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автор Frank Harris

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

CHAPTER II. HAMLET—MACBETH

CHAPTER III. DUKE VINCENTIO—POSTHUMUS

CHAPTER IV. SHAKESPEARE’S MEN OF ACTION: THE BASTARD, ARTHUR, AND KING RICHARD II.

CHAPTER V. SHAKESPEARE’S MEN OF ACTION (continued). HOT-SPUR, HENRY V., RICHARD III.

CHAPTER VI. SHAKESPEARE’S MEN OF ACTION (concluded): KING HENRY VI. AND RICHARD III.

CHAPTER VII. SHAKESPEARE AS LYRIC POET: “TWELFTH NIGHT”

CHAPTER VIII. SHAKESPEARE’S HUMOUR: FALSTAFF

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I. SHAKESPEARE’S EARLY ATTEMPTS TO PORTRAY HIMSELF AND HIS WIFE: BIRON, ADRIANA, VALENTINE

CHAPTER II. SHAKESPEARE AS ANTONIO, THE MERCHANT

CHAPTER III. THE SONNETS: PART I.

CHAPTER IV. THE SONNETS: PART II.

CHAPTER V. THE SONNETS: PART III.

CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST-FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: BRUTUS

CHAPTER VII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: HAMLET.

CHAPTER VIII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: PART II “OTHELLO”

CHAPTER IX. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART I. Troilus and Cressida

CHAPTER X. DRAMAS OF LUST: PART II. Antony and Cleopatra

CHAPTER XI. THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: “LEAR”

CHAPTER XII. THE DRAMA OF DESPAIR: “TIMON OF ATHENS”

CHAPTER XIII. SHAKESPEARE’S LAST ROMANCES: ALL COPIES.

CHAPTER XIV. SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE

CHAPTER XV. SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE—continued

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 Loveb, 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. 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.