalleled,” as Charmian calls her, and
+accordingly we can believe that all emotions became her, and that when
+hopping on the street or pretending to die she was alike be-witching;
+beauty has this magic. But how can all things become a woman who is not
+beautiful, whose face some say “hath not the power to make love groan,”
+ who cannot even blind the senses with desire? And yet the “dark lady” of
+the sonnets who is thus described, has the “powerful might” of
+personality in as full measure as Egypt's queen. The point of seeming
+unlikeness is as convincing as any likeness could be; the peculiarities
+of both women are the same and spring from the same dominant quality.
+Cleopatra is cunning, wily, faithless, passionately unrestrained in
+speech and proud as Lucifer, and so is the sonnet-heroine. We may be
+sure that the faithlessness, scolding, and mad vanity of his mistress
+were defects in Shakespeare's eyes as in ours; these, indeed, were “the
+things ill” which nevertheless became her. What Shakespeare loved in her
+was what he himself lacked or possessed in lesser degree--that dæmonic
+power of personality which he makes Enobarbus praise in Cleopatra and
+which he praises directly in the sonnet-heroine. Enobarbus says of
+Cleopatra:
+
+    “I saw her once
+  Hop forty paces through the public street,
+  And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted,
+  That she did make defect perfection,
+  And, breathless, power breathe forth.”
+
+One would be willing to wager that Shakespeare is here recalling a
+performance of his mistress; but it is enough for my purpose now to draw
+attention to the unexpectedness of the attribute “power.” The sonnet
+fastens on the same word:
+
+  “O, from what power hast thou this powerful might
+  With insufficiency my heart to sway?”
+
+In the same sonnet he again dwells upon her “strength”: she was bold,
+too, to unreason, and of unbridled tongue, for, “twice forsworn
+herself,” she had yet urged his “amiss,” though guilty of the same
+fault. What he admired most in her was force of character. Perhaps the
+old saying held in her case: _ex forti dulcedo_; perhaps her
+confident strength had abandonments more flattering and complete than
+those of weaker women; perhaps in those moments her forceful dark face
+took on a soulful beauty that entranced his exquisite susceptibility;
+perhaps--but the suppositions are infinite.
+
+Though a lover and possessed by his mistress Shakespeare was still an
+artist. In the sonnets he brings out her overbearing will, boldness,
+pride--the elemental force of her nature; in the play, on the other
+hand, while just mentioning her “power,” he lays the chief stress upon
+the cunning wiles and faithlessness of her whose trade was love. But
+just as Cleopatra has power, so there can be no doubt of the wily
+cunning--“the warrantise of skill”--of the sonnet-heroine, and no doubt
+her faithlessness was that “just cause of hate” which Shakespeare
+bemoaned.
+
+It is worth while here to notice his perfect comprehension of the powers
+and limits of the different forms of his art. Just as he has used the
+sonnets in order to portray certain intimate weaknesses and maladies of
+his own nature that he could not present dramatically without making his
+hero ridiculously effeminate, so also he used the sonnets to convey to
+us the domineering will and strength of his mistress--qualities which if
+presented dramatically would have seemed masculine-monstrous.
+
+By taking the sonnets and the play together we get an excellent portrait
+of Shakespeare's mistress. In person she was probably tall and vain of
+her height, as Cleopatra is vain of her superiority in this respect to
+Octavia, with dark complexion, black eyebrows and hair, and pitch-black
+eyes that mirrored emotion as the lakelet mirrors the ever-changing
+skies; her cheeks are “damask'd white”; her breath fragrant with health,
+her voice melodious, her movements full of dignity--a superb gipsy to
+whom beauty may be denied but not distinction.
+
+If we have a very good idea of her person we have a still better idea of
+her mind and soul. I must begin by stating that I do not accept
+implicitly Shakespeare's angry declarations that his mistress was a mere
+strumpet. A nature of great strength and pride is seldom merely wanton;
+but the fact stands that Shakespeare makes a definite charge of
+faithlessness against his mistress; she is, he tells us, “the bay where
+all men ride”; no “several plot,” but “the wide world's common place.”
+ The accusation is most explicit. But if it were well founded why should
+he devote two sonnets (135 and 136) to imploring her to be as liberal as
+the sea and to receive his love-offering as well as the tributes of
+others?
+
+  “Among a number one is reckon'd none
+  Then in the number let me pass untold.”
+
+It is plain that Mistress Fitton drew away from Shakespeare after she
+had given herself to his friend, and this fact throws some doubt upon
+his accusations of utter wantonness. A true “daughter of the game,” as
+he says in “Troilus and Cressida,” is nothing but “a sluttish spoil of
+opportunity” who falls to Troilus or to Diomedes in turn, knowing no
+reserve. It must be reckoned to the credit of Mary Fitton, or to her
+pride, that she appears to have been faithful to her lover for the time
+being, and able to resist even the solicitings of Shakespeare. But her
+desires seem to have been her sole restraint, and therefore we must add
+an extraordinary lewdness to that strength, pride, and passionate temper
+which Shakespeare again and again attributes to her. Her boldness is so
+reckless that she shows her love for his friend even before
+Shakespeare's face; she knows no pity in her passion, and always defends
+herself by attacking her accuser. But she is cunning in love's ways and
+dulls Shakespeare's resentment with “I don't hate you.” Unwilling
+perhaps to lose her empire over him and to forego the sweetness of his
+honeyed flatteries, she blinded him to her faults by occasional
+caresses. Yet this creature, with the soul of a strumpet, the tongue of
+a fishwife and the “proud heart” of a queen, was the crown and flower of
+womanhood to Shakespeare, his counterpart and ideal. Hamlet in love with
+Cleopatra, the poet lost in desire of the wanton--that is the tragedy of
+Shakespeare's life.
+
+In this wonderful world of ours great dramatic writers are sure to have
+dramatic lives. Again and again in his disgrace Antony cries:
+
+  “Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?”
+
+Shakespeare's passion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and
+despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back
+again to health. He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is
+Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:
+
+  “O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,--
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
+  Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.”
+
+Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies
+of life--a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is
+inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death;
+inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is
+superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the
+swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own
+excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate
+sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: “LEAR”
+
+
+Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashion to praise
+Shakespeare as a demi-god; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of
+perfection. This senseless hero-worship, which reached idolatry in the
+superlatives of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” and elsewhere in England,
+was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has come to vigorous
+expression in Tolstoi, who finds nothing to praise in any of
+Shakespeare's works, and everything to blame in most of them, especially
+in “Lear.” Lamb and Coleridge, on the other hand, have praised “Lear” as
+a world's masterpiece. Lamb says of it:
+
+“While we read it, we see not Lear; but we are Lear,--we are in his
+mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of
+daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a
+mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary
+purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it
+listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.”
+
+Coleridge calls “Lear,” “the open and ample playground of Nature's
+passions.”
+
+These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the
+thing described.
+
+Tolstoi, on the other hand, keeps his eyes on the object, and sets
+himself to describe the story of “Lear” “as impartially as possible.” He
+says of the first scene:
+
+  “Not to mention the pompous, characterless language
+  of King Lear, the same in which all Shakespeare's kings
+  speak, the reader or spectator cannot conceive that a
+  king, however old and stupid he may be, could believe
+  the words of the vicious daughters with whom he had
+  passed his whole life, and not believe his favourite
+  daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore, the
+  spectator or reader cannot share the feelings of the
+  persons participating in this unnatural scene.”
+
+He goes on to condemn the scene between Gloucester and his sons in the
+same way. The second act he describes as “absurdly foolish.” The third
+act is “spoiled, by the characteristic Shakespearean language.” The
+fourth act is “marred in the making,” and of the fifth act, he says:
+“Again begin Lear's awful ravings, at which one feels ashamed, as at
+unsuccessful jokes.” He sums up in these words:
+
+  “Such is this celebrated drama. However absurd it
+  may appear in my rendering (which I have endeavoured
+  to make as impartial as possible), I may confidently say
+  that in the original it is yet more absurd. For any man
+  of our time--if he were not under the hypnotic suggestion
+  that this drama is the height of perfection--it would
+  be enough to read it to its end (were he to have sufficient
+  patience for this) in order to be convinced that, far from
+  being the height of perfection, it is a very bad, carelessly-composed
+  production, which, if it could have been of
+  interest to a certain public at a certain time, cannot evoke
+  amongst us anything but aversion and weariness. Every
+  reader of our time who is free from the influence of suggestion
+  will also receive exactly the same impression from
+  all the other extolled dramas of Shakespeare, not to mention
+  the senseless dramatized tales, 'Pericles,' 'Twelfth
+  Night,' 'The Tempest,' 'Cymbeline,' and 'Troilus and
+  Cressida.'”
+
+Every one must admit, I think, that what Tolstoi has said of the
+hypothesis of the play is justified. Shakespeare, as I have shown, was
+nearly always an indifferent playwright, careless of the architectural
+construction of his pieces, contemptuous of stage-craft. So much had
+already been said in England, if not with the authority of Tolstoi.
+
+It may be conceded, too, that the language which Shakespeare puts into
+Lear's mouth in the first act is “characterless and pompous,” even
+silly; but Tolstoi should have noticed that as soon as Lear realizes the
+ingratitude of his daughters, his language becomes more and more simple
+and pathetic. Shakespeare's kings are apt to rant and mouth when first
+introduced; he seems to have thought pomp of speech went with royal
+robes; but when the action is engaged even his monarchs speak naturally.
+
+The truth is, that just as the iambics of Greek drama were lifted above
+ordinary conversation, so Shakespeare's language, being the language
+mainly of poetic and romantic drama, is a little more measured and, if
+you will, more pompous than the small talk of everyday life, which seems
+to us, accustomed as we are to prose plays, more natural. Shakespeare,
+however, in his blank verse, reaches heights which are not often reached
+by prose, and when he pleases, his verse becomes as natural-easy as any
+prose, even that of Tolstoi himself. Tolstoi finds everything Lear says
+“pompous,” “artificial,” “unnatural,” but Lear's words:
+
+    “Pray do not mock me,
+  I am a very foolish-fond old man
+  Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less,
+  And, to deal plainly
+  I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”
+
+touch us poignantly, just because of their childish simplicity; we feel
+as if Lear, in them, had reached the heart of pathos. Tolstoi, I am
+afraid, has missed all the poetry of Lear, all the deathless phrases.
+Lear says:
+
+    “I am a man,
+  More sinn'd against than sinning,”
+
+and the new-coined phrase passed at once into the general currency. Who,
+too, can ever forget his description of the poor?
+
+  “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
+  That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
+  How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
+  Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
+  From seasons such as these?”
+
+The like of that “looped and windowed raggedness” is hardly to be found
+in any other literature. In the fourth and fifth acts Lear's language is
+simplicity itself, and even in that third act which Tolstoi condemns as
+“incredibly pompous and artificial,” we find him talking naturally:
+
+  “Ha! here 's three on's are sophisticated: thou art
+  the thing itself, unaccommodated man is no more but
+  such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”
+
+There is still another reason why some of us cannot read “Lear” with the
+cold eyes of reason, contemptuously critical. “Lear” marks a stage in
+Shakespeare's agony. We who know the happy ingenuousness of his youth
+undimmed by doubts of man or suspicions of woman, cannot help
+sympathizing with him when we see him cheated and betrayed, drinking the
+bitter cup of disillusion to the dregs. In “Lear” the angry brooding
+leads to madness; and it is only fitting that the keynote of the
+tragedy, struck again and again, should be the cry.
+
+  “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven!
+  Keep me in temper: I would not be mad.”
+
+“Lear” is the first attempt in all literature to paint madness, and not
+the worst attempt.
+
+In “Lear,” Shakespeare was intent on expressing his own disillusion and
+naked misery. How blind Lear must have been, says Tolstoi; how
+incredibly foolish not to know his daughters better after living with
+them for twenty years; but this is just what Shakespeare wishes to
+express: How blind I was, he cries to us, how inconceivably trusting and
+foolish! How could I have imagined that a young noble would be grateful,
+or a wanton true? “Lear” is a page of Shakespeare's autobiography, and
+the faults of it are the stains of his blistering tears.
+
+“Lear” is badly constructed, but worse was to come. The next tragedy,
+“Timon,” is merely a scream of pain, and yet it, too, has a deeper than
+artistic interest for us as marking the utmost limit of Shakespeare's
+suffering. The mortal malady of perhaps the finest spirit that has ever
+appeared among men has an interest for us profounder than any tragedy.
+And to find that in Shakespeare's agony and bloody sweat he ignores the
+rules of artistry is simply what might have been expected, and, to some
+of us, deepens the personal interest in the drama.
+
+In “Lear” Edgar is peculiarly Shakespeare's mouthpiece, and to Edgar
+Shakespeare gives some of the finest words he ever coined:
+
+  “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
+  Make instruments to plague us.”
+
+Here, too, in what Edgar says of himself, is the moral of all passion:
+it is manifestly Shakespeare's view of himself:
+
+  “A most poor man, made tame to Fortune's blows,
+  Who by the art of knowing and feeling sorrows
+  Am pregnant to good pity.”
+
+Then we find the supreme phrase--perhaps the finest ever written:
+
+                              “Men must endure
+  Their going hence even as their coming hither.
+  Ripeness is all.”
+
+Shakespeare speaks through Lear in the last acts as plainly as through
+Edgar. In the third scene of the fifth act Lear talks to Cordelia in the
+very words Shakespeare gave to the saint Henry VI. at the beginning of
+his career. Compare the extracts on pages 118-9 with the following
+passage, and you will see the similarity and the astounding growth in
+his art.
+
+              “... Come, let's away to prison:
+  We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
+  When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
+  And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
+  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
+  At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
+  Talk of court news; ...”
+
+More characteristic still of Shakespeare is the fact that when Lear is
+at his bitterest in the fourth act, he shows the erotic mania which is
+the source of all Shakespeare's bitterness and misery; but which is
+utterly out of place in Lear. The reader will mark how “adultery” is
+dragged in:
+
+          “... Ay, every inch a king:
+  When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.
+  I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
+  Adultery?
+  Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No:
+  The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded fly
+  Does lecher in my sight.
+  Let copulation thrive; ...
+  ...
+  Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
+  Though women all above;
+  But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
+  Beneath is all the fiends'; ...”
+
+Thus Lear raves for a whole page: Shakespeare on his hobby: in the same
+erotic spirit he makes both Goneril and Regan lust after Edmund.
+
+The note of this tragedy is Shakespeare's understanding of his insane
+blind trust in men; but the passion of it springs from erotic mania and
+from the consciousness that he is too old for love's lists. Perhaps his
+imagination never carried him higher than when Lear appeals to the
+heavens because they too are old:
+
+          “... O heavens,
+  If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
+  Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
+  Make it your cause.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE DRAMA OF DESPAIR: “TIMON OF ATHENS”
+
+
+“Timon” marks the extremity of Shakespeare's suffering. It is not to be
+called a work of art, it is hardly even a tragedy; it is the causeless
+ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently motived by complete trust in men
+and spendthrift generosity. If there was ever a man who gave so lavishly
+as Timon, if there was ever one so senseless blind in trusting, then he
+deserved his fate. There is no gradation in his giving, and none in his
+fall; no artistic crescendo. The whole drama is, as I have said, a
+scream of suffering, or rather, a long curse upon all the ordinary
+conditions of life. The highest qualities of Shakespeare are not to be
+found in the play. There are none of the magnificent phrases which
+bejewel “Lear”; little of high wisdom, even in the pages which are
+indubitably Shakespeare's, and no characterization worth mentioning. The
+honest steward, Flavius, is the honest Kent again of “Lear,” honest and
+loyal beyond nature; Apemantus is another Thersites. Words which throw a
+high light on Shakespeare's character are given to this or that
+personage of the play without discrimination. One phrase of Apemantus is
+as true of Shakespeare as of Timon and is worth noting:
+
+  “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the
+  extremity of both ends.”
+
+The tragic sonnet-note is given to Flavius:
+  “What viler thing upon the earth than friends
+  Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!”
+
+In so far as Timon is a character at all he is manifestly Shakespeare,
+Shakespeare who raves against the world, because he finds no honesty in
+men, no virtue in women, evil everywhere--“boundless thefts in limited
+professions.” This Shakespeare-Timon swings round characteristically as
+soon as he finds that Flavius is honest:
+
+    “Had I a steward
+  So true, so just, and now so comfortable?
+  It almost turns my dangerous nature mild.
+  Let me behold thy face. Surely this man
+  Was born of woman.
+  _Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,
+  You perpetual-sober gods_! I do proclaim
+  One honest man--mistake me not--but one ...”
+
+I cannot help putting the great and self-revealing line [Footnote: This
+passage is among those rejected by the commentators as un-Shakespearean:
+“it does not stand the test,” says the egregious Gollancz.] in italics;
+a line Tolstoi would, no doubt, think stupid-pompous. Timon ought to
+have known his steward, one might say in Tolstoi's spirit, as Lear
+should have known his daughters; but this is still the tragedy, which
+Shakespeare wishes to emphasize that his hero was blind in trusting.
+
+Towards the end Shakespeare speaks through Timon quite unfeignedly:
+Richard II. said characteristically:
+
+  “Nor I nor any man that but man is
+  With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
+  With being nothing:”
+
+And Timon says to Flavius:
+
+                          “My long sickness
+  Of health and living now begins to mend
+  And nothing brings me all things.”
+
+Then the end:
+
+  “Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
+  Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood....”
+
+We must not leave this play before noticing the overpowering erotic
+strain in Shakespeare which suits Timon as little as it suited Lear. The
+long discussion with Phrynia and Timandra is simply dragged in: neither
+woman is characterized: Shakespeare-Timon eases himself in pages of
+erotic raving:
+
+        “... Strike me the counterfeit matron;
+  It is her habit only that is honest,
+  Herself's a bawd:...”
+
+And then:
+
+  “Consumptions sow
+  In hollow bones of man...........
+  ...............Down with the nose,
+  Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away ...”
+
+The “damned earth” even is “the common whore of mankind.”
+
+“Timon” is the true sequel to “The Merchant of Venice.” Antonio gives
+lavishly, but is saved at the crisis by his friends. Timon gives with
+both hands, but when he appeals to his friends, is treated as a bore.
+Shakespeare had travelled far in the dozen years which separate the two
+plays.
+
+All Shakespeare's tragedies are phases of his own various weaknesses,
+and each one brings the hero to defeat and ruin. Hamlet cannot carry
+revenge to murder and fails through his own irresolution. Othello comes
+to grief through mad jealousy. Antony fails and falls through excess of
+lust; Lear through trust in men, and Timon through heedless generosity.
+All these are separate studies of Shakespeare's own weaknesses; but the
+ruin is irretrievable, and reaches its ultimate in Timon. Trust and
+generosity, Shakespeare would like to tell us, were his supremest
+faults. In this he deceived himself. Neither “Lear” nor “Timon” is his
+greatest tragedy; but “Antony and Cleopatra,” for lust was his chief
+weakness, and the tragedy of lust his greatest play.
+
+Much of “Timon” is not Shakespeare's, the critics tell us, and some of
+it is manifestly not his, though many of the passages rejected with the
+best reason have, I think, been touched up by him. The second scene of
+the first act is as bad as bad can be; but I hear his voice in the line:
+
+  “Methinks, I could deal kingdoms to my friends,
+  And ne'er be weary.”
+
+At any rate, this is the keynote of the tragedy, which is struck again
+and again. Shakespeare probably exaggerated his generosity out of
+aristocratic pose; but that he was careless of money and freehanded to a
+fault, is, I think, certain from his writings, and can be proved from
+the facts known to us of his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. SHAKESPEARE'S LAST ROMANCES: ALL COPIES.
+
+_“Winters Tale”: “Cymbeline”: “The Tempest.”_
+
+
+The wheel has swung full circle: Timon is almost as weak as “Titus
+Andronicus”; the pen falls from the nerveless hand. Shakespeare wrote
+nothing for some time. Even the critics make a break after “Timon,”
+ which closes what they are pleased to call his third period; but they do
+not seem to see that the break was really a breakdown in health. In
+“Lear” he had brooded and raged to madness; in “Timon” he had spent
+himself in futile, feeble cursings. His nerves had gone to pieces. He
+was now forty-five years of age, the forces of youth and growth had left
+him. He was prematurely old and feeble.
+
+His recovery, it seems certain, was very slow, and he never again, if I
+am right, regained vigorous health, I am almost certain he went down to
+Stratford at this crisis and spent some time there, probably a couple of
+years, trying, no doubt, to staunch the wound in his heart, and win back
+again to life. The fear of madness had frightened him from brooding: he
+made up his mind to let the dead past bury its dead; he would try to
+forget and live sanely. After all, life is better than death.
+
+It was probably his daughter who led him back from the brink of the
+grave. Almost all his latest works show the same figure of a young girl.
+He seems now, for the first time, to have learned that a maiden can be
+pure, and in his old idealizing way which went with him to the end, he
+deified her. Judith became a symbol to him, and he lent her the ethereal
+grace of abstract beauty. In “Pericles” she is Marina; in “The Winter's
+Tale” Perdita; in “The Tempest” Miranda. It is probable when one comes
+to think of it, that Ward was right when he says that Shakespeare spent
+his “elder years” in Stratford; he was too broken to have taken up his
+life in London again.
+
+The assertion that Shakespeare broke down in health, and never won back
+to vigorous life, will be scorned as my imagining. The critics who have
+agreed to regard “Cymbeline,” “The Winter's Tale,” and “The Tempest” as
+his finest works are all against me on this point, and they will call
+for “Proofs, proofs. Give us proofs,” they will cry, “that the man who
+went mad and raved with Lear, and screamed and cursed in “Timon” did
+really break down, and was not imagining madness and despair.” The
+proofs are to be found in these works themselves, plain for all men to
+read.
+
+The three chief works of his last period are romances and are all
+copies; he was too tired to invent or even to annex; his own story is
+the only one that interests him. The plot of “The Winter's Tale” is the
+plot of “Much Ado about Nothing.” Hero is Hermione. Another phase of
+“Much Ado About Nothing” is written out at length in “Cymbeline”; Imogen
+suffers like Hero and Hermione, under unfounded accusation. It is
+Shakespeare's own history turned from this world to fairyland: what
+would have happened, he asks, if the woman whom I believed false, had
+been true? This, the theme of “Much Ado,” is the theme also of “The
+Winter's Tale” and of “Cymbeline.” The idealism of the man is
+inveterate: he will not see that it was his own sensuality which gave
+him up to suffering, and not Mary Fitton's faithlessness. “The Tempest”
+ is the story of “As you Like it.” We have again the two dukes, the
+exiled good Duke, who is Shakespeare, and the bad usurping Duke,
+Shakespeare's rival, Chapman, who has conquered for a time. Shakespeare
+is no longer able or willing to discover a new play: he can only copy
+himself, and in one of the scenes which he wrote into “Henry VIII.” the
+copy is slavish.
+
+I allude to the third scene in the second act; the dialogue between Anne
+Bullen and the Old Lady is extraordinarily reminiscent. When Anne Bullen
+says--
+
+    “'Tis better to be lowly born,
+  And range with humble livers in content,
+  Than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief
+  And wear a golden sorrow”
+
+I am reminded of Henry VI. And the contention between Anne Bullen and
+the Old Lady, in which Anne Bullen declares that she would not be a
+queen, and the Old Lady scorns her:
+
+    “Beshrew me, I would,
+  And venture maidenhead for't; and so would you,
+  For all this spice of your hypocrisy.”
+
+is much the same contention, and is handled in the same way as the
+contention between Desdemona and Emilia in “Othello.”
+
+There are many other proofs of Shakespeare's weakness of hand throughout
+this last period, if further proofs were needed. The chief
+characteristics of Shakespeare's health are his humour, his gaiety, and
+wit--his love of life. A correlative characteristic is that all his
+women are sensuous and indulge in coarse expressions in and out of
+season. This is said to be a fault of his time; but only professors
+could use an argument which shows such ignorance of life. Homer was
+clean enough, and Sophocles, Spenser, too; sensuality is a quality of
+the individual man. Still another characteristic of Shakespeare's
+maturity is that his characters, in spite of being idealized, live for
+us a vigorous, pulsing life.
+
+All these characteristics are lacking in the works after “Timon.” There
+is practically no humour, no wit, the clowns even are merely
+boorish-stupid with the solitary exception of Autolycus, who is a pale
+reflex of one or two characteristics of Falstaff. Shakespeare's humour
+has disappeared, or is so faint as scarcely to be called humour; all the
+heroines, too, are now vowed away from sensuality: Marina passes through
+the brothel unsoiled; Perdita might have milk in her veins, and not
+blood, and Miranda is but another name for Perdita. Imogen, too, has no
+trace of natural passion in her: she is a mere washing-list, so to
+speak, of sexless perfections. In this last period Shakespeare will have
+nothing to do with sensuality, and his characters, and not the female
+characters alone, are hardly more than abstractions; they lack the blood
+of emotion; there is not one of them could cast a shadow. How is it that
+the critics have mistaken these pale, bloodless silhouettes for
+Shakespeare's masterpieces?
+
+In his earliest works he was compelled, as we have seen, to use his own
+experiences perpetually, not having had any experience of life, and in
+these, his latest plays, he also uses when he can his own experiences to
+give his pictures of the world from which he had withdrawn, some sense
+of vivid life. For example, in “Winter's Tale” his account of the death
+of the boy Mamillius is evidently a reflex of his own emotion when he
+lost his son, Hamnet, an emotion which at the time he pictured
+deathlessly in Arthur and the grief of the Queen-mother Constance.
+Similarly, in “Cymbeline,” the joy of the brothers in finding the sister
+is an echo of his own pleasure in getting to know his daughter.
+
+I have an idea about the genesis of these last three plays as regards
+their order which may be wholly false, though true, I am sure, to
+Shakespeare's character. I imagine he was asked by the author to touch
+up “Pericles.” On reading the play, he saw the opportunity of giving
+expression to the new emotion which had been awakened in him by the
+serious sweet charm of his young daughter, and accordingly he wrote the
+scenes in which Marina figures. Judith's modesty was a perpetual wonder
+to him.
+
+His success induced him to sketch out “The Winter's Tale,” in which tale
+he played sadly with what might have been if his accused love, Mary
+Fitton, had been guiltless instead of guilty. I imagine he saw that the
+play was not a success, or supreme critic as he was, that his hand had
+grown weak, and seeking for the cause he probably came to the conclusion
+that the comparative failure was due to the fact that he did not put
+himself into “The Winter's Tale,” and so he determined in the next play
+to draw a full-length portrait of himself again, as he had done in
+“Hamlet,” and accordingly he sketched Posthumus, a staider, older,
+idealized Hamlet, with lymph in his veins, instead of blood. In the same
+idealizing spirit, he pictured his rose of womanhood for us in Imogen,
+who is, however, not a living woman at all, any more than his earliest
+ideal, Juliet, was a woman. The contrast between these two sketches is
+the contrast between Shakespeare's strength and his weakness. Here is
+how the fourteen-year-old Juliet talks of love:
+
+  “Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
+  That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo
+  Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen.
+  Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
+  By their own beauties.”
+
+And here what Posthumus says of Imogen:
+
+  “Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd,
+  And pray'd me oft forbearance: did it with
+  A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't
+  Might well have warmed old Saturn.”
+
+Neither of these statements is very generally true: but the second is
+out of character. When Shakespeare praises restraint in love he must
+have been very weak; in full manhood he prayed for excess of it, and
+regarded a surfeit as the only rational cure.
+
+I think Shakespeare liked Posthumus and Imogen; but he could not have
+thought “Cymbeline” a great work, and so he pulled himself together for
+a masterpiece. He seems to have said to himself, “All that fighting of
+Posthumus is wrong; men do not fight at forty-eight; I will paint myself
+simply in the qualities I possess now; I will tell the truth about
+myself so far as I can.” The result is the portrait of Prospero in “The
+Tempest.”
+
+Let me just say before I begin to study Prospero that I find the
+introduction of the Masque in the fourth act extraordinarily
+interesting. Ben Jonson had written classic masques for this and that
+occasion; masques which were very successful, we are told; they had
+“caught on,” in fact, to use our modern slang. Shakespeare will now show
+us that he, too, can write a masque with classic deities in it, and
+better Jonson's example. It is pitiful, and goes to prove, I think, that
+Shakespeare was but little esteemed by his generation.
+
+Jonson answered him conceitedly, as Jonson would, in the Introduction to
+his “Bartholomew Fair” (1612-14), “If there be never a _Servant
+monster_ i' the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes; nor a nest of
+_Antiques_. He is loth to make nature afraid in his _Playes_,
+like those that beget _Tales_, _Tempests_, and such like
+_Drolleries_.”
+
+At the very end, the creator of Hamlet, the finest mind in the world,
+was eager to show that he could write as well in any style as the author
+of “Every Man in his Humour.” To me the bare fact is full of interest,
+and most pitiful.
+
+Let us now turn to “The Tempest,” and see how our poet figures in it. It
+is Shakespeare's last work, and one of his very greatest; his testament
+to the English people; in wisdom and high poetry a miracle.
+
+The portrait of Shakespeare we get in Prospero is astonishingly faithful
+and ingenuous, in spite of its idealization. His life's day is waning to
+the end; shadows of the night are drawing in upon him, yet he is the
+same bookish, melancholy student, the lover of all courtesies and
+generosities, whom we met first as Biron in “Love's Labour's Lost.” The
+gaiety is gone and the sensuality; the spiritual outlook is infinitely
+sadder--that is what the years have done with our gentle Shakespeare.
+
+Prospero's first appearance in the second scene of the first act is as a
+loving father and magician; he says to Miranda:
+
+  “I have done nothing but in care of thee,
+  Of thee, my dear one! thee, my daughter.”
+
+He asks Miranda what she can remember of her early life, and reaches
+magical words:
+
+       “What seest thou else
+  In the dark backward and abysm of time?”
+
+Miranda is only fifteen years of age. Shakespeare turned Juliet, it will
+be remembered, from a girl of sixteen into one of fourteen; now, though
+the sensuality has left him, he makes Miranda only fifteen; clearly he
+is the same admirer of girlish youth at forty-eight as he was twenty
+years before. Then Prospero tells Miranda of himself and his brother,
+the “perfidious” Duke:
+
+  “And Prospero, the prime Duke, being so reputed
+  In dignity, and for the liberal arts
+  Without a parallel; those being all my study.”
+
+He will not only be a Prince now, but a master “without a parallel” in
+the liberal arts. He must explain, too, at undue length, how he allowed
+himself to be supplanted by his false brother, and speaks about himself
+in Shakespeare's very words:
+
+  “I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicate
+  To closeness, and the bettering of my mind
+  With that, which, but by being so retired,
+  O'erprized all popular rate, in my false brother
+  Awaked an evil nature: and my trust,
+  Like a good parent, did beget of him,
+  A falsehood, in its contrary as great
+  As my trust was; which had, indeed, no limit,
+  A confidence sans bound.”
+
+Shakespeare, too, “neglecting worldly ends,” had dedicated himself to
+“bettering of his mind,” we may be sure. Prospero goes on to tell us
+explicitly how Shakespeare loved books, which we were only able to infer
+from his earlier plays:
+
+      “Me, poor man, my library
+  Was dukedom large enough.”
+
+And again, Gonzalo (another name for Kent and Flavius) having given him
+some books, he says:
+
+      “Of his gentleness,
+  Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me
+  From my own library, with volumes that
+  I prize above my dukedom.”
+
+His daughter grieves lest she had been a trouble to him: forthwith
+Shakespeare-Prospero answers:
+
+      “O, a cherubim
+  Thou wast, that did preserve me. Thou didst smile
+  Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
+  When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt
+  Under my burden groan'd; which raised in me
+  An undergoing stomach, to bear up
+  Against what should ensue.”
+
+But why should the magician weep or groan under a burden? had he no
+confidence in his miraculous powers? All this is Shakespeare's
+confession. Every word is true; his daughter did indeed “preserve”
+ Shakespeare, and enable him to bear up under the burden of life's
+betrayals.
+
+No wonder Prospero begins to apologize for this long-winded confession,
+which indeed is “most impertinent” to the play, as he admits, though
+most interesting to him and to us, for he is simply Shakespeare telling
+us his own feelings at the time. The gentle magician then hears from
+Ariel how the shipwreck has been conducted without harming a hair of
+anyone.
+
+The whole scene is an extraordinarily faithful and detailed picture of
+Shakespeare's soul. I find significance even in the fact that Ariel
+wants his freedom “a full year” before the term Prospero had originally
+proposed. Shakespeare finished “The Tempest,” I believe, and therewith
+set the seal on his life's work a full year earlier than he had
+intended; he feared lest death might surprise him before he had put the
+pinnacle on his work. Ariel's torment, too, is full of meaning for me;
+for Ariel is Shakespeare's “shaping spirit of imagination,” who was once
+the slave of “a foul witch,” and by her “imprisoned painfully” for “a
+dozen years.”
+
+That “dozen years” is to me astonishingly true and interesting: it shows
+that my reading of the duration of his passion-torture was absolutely
+correct--Shakespeare's “delicate spirit” and best powers bound to Mary
+Fitton's “earthy” service from 1597 to 1608.
+
+We can perhaps fix this latter date with some assurance. Mistress Fitton
+married for the second time a Captain or Mr. Polwhele late in 1607, or
+some short time before March, 1608, when the fact of her recent marriage
+was recorded in the will of her great uncle. It seems to me probable, or
+at least possible, that this event marks her complete separation from
+Shakespeare; she may very likely have left the Court and London on
+ceasing to be a Maid of Honour.
+
+Shakespeare is so filled with himself in this last play, so certain that
+he is the most important person in the world, that this scene is more
+charged with intimate self-revealing than any other in all his works.
+And when Ferdinand comes upon the stage Shakespeare lends him, too, his
+own peculiar qualities. His puppets no longer interest him; he is
+careless of characterization. Ferdinand says:
+
+  “This music crept by me upon the waters
+  Allaying both their fury and my passion
+  With its sweet air.”
+
+Music, it will be remembered, had precisely the same peculiar effect
+upon Duke Orsino in “Twelfth Night.” Ferdinand, too, is extraordinarily
+conceited:
+
+  “I am the best of them that speak this speech.
+  .... Myself am Naples.”
+
+Shakespeare's natural aristocratic pride as a Prince reinforced by his
+understanding of his own real importance. Ferdinand then declares he
+will be content with a prison if he can see Miranda in it:
+
+    “Space enough
+  Have I in such a prison.”
+
+Which is Hamlet's:
+
+  “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself
+  a king of infinite space.”
+
+The second act, with its foiled conspiracy, is wretchedly bad, and the
+meeting of Caliban and Trinculo with Stephanie does not improve it much,
+Shakespeare has little interest now in anything outside himself: age and
+greatness are as self-centred as youth.
+
+In the third act the courtship of Ferdinand and Miranda is pretty, but
+hardly more. Ferdinand is bloodless, thin, and Miranda swears “by her
+modesty,” as the jewel in her dower, which takes away a little from the
+charming confession of girl-love:
+
+      “I would not wish
+  Any companion in the world but you.”
+
+The comic relief which follows is unspeakably dull; but the words of
+Ariel, warning the King of Naples and the usurping Duke that the wrong
+they have done Prospero is certain to be avenged unless blotted out by
+“heart-sorrow and a clear life ensuing,” are most characteristic and
+memorable.
+
+In the fourth act Prospero preaches, as we have seen, self-restraint to
+Ferdinand in words which, in their very extravagance, show how deeply he
+regretted his own fault with his wife before marriage. I shall consider
+the whole passage when treating of Shakespeare's marriage as an incident
+in his life. Afterwards comes the masque, and the marvellous speech of
+Prospero, which touches the highest height of poetry:
+
+      “These our actors,
+  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
+  Are melted into air, into thin air:
+  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
+  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
+  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
+  Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve
+  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
+  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
+  As dreams are made of; and our little life
+  Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
+  Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled:
+  Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
+  If you be pleased, retire into my cell,
+  And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
+  To still my beating mind.”
+
+I have given the verses to the very end, for I find the insistence on
+his age and weakness (which are not in keeping with the character of a
+magician), a confession of Shakespeare himself: the words “beating mind”
+ are extraordinarily characteristic, proving as they do that his thoughts
+and emotions were too strong for his frail body.
+
+In the fifth act Shakespeare-Prospero shows himself to us at his
+noblest: he will forgive his enemies:
+
+  “Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
+  Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
+  Do I take part: the rarer action is
+  In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
+  The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
+  Not a frown further.”
+
+In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” we saw how Shakespeare-Valentine
+forgave his faithless friend as soon as he repented: here is the same
+creed touched to nobler expression.
+
+And then, with all his wishes satisfied, his heart's desire
+accomplished, Prospero is ready to set out for Milan again and home. We
+all expect some expression of joy from him, but this is what we get:
+
+  “And thence retire me to my Milan, where
+  Every third thought shall be my grave.”
+
+The despair is wholly unexpected and out of place, as was the story of
+his weakness and infirmity, his “beating mind.” It is evidently
+Shakespeare's own confession. After writing “The Tempest” he intends to
+retire to Stratford, where “every third thought shall be my grave.”
+
+I have purposely drawn special attention to Shakespeare's weakness and
+despair at this time, because the sad, rhymed Epilogue which has to be
+spoken by Prospero has been attributed to another hand by a good many
+scholars. It is manifestly Shakespeare's, out of Shakespeare's very
+heart indeed; though Mr. Israel Gollancz follows his leaders in saying
+that the “Epilogue to the play is evidently by some other hand than
+Shakespeare's”: “evidently” is good. Here it is:
+
+  “Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
+  And what strength I have's mine own,
+  Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
+  I must be here confined by you,
+  Or sent to Naples. Let me not
+  Since I have my dukedom got,
+  And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
+  In this bare island by your spell;
+  But release me from my bands
+  With the help of your good hands:
+  Gentle breath of yours my sails
+  Must fill, or else my project fails,
+  Which was to please. Now I want,
+  Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
+  And my ending is despair,
+  Unless I be relieved by prayer,
+  Which pierces so that it assaults
+  Mercy itself, and frees all faults
+  As you from crimes would pardon'd be
+  Let your indulgence set me free.”
+
+From youth to age Shakespeare occupied himself with the deepest problems
+of human existence; again and again we find him trying to pierce the
+darkness that enshrouds life. Is there indeed nothing beyond the
+grave--nothing? Is the noble fabric of human thought, achievement and
+endeavour to fade into nothingness and pass away like the pageant of a
+dream? He will not cheat himself with unfounded hopes, nor delude
+himself into belief; he resigns himself with a sigh--it is the
+undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns. But
+Shakespeare always believed in repentance and forgiveness, and now,
+world-weary, old and weak, he turns to prayer, [Footnote: Hamlet, too,
+after speaking with his father's ghost, cries: “I'll go pray.”] prayer
+that--
+
+       “assaults
+  Mercy itself and frees all faults.”
+
+Poor, broken Shakespeare! “My ending is despair”: the sadness of it, and
+the pity, lie deeper than tears.
+
+What a man! to produce a masterpiece in spite of such weakness. What a
+play is this “Tempest”! At length Shakespeare sees himself as he is, a
+monarch without a country; but master of a very “potent art,” a great
+magician, with imagination as an attendant spirit, that can conjure up
+shipwrecks, or enslave enemies, or create lovers at will; and all his
+powers are used in gentle kindness. Ariel is a higher creation, more
+spiritual and charming than any other poet has ever attempted; and
+Caliban, the earth-born, half-beast, half-man--these are the poles of
+Shakespeare's genius.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
+
+
+Our long travail is almost at an end. We have watched Shakespeare
+painting himself at various periods of his life, and at full length in
+twenty dramas, as the gentle, sensuous poet-thinker. We have studied him
+when given over to wild passion in the sonnets and elsewhere, and to
+insane jealousy in “Othello”; we have seen him as Hamlet brooding on
+revenge and self-murder, and in “Lear,” and “Timon” raging on the verge
+of madness, and in these ecstasies, when the soul is incapable of
+feigning, we have discovered his true nature as it differed from the
+ideal presentments which his vanity shaped and coloured. We have
+corrected his personal estimate by that “story of faults conceal'd”
+ which Shakespeare himself referred to in sonnet 88. It only remains for
+me now to give a brief account of his life and the incidents of it to
+show that my reading of his character is borne out by the known facts,
+and thus put the man in his proper setting, so to speak.
+
+On the other hand, our knowledge of Shakespeare's character will help us
+to reconstruct his life-story. What is known positively of his life
+could be given in a couple of pages; but there are traditions of him,
+tales about him, innumerable scraps of fact and fiction concerning him
+which are more or less interesting and authentic; and now that we know
+the man, we shall be able to accept or reject these reports with some
+degree of confidence, and so arrive at a credible picture of his life's
+journey, and the changes which Time wrought in him. In all I may say
+about him I shall keep close to the facts as given in his works. When
+tradition seems consonant with what Shakespeare has told us about
+himself, or with what Ben Jonson said of him, I shall use it with
+confidence.
+
+Shakespeare was a common name in Warwickshire; other Shakespeares
+besides the poet's family were known there in the sixteenth century, and
+at least one other William Shakespeare in the neighbourhood of
+Stratford. The poet's father, John Shakespeare, was of farmer stock, and
+seems to have had an adventurous spirit: he left Snitterfield, his
+birthplace, as a young man, for the neighbouring town of Stratford,
+where he set up in business for himself. Aubrey says he was a butcher;
+he certainly dealt in meat, skins, and leather, as well as in corn,
+wool, and malt--an adaptable, quick man, who turned his hand to
+anything--a Jack-of-all-trades. He appears to have been successful at
+first, for in 1556, five years after coming to Stratford, he purchased
+two freehold tenements, one with a garden in Henley Street, and the
+other in Greenhill Street, with an orchard. In 1557 he was elected
+burgess, or town councillor, and shortly afterwards did the best stroke
+of business in his life by marrying Mary Arden, whose father had been a
+substantial farmer. Mary inherited the fee simple of Asbies, a house
+with some fifty acres of land at Wilmcote, and an interest in property
+at Snitterfield; the whole perhaps worth some £80 or £90, or, say, £600
+of our money. His marriage turned John Shakespeare into a well-to-do
+citizen; he filled various offices in the borough, and in 1568 became a
+bailiff, the highest position in the corporation. During his year of
+office, we are told, he entertained two companies of actors at
+Stratford.
+
+Mary Arden seems to have been her father's favourite child, and though
+she could not sign her own name, must have possessed rare qualities; for
+the poet, as we learn from “Coriolanus,” held her in extraordinary
+esteem and affection, and mourned her after her death as “the noblest
+mother in the world.”
+
+William Shakespeare, the first son and third child of this couple, was
+born on the 22nd or 23rd April, 1564, no one knows which day; the
+Stratford parish registers prove that he was baptized on 26th April. And
+if the date of his birth is not known, neither is the place of it; his
+father owned two houses in Henley Street, and it is uncertain which he
+was born in.
+
+John Shakespeare had, fortunately, nothing to pay for the education of
+his sons. They had free tuition at the Grammar School at Stratford. The
+poet went to school when he was seven or eight years of age, and
+received an ordinary education together with some grounding in Latin. He
+probably spent most of his time at first making stories out of the
+frescoes on the walls. There can be no doubt that he learned easily all
+he was taught, and still less doubt that he was not taught much. He
+mastered Lyly's “Latin Grammar,” and was taken through some conversation
+books like the “Sententiae Pueriles,” and not much further, for he puts
+Latin phrases in the mouth of the schoolmasters, Holofernes in “Love's
+Labour's Lost,” and Hugh Evans in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and all
+these phrases are taken word for word either from Lyly's Grammar or from
+the “Sententiae Pueriles.” In “Titus Andronicus,” too, one of Tamora's
+sons, on reading a Latin couplet, says it is a verse of Horace, but he
+“read it in the grammar,” which was probably the author's case. Ben
+Jonson's sneer was well-founded, Shakespeare had “little Latine and
+lesse Greeke.” His French, as shown in his “Henry V.,” was anything but
+good, and his Italian was probably still slighter.
+
+It was lucky for Shakespeare that his father's increasing poverty
+withdrew him from school early, and forced him into contact with life.
+Aubrey says that “when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade [of
+butcher]; but when he kill'd a calfe he would doe it in high style and
+make a speech.” I daresay young Will flourished about with a knife and
+made romantic speeches; but I am pretty sure he never killed a calf.
+Killing a calf is not the easiest part of a butcher's business; nor a
+task which Shakespeare at any time would have selected. The tradition is
+simply sufficient to prove that the town folk had already noticed the
+eager, quick, spouting lad.
+
+Of Shakespeare's life after he left school, say from thirteen to
+eighteen, we know almost nothing. He probably did odd jobs for his
+father from time to time; but his father's business seems to have run
+rapidly from bad to worse; for in 1586 a creditor informed the local
+Court that John Shakespeare had no goods on which distraint could be
+levied, and on 6th September of the same year he was deprived of his
+alderman's gown. During this period of steadily increasing poverty in
+the house it was only to be expected that young Will Shakespeare would
+run wild.
+
+The tradition as given by Rowe says that he fell “into low company, and
+amongst them some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing engaged
+him with them more than once in robbing the park of Sir Thomas Lucy of
+Charlecot, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman,
+as he then thought somewhat too severely, and in order to revenge that
+ill-usage he made a ballad upon him.”
+
+Another story has it that Sir Thomas Lucy got a lawyer from Warwick to
+prosecute the boys, and that Shakespeare stuck his satirical ballad to
+the park gates at Charlecot. The ballad is said to have been lost, but
+certain verses were preserved which fit the circumstances and suit
+Shakespeare's character so perfectly that I for one am content to accept
+them. I give the first and the last verses as most characteristic:
+
+SONG
+
+  “A parliament member, a Justice of peace,
+  At home a poor scarecrow, in London an asse,
+  If Lowsie is lucy, as some volke miscalle it
+  Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it.
+      He thinks himself greate
+      Yet an asse in his state,
+  We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.
+  If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it
+  Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it.
+         - -       - -       - -       - -       - -
+  “If a juvenile frolick he cannot forgive,
+  We'll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live,
+  And Lucy, the lowsie, a libel may calle it
+  Sing lowsie Lucy whatever befalle it.
+    He thinks himself greate
+    Yet an asse in his state,
+  We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate.
+  If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it
+  Sing lowsie Lucy, Whatever befalle it.”
+
+The last verse, so out of keeping in its curious impartiality with the
+scurrilous refrain, appears to me to carry its own signature. There can
+be no doubt that the verses give us young Shakespeare's feelings in the
+matter. It was probably reading ballads and tales of “Merrie Sherwood”
+ that first inclined him to deer-stealing; and we have already seen from
+his “Richard II.” and “Henry IV.” and “Henry V.” that he had been led
+astray by low companions.
+
+In his idle, high-spirited youth, Shakespeare did worse than break
+bounds and kill deer; he was at a loose end and up to all sorts of
+mischief. At eighteen he had already courted and won Anne Hathaway, a
+farmer's daughter of the neighbouring village of Shottery. Anne was
+nearly eight years older than he was. Her father had died a short time
+before and left Anne, his eldest daughter, £6 13_s_. 4_d_.,
+or, say, £50 of our money. The house at Shottery, now shown as Anne
+Hathaway's cottage, once formed part of Richard Hathaway's farmhouse,
+and there, and in the neighbouring lanes, the lovers did their courting.
+The wooing on Shakespeare's side was nothing but pastime, though it led
+to marriage.
+
+His marriage is perhaps the first serious mistake that Shakespeare made,
+and it certainly influenced his whole life. It is needful, therefore, to
+understand it as accurately as may be, however we may judge it. A man's
+life, like a great river, may be limpid-pure in the beginning, and when
+near its source; as it grows and gains strength it is inevitably sullied
+and stained with earth's soilure.
+
+The ordinary apologists would have us believe that the marriage was
+happy; they know that Shakespeare was not married in Stratford, and,
+though a minor, his parents' consent to the marriage was not obtained;
+but they persist in talking about his love for his wife, and his wife's
+devoted affection for him. Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, the bell-wether of
+the flock, has gone so far as to tell us how on the morning of the day
+he died “his wife, who had smoothed the pillow beneath his head for the
+last time, felt that her right hand was taken from her.” Let us see if
+there is any foundation for this sentimental balderdash. Here are some
+of the facts.
+
+In the Bishop of Worcester's register a licence was issued on 27th
+November, 1582, authorizing the marriage of William Shakespeare with
+Anne Whately, of Temple Grafton. On the very next day in the register of
+the same Bishop there is a deed, wherein Fulk Sandells and John
+Richardson, farmers of Shottery, bound themselves in the Bishop's court
+under a surety of £40 to free the Bishop of all liability should a
+lawful impediment--“by reason of any pre-contract or consanguinity”--be
+subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, then in
+contemplation, of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway.
+
+Dryasdust, of course, argues that there is no connection whatever
+between these two events. He is able to persuade himself easily that the
+William Shakespeare who got a licence to marry Anne Whately, of Temple
+Grafton, on 27th November, 1582, is not the same William Shakespeare who
+is being forced to marry Anne Hathaway on the next day by two friends of
+Anne Hathaway's father. Yet such a coincidence as two William
+Shakespeares seeking to be married by special licence in the same court
+at the same moment of time is too extraordinary to be admitted. Besides,
+why should Sandells and Richardson bind themselves as sureties in £40 to
+free the Bishop of liability by reason of any pre-contract if there were
+no pre-contract? The two William Shakespeares are clearly one and the
+same person. Sandells was a supervisor of the will of Richard Hathaway,
+and was described in the will as “my trustie friende and neighbour.” He
+showed himself a trusty friend of the usual sort to his friend's
+daughter, and when he heard that loose Will Shakespeare was attempting
+to marry Anne Whately, he forthwith went to the same Bishop's court
+which had granted the licence, pledged himself and his neighbour,
+Richardson, as sureties that there was no pre-contract, and so induced
+the Bishop, who no doubt then learned the unholy circumstances for the
+first time, to grant a licence in order that the marriage with Anne
+Hathaway could be celebrated, “with once asking of the bannes” and
+without the consent of the father of the bridegroom, which was usually
+required when the bridegroom was a minor.
+
+Clearly Fulk Sandells was a masterful man; young Will Shakespeare was
+forced to give up Anne Whately, poor lass, and marry Anne Hathaway, much
+against his will. Like many another man, Shakespeare married at leisure,
+and repented in hot haste. Six months later a daughter was born to him,
+and was baptized in the name of Susanna at Stratford Parish Church on
+the 26th of May, 1583. There was, therefore, an importunate reason for
+the wedding, as Sandells, no doubt, made the Bishop understand.
+
+The whole story, it seems to me, is in perfect consonance with
+Shakespeare's impulsive, sensual nature; is, indeed, an excellent
+illustration of it. Hot, impatient, idle Will got Anne Hathaway into
+trouble, was forced to marry her, and at once came to regret. Let us see
+how far these inferences from plain facts are borne out from his works.
+
+The most important passages seem to have escaped critical scholarship. I
+have already said that the earliest works of Shakespeare, and the
+latest, are the most fruitful in details about his private life. In the
+earliest works he was compelled to use his own experience, having no
+observation of life to help him, and at the end of his life, having said
+almost everything he had to say, he again went back to his early
+experience for little vital facts to lend a colour to the fainter
+pictures of age. In “The Winter's Tale,” a shepherd finds the child
+Perdita, who has been exposed; one would expect him to stumble on the
+child by chance and express surprise; but this shepherd of Shakespeare
+begins to talk in this way:
+
+“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that
+youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but
+getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.
+Hark you now! Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and
+two-and-twenty hunt this weather?”
+
+Now this passage has nothing to do with the play, nor with the
+shepherd's occupation; nor is it at all characteristic of a shepherd
+boy. Between ten and three-and-twenty a poor shepherd boy is likely to
+be kept hard at work; he is not idle and at a loose end like young
+Shakespeare, free to rob the ancientry, steal, fight, and get wenches
+with child. That, in my opinion, is Shakespeare's own confession.
+
+Of course, every one has noticed how Shakespeare again and again in his
+plays declares that a woman should take in marriage an “elder than
+herself,” and that intimacy before marriage is productive of nothing but
+“barren hate and discord.” In “Twelfth Night” he says:
+
+    “Let still the woman take
+  An elder than herself: so wears she to him,
+  So sways she level in her husband's heart.”
+
+In “The Tempest” he writes again:
+
+  “If thou dost break her virgin knot before
+  All sanctimonious ceremonies may
+  With full and holy rite be minister'd,
+  No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall
+  To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
+  Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
+  The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
+  That you shall hate it both.”
+
+These admonitions are so far-fetched and so emphatic that they plainly
+discover personal feeling. We have, besides, those quaint, angry
+passages in the “Comedy of Errors,” to which we have already drawn
+attention, which show that the poet detested his wife.
+
+The known facts, too, all corroborate this inference: let us consider
+them a little. The first child was born within six months of the
+marriage; twins followed in 1585; a little later Shakespeare left
+Stratford not to return to it for eight or nine years, and when he did
+return there was probably no further intimacy with his wife; at any
+rate, there were no more children. Yet Shakespeare, one fancies, was
+fond of children. When his son Hamnet died his grief showed itself in
+his work--in “King John” and in “The Winter's Tale.” He was full of
+loving kindness to his daughters, too, in later life; it was his wife
+alone for whom he had no affection, no forgiveness.
+
+There are other facts which establish this conclusion. While Shakespeare
+was in London he allowed his wife to suffer the extremes of poverty.
+Sometime between 1585 and 1595 she appears to have borrowed forty
+shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father's
+shepherd. The money was still unpaid when Whittington died, in 1601, and
+he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet, and
+distribute it among the poor of Stratford. Now Shakespeare was rich when
+he returned to Stratford in 1595, and always generous. He paid off his
+father's heavy debts; how came it that he did not pay this trifling debt
+of his wife? The mere fact proves beyond doubt that Shakespeare disliked
+her and would have nothing to do with her.
+
+Even towards the end of his life, when he was suffering from increasing
+weakness, which would have made most men sympathetic, even if it did not
+induce them completely to relent, Shakespeare shows the same aversion to
+his poor wife. In 1613, when on a short visit to London, he bought a
+house in Blackfriars for £140; in the purchase he barred his wife's
+dower, which proceeding seems even to Dryasdust “pretty conclusive proof
+that he had the intention of excluding her from the enjoyment of his
+possessions after his death.”
+
+In the first draft of his will Shakespeare did not mention his wife. The
+apologists explain this by saying that, of course, he had already given
+her all that she ought to have. But if he loved her he would have
+mentioned her with affection, if only to console her in her widowhood.
+Before the will was signed he inserted a bequest to her of his
+“second-best bed,” and the apologists have been at pains to explain that
+the best bed was kept for guests, and that Shakespeare willed to his
+wife the bed they both occupied. How inarticulate poor William
+Shakespeare must have become! Could the master of language find no
+better word than the contemptuous one? Had he said “our bed” it would
+have been enough; “the second-best bed” admits of but one
+interpretation. His daughters, who had lived with their mother, and who
+had not been afflicted by her jealousy and scolding tongue, begged the
+dying man to put in some mention of her, and he wrote in that
+“second-best bed”--bitter to the last. If his own plain words and these
+inferences, drawn from indisputable facts, are not sufficient, then let
+us take one fact more, and consider its significance; one fact, so to
+speak, from the grave.
+
+When Shakespeare died he left some lines to be placed over his tomb.
+Here they are:
+
+  “Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare
+  To Digg the dust enclosed heare.
+  Blessed be ye man yt spares thes stones
+  And Curst be ye yt moves my bones.”
+
+Now, why did Shakespeare make this peculiar request? No one seems to
+have seen any meaning in it. It looks to me as if Shakespeare wrote the
+verses in order to prevent his wife being buried with him. He wanted to
+be free of her in death as in life. At any rate, the fact is that she
+was not buried with him, but apart from him; he had seen to that. His
+grave was never opened, though his wife expressed a desire to be buried
+with him. The man who needs further proofs would not be persuaded though
+one came from the dead to convince him.
+
+The marriage was an unfortunate one for many reasons, as an enforced
+marriage is apt to be, even when it is not the marriage of a boy in his
+teens to a woman some eight years his senior. Shakespeare takes trouble
+to tell us in “The Comedy of Errors” that his wife was spitefully
+jealous, and a bitter scold. She must have injured him, poisoned his
+life with her jealous nagging, or Shakespeare would have forgiven her.
+There is some excuse for him, if excuse be needed. At the time the
+marriage must have seemed the wildest folly to him, seething as he was
+with inordinate conceit. He was wise beyond his years, and yet he had
+been forced to give hostages to fortune before he had any means of
+livelihood, before he had even found a place in life. What a position
+for a poet--penniless, saddled with a jealous wife and three children
+before he was twenty-one. And this poet was proud, and vain, and in love
+with all distinctions.
+
+But why did Shakespeare nurse such persistent enmity all through his
+life to jealous, scolding Anne Hathaway? Shakespeare had wronged her;
+the keener his moral sense, the more certain he was to blame his partner
+in the fault, for in no other way could he excuse himself.
+
+It was overpowering sensuality and rashness which had led Shakespeare
+into the noose, and now there was nothing for it but to cut the rope. He
+had either to be true to his higher nature or to the conventional view
+of his duty; he was true to himself and fled to London, and the world is
+the richer for his decision. The only excuse he ever made is to be found
+in the sonnet-line:
+
+  “Love is too young to know what conscience is.”
+
+For my part I do not see that any excuse is needed: if Shakespeare had
+married Anne Whately he might never have gone to London or written a
+play. Shakespeare's hatred of his wife and his regret for having married
+her were alike foolish. Our brains are seldom the wisest part of us. It
+was well that he made love to Anne Hathaway; well, too, that he was
+forced to marry her; well, finally, that he should desert her. I am
+sorry he treated her badly and left her unsupplied with money; that was
+needlessly cruel; but it is just the kindliest men who have these
+extraordinary lapses; Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was
+measureless, was a part of his own self-esteem, and his self-esteem was
+founded on snobbish non-essentials for many years, if not, indeed,
+throughout his life.
+
+There is a tradition preserved by Rowe that before going to London young
+Shakespeare taught school in the country; it may be; but he did not
+teach for long, we can be sure, and what he had to teach there were few
+scholars in the English country then or now capable of learning. Another
+tradition asserts that he obtained employment as a lawyer's clerk,
+probably because of the frequent use of legal phrases in his plays. But
+these apologists all forget that they are speaking of men like
+themselves, and of times like ours. Politics is the main theme of talk
+in our day; but in the time of Elizabeth it was rather dangerous to show
+one's wisdom by criticizing the government: law was then the chief
+staple of conversation: every educated man was therefore familiar with
+law and its phraseology, as men are familiar in our day with the jargon
+of politics.
+
+When did Shakespeare fly to London? Some say when he was twenty-one, as
+soon as his wife presented him with twins, in 1585. Others say as soon
+as Sir Thomas Lucy's persecution became intolerable. Both causes no
+doubt worked together, and yet another cause, given in “The Two
+Gentlemen of Verona,” was the real _causa causans_. Shakespeare was
+naturally ambitious; eager to measure himself with the best and try his
+powers. London was the arena where all great prizes were to be won:
+Shakespeare strained towards the Court like a greyhound in leash. But
+when did he go? Again in doubt I take the shepherd's words in “The
+Winter's Tale” as a guide. Most men would have said from fourteen to
+twenty was the dangerous age for a youth; but Shakespeare had perhaps a
+personal reason for the peculiar “ten to twenty-three.” He was, no
+doubt, astoundingly precocious, and probably even at ten he had learned
+everything of value that the grammar school had to teach, and his
+thoughts had begun to play truant. Twenty-three, too, is a significant
+date in his life; in 1587, when he was twenty-three, two companies of
+actors, under the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord Leicester,
+returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited
+Stratford. In Lord Leicester's company were Burbage and Heminge, with
+whom we know that Shakespeare was closely connected in later life. It
+seems to me probable that he returned with this company to London, and
+arrived in London, as he tells us in “The Comedy of Errors,” “stiff and
+weary with long travel,” and at once went out to view the town and
+“peruse the traders.”
+
+There is a tradition that when he came to London in 1587 he held horses
+outside the doors of the theatre. This story was first put about by the
+compiler of “The Lives of the Poets,” in 1753. According to the author
+the story was related by D'Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom
+Betterton must have told it, does not transmit it. Rowe was perhaps
+right to forget it or leave it out; though the story is not in itself
+incredible. Such work must have been infinitely distasteful to
+Shakespeare, but necessity is a hard master, and Greene, who talks of
+him later as “Shake-scene,” also speaks in the same connection of these
+“grooms.” The curious amplified version of the story that Shakespeare
+organized a service of boys to hold the horses is hardly to be believed.
+The great Doctor was anything but a poet, or a good judge of the poetic
+temperament.
+
+The Shakespeares of this world are not apt to take up menial employs,
+and this one had already shown that he preferred idle musings and
+parasitic dependence to uncongenial labour. Whoever reads the second
+scene of the second act of “The Comedy of Errors,” will see that
+Shakespeare, even at the beginning, had an uncommonly good opinion of
+himself. He plays gentleman from the first, and despises trade; he snubs
+his servant and will not brook familiarity from him. In “The Two
+Gentlemen of Verona,” he tells us that he left the country and came to
+London seeking “honour,” intending, no doubt, to make a name for himself
+by his writings. He had probably “Venus and Adonis” in his pocket when
+he first reached London. This would inspire a poet with the
+self-confidence which a well-filled purse lends to an ordinary man.
+
+I am inclined to accept Rowe's statement that Shakespeare was received
+into an actor-company at first in a very mean rank. The parish clerk of
+Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century used to tell the
+visitors that Shakespeare entered the playhouse as a servitor; but,
+however he entered it, it is pretty certain he was not long in a
+subordinate position.
+
+What manner of man was William Shakespeare when he first fronted life in
+London somewhere about 1587? Aubrey tells us that he was “a handsome,
+well-shap't man, very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant
+smooth witt.” The bust of him in Stratford Church was coloured; it gave
+him light hazel eyes, and auburn hair and beard. Rowe says of him that
+“besides the advantages of his witt, he was in himself a good-natured
+man, of too great sweetness in his manners, and a most agreeable
+companion.”
+
+I picture him to myself very like Swinburne--of middle height or below
+it, inclined to be stout; the face well-featured, with forehead domed to
+reverence and quick, pointed chin; a face lighted with hazel-clear vivid
+eyes and charming with sensuous-full mobile lips that curve easily to
+kisses or gay ironic laughter; an exceedingly sensitive, eager speaking
+face that mirrors every fleeting change of emotion....
+
+I can see him talking, talking with extreme fluency in a high tenor
+voice, the reddish hair flung back from the high forehead, the eyes now
+dancing, now aflame, every feature quick with the “beating mind.”
+
+And such talk--the groundwork of it, so to speak, very
+intimate-careless; but gemmed with thoughts, diamonded with wit,
+rhythmic with feeling: don't we know how it ran--“A hundred and fifty
+tattered prodigals.... No eye hath seen such scarecrows, ... discarded,
+unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters,
+and ostlers trade-fallen: the cankers of a calm world and a long peace.”
+ And after the thought the humour again--“food for powder, food for
+powder.”
+
+Now let us consider some of his other qualities. In 1592 he published
+his “Venus and Adonis,” which he had no doubt written in 1587 or even
+earlier, for he called it “the first heir of my invention” when he
+dedicated it to Lord Southampton. This work is to me extremely
+significant. It is all concerned with the wooing of young Adonis by
+Venus, an older woman. Now, goddesses have no age, nor do women, as a
+rule, woo in this sensual fashion. The peculiarities point to personal
+experience. “I, too,” Shakespeare tells us practically, “was wooed by an
+older woman against my will.” He seems to have wished the world to
+accept this version of his untimely marriage. Young Shakespeare in
+London was probably a little ashamed of being married to some one whom
+he could hardly introduce or avow. The apologists who declare that he
+made money very early in his career give us no explanation of the fact
+that he never brought his wife or children to London. Wherever we touch
+Shakespeare's intimate life, we find proof upon proof that he detested
+his wife and was glad to live without her.
+
+Looked at in this light “Venus and Adonis” is not a very noble thing to
+have written; but I am dealing with a young poet's nature, and the
+majority of young poets would like to forget their Anne Hathaway if they
+could; or, to excuse themselves, would put the blame of an ill-sorted
+union upon the partner to it.
+
+There is a certain weakness, however, shown in the whole story of his
+marriage; a weakness of character, as well as a weakness of
+_morale_, which it is impossible to ignore; and there were other
+weaknesses in Shakespeare, especially a weakness of body which must
+necessarily have had its correlative delicacies of mind.
+
+I have pointed out in the first part of this book that sleeplessness was
+a characteristic of Shakespeare, even in youth; he attributes it to
+Henry IV. in old age, and to Henry V., a youth at the time, who probably
+never knew what a sleepless night meant. Shakespeare's _alter ego_,
+Valentine, in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” suffers from it, and so do
+Macbeth and Hamlet, and a dozen others of his chief characters, in
+particular his impersonations--all of which shows, I think, that from
+the beginning the mind of Shakespeare was too strong for his body. As we
+should say to-day, he was too emotional, and lived on his nerves. I
+always think of him as a ship over-engined; when the driving-power is
+working at full speed it shakes the ship to pieces.
+
+One other weakness is marked in him, and that is that he could not
+drink, could not carry his liquor like a man--to use our accepted
+phrase. Hamlet thought drinking a custom more honoured in the breach
+than in the observance; Cassius, Shakespeare's incarnation in “Othello,”
+ confessed that he had “poor unhappy brains for drinking”: tradition
+informs us that Shakespeare himself died of a “feavour” from
+drinking--all of which confirms my opinion that Shakespeare was delicate
+rather than robust. He was, also, extraordinarily fastidious: in drama
+after drama he rails against the “greasy” caps and “stinking” breath of
+the common people. This overstrained disgust suggests to me a certain
+delicacy of constitution.
+
+But there is still another indication of bodily weakness which in itself
+would be convincing to those accustomed to read closely; but which would
+carry little or no weight to the careless. In sonnet 129 Shakespeare
+tells us of lust and its effects, and the confession seems to me purely
+personal. Here are four lines of it:
+
+  “Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
+  Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
+  Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
+  On purpose laid to make the taker mad.”
+
+Now, this is not the ordinary man's experience of passion and its
+effects. “Past reason hunted,” such an one might say, but he would
+certainly not go on “No sooner had, Past reason hated.” He is not moved
+to hate by enjoyment, but to tenderness; it is your weakling who is
+physically exhausted by enjoyment who is moved to hatred. This sonnet
+was written by Shakespeare in the prime of manhood at thirty-four or
+thirty-five at latest.
+
+Shakespeare was probably healthy as a young man, but intensely sensitive
+and highly strung; too finely constituted ever to have been strong. One
+notices that he takes no pleasure in fighting; his heroes are, of
+course, all “valiant,” but he shows no loving interest in the game of
+fighting as a game. In fact, we have already seen that he found no
+wonderful phrase for any of the manly virtues; he was a neuropath and a
+lover, and not a fighter, even in youth, or Fulk Sandells might have
+rued his interference.
+
+The dominating facts to be kept ever in mind about Shakespeare are that
+he was delicate in body, and over-excitable; yielding and irresolute in
+character; with too great sweetness of manners and inordinately given to
+the pleasures of love.
+
+How would such a man fare in the world of London in 1587? It was a wild
+and wilful age; eager English spirits were beginning to take a part in
+the opening up of the new world; the old, limiting horizons were gone;
+men dared to think for themselves and act boldly; ten years before Drake
+had sailed round the world--the adventurer was the characteristic
+product of the time. In ordinary company a word led to a blow, and the
+fight was often brought to a fatal conclusion with dagger or sword or
+both. In those rough days actors were almost outlaws; Ben Jonson is
+known to have killed two or three men; Marlowe died in a tavern brawl.
+Courage has always been highly esteemed in England, like gentility and a
+university training. Shakespeare possessed none of these passports to
+public favour. He could not shoulder his way through the throng. The
+wild adventurous life of the time was not to his liking, even in early
+manhood; from the beginning he preferred “the life removed” and his
+books; all given over to the “bettering of his mind” he could only have
+been appreciated at any time by the finer spirits.
+
+Entering the theatre as a servitor he no doubt made such acquaintances
+as offered themselves, and spent a good deal of his leisure perforce
+with second-rate actors and writers in common taverns and studied his
+Bardolph and Pistol, and especially his Falstaff at first hand. Perhaps
+Marlowe was one of his _ciceroni_ in rough company. Shakespeare had
+almost certainly met Marlowe very early in his career, for he worked
+with him in the “Third Part of Henry VI.,” and his “Richard III.” is a
+conscious imitation of Marlowe, and Marlowe was dissipated enough and
+wild enough to have shown him the wildest side of life in London in the
+'80's. It was the very best thing that could have happened to delicate
+Shakespeare, to come poor and unknown to London, and be soused in common
+rowdy life like this against his will by sheer necessity; for if left to
+his own devices he would probably have grown up a bookish poet--a second
+Coleridge. Fate takes care of her favourites.
+
+It was all in his favour that he should have been forced at first to win
+his spurs as an actor. He must have been too intelligent, one would
+think, ever to have brought it far as a mummer; he looked upon the
+half-art of acting with disdain and disgust, as he tells us in the
+sonnets, and if in Hamlet he condescends to give advice to actors, it is
+to admonish them not to outrage the decencies of nature by tearing a
+passion to tatters. He had at hand a surer ladder to fame than the
+mummer's art. As soon as he felt his feet in London he set to work
+adapting plays, and writing plays, while reading his own poetry to all
+and sundry who would listen, and I have no doubt that patrons of the
+stage, who were also men of rank, were willing to listen to Shakespeare
+from the beginning. He was of those who require no introductions.
+
+In 1592, four or five years after his arrival in London, he had already
+come to the front as a dramatist, or at least as an adapter of plays,
+for Robert Greene, a scholar and playwright, attacked him in his
+“Groatsworth of Wit” in this fashion:
+
+  “There is an upstart Crow, beautified in our feathers
+  that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes
+  he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as
+  the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes fac
+  totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a
+  country. Oh, that I might intreat your rare wits to be
+  employed in more profitable courses, and let these apes
+  imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint
+  them with your admired inventions.”
+
+It is plain from this weird appeal that Shakespeare had already made his
+mark.
+
+There are further proofs of his rapid success. One of Chettle's
+references to Shakespeare (I take Chettle to be the original of
+Falstaff) throws light upon the poet's position in London in these early
+days. Shortly after Greene had insulted Shakespeare as “Shake-scene”
+ Chettle apologized for the insult in these terms:
+
+  “I am as sorry,” Chettle wrote, “as if the original
+  fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seen his
+  (_i.e._, Shakespeare's) demeanour no less civill than he (is)
+  exelent in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of
+  worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which
+  argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that
+  aprooves his art.”
+
+In 1592, then, Shakespeare was most “civill in demeanour,” and had won
+golden opinions from people of importance.
+
+Actors and poets of that time could not help knowing a good many of the
+young nobles who came to the theatre and sat round the stage listening
+to the performances. And Shakespeare, with his aristocratic sympathies
+and charming sweetness of nature, must have made friends with the
+greatest ease. Chettle's apology proves that early in his career he had
+the art or luck to win distinguished patrons who spoke well of him.
+While still new to town he came to know Lord Southampton, to whom he
+dedicated “Venus and Adonis”; the fulsome dedication of “Lucrece” to the
+same nobleman two years later shows that deference had rapidly ripened
+into affectionate devotion; no wonder Rowe noticed the “too great
+sweetness in his manners.” Thinking of his intimacy with Southampton on
+the one hand and Bardolph on the other, one is constrained to say of
+Shakespeare what Apemantus says of Timon:
+
+  “The middle of humanity thou never knewest,
+  But the extremity of both ends.”
+
+In the extremes characters show themselves more clearly than they do in
+the middle classes; at both ends of society speech and deed are
+unrestrained. Falstaff and Bardolph and the rest were free of convention
+by being below it, just as Bassanio and Mercutio were free because they
+were above it, and made the rules. The young lord did what he pleased,
+and spoke his mind as plainly as the footpad. Life at both ends was the
+very school for quick, sympathetic Shakespeare. But even in early
+manhood, as soon as he came to himself and found his work, one other
+quality is as plain in Shakespeare as even his humour--high impartial
+intellect with sincere ethical judgement. He judges even Falstaff
+severely, to the point of harshness, indeed; as he judged himself later
+in Enobarbus. This high critical faculty pervades all his work. But it
+must not be thought that his conduct was as scrupulous as his
+principles, or his will as sovereign as his intelligence. That he was a
+loose-liver while in London is well attested. Contemporary anecdotes
+generally hit off a man's peculiarities, and the only anecdote of
+Shakespeare that is known to have been told about him in his lifetime
+illustrates this master trait of his character. Burbage, we are told,
+when playing Richard III., arranged with a lady in the audience to visit
+her after the performance. Shakespeare overheard the rendezvous,
+anticipated his fellow's visit, and met Burbage on his arrival with the
+jibe that “William the Conqueror came before Richard III.” The lightness
+is no doubt as characteristic of Shakespeare as the impudent humour.
+
+There is another fact in Shakespeare's life which throws almost as much
+light on his character as his marriage. He seems to have come to riches
+very early and very easily. As we have seen, he was never able to paint
+a miser, which confirms Jonson's testimony that he was “of an open and
+free nature.” In 1597 he went down to Stratford and bought New Place,
+then in ruinous condition, but the chief house in the town, for £60; he
+spent at least as much more between 1597 and 1599 in rebuilding the
+house and stocking the barns with grain. In 1602 we find that he
+purchased from William and John Combe, of Stratford, a hundred and seven
+acres of arable land near the town, for which he paid £320; in 1605,
+too, he bought for £440 a moiety of the tithes of Stratford for an
+unexpired term of thirty-one years, which investment seems to have
+brought him in little except a wearisome lawsuit.
+
+Now, how did the poet obtain this thousand pounds or so? English
+apologists naturally assume that he was a “good business man”; with
+delicious unconscious irony they one and all picture the man who hated
+tradesmen as himself a sort of thrifty tradesman-soul--a master of
+practical life who looked after the pennies from the beginning. These
+commentators all treat Shakespeare as the Hebrews treated God; they make
+him in their own likeness. In Shakespeare's case this practice leads to
+absurdity. Let us take the strongest advocate of the accepted view.
+Dryasdust is at pains to prove that Shakespeare's emoluments, even as an
+actor in the '90's, were not likely to have fallen below a hundred a
+year; but even Dryasdust admits that his large earnings came after 1599,
+from his shares in the Globe Theatre, and is inclined “to accept the
+tradition that Shakespeare received from the Earl of Southampton a large
+gift of money.” As Southampton came of age in 1595, he may well out of
+his riches have helped the man who had dedicated his poems to him with
+servile adulation. Moreover, the statement is put forward by Rowe, who
+is certainly more trustworthy than the general run of gossip-mongers,
+and his account of the matter proves that he did not accept the story
+with eager credulity, but as one compelled by authority. Here is what he
+says:
+
+“There is one story so singular in magnificence of this patron of
+Shakspeare that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down
+by Sir Wm. D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his
+affairs, I should not have ventured to insert that my lord Southampton,
+at one time, gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with
+a purchase to which he heard he had a mind. A bounty very great, and
+very rare at any time, almost equal to that profuse generosity the
+present age has shown to French dancers and Italian Eunuchs.”
+
+It seems to me a great deal more likely that this munificent gift of
+Southampton was the source of Shakespeare's wealth than that he added
+coin to coin in saving, careful fashion. It may be said at once that all
+the evidence we have is in favour of Shakespeare's extravagance, and
+against his thrift. As we have seen, when studying “The Merchant of
+Venice,” the presumption is that he looked upon saving with contempt, and
+was himself freehanded to a fault. The Rev. John Ward, who was Vicar
+of Stratford from 1648 to 1679, tells us “that he spent at the rate of a
+thousand a year, as I have heard.”
+
+It is impossible to deny that Shakespeare got rid of a great deal of
+money even after his retirement to Stratford; and men accustomed to save
+are not likely to become prodigal in old age.
+
+On the 10th March, 1613, Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars for
+£140; the next day he executed another deed, now in the British Museum,
+which stipulated that £60 of the purchase-money was to remain on
+mortgage until the following Michaelmas; the money was unpaid at
+Shakespeare's death, which seems to me to argue a certain carelessness,
+to say the least of it.
+
+Dryasdust makes out that Shakespeare, in the years from 1600 to 1612,
+was earning about six hundred a year in the money of the period, or
+nearly five thousand a year of our money, and yet he was unable or
+unwilling to pay off a paltry £60.
+
+After passing the last five years of his life in village Stratford,
+where he could not possibly have found many opportunities of
+extravagance, he was only able to leave a little more than one year's
+income. He willed New Place to his elder daughter, Susanna Hall,
+together with the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford (except
+the tenement in Chapel Lane), and the house in Blackfriars, London, all
+together equal, at the most, to five or six hundred pounds; and to his
+younger daughter, Judith, he bequeathed the tenement in Chapel Lane,
+£150 in money, and another £150 to be paid if she was alive three years
+after the date of the will. Nine hundred pounds, or so, of the money of
+the period, would cover all he possessed at death. When we consider
+these things, it becomes plain, I think, that Shakespeare was
+extravagant to lavishness even in cautious age. While in London he no
+doubt earned and was given large sums of money; but he was free-handed
+and careless, and died far poorer than one would have expected from an
+ordinarily thrifty man. The loose-liver is usually a spendthrift.
+
+There are worse faults to be laid to his account than lechery and
+extravagance. Every one who has read his works with any care must admit
+that Shakespeare was a snob of the purest English water. Aristocratic
+tastes were natural to him; inherent, indeed, in the delicate
+sensitiveness of his beauty-loving temperament; but he desired the
+outward and visible signs of gentility as much as any podgy millionaire
+of our time, and stooped as low to get them as man could stoop. In 1596,
+his young son, Hamnet, died at Stratford, and was buried on 11th August
+in the parish church. This event called Shakespeare back to his village,
+and while he was there he most probably paid his father's debts, and
+certainly tried to acquire for himself and his successors the position
+of gentlefolk. He induced his father to make application to the College
+of Heralds for a coat of arms, on the ground not only that his father
+was a man of substance, but that he had also married into a “worshipful”
+ family. The draft grant of arms was not executed at the time. It may
+have been that the father's pecuniary position became known to the
+College, or perhaps the profession of the son created difficulties;
+but in any case nothing was done for some time. In 1597, however, the
+Earl of Essex became Earl Marshal and Chief of the Heralds' College, and
+the scholar and antiquary, William Camden, joined the College as
+Clarenceux King of Arms. Shakespeare must have been known to the Earl of
+Essex, who was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton; he was
+indeed almost certainly a friend and admirer of Essex. The Shakespeares'
+second application to be admitted to the status of gentlefolk took a new
+form. They asserted roundly that the coat as set out in the draft of
+1596 had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the
+heralds were asked to give him a “recognition” of it. At the same time
+John Shakespeare asked for permission to quarter on his “ancient coat of
+arms” that of the Ardens of Wilmscote, his wife's family. But this was
+going too far, even for a friend of Essex. To grant such a request might
+have got the College into trouble with the influential Warwickshire
+family of Arden, and so it was refused; but the grant was “recognized,”
+ and Shakespeare's peculiar ambition was satisfied.
+
+Every single incident in his life bears out what we have learned from
+his works. In all his writings he praises lords and gentlemen, and runs
+down the citizens and common people, and in his life he spent some
+years, a good deal of trouble, and many impudent lies in getting for his
+father a grant of arms and recognition as a gentleman--a very pitiful
+ambition, but peculiarly English. Shakespeare, one fancies, was a
+gentleman by nature, and a good deal more.
+
+But his snobbishness had other worse results. Partly because of it he
+never got to know the middle classes in England. True, even in his time
+they were excessively Puritanical, which quality hedged them off, so to
+speak, from the playwright-poet. With his usual gentleness or timidity,
+Shakespeare never tells us directly what he thought of the Puritans, but
+his half-averted, contemptuous glance at them in passing, is very
+significant. Angelo, the would-be Puritan ruler, was a “false seemer,”
+ Malvolio was a “chough.” The peculiar virtues of the English middle
+class, its courage and sheepishness; its good conduct and respect for
+duties; its religious sense and cocksure narrow-mindedness, held no
+attraction for Shakespeare, and, armoured in snobbishness, he utterly
+missed what a knowledge of the middle classes might have given him.
+
+Let us take one instance of his loss. Though he lived in an age of
+fanaticism, he never drew a fanatic or reformer, never conceived a man
+as swimming against the stream of his time. He had but a vague
+conception of the few spirits in each age who lead humanity to new and
+higher ideals; he could not understand a Christ or a Mahomet, and it
+seems as if he took but small interest in Jeanne d'Arc, the noblest
+being that came within the ken of his art. For even if we admit that he
+did not write the first part of “Henry VI.,” it is certain that it
+passed through his hands, and that in his youth, at any rate, he saw
+nothing to correct in that vile and stupid libel on the greatest of
+women. Even the English fanatic escaped his intelligence; his Jack Cade,
+as I have already noticed, is a wretched caricature; no Cade moves his
+fellows save by appealing to the best in them, to their sense of
+justice, or what they take for justice. The Cade who will wheedle men
+for his own gross ambitions may make a few dupes, but not thousands of
+devoted followers. These elementary truths Shakespeare never understood.
+Yet how much greater he would have been had he understood them; had he
+studied even one Puritan lovingly and depicted him sympathetically. For
+the fanatic is one of the hinges which swing the door of the modern
+world. Shakespeare's “universal sympathy”--to quote Coleridge--did not
+include the plainly-clad tub-thumper who dared to accuse him to his face
+of serving the Babylonish Whore. Shakespeare sneered at the Puritan
+instead of studying him; with the result that he belongs rather to the
+Renaissance than to the modern world, in spite even of his Hamlet. The
+best of a Wordsworth or a Turgenief is outside him; he would never have
+understood a Marianna or a Bazarof, and the noble faith of the sonnet to
+“Toussaint l'Ouverture” was quite beyond him. He could never have
+written:
+
+                              “Thou hast left behind
+  Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies;
+  There's not a breathing of the common wind
+  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
+  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
+  And love, and man's unconquerable mind.”
+
+It is time to speak of him frankly; he was gentle, and witty; gay, and
+sweet-mannered, very studious, too, and fair of mind; but at the same
+time he was weak in body and irresolute, hasty and wordy, and took
+habitually the easiest way out of difficulties; he was ill-endowed in
+the virile virtues and virile vices. When he showed arrogance it was
+always of intellect and not of character; he was a parasite by nature.
+But none of these faults would have brought him to ruin; he was snared
+again in full manhood by his master-quality, his overpowering
+sensuality, and thrown in the mire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE--continued
+
+
+Shakespeare's life seems to fall sharply into two halves. Till he met
+Mistress Fitton, about 1597, he must have been happy and well content, I
+think, in spite of his deep underlying melancholy. According to my
+reckoning he had been in London about ten years, and no man has ever
+done so much in the time and been so successful even as the world counts
+success. He had not only written the early poems and the early plays,
+but in the last three or four years half-a-dozen masterpieces: “A
+Midsummer's Night's Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Richard II.,” “King
+John,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “The Two Parts of Henry IV.” At
+thirty-three he was already the greatest poet and dramatist of whom Time
+holds any record.
+
+Southampton's bounty had given him ease, and allowed him to discharge
+his father's debts, and place his dearly loved mother in a position of
+comfort in the best house in Stratford.
+
+He had troops of friends, we may be sure, for there was no gentler,
+gayer, kindlier creature in all London, and he set store by friendship.
+Ten years before he had neither money, place, nor position; now he had
+all these, and was known even at Court. The Queen had been kind to him.
+He ended the epilogue to the “Second Part of Henry IV.,” which he had
+just finished, by kneeling “to pray for the Queen.” Essex or Southampton
+had no doubt brought his work to Elizabeth's notice: she had approved
+his “Falstaff” and encouraged him to continue. Of all his successes,
+this royal recognition was surely the one which pleased him most. He was
+at the topmost height of happy hours when he met the woman who was to
+change the world for him.
+
+In the lives of great men the typical tragedies are likely to repeat
+themselves. Socrates was condemned to drain many a poisoned cup before
+he was given the bowl of hemlock: Shakespeare had come to grief with
+many women before he fell with Mary Fitton. It was his ungovernable
+sensuality which drove him in youth to his untimely and unhappy
+marriage; it was his ungovernable sensuality, too, which in his maturity
+led him to worship Mary Fitton, and threw him into those twelve years of
+bondage to earthy, coarse service which he regretted so bitterly when
+the passion-fever had burned itself out.
+
+One can easily guess how he came to know the self-willed and wild-living
+maid-of-honour. Like many of the courtiers, Mistress Fitton affected the
+society of the players. Kemp, the clown of his company, knew her, and
+dedicated a book to her rather familiarly. I have always thought that
+Shakespeare resented Kemp's intimacy with Mistress Fitton, for when
+Hamlet advises the players to prevent the clown from gagging, he adds,
+with a snarl of personal spite:
+
+  “a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”
+
+Mary Fitton's position, her proud, dark beauty, her daring of speech and
+deed took Shakespeare by storm. She was his complement in every failing;
+her strength matched his weakness; her resolution his hesitation, her
+boldness his timidity; besides, she was of rank and place, and out of
+pure snobbery he felt himself her inferior. He forgot that humble
+worship was not the way to win a high-spirited girl. He loved her so
+abjectly that he lost her; and it was undoubtedly his overpowering
+sensuality and snobbishness which brought him to his knees, and his love
+to ruin. He could not even keep her after winning her; desire blinded
+him. He would not see that Mary Fitton was not a wanton through mere
+lust. As soon as her fancy was touched she gave herself; but she was
+true to the new lover for the time. We know that she bore a son to
+Pembroke and two illegitimate daughters to Sir Richard Leveson. Her
+slips with these men wounded Shakespeare's vanity, and he persisted in
+underrating her. Let us probe to the root of the secret sore. Here is a
+page of “Troilus and Cressida,” a page from that terrible fourth scene
+of the fourth act, when Troilus, having to part from Cressida, warns her
+against the Greeks and their proficience in the arts of love:
+
+  “_Troilus_.      I cannot sing
+  Nor heel the high lavolt, nor sweeten talk,
+  Nor play at subtle games; fair virtues all,
+  To which the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant:
+  But I can tell thee in each grace of these
+  There lurks a still and dumb-discoursive devil
+  That tempts most cunningly: but be not tempted.
+
+  _Cressida._ Do you think I will?
+
+  _Troilus. No: but something may be done that we will not._”
+
+The first lines show that poor Shakespeare often felt out of it at
+Court. The suggestion, I have put in italics, is unspeakable.
+Shakespeare made use of every sensual bait in hope of winning his love,
+liming himself and not the woman. His vanity was so inordinate that
+instead of saying to himself, “it's natural that a high-born girl of
+nineteen should prefer a great lord of her own age to a poor poet of
+thirty-four”: he strives to persuade himself and us that Mary Fitton was
+won away from him by “subtle games,” and in his rage of wounded vanity
+he wrote that tremendous libel on her, which he put in the mouth of
+Ulysses:
+
+                      “Fie, fie upon her!
+  There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
+  Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
+  At every joint and motive of her body.
+  O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
+  That give accosting welcome ere it comes,
+  And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
+  To every ticklish reader! set them down
+  For sluttish spoils of opportunity
+  And daughters of the game.”
+
+His tortured sensuality caricatures her: that “ticklish reader” reveals
+him. Mary Fitton was finer than his portraits; we want her soul, and do
+not get it even in Cleopatra. It was the consciousness of his own age
+and physical inferiority that drove him to jealous denigration of his
+mistress.
+
+Mary Fitton did not beguile Shakespeare to “the very heart of loss,” as
+he cried; but to the innermost shrine of the temple of Fame. It was his
+absolute abandonment to passion which made Shakespeare the supreme poet.
+If it had not been for his excessive sensuality, and his mad passion for
+his “gipsy,” we should never have had from him “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,”
+ “Othello,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” or “Lear.” He would still have been a
+poet and a dramatic writer of the first rank; but he would not have
+stood alone above all others: he would not have been Shakespeare.
+
+His passion for Mary Fitton lasted some twelve years. Again and again he
+lived golden hours with her like those Cleopatra boasted of and
+regretted. Life is wasted quickly in such orgasms of passion; lust
+whipped to madness by jealousy. Mary Fitton was the only woman
+Shakespeare ever loved, or at least, the only woman he loved with such
+intensity as to influence his art. She was Rosaline, Cressid, Cleopatra,
+and the “dark lady” of the sonnets. All his other women are parts of her
+or reflections of her, as all his heroes are sides of Hamlet, or
+reflections of him. Portia is the first full-length sketch of Mary
+Fitton, taken at a distance: Beatrice and Rosalind are mere reflections
+of her high spirits, her aristocratic pride and charm: her strength and
+resolution are incarnate in Lady Macbeth. Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia,
+are but abstract longings for purity and constancy called into life by
+his mistress's faithlessness and passion.
+
+Shakespeare admired Mary Fitton as intensely as he desired her, yet he
+could not be faithful to her for the dozen years his passion lasted.
+Love and her soft hours drew him irresistibly again and again: he was
+the ready spoil of opportunity. Here is one instance: it was his custom,
+Aubrey tells us, to visit Stratford every year, probably every summer:
+on his way he was accustomed to put up at an inn in Oxford, kept by John
+D'Avenant. Mrs. D'Avenant, we are told, was “a very beautiful woman, and
+of a very good witt and of conversation extremely agreeable.” No doubt
+Shakespeare made up to her from the first. Her second son, William, who
+afterwards became the celebrated playwright, was born in March, 1605,
+and according to a tradition long current in Oxford, Shakespeare was his
+father. In later life Sir William D'Avenant himself was “contented
+enough to be thought his (Shakespeare's) son.” There is every reason to
+accept the story as it has been handed down. Shakespeare, as Troilus,
+brags of his constancy; talks of himself as “plain and true”; but it was
+all boasting: from eighteen to forty-five he was as inconstant as the
+wind, and gave himself to all the “subtle games” of love with absolute
+abandonment, till his health broke under the strain.
+
+In several of the Sonnets, notably in 36 and 37, Shakespeare tells us
+that he was “poor and despised ... made lame by fortune's dearest
+spite.” He will not even have his friend's name coupled with his for
+fear lest his “bewailed guilt” should do him shame:
+
+  “Let me confess that we two must be twain,
+  Although our undivided loves are one:
+  So shall those blots that do with me remain
+  Without thy help, by me be borne alone....”
+
+Spalding and other critics believe that this “guilt” of Shakespeare
+refers to his profession as an actor, but that stain should not have
+prevented Lord Herbert from honouring him with “public kindness.” It is
+clear, I think, from the words themselves, that the guilt refers to the
+fact that both Herbert and he were in love with the same woman. Jonson,
+as we have seen, had poked fun at their connection, and this is how
+Shakespeare tries to take the sting out of the sneer.
+
+Shakespeare had many of the weaknesses of the neurotic and artistic
+temperament, but he had assuredly the noblest virtues of it: he was true
+to his friends, and more than generous to their merits.
+
+If his ethical conscience was faulty, his aesthetical conscience was of
+the very highest. Whenever we find him in close relations with his
+contemporaries we are struck with his kindness and high impartial
+intelligence. Were they his rivals, he found the perfect word for their
+merits and shortcomings. How can one better praise Chapman than by
+talking of
+
+  “The proud full sail of his great verse”?
+
+How can one touch his defect more lightly than by hinting that his
+learning needed feathers to lift it from the ground? And if Shakespeare
+was fair even to his rivals, his friends could always reckon on his
+goodwill and his unwearied service. All his fine qualities came out when
+as an elder he met churlish Ben Jonson. Jonson did not influence him as
+much as Marlowe had influenced him; but these were the two greatest of
+living men with whom he was brought into close contact, and his
+relations with Jonson show him as in a glass. Rowe has a characteristic
+story which must not be forgotten:
+
+  “His acquaintance with Ben Jonson began with a remarkable
+  piece of humanity and good-nature; Mr. Jonson,
+  who was at that time altogether unknown, had offered
+  one of his playes to the Players, in order to have it
+  acted; but the persons into whose hands it was put, after
+  having turned it carelessly and superciliously over, were
+  just upon returning it to him, with an ill-natured answer,
+  that it would be of no service to their company, when
+  Shakespeare luckily cast his eye upon it, and found something
+  so well in it as to encourage him to read through
+  and afterwards to recommend Ben Jonson and his writings
+  to the publick. After this they were professed
+  friends; though I don't know whether the other ever
+  made him an equal return of gentleness and sincerity.
+  Ben was naturally proud and indolent, and in the days
+  of his reputation did so far take upon him the premier
+  in witt that he could not but look with an evil eye upon
+  anyone that seemed to stand in competition with him.
+  And if at times he has affected to commend him, it has
+  always been with some reserve, insinuating his incorrectness,
+  a careless manner of writing and a want of judgment;
+  the praise of seldom altering or blotting out what
+  he writt which was given him by the players over the first
+  publish of his works after his death was what Jonson
+  could not bear....”
+
+The story reads exactly like the story of Goethe and Schiller. It was
+Schiller who held aloof and was full of fault-finding criticism: it was
+Goethe who made all the advances and did all the kindnesses. It was
+Goethe who obtained for Schiller that place as professor of history at
+Jena which gave Schiller the leisure needed for his dramatic work. It is
+always the greater who gives and forgives.
+
+I believe, of course, too, in the traditional account of the
+unforgettable evenings at the Mermaid. “Many were the wit-combats,”
+ wrote Fuller of Shakespeare in his “Worthies” (1662), “betwixt him and
+Ben Jonson, which too I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an
+English man of war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher
+in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the
+English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn
+with all sides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the
+quickness of his wit and invention.”
+
+It was natural for the onlooker to compare Ben Jonson and his
+“mountainous belly” to some Spanish galleon, and Shakespeare, with his
+quicker wit, to the more active English ship. It was Jonson's great
+size--a quality which has always been too highly esteemed in
+England--his domineering temper and desperate personal courage that
+induced the gossip to even him with Shakespeare.
+
+Beaumont described these meetings, too, in his poetical letter to his
+friend Jonson:
+
+                   “What things have we seen
+  Done at the Mermaid? Heard words that have been
+  So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
+  As if that every one from whence they came
+  Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
+  And had resolved to live a fool the rest
+  Of his dull life.”
+
+In one respect at least the two men were antitheses. Jonson was
+exceedingly combative and quarrelsome, and seems to have taken a chief
+part in all the bitter disputes of his time between actors and men of
+letters. He killed one actor in a duel and attacked Marston and Dekker
+in “The Poetaster”; they replied to him in the “Satiromastix.” More than
+once he criticized Shakespeare's writings; more than once jibed at
+Shakespeare, unfairly trying to wound him; but Shakespeare would not
+retort. It is to Jonson's credit that though he found fault with
+Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar” and “Pericles,” he yet wrote of him in the
+“Poetaster” as a peacemaker, and, under the name of Virgil, honoured him
+as the greatest master of poetry.
+
+Tradition gives us one witty story about the relations between the pair
+which seems to me extraordinarily characteristic. Shakespeare was
+godfather to one of Ben's children, and after the christening, being in
+a deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up, and asked him why he was so
+melancholy. “No, faith, Ben,” says he; “not I, but I have been
+considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to
+bestow upon my godchild and I have resolved at last.” “I pr'ythee,
+what?” sayes he. “I'faith, Ben, I'll e'en give him a dozen good Lattin
+spoons, and thou shalt translate them.” Lattin, as everybody knows, was
+a mixed metal resembling brass: the play upon words and sly fun poked at
+Jonson's scholarship are in Shakespeare's best manner. The story must be
+regarded as Shakespeare's answer to Jonson's sneer that he had “little
+Latine and lesse Greeke.”
+
+Through the mist of tradition and more or less uncertain references in
+his poetry, one sees that he had come, probably through Southampton, to
+admire Essex, and the fall and execution of Essex had an immense effect
+upon him. It is certain, I think, that the noble speech on mercy put
+into Portia's mouth in “The Merchant of Venice,” was primarily an appeal
+to Elizabeth for Essex or for Southampton. It is plainly addressed to
+the Queen, and not to a Jew pariah:
+
+                “... It becomes
+  The throned monarch better than his crown;
+  His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
+  The attribute to awe and majesty,
+  Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
+  But mercy is above this scepter'd sway,
+  It is enthroned in the heart of kings.
+  It is an attribute of God Himself,
+  And earthly power doth then show likest God's,
+  When Mercy seasons Justice.”
+
+All this must have seemed the veriest irony when addressed to an outcast
+Jew. It was clearly intended as an appeal to Elizabeth, and shows how
+far gentle Shakespeare would venture in defence of a friend. Like a
+woman, he gained a certain courage through his affections.
+
+I feel convinced that he resented the condemnation of Essex and the
+imprisonment of Southampton very bitterly, for though he had praised
+Elizabeth in his salad days again and again, talked about her in “A
+Midsummer Night's Dream” as a “fair vestal throned by the west”; walking
+in “maiden meditation, fancy-free”; yet, when she died, he could not be
+induced to write one word about her. His silence was noticed, and
+Chettle challenged him to write in praise of the dead sovereign, because
+she had been kind to him; but he would not: he had come to realise the
+harsh nature of Elizabeth, and he detested her ruthless cruelties. Like
+a woman, he found it difficult to forgive one who had injured those he
+loved. Now that I have discussed at some length Shakespeare's character,
+its powers and its weaknesses, let us for a moment consider his
+intellect. All sorts and conditions of men talk of it in superlatives;
+but that does not help us much. It is as easy to sit in Shakespeare's
+brain and think from there, as it is from Balzac's. If we have read
+Shakespeare rightly, his intelligence was peculiarly self-centred; he
+was wise mainly through self-knowledge, and not, as is commonly
+supposed, through knowledge of others and observation; he was assuredly
+anything but worldly-wise. Take one little point. In nearly every play
+he discovers an intense love of music and of flowers; but he never tells
+you anything about the music he loves, and he only mentions a dozen
+flowers in all his works. True, he finds exquisite phrases for his
+favourites; but he only seems to have noticed or known the commonest.
+His knowledge of birds and beasts is similarly limited. But when Bacon
+praises flowers he shows at once the naturalist's gift of observation;
+he mentions hundreds of different kinds, enumerating them month by
+month; in April alone he names as many as Shakespeare has mentioned in
+all his writings. He used his eyes to study things outside himself, and
+memory to recall them; but Shakespeare's eyes were turned inward; he
+knew little of the world outside himself.
+
+Shakespeare's knowledge of men and women has been overrated. With all
+his sensuality he only knew one woman, Mary Fitton, though he knew her
+in every mood, and only one man, himself, profoundly apprehended in
+every accident and moment of growth.
+
+He could not construct plays or invent stories, though he selected good
+ones with considerable certainty. He often enriched the characters,
+seldom or never the incidents; even the characters he creates are
+usually sides of himself, or humorous masks without a soul. He must have
+heard of the statesman Burleigh often enough; but nowhere does he
+portray him; no hint in his works of Drake, or Raleigh, or Elizabeth, or
+Sidney. He has no care either for novelties; he never mentions forks or
+even tobacco or potatoes. A student by nature if ever there was one, all
+intent, as he tells us, on bettering his mind, he passes through Oxford
+a hundred times and never even mentions the schools: Oxford men had
+disgusted him with their _alma mater_.
+
+The utmost reach of this self-student is extraordinary; the main puzzle
+of life is hidden from us as from him; but his word on it is deeper than
+any of ours, though we have had three centuries in which to climb above
+him.
+
+                      “Men must abide
+  Their going hence even as their coming hither.
+  Ripeness is all.”
+
+And if it be said that the men of the Renaissance occupied themselves
+more with such questions than we do, and therefore show better in
+relation to them, let us take another phrase which has always seemed to
+me of extraordinary insight. Antony has beaten Caesar, and returns to
+Cleopatra, who greets him with the astounding words:
+
+                      “Lord of lords,
+  O, infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from
+  The world's great snare uncaught?”
+
+This is all more or less appropriate in the mouth of Cleopatra; but it
+is to me Shakespeare's own comment on life; he is conscious of his
+failure; he has said to himself: “if I, Shakespeare, have failed, it is
+because every one fails; life's handicap searches out every weakness; to
+go through life as a conqueror would require 'infinite virtue.'” This is
+perhaps the furthest throw of Shakespeare's thought.
+
+But his worldly wisdom is to seek. After he had been betrayed by Lord
+Herbert he raves of man's ingratitude, in play after play. Of course men
+are ungrateful; it is only the rarest and noblest natures who can feel
+thankful for help without any injury to vanity. The majority of men love
+their inferiors, those whom they help; to give flatters self-esteem; but
+they hate their superiors, and lend to the word “patron” an intolerable
+smirk of condescension. Shakespeare should have understood that at
+thirty.
+
+When his vanity was injured, his blindness was almost inconceivable. He
+should have seen Mary Fitton as she was and given us a deathless-true
+portrait of her; but the noble side of her, the soul-side a lover should
+have cherished, is not even suggested. He deserved to lose her, seeking
+only the common, careless of the “silent, silver lights” she could have
+shown him. He was just as blind with his wife; she had been unwillingly
+the ladder to his advancement; he should have forgiven her on that
+ground, if not on a higher.
+
+He was inordinately vain and self-centred. He talked incontinently, as
+he himself assures us, and as Ben Jonson complains. He was exceedingly
+quick and witty and impatient. His language shows his speed of thought;
+again and again the images tumble over each other, and the mere music of
+his verse is breathlessly rapid, just as the movement of Tennyson's
+verse is extremely slow.
+
+More than once in his works I have shown how, at the crisis of fate, he
+jumps to conclusions like a woman. He seems often to have realized the
+faults of his own haste. His Othello says:
+
+  “How poor are they that have not patience.”
+
+With this speed of thought and wealth of language and of wit, he
+naturally loved to show off in conversation; but as he wished to get on
+and make a figure in the world, he should have talked less and
+encouraged his patrons to show off. Poor heedless, witty, charming
+Shakespeare! One threat which he used again and again, discovers all his
+world-blindness to me. Gravely, in sonnet 140, he warns Mary Fitton that
+she had better not provoke him or he will write the truth about
+her--just as if the maid of honour who could bear bastard after bastard,
+while living at court, cared one straw what poor Shakespeare might say
+or write or sing of her. And Hamlet runs to the same weapon: he praises
+the players to Polonius as
+
+  “Brief chronicles of the time; after your death you
+  were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while
+  you live.”
+
+It is all untrue; actors were then, as now, only mummers without
+judgement. Shakespeare was thinking of himself, the dramatist-poet, who
+was indeed a chronicle of the time; but the courtier Lord Polonius would
+not care a dam for a rhymester's praise or blame. Posthumus, too, will
+write against the wantons he dislikes. Shakespeare's weapon of offence
+was his pen; but though he threatened, he seldom used it maliciously; he
+was indeed a “harmless opposite,” too full of the milk of human kindness
+to do injury to any man. But these instances of misapprehension in the
+simple things of life, show us that gentle Shakespeare is no trustworthy
+guide through this rough all-hating world. The time has now come for me
+to consider how Shakespeare was treated by the men of his own time, and
+how this treatment affected his character. The commentators, of course,
+all present him as walking through life as a sort of uncrowned king,
+fêted and reverenced on all sides during his residence in London, and in
+the fullness of years and honours retiring to Stratford to live out the
+remainder of his days in the bosom of his family as “a prosperous
+country gentleman,” to use Dowden's unhappy phrase. As I have already
+shown, his works give the lie to this flattering fiction, which in all
+parts is of course absolutely incredible. It is your Tennyson, who is of
+his time and in perfect sympathy with it; Tennyson, with his May Queens,
+prig heroes and syrupy creed, who passes through life as a conqueror,
+and after death is borne in state to rest in the great Abbey.
+
+The Shakespeares, not being of an age, but for all time, have another
+guess sort of reception. From the moment young Will came to London, he
+was treated as an upstart, without gentle birth or college training: to
+Greene he was “Maister of Artes in Neither University.” He won through,
+and did his work; but he never could take root in life; his children
+perished out of the land. He was in high company on sufferance. On the
+stage he met the highest, Essex, Pembroke, Southampton, on terms of
+equality; but at court he stood among the menials and was despitefully
+treated. Let no one misunderstand me: I should delight in painting the
+other picture if there were any truth in it: I should have joyed in
+showing how the English aristocracy for this once threw off their
+senseless pride and hailed the greatest of men at least as an equal.
+Frederic the Great would have done this, for he put Voltaire at his own
+table, and told his astonished chamberlains that “privileged spirits
+rank with sovereigns.” Such wisdom was altogether above the English
+aristocracy of that or any time. Yet they might have risen above the
+common in this one instance. For Shakespeare had not only supreme genius
+to commend him, but all the graces of manner, all the sweetness of
+disposition, all the exquisite courtesies of speech that go to ensure
+social success. His imperial intelligence, however, was too heavy a
+handicap. Men resent superiority at all times, and there is nothing your
+aristocrat so much dislikes as intellectual superiority, and especially
+intellect that is not hall-marked and accredited: the Southamptons and
+the Pembrokes must have found Shakespeare's insight and impartiality
+intolerable. It was Ben Jonson whom Pembroke made Poet Laureate; it was
+Chapman the learned, and not Shakespeare, who was regarded with
+reverence. How could these gentlemen appreciate Shakespeare when it was
+his “Venus and Adonis” and his “Lucrece” that they chiefly admired.
+“Venus and Adonis” went through seven editions in Shakespeare's
+lifetime, while “Othello” was not thought worthy of type till the author
+had been dead six years.
+
+But badly as the aristocrats treated Shakespeare they yet treated him
+better than any other class. The shopkeepers in England are infinitely
+further removed from art or poetry than the nobles; now as in the time
+of Elizabeth they care infinitely more for beef and beer and broadcloth
+than for any spiritual enjoyment; while the masses of the people prefer
+a dog-fight to any masterpiece in art or letters.
+
+Some will say that Shakespeare was perhaps condemned for dissolute
+living, and did not come to honour because of his shortcomings in
+character. Such a judgement misapprehends life altogether. Had
+Shakespeare's character been as high as his intellect he would not have
+been left contemptuously on one side; he would have been hated and
+persecuted, pilloried or thrown into prison as Bunyan was. It was his
+dissolute life that commended him to the liking of the loose-living
+Pembroke and Essex. Pembroke, we know from Clarendon, was “immoderately
+given to women.” Four maids of honour, we learn, were _enceintes_
+to Essex at the same time. Shakespeare was hardly as dissolute as his
+noble patrons. The truth was they could not understand his genius; they
+had no measure wherewith to measure it, for no one can see above his own
+head; and so they treated him with much the same condescending
+familiarity that nobles nowadays show to a tenor or a ballet dancer. In
+March, 1604, after he had written “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” Shakespeare
+and some other actors walked from the Tower of London to Westminster in
+the procession which accompanied King James on his formal entry into
+London. Each of the actors received four and a half yards of scarlet
+cloth to wear as a cloak on the occasion. The scarlet cloak to
+Shakespeare must have been a sort of Nessus' shirt, or crown of
+thorns--the livery of derision.
+
+Shakespeare, who measured both enemies and friends fairly, measured
+himself fairly, too. He usually praises his impersonations: Hamlet is “a
+noble heart,” Brutus “the noblest Roman of them all”; and speaking
+directly he said of himself in a sonnet:
+
+  “I am that I am, and they that level
+  At my abuses reckon up their own;
+  I may be straight though they themselves be bevel.”
+
+He knew his own greatness, none better, and as soon as he reached middle
+age and began to take stock of himself, he must have felt bitterly that
+he, the best mind in the world, had not brought it far in the ordinary
+estimation of men. No wonder he showed passionate sympathy with all
+those who had failed in life; he could identify himself with Brutus and
+Antony, and not with the Caesars.
+
+Shakespeare's view of England and of Englishmen was naturally affected
+by their treatment of him. He is continually spoken of as patriotic, and
+it is true that he started in youth with an almost lyrical love of
+country. His words in “Richard II.” are often quoted; but they were
+written before he had any experience or knowledge of men.
+
+    “_Gaunt_. This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
+  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
+  This happy breed of men, this little world;
+  This precious stone set in the silver sea,
+  Which serves it in the office of a wall,
+  Or as a moat, defensive to a house,
+  Against the envy of less happier lands;
+  This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
+
+The apologists who rejoice in his patriotism never realize that
+Shakespeare did not hold the same opinions throughout his life; as he
+grew and developed, his opinions developed with him. In “The Merchant of
+Venice” we find that he has already come to saner vision; when Portia
+and Nerissa talk of the English suitor, Portia says:
+
+    “You know I say nothing to him; for he understands
+  not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latin, French, nor
+  Italian; and you will come into the court and swear that
+  I have a poor pennyworth in the Englishman. He is a
+  proper man's picture; but, alas, who can converse with a
+  dumb show? How oddly he is suited! I think he bought
+  his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet
+  in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere.”
+
+What super-excellent criticism it all is; true, now as then, “a proper
+man's picture but ... a dumb show.” It proves conclusively that
+Shakespeare was able to see around and over the young English noble of
+his day. From this time on I find no praise of England or of Englishmen
+in any of his works, except “Henry V.,” which was manifestly written to
+catch applause on account of its jingoism. In his maturity Shakespeare
+saw his countrymen as they were, and mentioned them chiefly to blame
+their love of drinking. Imogen says:
+
+  “Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day, night,
+  Are they not but in Britain?..........................prithee, think
+  There's livers out of Britain.”
+
+Whoever reads “Coriolanus” carefully will see how Shakespeare loathed
+the common Englishman; there can be no doubt at all that he incorporated
+his dislike of him once for all in Caliban. The qualities he lends
+Caliban are all characteristic. Whoever will give him drink is to
+Caliban a god. The brutish creature would violate and degrade art
+without a scruple, and the soul of him is given in the phrase that if he
+got the chance he would people the world with Calibans. Sometimes one
+thinks that if Shakespeare were living to-day he would be inclined to
+say that his prediction had come true.
+
+One could have guessed without proof that in the course of his life
+Shakespeare, like Goethe, would rise above that parochial vanity which
+is so much belauded as patriotism. He was in love with the ideal and
+would not confine it to any country.
+
+There is little to tell of his life after he met Mary Fitton, or rather
+the history of his life afterwards is the history of his passion and
+jealousy and madness as he himself has told it in the great tragedies.
+He appears to have grown fat and scant of breath when he was about
+thirty-six or seven. In 1608 his mother died, and “Coriolanus” was
+written as a sort of monument to the memory of “the noblest mother in
+the world.” His intimacy with Mary Fitton lasted, I feel sure, up to his
+breakdown in 1608 or thereabouts, and was probably the chief cause of
+his infirmity and untimely death.
+
+It only remains for me now to say a word or two about the end of his
+life. Rowe says that “the latter part of his life was spent as all men
+of good sense will that theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the
+conversation of his friends. He had the good fortune to gather an estate
+equal to his occasion, and, in that, to his wish, and is said to have
+spent some years before his death at his native Stratford.” Rowe, too,
+tells us that it is a story “well remembered in that country, that he
+had a particular intimacy with Mr. Combe, an old gentleman noted
+thereabouts for his wealth and usury; it happened that in a pleasant
+conversation amongst their common friends Mr. Combe told Shakespeare, in
+a laughing manner, that he fancied he intended to write his epitaph, if
+he happened to outlive him; and since he did not know what might be said
+of him when he was dead, he desired it might be done immediately; upon
+which Shakespeare gave him these four verses:
+
+  “Ten in the Hundred lies here ingrav'd
+  'Tis a Hundred to Ten his soul is not sav'd:
+  If any Man ask, 'Who lies in this tomb,'
+  Oh! ho! quoth the Devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe.”
+
+But the sharpness of the Satyr is said to have stung the man so severely
+that he never forgave him.”
+
+I have given all this because I want the reader to have the sources
+before him, and because the contempt of tradesman-gain and usury, even
+at the very end, is so characteristic.
+
+It appears, too, from the Stratford records, and is therefore certain,
+that as early as the year 1614 a preacher was entertained at New
+Place--“Item, one quart of sack, and one quart of claret wine, given to
+a preacher at the New Place, twenty pence.” The Reverend John Ward, who
+was vicar of Stratford, in a manuscript memorandum book written in the
+year 1664, asserts that “Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Johnson had a
+merie meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a
+feavour there contracted.”
+
+Shakespeare, as we have seen from “The Tempest,” retired to
+Stratford--“where every third thought shall be my grave”--in broken
+health and in a mood of despairing penitence. I do not suppose the mood
+lasted long; but the ill-health and persistent weakness explain to me as
+nothing else could his retirement to Stratford. It is incredible to me
+that Shakespeare should leave London at forty-seven or forty-eight years
+of age, in good health, and retire to Stratford to live as a “prosperous
+country gentleman”! What had Stratford to offer Shakespeare--village
+Stratford with a midden in the chief street and the charms of the
+village usurer's companionship tempered by the ministrations of a
+wandering tub-thumper?
+
+There is abundant evidence, even in “The Winter's Tale” and “Cymbeline,”
+ to prove that the storm which wrecked Shakespeare's life had not blown
+itself out even when these last works were written in 1611-12; the
+jealousy of Leontes is as wild and sensual as the jealousy of Othello;
+the attitude of Posthumus towards women as bitter as anything to be
+found in “Troilus and Cressida”:
+
+                     “Could I find out
+  The woman's part in me! For there's no motion
+  That tends to vice in man but I affirm
+  It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it,
+  The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
+  Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
+  Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
+  Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
+  All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows,
+  Why, hers, in part or all, but rather all;
+  For even to vice
+  They are not constant, but are changing still
+  One vice, but of a minute old, for one
+  Not half so old as that.”
+
+The truth is, that the passions of lust and jealousy and rage had at
+length worn out Shakespeare's strength, and after trying in vain to win
+to serenity in “The Tempest,” he crept home to Stratford to die.
+
+In his native air, I imagine, his health gradually improved; but he was
+never strong enough to venture back to residence in London. He probably
+returned once or twice for a short visit, and during his absence his
+pious daughter, Mrs. Hall, entertained the wandering preacher in New
+Place.
+
+As Shakespeare grew stronger he no doubt talked with Combe, the usurer,
+for want of any one better.
+
+It is probable, too, that on one of his visits to London he took up
+Fletcher's “Henry VIII.” and wrote in some scenes for him and touched up
+others, or Fletcher may have visited him in Stratford and there have
+begged his help.
+
+His youngest daughter, Judith, was married early in 1616; it seems
+probable to me that this was the occasion of the visit of Jonson and
+Drayton to Stratford. No doubt Shakespeare was delighted to meet them,
+talked as few men ever talked before or since, and probably drank too
+much with those “poor unhappy brains for drinking” which his Cassius
+deplored. Thus fanned, the weak flame of his life wasted quickly and
+guttered out. It is all comprehensible enough, and more than likely,
+that the greatest man in the world, after the boredom of solitary years
+spent in Stratford, died through a merry meeting with his friends; in
+his joy and excitement he drank a glass or so of wine, which brought on
+a fever. It is all true, true to character, and pitiful beyond words.
+
+Shakespeare to me is the perfect type of the artist, and the artist is
+gradually coming to his proper place in the world's esteem. In the
+introduction to one of his “Lives,” Plutarch apologizes for writing
+about a painter, a mere artist, instead of about some statesman or
+general, who would be a worthy object of ambition for a well-born youth.
+But since Plutarch's time our view of the relative merits of men has
+changed and developed: to-day we put the artist higher even than the
+saint. Indeed, it seems to us that the hero or statesman, or saint, only
+ranks in proportion to the artist-faculty he may possess. The winning of
+a battle is not enough to engage all our admiration; it must be won by
+an artist. In every department of life this faculty is beginning to be
+appreciated as the finest possession of humanity, and Shakespeare was an
+almost perfect example of the self-conscious artist.
+
+People talk as if his masterpieces were produced at haphazard or by
+unconscious fruition; but masterpieces are not brought forth in this
+happy-go-lucky fashion. They are of the sort that only come to
+flower with perfect tendance. Even if we did not know that Shakespeare
+corrected his finest verses again and again with critical care, we
+should have to assume it. But we know that he spared no pains to better
+his finer inspirations, and he has told us in a sonnet how anxiously he
+thought about his art and the art of his rivals:
+
+  “Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope
+  With what I most enjoy contented least.”
+
+He has all the qualities and all the shortcomings of the reflective,
+humane, sensuous artist temperament, intensified by the fact that he had
+not had the advantage of a middle-class training.
+
+In a dozen ways our Puritan discipline and the rubs and buffets one gets
+in this work-a-day world where money is more highly esteemed than birth
+or sainthood or genius, have brought us beyond Shakespeare in knowledge
+of men and things. The courage of the Puritan, his self-denial and
+self-control, have taught us invaluable lessons; Puritanism tempered
+character as steel is tempered with fire and ice, and the necessity of
+getting one's bread not as a parasite, but as a fighter, has had just as
+important results on character. Shakespeare is no longer an ideal to us;
+no single man can now fill our mental horizon; we can see around and
+above the greatest of the past: the overman of to-day is only on the
+next round of the ladder, and our children will smile at the fatuity of
+his conceit.
+
+But if we can no longer worship Shakespeare, it is impossible not to
+honour him, impossible not to love him. All men--Spenser as well as
+Jonson--found him gentle and witty, gay and generous. He was always
+willing to touch up this man's play or write in an act for that one. He
+never said a bitter or cruel word about any man. Compare him with Dante
+or even with Goethe, and you shall find him vastly superior to either of
+them in loving kindness. He was more contemptuously treated in life than
+even Dante, and yet he never fell away to bitterness as Dante did: he
+complained, it is true; but he never allowed his fairness to be warped;
+he was of the noblest intellectual temper.
+
+It is impossible not to honour him, for the truth is he had more virtue
+in him than any other son of man. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
+ He produced more masterpieces than any other writer, and the finest
+sayings in the world's literature are his. Think of it: Goethe was
+perfectly equipped; he had a magnificent mind and body and temperament:
+he was born in the better middle classes; he was well off; splendidly
+handsome; thoroughly educated; his genius was recognized on all hands
+when he was in his teens; and it was developed by travel and princely
+patronage. Yet what did Goethe do in proof of his advantages? “Faust” is
+the only play he ever wrote that can rank at all with a dozen of
+Shakespeare's. Poor Shakespeare brought it further in the sixteenth
+century than even Goethe at full strain could bring it in the
+nineteenth. I find Shakespeare of surpassing virtue. Cervantes ranks
+with the greatest because he created Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; but
+Hamlet and Falstaff are more significant figures, and take Hamlet and
+Falstaff away from Shakespeare's achievement, and more is left than any
+other poet ever produced.
+
+Harvest after harvest Shakespeare brought forth of astounding quality.
+Yet he was never strong, and he died at fifty-two, and the last six
+years of his life were wasted with weakness and ill-health. No braver
+spirit has ever lived. After “Hamlet” and “Antony and Cleopatra” and
+“Lear” and “Timon” he broke down: yet as soon as he struggled back to
+sanity, he came to the collar again and dug “The Winter's Tale” out of
+himself, and “Cymbeline,” and seeing they were not his best, took
+breath, and brought forth “The Tempest”--another masterpiece,
+though written with a heart of lead and with the death-sweat dank on his
+forehead. Think of it; the noblest autumn fruit ever produced; all
+kindly-sweet and warm, bathed so to speak in love's golden sunshine; his
+last word to men:
+
+  “The rarer action is
+  In virtue than in vengeance....”
+
+And then the master of many styles, including the simple, wins to a
+childlike simplicity, and touches the source of tears:
+
+  “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
+  And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
+
+True, Shakespeare was not the kind of man Englishmen are accustomed to
+admire. By a curious irony of fate Jesus was sent to the Jews, the most
+unworldly soul to the most material of peoples, and Shakespeare to
+Englishmen, the most gentle sensuous charmer to a masculine, rude race.
+It may be well for us to learn what infinite virtue lay in that frail,
+sensual singer.
+
+This dumb struggling world, all in travail between Thought and Being,
+longs above everything to realize itself and become articulate, and
+never has it found such width of understanding, such melody of speech,
+as in this Shakespeare. “I have often said, and will often repeat,”
+ writes Goethe, “that the final cause and consummation of all natural and
+human activity is dramatic poetry.” Englishmen do not appear yet to
+understand what arrogance and what profound wisdom there is in this
+saying; but in a dull, half-conscious way they are beginning dimly to
+realize that the biggest thing they have done in the world yet is to
+produce Shakespeare. When I think of his paltry education, his limiting
+circumstances, the scanty appreciation of his contemporaries, his
+indifferent health, and recall his stupendous achievement, I am fain to
+apply to him, as most appropriate, the words he gave to his _alter
+ego_, Antony, Antony who, like himself, was world-worn and
+passion-weary:
+
+                    “A rarer spirit never
+  Did steer humanity; but you, gods, will give us
+  Some faults to make us men.”
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+  Abbess
+  Academe
+  Achilles
+  Actium
+  Adam
+  Adonis
+  Adriana
+  Aegeon
+  Aeneas
+  Agamemnon
+  Agincourt
+  Agrippa
+  Ajax
+  Albany, The Duke of (in “Lear”)
+  Aleppo
+  Alexander
+  Angelo
+  Anne, Lady
+  Antigone
+  Antipholus
+  Antonio
+  Antonio (Duke in the “Tempest”),
+  Antony, Marc
+  “Antony and Cleopatra”
+   Apelles
+  Apemantus
+  “Arabian Nights' Entertainment”
+   Archbishop of Canterbury
+  Arden, Mary
+  Arden, the family of
+  Argus
+  Ariel
+  Armado
+  Arnold, Matthew
+  Arthur, Prince
+  Arviragus
+  Asbies
+  “As You Like It”
+   Aubrey
+  Aufidius
+  Aumerle
+  Austin, Alfred
+  Autolycus
+
+  “Babes in a Wood”
+   Bacon
+  Bagot
+  Balzac
+  Bankside
+  Banquo
+  Bardolph
+  Barnardine
+  Bartholomew Fair
+  Bassanio
+  Bastard (the)
+  Bazarof
+  Beatrice
+  Beaumont
+  Beckett, Ernest, dedication.
+  Belarius
+  Belch, Sir Toby
+  Bellario
+  Benedick
+  Benvolio
+  Berowne
+  Bertillon
+  Betterton
+  Bevis, Geo.
+  Bianca
+  Birnam Wood
+  Biron
+  Bishop of Worcester
+  Blackfriars
+  Blount, Sir Walter
+  Boaden
+  Bolingbroke
+  Borachio
+  Bottom
+  Bourbon
+  Boyet
+  Brabant
+  Brabantio
+  Brandes
+  Bright
+  Browning
+  Brutus
+  Bullen, Anne
+  Bunyan
+  Burbage
+  Bushey
+  Byron
+
+  Cade
+  Caesar
+  Caliban
+  Camden, William
+  Campaspe
+  Capulet
+  Carlyle, Thomas
+  Cassio
+  Cassius
+  Cecil, Sir Robert
+  Cervantes
+  Cesario
+  Chamberlain, the Lord
+  Chapel Lane
+  Chapman
+  Charlecot
+  Charmian
+  Chesterfield
+  Chettle
+  Chief Justice
+  Chus
+  Cinna
+  Cinthio
+  Clarenceux (King of Arms)
+  Clarendon
+  Claudio
+  Claudius, King of Denmark
+  Cleopatra
+  Clifford
+  Cloten
+  “Colbourn's Magazine”
+   Coleridge
+  College of Heralds
+  Combe, John
+  “Comedy of Errors”
+   Comic Muse
+  Condell  “Confessio Amantis”
+   Constance
+  Cordelia
+  “Coriolanus”
+   Cressida
+  Crichton, Admiral
+  Cromwell
+  Cupid
+  “Cymbeline”
+
+  Damon
+  Dante
+  Dark Lady (of the Sonnets)
+  Dauphin
+  D'Avenant, John
+  D'Avenant, Mrs.
+  D'Avenant, Sir William
+  Dekker
+  Desdemona
+  Diana and Dian
+  Dido
+  Diomedes
+  Dogberry
+  Don John
+  Don Pedro
+  Don Quixote
+  Douglas
+  Dowden, Prof.
+  Drake
+  Drayton
+  Dryasdust
+  Duke (the Exiled in “As You Like It”)
+  Duke of York
+  Duke of Milan (“Two Gentlemen of Verona”)
+  Duke of Venice (“The Merchant of Venice”)
+  Duke of Venice (“Othello “)
+  Dumas
+  Duncan, King
+
+  Eachin
+  Eastcheap, tavern
+  Ecclesiastes
+  Edgar
+  Egypt, Queen of
+  Egypt,
+  Elizabeth, Queen
+  Ely, Bishop of
+  Elysium
+  Emilia
+  Emerson
+  “Encyclopedia Britannica”
+   England
+  Enobarbus
+  Ephesus
+  Erebus
+  Eros
+  Escalus
+  Esmond
+  Essex, Earl of
+  Evans, Hugh
+  “Every Man in his Humour”
+
+  Fair Maid of Perth, the
+  Falstaff
+  “Famous Victories of Henry V., The”
+   Fauconbridge, Philip
+  Faust
+  Ferdinand
+  First Gentleman
+  First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and
+                Lancaster
+  Fitton, Mistress Mary
+  Flavius
+  Fleance
+  Fleet prison
+  Fletcher (the poet)
+  Ford, Mrs.
+  Forman's Diary
+  Fortinbras
+  France
+  Frederick the Great
+  Fuller
+  Furnival, Mr.
+
+  Gadshill
+  Gauls
+  Gaunt, John of
+  Germany
+  Gertrude (Queen: “Hamlet”)
+  Gill, Sir David
+  Gladstone
+  Glendower
+  Globe Theatre
+  Gloster
+  Glostershire
+  Gloucester
+  Goethe
+  Gollancz, Israel
+  Gonzalo
+  “Gorgias”
+   Goneril (“Lear”)
+  Gower
+  Gratiano
+  Greece
+  Green (“Richard II”)
+  Greene, Robert (the playwright)
+  Greenhill Street
+  “Groatsworth of Wit, The”
+   Guildenstern
+
+  Hal, Prince
+  Hall, Susann
+  Hallam
+  Halliwell-Phillipps
+  Hamlet
+  Hamnet
+  Harfleur
+  Haroun-al-Raschid
+  Harrison, Rev. W. A.
+  Hathaway, Anne
+  Hathaway
+  Richard
+  Hazlitt
+  Hector
+  Heine
+  Helen
+  Hellicon
+  Henley Street
+  Heminge
+  Henry IV., King
+  ----First Part
+  ----Second Part
+  Henry V., King
+  Henry VI., King
+  ----First Part
+  ----Second Part
+  ----Third Part
+  Henry VIII.
+  Henry, Prince
+  Herbert, Lord William
+  Hermione
+  Hero
+  “Hero and Leander”
+   Holland, John
+  Holofernes
+  Homer
+  Horace
+  Hotspur, Harry
+  Hubert
+  Humphrey, Duke of Gloster
+  Hyperion
+
+  Iachimo
+  Iago
+  Imogen
+  Iras
+  Ironsides
+  Irving, Sir Henry
+  Isabella
+  Isis
+  Ismene
+  Italy
+
+  Jack
+  Jack-a-Lent
+  Jacob
+  James
+  Jaques
+  Jeanne d'Arc
+  Jena
+  Jessica
+  Jesus
+  Jews
+  John (Prince: “Henry IV.”)
+  John, King
+  Johnson, Dr.
+  Jonson, Ben
+  Joubert
+  Jove
+  Judas
+  Judith
+  Julia
+  Juliet
+  Julius Caesar
+  Juno
+
+  Kate
+  Katherine
+  Keats
+  Kemp
+  Kent
+  King
+  King's Council
+  King of Naples
+  King of Navarre (Ferdinand)
+  King James
+  “Knight's Conjuring, A”
+
+  Laban
+  Laertes
+  Lamb
+  Langland, William
+  Launce
+  Lear
+  Leatherhead
+  Lee, Sidney
+  Leicester, Lord
+  Leontes
+  Lessing
+  Leveson, Sir Richard
+  Lieutenant of the Tower
+  “Lives” (Plutarch)
+  “Lives of the Poets, The”
+   Lodge
+  Lodovico
+  London
+  Longaville
+  Lope de Vega
+  Lord Governor of England
+  Lord of Comedy
+  Lord of Humour
+  Lorenzo
+  “Love's Labour's Lost”
+   Lucetta
+  Luciana
+  Lucifer
+  Lucio
+  Lucius (“Julius Caesar”)
+  Lucrece
+  Lucy, Sir Thomas
+  Luther
+  Lyly
+
+  Macbeth
+  Macbeth, Lady
+  Macduff
+  Malcolm
+  Malvolio
+  Mamillius
+  Marcus, Brutus
+  Marcus (“Titus Andronicus”)
+  Mardian (“Antony and Cleopatra”)
+  Margaret
+  Maria
+  Mariana
+  Marie
+  Marina
+  Marlowe
+  Mars,
+  Marston
+  Master of the Revels
+  Masque
+  May Queen
+  “Measure for Measure”
+   “Merchant of Venice”
+   Mercury
+  Mercutio,
+  Meredith, George
+  Meres
+  “Merry Wives of Windsor, The”
+   “Midsummer Night's Dream”
+   Milan
+  Milton
+  Miranda
+  Moliere
+  Montaigne
+  Mortimer
+  Motley
+  “Much Ado”
+   Naples
+  Neptune
+  Nerissa
+  Nessus
+  Nestor
+  New Place
+  Northumberland
+  Nurse
+
+  Oberon
+  Octavia
+  Olivia
+  Ophelia
+  Orlando
+  Orsino, Duke (in “Twelfth Night”)
+  Othello
+  Otterbourne
+  Old Lady (“Henry VIII.”)
+  Oxford
+
+  Padua
+  Page, Mrs.
+  Palace
+  Pandarus
+  Paris
+  Parolles
+  Paul
+  Pedro (Prince: “Much Ado”),
+  Pembroke,
+  Percy, Lady,
+  Perdita,
+  Pericles,
+  Phidias,
+  Philario,
+  Philippan,
+  Philippi,
+  Phoebus,
+  Pinero,
+  Pisanio,
+  Pistol,
+  Pity(?),
+  Plantaginet,
+  Plato,
+  Plutarch,
+  Poet Laureate,
+  Poins,
+  Polixenes,
+  Polonius,
+  Pompey,
+  Portia,
+  Posthumus,
+  Princess of France (in “Love's Labour's Lost”),
+  Proculeius,
+  Prospero, Duke,
+  Proteus,
+  Pythias,
+
+  Queen Margaret
+  Queen to King Richard II.,
+  Quickly, Dame,
+
+  Raleigh,
+  Regan,
+  Rembrandt,
+  Renascence,
+  Renaissance,
+  Rialto,
+  Richard Coeur de Lion,
+  Richard II., King,
+  Richard III.,
+  Richardson, John,
+  Roman,
+  Rome,
+  Romeo,
+  “Romeo and Juliet,”
+   Rosaline,
+  Rosalind,
+  Rosalynde,
+  Rosencrantz,
+  Rubicon,
+  Rowe,
+
+  Salarino,
+  Salique,
+  Salisbury,
+  Salvini,
+  Sandells, Fulk,
+  Sappho,
+  Satan,
+  Satiromastix,
+  Sancho Panza,
+  “Saturday Review, The,”
+   Saturn,
+  Schiller,
+  Scoop,
+  Scott, Walter,
+  Second Gentleman,
+  Seleucus,
+  Senate,
+  “Sententiae Pueriles,”
+   Sidney,
+  Severn,
+  Shallow, Justice
+  Shottery
+  Shylock
+  Silvia
+  Slender, Master
+  Snitterfield
+  Solinus (Duke in “Comedy of Errors”)
+  Sophocles
+  Southampton, Earl of
+  Socrates  Spalding
+  Spencer, Herbert
+  Spenser
+  Star Chamber
+  Stephanio
+  Stratford
+  Stratford Parish Church
+  Suffolk
+  Susanna
+  Swinburne
+  Sycorax
+  Syracuse
+  Sonnets: [Footnote 1]
+    [36 and 37]
+    [140]
+    [40]
+    [127]
+    [104]
+    [142]
+    [18]
+    [19]
+    [20]
+    [22]
+    [23]
+    [33]
+    [144]
+    [133]
+    [41]
+    [105]
+    [136]
+    [122]
+    [78]
+    [86]
+    [131]
+    [135]
+    [88]
+    [129]
+    [37]
+  Shakespeare
+
+  [Footnote 1: Sonnets in brackets are mentioned especially on the pages
+                marked
+  opposite.]
+
+  Shakespeare, John
+  Shake-scene
+
+  Talbot
+  “Taming of the Shrew”
+   Tamora
+  Tearsheet, Doll
+  “Tempest, The”
+   Temple Gardens
+  Temple Grafton
+  Tennyson
+  Thackeray
+  Thames
+  Thane of Cawdor
+  Thersites
+  Thurio
+  Thyreus
+  Timbuctoo
+  Timon
+  Titania
+  Titian
+  Titus
+  “Titus Andronicus”
+   Tolstoi
+  Tourgenief
+  Toussaint l'Ouverture
+  Tower of London
+  Tree, Beerbohm
+  Trial Table of the order of Shakespeare's Plays
+  Trinculo
+  Triton
+  Troilus
+  Trojans
+  “Troilus and Cressida”
+   “Troublesome Raigne of King John, The”
+   Troy
+  “True Tragedie of Richard, The”
+   Tubal
+  “Twelfth Night”
+   “Two Gentlemen of Verona, The”
+   “Two Noble Kinsmen, The”
+   Tyler, Mr.
+
+  Ulysses
+
+  Valentine
+  Valiant-for-Truth
+  “Venus and Adonis”
+   Vernon
+  Veronese
+  Vienna
+  Villon
+  Vincentio, Duke
+  Viola
+  Virgil
+  “Vision of Piers Plowman”
+   Venice
+  Venus
+  Voltaire
+
+  Ward, Rev. John
+  Warwickshire
+  Watts-Dunton, Theodore
+  Westminster
+  Westmoreland
+  Whately, Anne
+  Whittington, Thomas
+  William the Conqueror
+  Wilmcote
+  Wilmscote
+  “Winter's Tale”
+   “Wit's Commonwealth”
+   Wittenberg
+  Worcester
+  Wordsworth
+  “Worthies,” (Fuller's)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Man Shakespeare, by Frank Harris
+
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