SOME have insisted that Shakespeare must have been a physician, for
the reason that he shows such knowledge of medicine--of the symptoms of
disease and death--was so familiar with the brain, and with insanity in
all its forms.
I do not think he was a physician. He knew too much--his generalizations
were too splendid. He had none of the prejudices of that profession
in his time. We might as well say that he was a musician, a composer,
because we find in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" nearly every musical
term known in Shakespeare's time.
Others maintain that he was a lawyer, perfectly acquainted with the
forms, with the expressions familiar to that profession--yet there is
nothing to show that he was a lawyer, or that he knew more about law
than any intelligent man should know.
He was not a lawyer. His sense of justice was never dulled by reading
English law.
Some think that he was a botanist, because he named nearly all known
plants. Others, that he was an astronomer, a naturalist, because he gave
hints and suggestions of nearly all discoveries.
Some have thought that he must have been a sailor, for the reason that
the orders given in the opening of "The Tempest" were the best that
could, under the circumstances, have been given to save the ship.
For my part, I think there is nothing in the plays to show that he was
a lawyer, doctor, botanist or scientist. He had the observant eyes
that really see, the ears that really hear, the brain that retains all
pictures, all thoughts, logic as unerring as light,-the imagination
that supplies defects and builds the perfect from a fragment. And these
faculties, these aptitudes, working together, account for what he did.
He exceeded all the sons of men in the splendor of his imagination. To
him the whole world paid tribute, and nature poured her treasures at his
feet. In him all races lived again, and even those to be were pictured
in his brain.
He was a man of imagination--that is to say, of genius, and having seen
a leaf, and a drop of water, he could construct the forests, the rivers,
and the seas--and in his presence all the cataracts would fall and foam,
the mists rise, the clouds form and float.
If Shakespeare knew one fact, he knew its kindred and its neighbors.
Looking at a coat of mail, he instantly imagined the society, the
conditions, that produced it and what it, in turn, produced. He saw
the castle, the moat, the draw-bridge, the lady in the tower, and the
knightly lover spurring across the plain. He saw the bold baron and the
rude retainer, the trampled serf, and all the glory and the grief of
feudal life.
He lived the life of all.
He was a citizen of Athens in the days of Pericles. He listened to the
eager eloquence of the great orators, and sat upon the cliffs, and with
the tragic poet heard "the multitudinous laughter of the sea." He saw
Socrates thrust the spear of question through the shield and heart of
falsehood. He was present when the great man drank hemlock, and met the
night of death, tranquil as a star meets morning. He listened to the
peripatetic philosophers, and was unpuzzled by the sophists. He watched
Phidias as he chiseled shapeless stone to forms of love and awe.
He lived by the mysterious Nile, amid the vast and monstrous. He knew
the very thought that wrought the form and features of the Sphinx. He
heard great Memnon's morning song when marble lips were smitten by
the sun. He laid him down with the embalmed and waiting dead, and felt
within their dust the expectation of another life, mingled with cold and
suffocating doubts--the children born of long delay.
He walked the ways of mighty Rome, and saw great Cæsar with his legions
in the field. He stood with vast and motley throngs and watched the
triumphs given to victorious men, followed by uncrowned kings, the
captured hosts, and all the spoils of ruthless war. He heard the
shout that shook the Coliseum's roofless walls, when from the reeling
gladiator's hand the short sword fell, while from his bosom gushed the
stream of wasted life.
He lived the life of savage men. He trod the forests' silent depths, and
in the desperate game of life or death he matched his thought against
the instinct of the beast.
He knew all crimes and all regrets, all virtues and their rich rewards.
He was victim and victor, pursuer and pursued, outcast and king. He
heard the applause and curses of the world, and on his heart had fallen
all the nights and noons of failure and success.
He knew the unspoken thoughts, the dumb desires, the wants and ways of
beasts. He felt the crouching tiger's thrill, the terror of the ambushed
prey, and with the eagles he had shared the ecstasy of flight and poise
and swoop, and he had lain with sluggish serpents on the barren rocks
uncoiling slowly in the heat of noon.
He sat beneath the bo-tree's contemplative shade, wrapped in Buddha's
mighty thought, and dreamed all dreams that light, the alchemist, has
wrought from dust and dew, and stored within the slumbrous poppy's
subtle blood.
He knelt with awe and dread at every shrine--he offered every sacrifice,
and every prayer--felt the consolation and the shuddering fear--mocked
and worshiped all the gods--enjoyed all heavens, and felt the pangs of
every hell.
He lived all lives, and through his blood and brain there crept the
shadow and the chill of every death, and his soul, like Mazeppa, was
lashed naked to the wild horse of every fear and love and hate.
The Imagination had a stage in. Shakespeare's brain, whereon were set
all scenes that lie between the morn of laughter and the night of tears,
and where his players bodied forth the false and true, the joys and
griefs, the careless shallows and the tragic deeps of universal life.
From Shakespeare's brain there poured a Niagara of gems spanned by
Fancy's seven-hued arch. He was as many-sided as clouds are many-formed.
To him giving was hoarding--sowing was harvest--and waste itself the
source of wealth. Within his marvelous mind were the fruits of all
thought past, the seeds of all to be. As a drop of dew contains the
image of the earth and sky, so all there is of life was mirrored forth
in Shakespeare's brain.
Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose waves touched all the
shores of thought; within which were all the tides and waves of destiny
and will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambition and revenge;
upon which fell the gloom and darkness of despair and death and all the
sunlight of content and love, and within which was the inverted sky lit
with the eternal stars--an intellectual ocean--towards which all rivers
ran, and from which now the isles and continents of thought receive
their dew and rain.