Three of Browning's poems, "At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop," refer
with more or less explicitness to Shakspere. The last stanza in "House"
contains a quotation from Wordsworth's "Scorn not the Sonnet" to the
effect that in his sonnets Shakspere revealed the most intimate facts of
his life. "At the Mermaid" and "House" both combat this idea. In "At the
Mermaid" Browning in the person of Shakspere says:
"Which of you did I enable
Once to slip within my breast,
There to catalogue and label
What I like least, what love best,
Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,
Seek and shun, respect--deride?
Who has right to make a rout of
Rarities he found inside?"
As applied to Browning the poems represent the indignation with which he
regarded such personal revelations, such utterance of sighs and groans,
as characterized Byron (the "Last King" of "At the Mermaid"); but they
overstate the impersonal nature of Browning's own work which is
frequently a very direct statement of his own emotions and views, while
even from his dramatic work it is not difficult to find his "hopes and
fears, beliefs and doubts." In stanzas 10-12 of "At the Mermaid," for
example, just after he has protested against "leaving bosom's gate
ajar," he fully sets forth the joy, the optimism, of his own outlook on
life. "Shop" is an indirect protest against the assumption that
Shakspere wrote mainly for money, caring merely for the material success
of his work. (See _Poet-Lore_, Vol. III, pp. 216-221, April, 1889, for
Browning's tribute to Shakspere.) More directly the poem represents the
starved life of the man whom "shop," the business necessary to earn a
living, occupies "each day and all day long" with no spirit-life behind.