Brilliant as is the picture of the fairy world in _A Midsummer Night's

Dream_, the mastery to which Shakespeare had attained is most clearly

displayed in the burlesque scenes, dealing with the little band of

worthy artisans who are moved to represent the history of Pyramus and

Thisbe at the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. Never before has

Shakespeare risen to the sparkling and genial humour with which these

excellent simpletons are portrayed. He doubtless drew upon childish

memories of the plays he had seen performed in the market-place at

Coventry and elsewhere. He also introduced some whimsical strokes of

satire upon the older English drama. For instance, when Quince says (i.

2), "Marry, our play is--The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel

death of Pyramus and Thisby," there is an obvious reference to the long

and quaint title of the old play of _Cambyses_: "A lamentable tragedy

mixed full of pleasant mirth,"[4] &c.

Shakespeare's elevation of mind, however, is most clearly apparent in

the playful irony with which he treats his own art, the art of acting,

and the theatre of the day, with its scanty and imperfect appliances

for the production of illusion. The artisan who plays Wall, his fellow

who enacts Moonshine, and the excellent amateur who represents the Lion

are deliciously whimsical types.

It was at all times a favourite device with Shakespeare, as with his

imitators, the German romanticists of two centuries later, to introduce

a play within a play. The device is not of his own invention. We find

it already in Kyd's _Spanish Tragedie_ (perhaps as early as 1584),

a play whose fustian Shakespeare often ridicules, but in which he

nevertheless found the germ of his own _Hamlet_. But from the very

first the idea of giving an air of greater solidity to the principal

play by introducing into it a company of actors had a great attraction

for him. We may compare with the Pyramus and Thisbe scenes in this

play the appearance of Costard and his comrades as Pompey, Hector,

Alexander, Hercules, and Judas Maccabæus in the fifth act of _Love's

Labour's Lost_. Even there the Princess speaks with a kindly tolerance

of the poor amateur actors:--

"That sport best pleases, that doth least know how:

Where zeal strives to content, and the contents

Die in the zeal of them which it presents,

Their form confounded makes most form in mirth;

When great things labouring perish in their birth."

Nevertheless, there is here a certain youthful cruelty in the

courtiers' ridicule of the actors, whereas in _A Midsummer Night's

Dream_ everything passes off in the purest, airiest humour. What can be

more perfect, for example, than the Lion's reassuring address to the

ladies?--

"'You, ladies, you, whose gentle hearts do fear

The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor

May now, perchance, both quake and tremble here,

When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.

Then know, that I, one Snug the joiner, am

No lion fell, nor else no lion's dam;

For, if I should as lion come in strife

Into this place, 't were pity on my life.'"

And how pleasant, when he at last comes in with his roar, is Demetrius'

comment, of proverbial fame, "Well roared, lion!"

It is true that _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ is rather to be described

as a dramatic lyric than a drama in the strict sense of the word. It

is a lightly-flowing, sportive, lyrical fantasy, dealing with love

as a dream, a fever, an illusion, an infatuation, and making merry,

in especial, with the irrational nature of the instinct. That is why

Lysander, turning, under the influence of the magic flower, from

Hermia, whom he loves, to Helena, who is nothing to him, but whom he

now imagines that he adores, is made to exclaim (ii. 3):--

"The will of man is by his reason sway'd,

And reason says you are the worthier maid."

Here, more than anywhere else, he is the mouthpiece of the poet's

irony. Shakespeare is far from regarding love as an expression of human

reason; throughout his works, indeed, it is only by way of exception

that he makes reason the determining factor in human conduct. He early

felt and divined how much wider is the domain of the unconscious than

of the conscious life, and saw that our moods and passions have their

root in the unconscious. The germs of a whole philosophy of life are

latent in the wayward love-scenes of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_.

And it is now that Shakespeare, on the farther limit of early youth,

and immediately after writing _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, for the

second time takes the most potent of youthful emotions as his theme,

and treats it no longer as a thing of fantasy, but as a matter of the

deadliest moment, as a glowing, entrancing, and annihilating passion,

the source of bliss and agony, of life and death. It is now that he

writes his first independent tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_, that unique,

imperishable love-poem, which remains to this day one of the loftiest

summits of the world's literature. As _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ is

the triumph of grace, so _Romeo and Juliet_ is the apotheosis of pure

passion.

[1] N. J. Halpin: _Oberon's Vision in the Midsummer Night's Dream,

illustrated by a Comparison with Lylie's Endymion_, 1842.

[2] _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1880-86, p. 67.

[3] The passage in _The Maydes Metamorphosis_ runs as follows:--

"_Mopso_. I pray you, what might I call you?

_1st Fairy_. My name is Penny.

_Mopso_. I am sorry I cannot purse you.

_Frisco_. I pray you, sir, what might I call you?

_2nd Fairy_. My name is Cricket.

_Frisco_. I would I were a chimney for your sake."

[4] The passion for alliteration in his contemporaries is satirised in

these lines of the prologue to _Pyramus and Thisbe_:--

"Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,

He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast."

XIII

_ROMEO AND JULIET--THE TWO QUARTOS--ITS ROMANESQUE STRUCTURE--THE USE

OF OLD MOTIVES--THE CONCEPTION OF LOVE_

_Romeo and Juliet_, in its original form, must be presumed to date from

1591, or, in other words, from Shakespeare's twenty-seventh year.

The matter was old; it is to be found in a novel by Masuccio of

Salerno, published in 1476, which was probably made use of by Luigi

da Porta when, in 1530, he wrote his _Hystoria novellamente ritrovata

di dui nobili Amanti_. After him came Bandello, with his tale, _La

sfortunata morte di due infelicissimi amanti;_ and upon it an English

writer founded a play of _Romeo and Juliet_, which seems to have been

popular in its day (before 1562), but is now lost.

An English poet, Arthur Brooke, found in Bandello's _Novella_ the

matter for a poem: _The tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,

written first in Italian by Bandell and now in Englishe by Ar. Br_.

This poem is composed in rhymed iambic verses of twelve and fourteen

syllables alternately, whose rhythm indeed jogs somewhat heavily along,

but is not unpleasant and not too monotonous. The method of narration

is very artless, loquacious, and diffuse; it resembles the narrative

style of a clever child, who describes with minute exactitude and

circumstantiality, going into every detail, and placing them all upon

the same plane.[1].

Shakespeare founded his play upon this poem, in which the two leading

characters, Friar Laurence, Mercutio, Tybalt, the Nurse, and the

Apothecary, were ready to his hand, in faint outlines. Romeo's fancy

for another woman immediately before he meets Juliet is also here, set

forth at length; and the action as a whole follows the same course as

in the tragedy.

The First Quarto of _Romeo and Juliet_ was published in 1597,

with the following

title: _An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. As it

hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right

Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Seruants._ Lord Hunsdon died in July

1596, during his tenure of office as Lord Chamberlain; his successor in

the title was appointed to the office in April 1597; in the interim his

company of actors was not called the Lord Chamberlain's, but only Lord

Hunsdon's servants, and it must, therefore, have been at this time that

the play was first acted.

Many things, however, suggest a much earlier origin for it, and the

Nurse's allusion to the earthquake (i. 3) is of especial importance in

determining its date. She says--

"'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;"

and a little later--

"And since that time it is eleven years."

There had been an earthquake in England in the year 1580. But we must

not, of course, take too literally the babble of a garrulous old

servant.

But even if Shakespeare began to work upon the theme in 1591, there is

no doubt that, according to his frequent practice, he went through the

play again, revised and remoulded it, somewhere between that date and

1599, when it appeared in the Second Quarto almost in the form in which

we now possess it. This Second Quarto has on its title-page the words,

"newly corrected, augmented and amended." Not until the fourth edition

does the author's name appear.

No one can doubt that Tycho Mommsen and that excellent Shakespeare

scholar Halliwell-Phillips are right in declaring the 1597 Quarto to be

a pirated edition. But it by no means follows that the complete text of

1599 already existed in 1597, and was merely carelessly abridged. In

view of those passages (such as the seventh scene of the second act)

where a whole long sequence of dialogue is omitted as superfluous, and

where the old text is replaced by one totally new and very much better,

this impression will not hold ground.

We have here, then, as elsewhere--but seldom so indubitably and

obviously as here--a play of Shakespeare's at two different stages of

its development.

In the first place, all that is merely sketched in the earlier edition

is elaborated in the later. Descriptive scenes and speeches, which

afford a background and foil to the action, are added. The street

skirmish in the beginning is much developed; the scene between the

servants and the scene with the musicians are added. The Nurse, too,

has become more loquacious and much more comic; Mercutio's wit has been

enriched by some of its most characteristic touches; old Capulet has

acquired a more lifelike physiognomy; the part of Friar Laurence, in

particular, has grown to almost twice its original dimensions; and we

feel in these amplifications that care on Shakespeare's part, which

appears in other places as well, to prepare, in the course of revision,

for what is to come, to lay its foundations and foreshadow it. The

Friar's reply, for example, to Romeo's vehement outburst of joy (ii. 6)

is an added touch:--

"These violent delights have violent ends,

And in their triumphs die: like fire and powder,

Which, as they kiss, consume."

New, too, is his reflection on Juliet's lightness of foot:--

"A lover may bestride the gossamer

That idles in the wanton summer air,

And yet not fall; so light is vanity."

With the exception of the first dozen lines, the Friar's splendidly

eloquent speech to Romeo (iii. 3) when, in his despair, he has drawn

his sword to kill himself, is almost entirely new. The added passage

begins thus:--

"Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth?

Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet

In thee at once, which thou at once wouldst lose.

Fie, fie! thou sham'st thy shape, thy love, thy wit;

Which, like an usurer, abound'st in all,

And usest none in that true use indeed

Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit."

New, too, is the Friar's minute description to Juliet (iv. I) of the

action of the sleeping-draught, and his account of how she will be

borne to the tomb, which paves the way for the masterly passage (iv.

3), also added, where Juliet, with the potion in her hand, conquers her

terror of awakening in the grisly underground vault.

But the essential change lies in the additional earnestness, and

consequent beauty, with which the characters of the two lovers have

been endowed in the course of the revision. For example, Juliet's

speech to Romeo (ii. 2) is inserted:--

"And yet I wish but for the thing I have.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite."

In the passage (ii. 5) where Juliet is awaiting the return of the

Nurse with a message from Romeo, almost the whole expression of her

impatience is new; for example, the lines:--

"Had she affections, and warm youthful blood,

She'd be as swift in motion as a ball;

My words would bandy her to my sweet love,

And his to me:

But old folks, many feign as they were dead;

Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead."

In Juliet's celebrated soliloquy (iii. 2), where, with that mixture of

innocence and passion which forms the groundwork of her character, she

awaits Romeo's first evening visit, only the four opening lines, with

their mythological imagery, are found in the earlier text:--

"_Jul_. Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phœbus' lodging: such a waggoner

As Phæthon would whip you to the west,

And bring in cloudy night immediately."

Not till he put his final touches to the work did Shakespeare find for

the young girl's love-longing that marvellous utterance which we all

know:--

"Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night!

That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo

Leap to these arms, untalk'd-of, and unseen!

. . . . . . . . .

Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

Come, night! come, Romeo! come, thou day in night!"

Almost the whole of the following scene between the Nurse and Juliet,

in which she learns of Tybalt's death and Romeo's banishment, is

likewise new. Here occur some of the most daring and passionate

expressions which Shakespeare has placed in Juliet's mouth:--

"Some word there was, worser than Tybalt's death,

That murder'd me. I would forget it fain.

. . . . . . . . .

That 'banished,' that one word 'banished,'

Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts. Tybalt's death

Was woe enough, if it had ended there:

Or,--if sour woe delights in fellowship,

And needly will be rank'd with other griefs,--Why

follow'd not, when she said--Tybalt's dead,

Thy father, or thy mother, nay, or both,

Which modern lamentation might have mov'd?

But, with a rearward following Tybalt's death,

'Romeo is banished!'--to speak that word,

Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet,

All slain, all dead."

To the original version, on the other hand, belong not only the highly

indecorous witticisms and allusions with which Mercutio garnishes the

first scene of the second act, but also the majority of the speeches in

which the conceit-virus rages. The uncertainty of Shakespeare's taste,

even at the date of the revision, is apparent in the fact that he has

not only let all these speeches stand, but has interpolated not a few

of equal extravagance.

So little did it jar upon him that Romeo, in the original text, should

thus apostrophise love (i. I)--

"O heavy lightness! serious vanity!

Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!"

that in the course of revision he must needs place in Juliet's mouth

these quite analogous ejaculations (iii. 2):--

"Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!

Dove-feather'd raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!

Despised substance of divinest show!"

Romeo in the old text indulges in this deplorably affected outburst (i.

2):--

"When the devout religion of mine eye

Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires;

And these, who, often drown'd, could never die,

Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars."

In the old text, too, we find the barbarously tasteless speech in which

Romeo, in his despair, envies the fly which is free to kiss Juliet's

hand (iii. 2):--

"More validity,

More honourable state, more courtship lives

In carrion flies, than Romeo: they may seize

On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand,

And steal immortal blessing from her lips;

Who, even in pure and vestal modesty,

Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin;

But Romeo may not; he is banished.

Flies may do this, but I from this must fly:

They are free men, but I am banished."

It is astonishing to come upon these lapses of taste, which are not

surpassed by any of the absurdities in which the French _Précieuses

Ridicules_ of the next century delighted, side by side with outbursts

of the most exquisite lyric poetry, the most brilliant wit, and the

purest pathos to be found in the literature of any country or of any

age.

_Romeo and Juliet_ is perhaps not such a flawless work of art as _A

Midsummer Night's Dream_. It is not so delicately, so absolutely

harmonious. But it is an achievement of much greater significance and

moment; it is the great and typical love-tragedy of the world.

It soars immeasurably above all later attempts to approach it. The

Danish critic who should mention such a tragedy as _Axel and Valborg_

in the same breath with this play would show more patriotism than

artistic sense. Beautiful as Oehlenschläger's drama is, the very nature

of its theme forbids us to compare it with Shakespeare's. It celebrates

constancy rather than love; it is a poem of tender emotions, of womanly

magnanimity and chivalrous virtue, at war with passion and malignity.

It is not, like _Romeo and Juliet_, at once the pæan and the dirge of

passion.

_Romeo and Juliet_ is the drama of youthful and impulsive

love-at-first-sight, so passionate that it bursts every barrier in its

path, so determined that it knows no middle way between happiness and

death, so strong that it throws the lovers into each other's arms with

scarcely a moment's pause, and, lastly, so ill-fated that death follows

straightway upon the ecstasy of union.

Here, more than anywhere else, has Shakespeare shown in all its

intensity the dual action of an absorbing love in filling the soul with

gladness to the point of intoxication, and, at the same time, with

despair at the very idea of parting.

While in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ he dealt with the imaginative side

of love, its fantastic and illusive phases, he here regards it in its

more passionate aspect, as the source of rapture and of doom.

His material enabled Shakespeare to place his love-story in the setting

best fitted to throw into relief the beauty of the emotion, using as

his background a vendetta between two noble families, which has grown

from generation to generation through one sanguinary reprisal after

another, until it has gradually infected the whole town around them.

According to the traditions of their race, the lovers ought to hate

each other. The fact that, on the contrary, they are so passionately

drawn together in mutual ecstasy, bears witness from the outset to

the strength of an emotion which not only neutralises prejudice in

their own minds, but continues to assert itself in opposition to the

prejudices of their surroundings. This is no peaceful tenderness. It

flashes forth like lightning at their first meeting, and its violence,

under the hapless circumstances, hurries these young souls straight to

their tragic end.

Between the lovers and the haters Shakespeare has placed Friar

Laurence, one of his most delightful embodiments of reason. Such

figures are rare in his plays, as they are in life, but ought not to be

overlooked, as they have been, for example, by Taine in his somewhat

one-sided estimate of Shakespeare's greatness. Shakespeare knows and

understands passionlessness; but he always places it on the second

plane. It comes in very naturally here, in the person of one who is

obliged by his age and his calling to act as an onlooker in the drama

of life. Friar Laurence is full of goodness and natural piety, a monk

such as Spinoza or Goethe would have loved, an undogmatic sage, with

the astuteness and benevolent Jesuitism of an old confessor--brought

up on the milk and bread of philosophy, not on the fiery liquors of

religious fanaticism.

It is very characteristic of the freedom of spirit which Shakespeare

early acquired, in the sphere in which freedom was then hardest of

attainment, that this monk is drawn with so delicate a touch, without

the smallest ill-will towards conquered Catholicism, yet without the

smallest leaning towards Catholic doctrine--the emancipated creation

of an emancipated poet. The poet here rises immeasurably above his

original, Arthur Brooke, who, in his naïvely moralising "Address to

the Reader," makes the Catholic religion mainly responsible for the

impatient passion of Romeo and Juliet and the disasters which result

from it.[2]

It would be to misunderstand the whole spirit of the play if we were

to reproach Friar Laurence with the not only romantic but preposterous

nature of the means he adopts to help the lovers--the sleeping-potion

administered to Juliet. This Shakespeare simply accepted from his

original, with his usual indifference to external detail.

The poet has placed in the mouth of Friar Laurence a tranquil

life-philosophy, which he first expresses in general terms, and then

applies to the case of the lovers. He enters his cell with a basket

full of herbs from the garden. Some of them have curative properties,

others contain death-dealing juices; a plant which has a sweet and

salutary smell may be poisonous to the taste; for good and evil are but

two sides to the same thing (ii. 3):--

"Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,

And vice sometimes's by action dignified.

Within the infant rind of this sweet flower

Poison hath residence, and medicine power:

For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;

Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.

Two such opposed kings encamp them still

In man as well as herbs,--grace, and rude will;

And where the worser is predominant,

Full soon the canker death eats up that plant."

When Romeo, immediately before the marriage, defies sorrow and death in

the speech beginning (ii. 6)--

"Amen, Amen! but come what sorrow can,

It cannot countervail the exchange of joy

That one short minute gives me in her sight,"

Laurence seizes the opportunity to apply his view of life. He fears

this overflowing flood-tide of happiness, and expounds his philosophy

of the golden mean--that wisdom of old age which is summed up in the

cautious maxim, "Love me little, love me long." Here it is that he

utters the above-quoted words as to the violent ends ensuing on violent

delights, like the mutual destruction wrought by the kiss of fire and

gunpowder. It is remarkable how the idea of gunpowder and of explosions

seems to have haunted Shakespeare's mind while he was busied with the

fate of Romeo and Juliet. In the original sketch of Juliet's soliloquy

in the fifth scene of the second act we read:--

"Loue's heralds should be thoughts,

And runne more swift, than hastie powder fierd,

Doth hurrie from the fearfull cannons mouth."

When Romeo draws his sword to kill himself, the Friar says (iii. 3):

"Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,

Misshapen in the conduct of them both,

Like powder in a skilless soldier's flask,

Is set a-fire by thine own ignorance,

And thou dismember'd with thine own defence."

Romeo himself, finally, in his despair over the false news of Juliet's

death, demands of the apothecary a poison so strong that

"the trunk may be discharg'd of breath

As violently, as the hasty powder fir'd,

Doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb."

In other words, these young creatures have gunpowder in their veins,

undamped as yet by the mists of life, and love is the fire which

kindles it. Their catastrophe is inevitable, and it was Shakespeare's

deliberate purpose so to represent it; but it is not deserved, in the

moral sense of the word: it is not a punishment for guilt. The tragedy

does not afford the smallest warranty for the pedantically moralising

interpretation devised for it by Gervinus and others.

_Romeo and Juliet_, as a drama, still represents in many ways the

Italianising tendency in Shakespeare's art. Not only the rhymed

couplets and stanzas and the abounding _concetti_ betray Italian

influence: the whole structure of the tragedy is very Romanesque. All

Romanesque, like all Greek art, produces its effect by dint of order,

which sometimes goes the length of actual symmetry. Purely English art

has more of the freedom of life itself; it breaks up symmetry in order

to attain a more delicate and unobtrusive harmony, much as an excellent

prose style shuns the symmetrical regularity of verse, and aims at a

subtler music of its own.

The Romanesque type is apparent in all Shakespeare's earlier plays. He

sometimes even goes beyond his Romanesque models. In _Love's Labour's

Lost_ the King with his three courtiers is opposed to the Princess

and her three ladies. In _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ the faithful

Valentine has his counterpart in the faithless Proteus, and each of

them has his comic servant. In the _Menachmi_ of Plautus there is

only one slave; in _The Comedy of Errors_ the twin masters have twin

servants. In _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ the heroic couple (Theseus and

Hippolyta) have as a counterpart the fairy couple (Oberon and Titania);

and, further, there is a complex symmetry in the fortunes of the

Athenian lovers, Hermia being at first wooed by two men, while Helena

stands alone and deserted, whereas afterwards it is Hermia who is left

without a lover, while the two men centre their suit upon Helena.

Finally, there is a fifth couple in Pyramus and Thisbe, represented

by the artisans, who in burlesque and sportive fashion complete the

symmetrical design.

The French critics who have seen in Shakespeare the antithesis to the

Romanesque principle in art have overlooked these his beginnings.

Voltaire, after more careful study, need not have expressed himself

horrified; and if Taine, in his able essay, had gone somewhat less

summarily to work, he would not have found everywhere in Shakespeare

a fantasy and a technique entirely foreign to the genius of the Latin

races.

The composition of _Romeo and Juliet_ is quite as symmetrical as that

of the comedies, indeed almost architectural in its equipoise. First,

two of Capulet's servants enter, then two of Montague's; then Benvolio,

of the Montague party; then Tybalt, of the Capulets; then citizens of

both parties; then old Capulet and his wife; then old Montague and his;

and finally, as the "keystone of the arch," the Prince, the central

figure around whom all the characters range themselves, and by whom the

fate of the lovers is to be determined.[3]

But it is not as a drama that _Romeo and Juliet_ has won all hearts.

Although, from a dramatic point of view, it stands high above _A

Midsummer Night's Dream_, yet it is in virtue of its exquisite lyrism

that this erotic masterpiece of Shakespeare's youth, like its fantastic

predecessor, has bewitched the world. It is from the lyrical portions

of the tragedy that the magic of romance proceeds, which sheds its

glamour and its glory over the whole.

The finest lyrical passages are these: Romeo's declaration of love

at the ball, Juliet's soliloquy before their bridal night, and their

parting at the dawn.

Gervinus, a conscientious and learned student, in spite of his

tendency to see in Shakespeare the moralist specially demanded by

the Germany of his own day, has followed Halpin in pointing out that

in all these three passages Shakespeare has adopted age-old lyric

forms. In the first he almost reproduces the Italian sonnet; in the

second he approaches, both in matter and form, to the bridal song,

the Epithalamium; in the third he takes as his model the mediæval

Dawn-Song, the _Tagelied_. But we may be sure that Shakespeare did not,

as the commentators think, deliberately choose these forms in order to

give perspective to the situation, but instinctively gave it a deep

and distant background in his effort to find the truest and largest

utterance for the emotion he was portraying.

The first colloquy between Romeo and Juliet (i. 5), being merely the

artistic idealisation of an ordinary passage of ballroom gallantry,

turns upon the prayer for a kiss, which the English fashion of the

day authorised each cavalier to demand of his lady, and is cast in a

sonnet form more or less directly derived from Petrarch. But whereas

Petrarch's style is simple and pure, here we have far-fetched turns

of speech, quibbling appeals, and expressions of admiration suggested

by the intellect rather than the feelings. The passage opens with a

quatrain of unspeakable tenderness:--

"_Romeo_. If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this;

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss."

And though the scene proceeds in the somewhat artificial style of the

later Italians--

"_Romeo_. Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg'd.

_[Kissing her_.]

_Juliet_. Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

_Rom_. Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urg'd!

Give me my sin again.

_Jul_. You kiss by the book"

--yet so much soul is breathed into the Italian love-fencing that under

its somewhat affected grace we can distinguish the pulse-throbs of

awakening desire.

Juliet's soliloquy before the bridal night (iii. 2) lacks only rhyme to

be, in good set form, an epithalamium of the period. These compositions

spoke of Hymen and Cupid, and told how Hymen at first appears alone,

while Cupid lurks concealed, until, at the door of the bridal chamber,

the elder brother gives place to the younger.

It is noteworthy that the mythological opening lines, which belong to

the earlier form of the play, contain a clear reminiscence of a passage

in Marlowe's _King Edward II_. Marlowe's

"Gallop apace, bright Phœbus, through the sky!"

reappears in Shakespeare in the form of

"Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phœbus' lodging!"

The rest of the soliloquy, as we have seen above, ranks among the

loveliest things Shakespeare ever wrote. One of its most delicately

daring expressions is imitated in Milton's _Comus_; and the difference

between the original and the imitation is curiously typical of the

difference between the poet of the Renaissance and the poet of

Puritanism. Juliet implores love-performing night to spread its close

curtain, that Romeo may leap unseen to her arms; for--

"Lovers can see to do their amorous rites

By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,

It best agrees with night."

Milton annexes the thought and the turn of phrase; but the part played

by beauty in Shakespeare, Milton assigns to virtue:--

"Virtue could see to do what virtue would

By her own radiant light."

There is in Juliet's utterance of passion a healthful delicacy that

ennobles it; and it need not be said that the presence of this very

passion in Juliet's monologue renders it infinitely more chaste than

the old epithalamiums.

The exquisite dialogue in Juliet's chamber at daybreak (iii. 5) is a

variation on the motive of all the old Dawn-Songs. They always turn

upon the struggle in the breasts of two lovers who have secretly passed

the night together, between their reluctance to part and their dread of

discovery--a struggle which sets them debating whether the light they

see comes from the sun or the moon, and whether it is the nightingale

or the lark whose song they hear.

How gracefully is this motive here employed, and what added depth is

given to the situation by our knowledge that the banished Romeo's life

is forfeit if he lingers until day!--

"_Juliet_. Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

_Romeo_. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east."

Romeo is a well-born youth, richly endowed by nature, enthusiastic and

reserved. At the beginning of the play we find him indifferent as to

the family feud, and absorbed in his hopeless fancy for a lady of the

hostile house, Capulet's fair niece, Rosaline, whom Mercutio describes

as a pale wench with black eyes. The Rosaline of _Love's Labour's Lost_

is also described by Biron, at the end of the third act, as

"A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,

With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes,"

so that the two namesakes may not improbably have had a common model.

Shakespeare has retained this first passing fancy of Romeo's, which

he found in his sources, because he knew that the heart is never more

disposed to yield to a new love than when it is bleeding from an old

wound, and because this early feeling already shows Romeo as inclined

to idolatry and self-absorption. The young Italian, even before he

has seen the woman who is to be his fate, is reticent and melancholy,

full of tender longings and forebodings of evil. Then he is seized as

though with an overwhelming ecstasy at the first glimpse of Rosaline's

girl-kinswoman.

Romeo's character is less resolute than Juliet's; passion ravages it

more fiercely; he, as a youth, has less control over himself than

she as a maiden. But none the less is his whole nature elevated and

beautified by his relation to her. He finds expressions for his

love for Juliet quite different from those he had used in the case

of Rosaline. There occur, indeed, in the balcony scene, one or two

outbursts of the extravagance so natural to the rhetoric of young love.

The envious moon is sick and pale with grief because Juliet is so much

more fair than she; two of the fairest stars, having some business, do

entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return. But side

by side with these conceits we find immortal lines, the most exquisite

words of love that ever were penned:--

"With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls;

For stony limits cannot hold love out ..."

or--

"It is my soul that calls upon my name:

How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,

Like softest music to attending ears!"

His every word is steeped in a sensuous-spiritual ecstasy.

Juliet has grown up in an unquiet and not too agreeable home. Her

testy, unreasonable father, though not devoid of kindliness, is yet

so brutal that he threatens to beat her and turn her out of doors if

she does not comply with his wishes; and her mother is a cold-hearted

woman, whose first thought, in her rage against Romeo, is to have him

put out of the way by means of poison. She has thus been left for the

most part to the care of the humorous and plain-spoken Nurse, one of

Shakespeare's most masterly figures (foretelling the Falstaff of a few

years later), whose babble has tended to prepare her mind for love in

its frankest manifestations.

Although a child in years, Juliet has the young Italian's mastery in

dissimulation. When her mother proposes to have Romeo poisoned, she

agrees without moving a muscle, and thus secures the promise that no

one but she shall be allowed to mix the potion. Her beauty must be

conceived as dazzling. I saw her one day in the streets of Rome, in all

the freshness of her fourteen years. My companion and I looked at each

other, and exclaimed with one consent, "Juliet!" Romeo's exclamation on

first beholding her--

"Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear,"

conveys an instant impression of nobility, high mental gifts, and

unsullied purity, combined with the utmost ardour of temperament. In a

few days the child ripens into a heroine.

We make acquaintance with her at the ball in the palace of the

Capulets, and in the moonlit garden where the nightingale sings in

the pomegranate-tree--surroundings which harmonise as completely with

the whole spirit and tone of the play as the biting wintry air on

the terrace at Kronborg, filled with echoes of the King's carouse,

harmonises with the spirit and tone of _Hamlet._ But Juliet is no

mere creature of moonshine. She is practical. While Romeo wanders off

into high-strung raptures of vague enthusiasm, she, on the contrary,

promptly suggests a secret marriage, and promises on the instant to

send the Nurse to him to make a more definite arrangement. After the

killing of her kinsman, it is Romeo who despairs and she who takes up

the battle, daring all to escape the marriage with Paris. With a firm

hand and a steadfast heart she drains the sleeping-potion, and arms

herself with her dagger, so that, if all else fails, she may still be

mistress of her own person.

How shall we describe the love that indues her with all this strength?

Modern critics in Germany and Sweden are agreed in regarding it as

a purely sensual passion, by no means admirable--nay, essentially

reprehensible. They insist that there is a total absence of maidenly

modesty in Juliet's manner of feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting.

She does not really know Romeo, they say; is there anything more, then,

in this unbashful love than the attraction of mere bodily beauty?[4]

As if it were possible thus to analyse and discriminate! As if, in

such a case, body and soul were twain! As if a love which, from the

first moment, both lovers feel to be, for them, the arbiter of life and

death, were to be decried in favour of an affection founded on mutual

esteem--the variety which, it appears, "our age demands."

Ah no! these virtuous philosophers and worthy professors have no

feeling for the spirit of the Renaissance: they are altogether too

remote from it. The Renaissance means, among many other things, a new

birth of warm-blooded humanity and pagan innocence of imagination.

It is no love of the head that Juliet feels for Romeo, no admiring

affection that she reasons herself into; nor is it a sentimental

love, a riot of idealism apart from nature. But still less is it a

mere ferment of the senses. It is based upon instinct, the infallible

instinct of the child of nature, and it is in her, as in him, a

vibration of the whole being in longing and desire, a quivering of all

its chords, from the highest to the lowest, so intense that neither he

nor she can tell where body ends and soul begins.

Romeo and Juliet dominate the whole tragedy; but the two minor

creations of Mercutio and the Nurse are in no way inferior to them

in artistic value. In this play Shakespeare manifests for the first

time not only the full majesty but the many-sidedness of his genius,

the suppleness of style which is equal at once to the wit of Mercutio

and to the racy garrulity of the Nurse. _Titus Andronicus_ was as

monotonously sombre as a tragedy of Marlowe's. _Romeo and Juliet_ is

a perfect orb, embracing the twin hemispheres of the tragic and the

comic. It is a symphony so rich that the strain from fairyland in the

Queen Mab speech harmonises with the note of high comedy in Mercutio's

sparkling, cynical, and audacious sallies, with the wanton flutings

of farce in the Nurse's anecdotes, with the most rapturous descants

of passion in the antiphonies of Romeo and Juliet, and with the deep

organ-tones in the soliloquies and speeches of Friar Laurence.

How intense is the life of Romeo and Juliet in their environment! Hark

to the gay and yet warlike hubbub around them, the sport and merriment,

the high words and the ring of steel in the streets of Verona! Hark

to the Nurse's strident laughter, old Capulet's jesting and chiding,

the low tones of the Friar, and the irrepressible rattle of Mercutio's

wit! Feel the magic of the whole atmosphere in which they are plunged,

these embodiments of tumultuous youth, living and dying in love, in

magnanimity, in passion, in despair, under a glowing Southern sky,

softening into moonlight nights of sultry fragrance--and realise

that Shakespeare had at this point completed the first stage of his

triumphal progress!

[1] Here is a specimen. Romeo says to Juliet--

"Since, lady, that you like to honor me so much

As to accept me for your spouse, I yeld my selfe for such.

In true witness whereof, because I must depart,

Till that my deed do prove my woord, I leave in pawne my hart.

Tomorrow eke bestimes, before the sunne arise,

To Fryer Lawrence will I wende, to learne his sage advise."

[2] "A coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselves to

vnhonest desire, neglecting the anthoritie and aduise of parents and

frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes

and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of

unchastitie), attemptyng all aduentures of peryll for thattaynyng of

their wished lust, vsyng auriculer confession (the key of whoredom and

treason)...."

[3] See Dowden: _Shakspere: His Mind and Art_, p. 60.

[4] Edward von Hartmann, from the lofty standpoint of German

morality, has launched a diatribe against Juliet. He asserts her

immeasurable moral inferiority to the typical German maiden, both of

poetry and of real life. Schiller's Thekla has undeniably less warm

blood in her veins.

A Swedish professor, Henrik Schück, in an able work on Shakespeare,

says of Juliet: "On examining into the nature of the love to which she

owes all this strength, the unprejudiced reader cannot but recognise

in it a purely sensual passion.... A few words from the lips of this

well-favoured youth are sufficient to awaken in its fullest strength

the slumbering desire in her breast. But this love possesses no

psychical basis; it is not founded on any harmony of souls. They

scarcely know each other.... Can their love, then, be anything more

than the merely sensual passion aroused by the contemplation of a

beautiful body? ... So much I say with confidence, that the woman who,

inaccessible to the spiritual element in love, lets herself be carried

away on this first meeting by the joy of the senses ... that woman is

ignorant of the love which our age demands."

XIV

_LATTER-DAY ATTACKS UPON SHAKESPEARE--THE BACONIAN

THEORY--SHAKESPEARE'S KNOWLEDGE, PHYSICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL_

In one of his sonnets Robert Browning says that Shakespeare's name,

like the Hebrew name of God, ought never to be taken in vain. A timely

monition to an age which has seen this great name besmirched by

American and European imbecility!

It is well known that in recent days a troop of less than halfeducated

people have put forth the doctrine that Shakespeare lent his name to a

body of poetry with which he had really nothing to do--which he could

not have understood, much less have written. Literary criticism is an

instrument which, like all delicate tools, must be handled carefully,

and only by those who have a vocation for it. Here it has fallen into

the hands of raw Americans and fanatical women. Feminine criticism on

the one hand, with its lack of artistic nerve, and Americanism on the

other hand, with its lack of spiritual delicacy, have declared war

to the knife against Shakespeare's personality, and have within the

last few years found a considerable number of adherents. We have here

another proof, if any were needed, that the judgment of the multitude,

in questions of art, is a negligible quantity.[1]

Before the middle of this century, it had occurred to no human being

to doubt that--trifling exceptions apart--the works attributed to

Shakespeare were actually written by him. It has been reserved for

the last forty years to see an ever-increasing stream of obloquy and

contempt directed against what had hitherto been the most honoured name

in modern literature.

At first the attack upon Shakespeare's memory was not so dogmatic as

it has since become. In 1848 an American, Hart by name, gave utterance

to some general doubts as to the origin of the plays. Then, in August

1852, there appeared in _Chambers's Edinburgh Journal_ an anonymous

article, the author of which declared his conviction that William

Shakespeare, uneducated as he was, must have hired a poet, some

penniless famished Chatterton, who was willing to sell him his genius,

and let him take to himself the credit for its creations. We see, he

says, that his plays steadily improve as the series proceeds, until

suddenly Shakespeare leaves London with a fortune, and the series comes

to an abrupt end. In the case of so strenuously progressive a genius,

can we account for this otherwise than by supposing that the poet had

died, while his employer survived him?

This is the first definite expression of the fancy that Shakespeare

was only a man of straw who had arrogated to himself the renown of an

unknown immortal.

In 1856 a Mr. William Smith issued a privately-printed letter to Lord

Ellesmere, in which he puts forth the opinion that William Shakespeare

was, by reason of his birth, his upbringing, and his lack of culture,

incapable of writing the plays attributed to him. They must have been

the work of a man educated to the highest point by study, travel,

knowledge of books and men--a man like Francis Bacon, the greatest

Englishman of his time. Bacon had kept his authorship secret, because

to have avowed it would have been to sacrifice his position both in

his profession and in Parliament; but he saw in these plays a means of

strengthening his economic position, and he used the actor Shakespeare

as a man of straw. Smith maintains that it was Bacon who, after having

fallen into disgrace in 1621, published the First Folio edition of the

plays in 1623.

If there were no other objection to this far-fetched theory, we cannot

but remark that Bacon was scrupulously careful as to the form in which

his works appeared, rewrote them over and over again, and corrected

them so carefully that scarcely a single error of the press is to be

found in his books. Can he have been responsible for the publication of

these thirty-six plays, which swarm with misreadings and contain about

twenty thousand errors of the press!

The delusion did not take serious shape until, in the same year, a Miss

Delia Bacon put forward the same theory in American magazines: her

namesake Bacon, and not Shakespeare, was the author of the renowned

dramas. In the following year she published a quite unreadable book on

the subject, of nearly 600 pages. And close upon her heels followed

her disciple, Judge Nathaniel Holmes, also an American, with a book

of no fewer than 696 pages, full of denunciations of the ignorant

vagabond William Shakespeare, who, though he could scarcely write his

own name and knew no other ambition than that of money-grubbing, had

appropriated half the renown of the great Bacon.

The assumption is always the same: Shakespeare, born in a provincial

town, of illiterate parents, his father being, among other things, a

butcher, was an ignorant boor, a low fellow, a "butcher-boy," as his

assailants currently call him. In Holmes, as in later writers, the

main method of proving Bacon's authorship of the Shakespearian plays

is to bring together passages of somewhat similar import in Bacon and

Shakespeare, in total disregard of context, form, or spirit.

Miss Delia Bacon literally dedicated her life to her attack

upon Shakespeare. She saw in his works, not poetry, but a great

philosophico-political system, and maintained that the proof of her

doctrine would be found deposited in Shakespeare's grave. She had

discovered in Bacon's letters the key to a cipher which would clear up

everything; but unfortunately she became insane before she had imparted

this key to the world.[2] She went to Stratford, obtained permission to

have the grave opened, hovered about it day and night, but at last left

it undisturbed, as it did not appear to her large enough to contain the

posthumous papers of the Elizabeth Club. She did not, however, expect

to find in the grave the original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays.

No! she exclaims in her article on "William Shakespeare and his Plays"

_(Putnam's Magazine_, January 1856), Lord Leicester's groom, of course,

cared nothing for them, but only for the profit to be made out of them.

What was to prevent him from lighting the fire with them? "He had those

manuscripts!... He had the original _Hamlet_ with its last finish; he

had the original _Lear_ with his own final readings; he had them all,

as they came from the gods.... And he left us to wear out our youth and

squander our lifetime in poring over and setting right the old garbled

copies of the playhouse!... Traitor and miscreant! what did you do with

them? You have skulked this question long enough. You will have to

account for them.... The awakening ages will put you on the stand, and

you will not leave it until you answer the question, 'What did you do

with them?'"

It is hard to be the greatest dramatic genius in the world's history,

and then, two centuries and a half after your death, to be called to

account in such a tone as this for the fact that your manuscripts

have disappeared. As regards purely external evidence, it is worth

mentioning that the greatest student of Bacon's works, his editor and

biographer, James Spedding, being challenged by Holmes to give his

opinion, made a statement which begins thus:--"I have read your book

on the authorship of Shakespeare faithfully to the end, and ... I

must declare myself not only unconvinced but undisturbed. To ask me

to believe that 'Bacon was the author of these dramas' is like asking

me to believe that Lord Brougham was the author not only of Dickens'

novels, but of Thackeray's also, and of Tennyson's poems besides.

I deny," he concludes, "that a _primâ facie_ case is made out for

questioning Shakespeare's title. But if there were any reason for

supposing that somebody else was the real author, I think I am in a

condition to say that, whoever it was, it was not Bacon" (_Reviews and

Discussions_, 1879, pp. 369-374).

What most amazes a critical reader of the Baconian impertinences

is the fact that all the different arguments for the impossibility

of attributing these plays to Shakespeare are founded upon the

universality of knowledge and insight displayed in them, which must

have been unattainable, it is urged, to a man of Shakespeare's

imperfect scholastic training. Thus all that these detractors bring

forward to Shakespeare's dishonour serves, rightly considered, to show

in a clearer light the wealth of his genius.

On the other hand, the arguments adduced in support of Bacon's

authorship are so ridiculous as almost to elude criticism. Opponents

of the doctrine have dwelt upon such details as the philistinism of

Bacon's essays "Of Love," "Of Marriage and Single Life," contrasted

with the depth and the wit of Shakesperian utterances on these

subjects; or they have cited certain lines from the miserable

translations of seven Hebrew psalms which Bacon produced in the last

years of his life, contrasting them with passages from _Rickard III_.

and _Hamlet_, in which Shakespeare has dealt with exactly similar

ideas--the harvest that follows from a seed-time of tears, and the

leaping to light of secret crimes. But it is a waste of time to go into

details. Any one who has read even a few of Bacon's essays or a stanza

or two of his verse translations, and who can discover in them any

trace of Shakespeare's style in prose or verse, is no more fitted to

have a voice on such questions than an inland bumpkin is fitted to lay

down the law upon navigation.

Even putting aside the conjecture with regard to Bacon, and looking

merely at the theory that Shakespeare did not write the plays, we

cannot but find it unrivalled in its ineptitude. How can we conceive

that not only contemporaries in general, but those with whom

Shakespeare was in daily intercourse--the players to whom he gave these

dramas for production, who received his instructions about them, who

saw his manuscripts and have described them to us (in the foreword to

the First Folio); the dramatists who were constantly with him, his

rivals and afterwards his comrades, like Drayton and Ben Jonson; the

people who discussed his works with him in the theatre, or, over the

evening glass, debated with him concerning his art; and, finally, the

young noblemen whom his genius attracted and who became his patrons

and afterwards his friends--how can we conceive that none of these,

no single one, should ever have observed that he was not the man he

pretended to be, and that he did not even understand the works he

fraudulently declared to be his! How can we conceive that none of all

this intelligent and critical circle should ever have discovered the

yawning gulf which separated his ordinary thought and speech from the

thought and style of his alleged works!

In sum, then, the only evidence against Shakespeare lies in the fact

that his works give proof of a too many-sided knowledge and insight!

The knowledge of English law which Shakespeare displays is so

surprising as to have led to the belief that he must for some time in

his youth have been a clerk in an attorney's office--a theory which was

thought to be supported by the belief, now discredited, that an attack

by the satirist Thomas Nash upon lawyers who had deserted the law for

poetry was directed against him.[3]

Shakespeare shows a quite unusual fondness for the use of legal

expressions. He knows to a nicety the technicalities of the bar, the

formulas of the bench. While most English writers of his period are

guilty of frequent blunders as to the laws of marriage and inheritance,

lawyers of a later date have not succeeded in finding in Shakespeare's

references to the law a single error or deficiency. Lord Campbell,

an eminent lawyer, has written a book on _Shakespeare's Legal

Acquirements_. And it was not through the lawsuits of Shakespeare's

riper years that he attained this knowledge. It is to be found even in

his earliest works. It appears, quaintly enough, in the mouth of the

goddess in _Venus and Adonis_ (verse 86, etc.), and it obtrudes itself

in Sonnet xlvi., with its somewhat tasteless and wire-drawn description

of a formal lawsuit between the eye and the heart. It is characteristic

that his knowledge does not extend to the laws of foreign countries;

otherwise we should scarcely find _Measure for Measure_ founded upon

such an impossible state of the law as that which is described as

obtaining in Vienna. Shakespeare's accurate knowledge begins and ends

with what comes within the sphere of his personal observation.

He seems equally at home in all departments of human life. If we might

conclude from his knowledge of law that he had been a lawyer, we might

no less confidently infer from his knowledge of typography that he had

been a printer's devil. An English printer named Blades has written

an instructive book, _Shakespeare and Typography_, to show that if

the poet had passed his whole life in a printing-office he could not

have been more familiar with the many peculiarities of nomenclature

belonging to the handicraft. Bishop Charles Wordsworth has written a

highly esteemed, very pious, but, I regret to say, quite unreadable

work, _Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible_, in which he

makes out that the poet was impregnated with the Biblical spirit, and

possessed a unique acquaintance with Biblical forms of expression.

Shakespeare's knowledge of nature is not simply such as can be

acquired by any one who passes his childhood and youth in the open

air and in the country. But even of this sort of knowledge he has an

astonishing store. Whole books have been written as to his familiarity

with insect life alone (R. Patterson: _The Natural History of the

Insects mentioned by Shakespeare_; London, 1841), and his knowledge

of the characteristics of the larger animals and birds seems to be

inexhaustible. Appleton Morgan, one of the commentators of the Baconian

theory, adduces in _The Shakespearean Myth_ a whole series of examples.

In _Much Ado_ (v. 2) Benedick says to Margaret--

"Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth; it catches."

The greyhound alone among dogs can seize its prey while in full career.

In _As You Like It_ (i. 2) Celia says--

"Here comes Monsieur Le Beau.

_Rosalind_. With his mouth full of news.

_Celia_. Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young."

Pigeons have a way, peculiar to themselves, of passing food down the

throats of their young.

In _Twelfth Night_ (iii. I) the Clown says to Viola--

"Fools are as like husbands, as pilchards are to

herrings,--the husband's the bigger."

The pilchard is a fish of the herring family, which is caught in the

Channel; it is longer and has larger scales.

In the same play (ii. 5) Maria says of Malvolio--

"Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling."

When a trout is tickled on the sides or the belly it becomes so

stupefied that it lets itself be caught in the hand.

In _Much Ado_ (iii. I) Hero says--

"For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs

Close by the ground, to hear our conference."

The lapwing, which runs very swiftly, bends its neck towards the ground

in running, in order to escape observation.

In _King Lear_ (i. 4) the Fool says--

"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long.

That it had its head bit off by its young."

In England, it is in the hedge-sparrow's nest that the cuckoo lays its

eggs.

In _All's Well that Ends Well_ (ii. 5) Lafeu says--

"I took this lark for a bunting."

The English bunting is a bird of the same colour and appearance as the

lark, but it does not sing so well.

It would be easy to show that Shakespeare was as familiar with the

characteristics of plants as with those of animals. Strangely enough,

people have thought this knowledge of nature so improbable in a great

poet, that in order to explain it they have jumped at the conclusion

that the author must have been a man of science as well.

More comprehensible is the astonishment which has been awakened by

Shakespeare's insight in other domains of nature not lying so open to

immediate observation. His medical knowledge early attracted attention.

In 1860 a Doctor Bucknill devoted a whole book to the subject, in which

he goes so far as to attribute to the poet the most advanced knowledge

of our own time, or, at any rate, of the 'sixties, in this department.

Shakespeare's representations of madness surpass all those of other

poets. Alienists are full of admiration for the accuracy of the

symptoms in Lear and Ophelia. Nay, more, Shakespeare appears to have

divined the more intelligent modern treatment of the insane, as opposed

to the cruelty prevalent in his own time and long after. He even had

some notions of what we in our days call medical jurisprudence; he was

familiar with the symptoms of violent death in contradistinction to

death from natural causes. Warwick says in the second part of _Henry

VI_. (iii. 2):--

"See, how the blood is settled in his face.

Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost,

Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,

Being all descended to the labouring heart."

These lines occur in the oldest text. In the later text, undoubtedly

the result of Shakespeare's revision, we read:--

"But see, his face is black, and full of blood;

His eye-balls further out than when he liv'd,

Staring full ghastly like a strangled man:

His hair uprear'd, his nostrils stretch'd with struggling;

His hands abroad display'd, as one that grasp'd

And tugg'd for life, and was by strength subdued.

Look, on the sheets, his hair, you see, is sticking;

His well-proportion'd beard made rough and rugged,

Like to the summer's corn by tempest lodg'd.

It cannot be but he was murder'd here;

The least of all these signs were probable."

Shakespeare seems, in certain instances, to be not only abreast of the

natural science of his time, but in advance of it. People have had

recourse to the Baconian theory in order to explain the surprising fact

that although Harvey, who is commonly represented as the discoverer

of the circulation of the blood, did not announce his discovery until

1619, and published his book upon it so late as 1628, yet Shakespeare,

who, as we know, died in 1616, in many passages of his plays alludes

to the blood as circulating through the body. Thus, for example, in

_Julius Cæsar_ (ii. I), Brutus says to Portia--

"You are my true and honourable wife;

As dear to me as are the ruddy drops

That visit my sad heart."

Again, in _Coriolanus_ (i. I) Menenius makes the belly say of its food--

"I send it through the rivers of your blood,

Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain;

And, through the cranks and offices of man,

The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins,

From me receive that natural competency

Whereby they live."

But apart from the fact that the highly gifted and unhappy Servetus,

whom Calvin burned, had, between 1530 and 1540, made the discovery and

lectured upon it, all men of culture in England knew very well before

Harvey's time that the blood flowed, even that it circulated, and,

more particularly, that it was driven from the heart to the different

limbs and organs; only, it was generally conceived that the blood

passed from the heart through the veins, and not, as is actually the

case, through the arteries. And there is nothing in the seventy-odd

places in Shakespeare where the circulation of the blood is mentioned

to show that he possessed this ultimate insight, although his general

understanding of these questions bears witness to his high culture.

Another point which some people have held inexplicable, except by the

Baconian theory, may be stated thus: Although the law of gravitation

was first discovered by Newton, who was born in 1642, or fully

twenty-six years after Shakespeare's death, and although the general

conception of gravitation towards the centre of the earth had been

unknown before Kepler, who discovered his third law of the mechanism of

the heavenly bodies two years after Shakespeare's death, nevertheless

in _Troilus and Cressida_ (iv. 2) the heroine thus expresses herself:--

"Time, force, and death,

Do to this body what extremes you can,

But the strong base and building of my love

Is as the very centre of the earth,

Drawing all things to it."

So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary

divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton

may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's

botanical and osteological discoveries; for Goethe had enjoyed a very

different education from his, and had, moreover, all desirable leisure

for scientific research. But Newton cannot rightly be said to have

discovered the law of gravitation; he only applied it to the movements

of the heavenly bodies. Even Aristotle had defined weight as "the

striving of heavy bodies towards the centre of the earth." Among men

of classical culture in England in Shakespeare's time, the knowledge

that the centre point of the earth attracts everything to it was

quite common. The passage cited only affords an additional proof that

several of the men whose society Shakespeare frequented were among the

most highly-developed intellects of the period. That his astronomical

knowledge was not, on the whole, in advance of his time is proved by

the expression, "the glorious planet Sol" in _Troilus and Cressida_ (i.

3). He never got beyond the Ptolemaic system.

Another confirmation of the theory that Bacon must have written

Shakespeare's plays has been found in the fact that the poet clearly

had some conception of geology; whereas geology, as a science, owes its

origin to Niels Steno, who was born in 1638, twenty-two years after

Shakespeare's death. In the second part of _Henry IV_. (iii. I), King

Henry says:--

"O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,

Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

Into the sea! and, other times, to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors!"

The purport of this passage is simply to show that in nature, as in

human life, the law of transformation reigns; but no doubt it is

implied that the history of the earth can be read in the earth itself,

and that changes occur through upheavals and depressions. It looks like

a forecast of the doctrine of Neptunism.

Here, again, people have gone to extremities in order artificially to

enhance the impression made by the poet's brilliant divination. It

was Steno who first systematised geological conceptions; but he was

by no means the first to hold that the earth had been formed little

by little, and that it was therefore possible to trace in the record

of the rocks the course of the earth's development. His chief service

lay in directing attention to stratification, as affording the best

evidence of the processes which have fashioned the crust of the globe.

It is, no doubt, a sign of Shakespeare's many-sided genius that here,

too, he anticipates the scientific vision of later times; but there

is nothing in these lines that presupposes any special or technical

knowledge. Here is an analogous case: In Michael Angelo's picture

of the creation of Adam, where God wakens the first man to life by

touching the figure's outstretched finger-tip with his own, we seem

to see a clear divination of the electric spark. Yet the induction of

electricity was not known until the eighteenth century, and Michael

Angelo could not possibly have any scientific understanding of its

nature.

Shakespeare's knowledge was not of a scientific cast. He learned from

men and from books with the rapidity of genius. Not, we may be sure,

without energetic effort, for nothing can be had for nothing; but the

effort of acquisition must have come easy to him, and must have escaped

the observation of all around him. There was no time in his life for

patient research; he had to devote the best part of his days to the

theatre, to uneducated and unconsidered players, to entertainments, to

the tavern. We may fancy that he must have had himself in mind when,

in the introductory scene to _Henry V_., he makes the Archbishop of

Canterbury thus describe his hero, the young king:--

"Hear him but reason in divinity,

And, all-admiring, with an inward wish

You would desire the king were made a prelate:

Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs,

You would say, it hath been all-in-all his study:

List his discourse of war, and you shall hear

A fearful battle render'd you in music:

Turn him to any cause of policy,

The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,

Familiar as his garter; that, 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;

So that the art and practic part of life

Must be the mistress to this theoric:

Which is a wonder, how his grace should glean it,

Since his addiction was to courses vain;

His companies unletter'd, rude, and shallow;

His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports;

And never noted in him any study,

Any retirement, any sequestration

From open haunts and popularity."

To this the Bishop of Ely answers very sagely, "The strawberry grows

underneath the nettle." We cannot but conceive, however, that, by a

beneficent provision of destiny, Shakespeare's genius found in the

highest culture of his day precisely the nourishment it required.

[1] According to W. H. Wyman's _Bibliography of the

Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy_ (Cincinnati, 1884), there had been

published up to that date 255 books, pamphlets, and essays as to

the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. In America 161 treatises of

considerable bulk had been devoted to the question, and in England 69.

Of these, 73 were decidedly opposed to Shakespeare's authorship, while

65 left the question undetermined. In other words, out of 161 books,

only 23 were in favour of Shakespeare. And since then the proportion

has no doubt remained much the same.

[2] One of her many followers, an American lawyer, Ignatius

Donelly formerly Member of Congress and Senator from Minnesota, claims

to have found the key. His crazy book is called _The Great Cryptogram:

Francis Bacon's Cipher in the so-called Shakespeare Plays_. Donelly

claims that among Bacon's papers he has discovered a cipher which

enables him to extract here and there from the First Folio letters

which form words and phrases distinctly stating that Bacon is the

author of the dramas, and how Bacon embodied in the First Folio a

cipher-confession of his authorship. It sets forth how Bacon embodied

in the First Folio a cipher-confession of his authorship. Apart from

the general madness of such a proceeding, Bacon must thus have made

the editors, Heminge and Condell, his accomplices in his meaningless

deception, and must even have induced Ben Jonson to confirm it by his

enthusiastic introductory poem.

[3] The passage runs thus: "It is a common practice now a

days among a sort of shifting companions that run through every art

and thrive by none, to leave the trade of _noverint_, whereto they

were born, and busy themselves with the endeavours of art, that could

scarcely latinize their neck-verse if they should have need; yet

English Seneca, read by candlelight, yields many good sentences, as

_Blood is a beggar_, and so forth; and if you entreat him fair in

a frosty morning, he will afford you whole _Hamlets_, I should say

handfuls, of tragical speeches." Although this passage seems at first

sight an evident gibe at Shakespeare, it has in reality no reference to

him, since _An Epistle to the Gentlemen Students of both Universities_,

by Thomas Nash, although not printed till 1589, can be proved to have

been written as early as 1587, many years before Shakespeare so much as

thought of _Hamlet_.

XV

_THE THEATRES--THEIR SITUATION AND ARRANGEMENTS--THE PLAYERS--THE

POETS--POPULAR AUDIENCES--THE ARISTOCRATIC PUBLIC--SHAKESPEARE'S

ARISTOCRATIC PRINCIPLES_

On swampy ground beside the Thames lay the theatres, of which the

largest were wooden sheds, only half thatched with rushes, with a

trench around them and a flagstaff on the roof. After the middle of

the fifteen-seventies, when the first was built, they shot up rapidly,

and in the early years of the new century theatre-building took such

a start that, as we learn from Prynne's _Histriomastix_, there were

in 1633 no fewer than nineteen permanent theatres in London, a number

which no modern town of 300,000 inhabitants can equal. These figures

show how keen and how widespread was the interest in the drama.

More than a hundred years before the first theatre was built there

had been professional actors in England. Their calling had developed

from that of the travelling jugglers, who varied their acrobatic

performances with "plays." The earliest scenic representations had

been given by the Church, and the Guilds had inherited the tradition.

Priests and choir-boys were the first actors of the Middle Ages, and

after them came the mummers of the Guilds. But none of these performers

acted except at periodical festivals; none of them were professional

actors. From the days of Henry the Sixth onwards, however, members of

the nobility began to entertain companies of actors, and Henry VII. and

Henry VIII. had their own private comedians. A "Master of the Revels"

was appointed to superintend the musical and dramatic entertainments at

court. About the middle of the sixteenth century, Parliament begins to

keep an eye upon theatrical representations. It forbids the performance

of anything conflicting with the doctrines of the Church, and prohibits

miracle-plays, but does not object to songs or plays designed to

attack vice and represent virtue. In other words, dramatic art escapes

condemnation when it is emphatically moral, and thrives best when it

keeps to purely secular matters.

Under Mary, religious plays once more came into honour. Elizabeth began

by strictly prohibiting all dramatic representations, but sanctioned

them again in 1560, subjecting them, however, to a censorship. This

measure was dictated at least as much by political as by religious

motives. The censorship must, however, have been exercised somewhat

loosely, since a statute of 1572 declared that all actors who were not

attached to the service of a nobleman should be treated as "rogues

and vagabonds," or, in other words, might be whipped out of any

town in which they appeared. This decree, of course, compelled all

actors to enter the service of one or other great man, and we see

that the aristocracy felt bound to protect their art. A large number

of the first men in the kingdom, during Elizabeth's reign, had each

his company of actors. The player received from the nobleman whose

"servant" he was a cloak bearing the arms of the family. On the other

hand, he received no salary, but was simply paid for each performance

given before his patron. We must thus conceive Shakespeare as bearing

on his cloak the arms of Leicester, and afterwards of the Lord

Chamberlain, until about his fortieth year. From 1604 onwards, when the

company was promoted by James I. to be "His Majesty's Servants," it was

the Royal arms that he wore. One is tempted to say that he exchanged a

livery for a uniform.

In 1574 Elizabeth had given permission to Lord Leicester's Servants

to give scenic representations of all sorts for the delectation of

herself and her lieges, both in London and anywhere else in England.

But neither in London nor in other towns did the local authorities

recognise this patent, and the hostile attitude of the Corporation

of London forced the players to erect their theatres outside its

jurisdiction. For if they played in the City itself, as had been

the custom, either in the great halls of the Guilds or in the open

inn-yards, they had to obtain the Lord Mayor's sanction for each

individual performance, and to hand over half their receipts to the

City treasury.

It was with anything but satisfaction that the peaceable burgesses of

London saw a playhouse rise in the neighbourhood of their homes. The

theatre brought in its train a loose, frivolous, and rowdy population.

Around the playhouses, at the hours of performance, the narrow streets

of that period became so crowded that business suffered in the shops,

processions and funerals were obstructed, and perpetual causes of

complaint arose. Houses of ill-fame, moreover, always clustered round

a theatre; and, although the performances took place by day, there was

always the danger of fire inseparable from theatres, and especially

from wooden erections with thatched roofs.

But the chief opposition to the theatres did not come from the mere

Philistinism of the industrious middle-class, but from the fanatical

Puritanism which was now rearing its head. It is the Puritans who

have killed the old Merry England, abolishing its May-games, its

popular dances, its numerous rustic sports. They could not look on

with equanimity, and see the drama, which had once been a spiritual

institution, become a platform for mere worldliness.

Their chief accusation against the dramatic poets was that they lied.

For intelligences of this order, there was no difference between a

fiction and a falsehood. The players they attacked on the ground that

when they played female parts they appeared in women's attire, which

was expressly forbidden in the Bible (Deut. xxii. 5) as an abomination

to the Lord. They saw in this masquerading in the guise of the other

sex a symptom of unnatural and degrading vices. They not only despised

the actors as jugglers and loathed them as persons living beyond the

pale of respectability, but they further accused them of cultivating in

private all the vices which they were in the habit of portraying on the

stage.

There can be no doubt that from a very early period the influence of

Puritanism made itself felt in the attitude of the City authorities.

It can easily be understood, then, that the leaders of the new

theatrical industry tried to escape from their jurisdiction; and

this they did by choosing sites outside the City, and yet as near

its boundaries as possible. To the south of the Thames lay a stretch

of land not belonging to the City but to the Bishop of Winchester, a

spiritual magnate who tried to make his territory as profitable as he

could without inquiring too closely as to the uses to which it was put.

Here lay the Bear Garden; here were numerous houses of ill-fame; and

here arose the different theatres, the "Hope," the "Swan," the "Rose,"

&c. When James Burbage's successors, in the year 1598, found themselves

compelled, after a lawsuit, to pull down the building known as the

Theatre (in Bishopsgate Street), they employed the material to erect

on this artistic no-man's-land the celebrated Globe Theatre, which was

opened in 1599.

The theatres were of two classes, one known as private, the other as

public, a distinction which was at one time rather obscure, since the

difference was clearly not that admission to the private theatres took

place by invitation, and to the public ones by payment. A nobleman

could hire any theatre, whether private or public, and engage the

company to give a performance for him and his invited guests. The real

distinction was, that the private theatres were designed on the model

of the Guildhalls or Town Halls, in which, before the period of special

buildings, representations had been given; while the public theatres

were constructed on the lines of the inn-yard. The private theatres,

then, were fully roofed, and, being the more fashionable, had seats

in every part of the house, including the parterre, here known as the

pit. Being roofed, they could be used not only in the daytime, but by

artificial light. In the public theatres, on the other hand, as in

ancient Greece and to this day in the Tyrol, only the stage was roofed,

the auditorium being open to the sky, so that performances could be

given only by daylight. But in Greece the air is pure, the climate

mild; in the Tyrol performances take place only on a few summer days.

Here plays were acted while rain and snow fell upon the spectators,

fogs enwrapped them, and the wind plucked at their garments. As the

prototype of these theatres was the old inn-yard, in which some of

the spectators stood, while others were seated in the open galleries

running all round it, the parterre, which retained the name of _yard_,

was here devoted to the poorest and roughest of the public, who stood

throughout the performance, while the galleries (_scaffolds_), running

along the walls in two or three tiers, offered seats to wealthier

playgoers of both sexes.

The days of performance at these theatres were announced by the

hoisting of a flag on the roof. The time of beginning was three o'clock

punctually, and the performance went straight on, uninterrupted by

entr'actes. It lasted, as a rule, for only two hours or two hours and a

half.

Close to the Globe Theatre lay the Bear Garden, the rank smell from

which greeted the nostrils, even before it came in sight. The famous

bear Sackerson, who is mentioned in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, now

and then broke his chain and put female theatre-goers shrieking to

flight.

Tickets there were none. A penny was the price of admission to

standing-room in the yard; and those who wanted better places put their

money in a box held out to them for that purpose, the amount varying

from a penny to half-a-crown, in accordance with the places required.

When we remember that one shilling of Queen Elizabeth's was equivalent

to five of Queen Victoria's, the price of the dearer places seems very

considerable in comparison with those current to-day. The wealthiest

spectators gave more than twelve shillings (in modern money) for their

places in the proscenium-boxes on each side of the stage. At the Globe

Theatre the orchestra was placed in the upper proscenium-box on the

right; it was the largest in London, consisting of ten performers, all

distinguished in their several lines, playing lutes, oboes, trumpets,

and drums.

The most fashionable seats were on the stage itself, approached, not

by the ordinary entrances, but through the players' tiring-room.

There sat the amateurs, the noble patrons of the theatre, Essex,

Southampton, Pembroke, Rutland; there snobs, upstarts, and fops took

their places on chairs or stools; if there were not seats enough, they

spread their cloaks upon the pine-sprigs that strewed the boards, and

(like Bracchiano in Webster's _Vittoria Corombona)_ lay upon them.

There, too, sat the author's rivals, the dramatic poets, who had free

admissions; and there, lastly, sat the shorthand writers, commissioned

by piratical booksellers, who, under pretence of making critical notes,

secretly took down the dialogue--men who were a nuisance to the

players and, as a rule, a thorn in the side to the poets, but to whom

posterity no doubt owes the preservation of many plays which would

otherwise have been lost.

All these notabilities on the stage carry on half-audible

conversations, and make the servitors of the theatre bring them drinks

and light their pipes, while the actors can with difficulty thread

their way among them--arrangements which cannot have heightened the

illusion, but perhaps did less to mar it than we might imagine.

For the audience is not easily disturbed, and does not demand any of

the illusion which is supplied by modern mechanism. Movable scenery

was unknown before 1660. The walls of the stage were either hung with

loose tapestries or quite uncovered, so that the wooden doors which

led to the players' tiring-rooms at the back were clearly visible. In

battle-scenes, whole armies entered triumphant, or were driven off in

confusion and defeat, through a single door. When a tragedy was acted

the stage was usually hung with black; for a comedy the hangings were

blue.

As in the theatre of antiquity, rude machines were employed to raise or

lower actors through the stage; trap-doors were certainly in use, and

probably "bridges," or small platforms, which could be elevated into

the upper regions. In somewhat earlier times still ruder appliances

had been in vogue. For example, in the religious and allegorical

plays, Hell-mouth was represented by a huge face of painted canvas

with shining eyes, a large red nose, and movable jaws set with tusks.

When the jaws opened, they seemed to shoot out flames, torches being

no doubt waved behind them. The theatrical property-room of that time

was incomplete without a "rybbe colleryd red" for the mystery of the

Creation. But in Shakespeare's day scarcely anything of this sort was

required. It was Inigo Jones who first introduced movable scenery and

decorations at the court entertainments. They were certainly not in use

at the popular playhouses at any time during Shakespeare's connection

with the stage.

Audiences felt no need for such aids to illusion; their imagination

instantly supplied the want. They saw whatever the poet required them

to see--as a child sees whatever is suggested to its fancy, as little

girls see real-life dramas in their games with their dolls. For the

spectators were children alike in the freshness and in the force of

their imagination. If only a placard were hung on one of the doors of

the stage bearing in large letters the name of Paris or of Venice, the

spectators were at once transported to France or Italy. Sometimes the

Prologue informed them where the scene was placed. Men of classical

culture, who insisted on unity of place in the drama, were offended by

the continual changes of scene and the pitiful appliances by which they

were indicated. Sir Philip Sidney, in his _Defense of Poesy,_ published

in 1583, ridicules the plays in which "You shall have Asia of the one

side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that

the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he

is, or else the tale will not be conceived."

This alacrity of imagination on the part of popular audiences was

unquestionably an advantage to the English stage in its youth. If an

actor made a movement as though he were plucking a flower, the scene

was at once understood to be a garden; as in _Henry VI_., where the

adoption of the red rose and white rose as party badges is represented.

If an actor spoke as though he were standing on a ship's deck in a

heavy sea, the convention was at once accepted; as in the famous scene

in _Pericles_ (iii. 2). Shakespeare, though he did not hesitate to take

advantage of this accommodating humour on the part of his public, and

made no attempt at illusive decoration, nevertheless ridiculed, as we

have seen, in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, the meagre scenic apparatus

of his time (especially, we may suppose, on the provincial stage);

while in the Prologue to his _Henry V_. he deplores and apologises for

the narrowness of his stage and the poverty of his resources:--

"Pardon, gentles all,

The flat unraised spirits that have dar'd

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object: can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques,

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

O, pardon! since a crooked figure may

Attest in little place a million;

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose, within the girdle of these walls

Are now confin'd two mighty monarchies."

These monarchies, then, were mounted in a frame formed of young

noblemen, critics and stage-struck gallants, who bantered the

boy-heroines, fingered the embroideries on the costumes, smoked their

clay pipes, and otherwise made themselves entirely at their ease.

A curtain, which did not rise, but parted in the middle, separated the

stage from the auditorium.

The only extant drawing of the interior of an Elizabethan theatre was

recently discovered by Karl Gaedertz in the University Library at

Utrecht. It is a sketch of the Swan Theatre, executed in 1596 by the

Dutch scholar, Jan de Witt. The stage, resting upon strong posts, has

no other furniture than a single bench, on which one of the performers

is seated. The background is formed by the tiring-house, into which two

doors lead. Over it is a roofed balcony, which could be used, no doubt,

both by the players and by the audience. Above the roof of the tiring-house

rises a second story, crowned by a sort of hutch, over which waves

a flag bearing the image of a swan. At an open door of the hutch is

seen a trumpeter giving a signal of some sort. The theatre is oval in

shape, and has three tiers of seats, while the pit is left open for the

standing "groundlings."

The balcony over the tiring-house answers in this case to the inner

stage of other and better-equipped theatres.

This smaller raised platform at the back of the principal stage was

exceedingly useful, and, in a certain measure, supplied the place of

the scenic apparatus of later times. Tieck, who probably went further

than any other critic in his dislike for modern mechanism and his

enthusiasm for the primitive arrangements of Shakespeare's day, has

elaborately reconstructed it in his novel, _Der junge Tischlermeister_.

In the middle of the deep stage, according to him, rose two wooden

pillars, eight or ten feet high, which supported a sort of balcony.

Three broad steps led from the front stage to the inner alcove

under the balcony, which was sometimes open, sometimes curtained

off. It represented, according to circumstances, a cave, a room, a

summer-house, a family vault, and so forth. It was here that, in

_Macbeth_, the ghost of Banquo appeared seated at the table. Here stood

the bed on which Desdemona was smothered. Here, in _Hamlet_, the play

within a play was acted. Here Gloucester's eyes were put out. On the

balcony above, Juliet waited for her Romeo, and Sly took his place

to see _The Taming of the Shrew_. When the siege of a town had to be

represented, the defenders of the walls stood and parleyed on this

balcony, while the assailants were grouped in the foreground.

It is probable that at each side a pretty broad flight of steps led

up to this balcony. Here sat senates, councils, and princes with

their courts. It needed but few figures to fill the inner stage, so

narrow were its dimensions. Macbeth mounted these stairs, and so did

Falstaff in the _Merry Wives_. Melancholy or contemplative personages

leaned against the pillars. The structure offered a certain facility

for effective groupings, somewhat like that in Raffaelle's "School of

Athens." Figures in front did not obstruct the view of those behind,

and groups gathered to the right and left of the main stage could,

without an overstrain of make-believe, be supposed not to see each

other.

The only department of decoration which involved any considerable

expense was the costumes of the actors. On these such large sums were

lavished that the Puritans made this extravagance one of their chief

points of attack upon theatres. In Henslowe's Diary we find such

entries as £4, 14s. for a pair of breeches, and £16 for a velvet cloak.

It is even on record that a famous actor once gave £20, 10s. for a

mantle. In an inventory of the property belonging to the Lord Admiral's

Company in the year 1598, we find many splendid dresses enumerated: for

example, "I payr of carnatyon satten Venesyons [breeches] layd with

gold lace," and "I orenge taney [tawny] satten dublet, layd thycke with

gowld lace."[1] The sums paid for these costumes are glaringly out of

keeping with the paltry fees allotted to the author. Up to the year

1600 the ordinary price of a play was from five to six pounds--scarcely

more than the cost of a pair of breeches to be worn by the actor who

played the Prince or King.

In the boxes ("rooms") sat the better sort of spectators, officers,

City merchants, sometimes with their wives; but ladies always wore a

mask of silk or velvet, partly for protection against sun and air,

partly in order to blush (or not to blush) unseen, at the frivolous

and often licentious things that were said upon the stage. The mask

was then as common an article of female attire as is the veil in

our days. But the front rows of what we should now call the first

tier were occupied by beauties who had no desire whatever to conceal

their countenances, though they might use the mask (as in later times

the fan) for purposes of coquetry. These were the kept mistresses

of men of quality, and other gorgeously decked ladies, who resorted

to the playhouse in order to make acquaintances. Behind them sat

the respectable citizens. But in the gallery above a rougher public

assembled--sailors, artisans, soldiers, and loose women of the lowest

class.

No women ever appeared upon the stage.

The frequenters of the pit, with their coarse boisterousness, were

the terror of the actors. They all had to stand--coal-heavers

and bricklayers, dock-labourers, serving-men, and idlers.

Refreshment-sellers moved about among them, supplying them with

sausages and ale, with apples and nuts. They ate and drank, drew corks,

smoked tobacco, fought with each other, and often, when they were out

of humour, threw fragments of food, and even stones, at the actors.

Now and then they would come to loggerheads with the fine gentlemen

on the stage, so that the performance had to be interrupted and the

theatre closed. The sanitary arrangements were of the most primitive

description, and the groundlings resisted all attempts at reform on

the part of the management. When the evil smells became intolerable,

juniper-berries were burnt by way of freshening the atmosphere.

The theatrical public made and executed its own laws. There was no

police in the theatre. Now and then a pickpocket would be caught in the

act, and tied to a post at the corner of the stage beside the railing

which divided it from the auditorium.

The beginning of the performance was announced by three trumpet-blasts.

The actor who spoke the Prologue appeared in a long cloak, with a

laurel-wreath on his head, probably because this duty was originally

performed by the poet himself. After the play, the Clown danced a jig,

at the same time singing some comic jingle and accompanying himself

on a small drum and flute. The Epilogue consisted of, or ended in, a

prayer for the Queen, in which all the actors took part, kneeling.

Elizabeth herself and her court did not visit these theatres. There

was no Royal box, and the public was too mixed. On the other hand, the

Queen could, without derogating from her state, summon the players

to court, and the Lord Chamberlain's Company, to which Shakespeare

belonged, was very often commanded to perform before her, especially

upon festivals such as Christmas Day, Twelfth Night, and so forth. Thus

Shakespeare is known to have acted before the Queen in two comedies

presented at Greenwich Palace at Christmas 1594. He is mentioned along

with the leading actors, Burbage and Kemp.

Elizabeth paid for such performances a fee of twenty nobles, and a

further gratuity of ten nobles--in all, £10.

As the Queen, however, was not content with thus witnessing plays

at rare intervals, she formed companies of her own, the so-called

Children's Companies, recruited from the choir-boys of the

Chapels-Royal, whose music-schools thus developed, as it were, into

nurseries for the stage. These half-grown boys, who were, of course,

specially fitted to represent female characters, won no small favour,

both at court and with the public; and we see that one such troupe,

consisting of the choir-boys of St. Paul's, for some time competed,

at the Blackfriars Theatre, with Shakespeare's company. We may gather

from the bitter complaint in _Hamlet_ (ii. 2) how serious was this

competition:--

"_Hamlet_. Do they [the players] hold the same estimation

they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed?

"_Rosencrantz_. No, indeed, they are not.

"_Ham_. How comes it? Do they grow rusty?

"_Ros_. Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace: but

there is, sir, an aery of children, little eyases, that

cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically

clapped for't: these are now the fashion; and so berattle

the common stages (so they call them), that many wearing

rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come

thither

. . . . . . . . . . .

"_Ham_. Do the boys carry it away?

"_Ros_. Ay, that they do, my lord; Hercules and his load

too."[2]

The number of players in a company was not great--not more, as a rule,

than eight or ten; never, probably, above twelve. The players were of

different grades. The lowest were the so-called hirelings, who received

wages from the others and were in some sense their servants. They

appeared as supernumeraries or in small speaking parts, and had nothing

to do with the management of the theatre. The actors, properly so called,

differed in standing according as they shared in the receipts only as

actors, or were entitled to a further share as part-proprietors of the

theatre. There was no manager. The actors themselves decided what plays

should be performed, distributed the parts, and divided the receipts

according to an established scale. The most advantageous position, of

course, was that of a shareholder in the theatre; for half of the gross

receipts went to the shareholders, who provided the costumes and paid

the wages of the hirelings.

Shakespeare's comparatively early rise to affluence can be accounted

for only by assuming that, in his dual capacity as poet and player, he

must quickly have become a shareholder in the theatre.

As an actor he does not seem to have attained the highest

eminence--fortunately, for if he had, he would probably have found

very little time for writing. The parts he played appear to have been

dignified characters of the second order; for there is no evidence

that he was anything of a comedian. We know that he played the Ghost

in _Hamlet_--a part of no great length, it is true, but of the first

importance. It is probable, too, that he played old Adam in _As You

Like It_, and pretty certain that he played old Knowell in Ben Jonson's

_Every Man in His Humour_. It may possibly be in the costume of Knowell

that he is represented in the well-known Droeshout portrait at the

beginning of the First Folio. Tradition relates that he once played his

own Henry IV. at court, and that the Queen, in passing over the stage,

dropped her glove as a token of her favour, whereupon Shakespeare

handed it back to her with the words:--

"And though now bent on this high embassy,

Yet stoop we to take up our cousin's glove."

In all lists of the players belonging to his company he is named among

the first and most important.

Not least among the marvels connected with his genius is the fact

that, with all his other occupations, he found time to write so much.

His mornings would be given to rehearsals, his afternoons to the

performances; he would have to read, revise, accept or reject a great

number of plays; and he often passed his evenings either at the Mermaid

Club or at some tavern; yet for eighteen years on end he managed to

write, on an average, two plays a year--and such plays!

In order to understand this we have to recollect that although

between 1557 and 1616 there were forty noteworthy and two hundred

and thirty-three inferior English poets, who issued works in epic or

lyric form, yet the characteristic of the period was the immense rush

of productivity in the direction of dramatic art. Every Englishman of

talent in Elizabeth's time could write a tolerable play, just as every

second Greek in the age of Pericles could model a tolerable statue, or

as every European of to-day can write a passable newspaper article.

The Englishmen of that time were born dramatists, as the Greeks were

born sculptors, and as we hapless moderns are born journalists. The

Greek, with an inborn sense of form, had constant opportunities for

observing the nude human body and admiring its beauty. If he saw a man

ploughing a field, he received a hundred impressions and ideas as to

the play of the muscles in the naked leg. The modern European possesses

a certain command of language, is practised in argument, has a knack of

putting thoughts and events into words, and is, finally, a confirmed

newspaper-reader--all characteristics which make for the multiplication

of newspaper articles. The Englishman of that day was keenly observant

of human destinies, and of the passions which, after the fall of

Catholicism and before the triumph of Puritanism, revelled in the brief

freedom of the Renaissance. He was accustomed to see men following

their instincts to the last extremity--which was not infrequently

the block. The high culture of the age did not exclude violence, and

this violence led to dramatic vicissitudes of fortune. It was but a

short way from the palace to the scaffold--witness the fate of Henry

VIII.'s wives, of Mary Stuart, of Elizabeth's great lovers, Essex and

Raleigh. The Englishman of that age had always before his eyes pictures

of extreme prosperity followed by sudden ruin and violent death. Life

itself was dramatic, as in Greece it was plastic, as in our days it is

journalistic, photographic--that is to say, striving in vain to give

permanence to formless and everyday events and thoughts.

A dramatic poet in those days, no less than a journalist in ours, had

to study his public closely. All the intellectual conflicts of the

period were for sixty years fought out in the theatre, as they are

nowadays in the press. Passionate controversies between one poet and

another were cast in dramatic form. Rosencrantz says to Hamlet, "There

was, for a while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the

player went to cuffs in the question." The efflorescence of the drama

on British soil was of short duration--as short as that of painting in

Holland. But while it lasted the drama was the dominant art-form and

medium of intellectual expression, and it was consequently supported by

a large public.

Shakespeare never wrote a play "for the study," nor could he have

imagined himself doing anything of the sort. As playwright and player

in one, he had the stage always in his eye, and what he wrote had

never long to wait for performance, but took scenic shape forthwith.

Although, like all productive spirits, he thought first of satisfying

himself in what he wrote, yet he must necessarily have borne in mind

the public to whom the play appealed. He could by no means avoid

considering the tastes of the average playgoer. The average playgoer,

indeed, made no bad audience, but an audience which had to be amused,

and which could not, for too long a stretch, endure unrelieved

seriousness or lofty flights of thought. For the sake of the common

people, then, scenes of grandeur and refinement were interspersed

with passages of burlesque. To please the many-headed, the Clown was

brought on at every pause in the action, much as he is in the circus

of to-day. The points of rest which are now marked by the fall of the

curtain between the acts were then indicated by conversations such as

that between Peter and the musicians in _Romeo and Juliet_ (iv. 5); it

merely implies that the act is over.

For the rest, Shakespeare did not write for the average spectator. He

did not value his judgment. Hamlet says to the First Player (ii. 2):--

"I heard thee speak me a speech once,--but it was never

acted; or, if it was, not above once; for the play, I

remember, pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the

general: but it was (as I received it, and others, whose

judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine) an

excellent play."

All Shakespeare lies in the words, "It pleased not the million."

The English drama as it took shape under Shakespeare's hand addressed

itself primarily to the best elements in the public. But "the best"

were the noble young patrons of the theatre, to whom he personally owed

a great deal of his culture, almost all his repute, and, moreover, the

insight he had attained into the aristocratic habit of mind.

A young English nobleman of that period must have been one of the

finest products of humanity, a combination of the Belvedere Apollo with

a prize racehorse; he must have felt himself at once a man of action

and an artist.

We have seen how early Shakespeare must have made the acquaintance

of Essex, before his fall the mightiest of the mighty. He wrote

_A Midsummer Night's Dream_ for his marriage, and he introduced a

compliment to him into the Prologue to the fifth act of _Henry V_.

England received her victorious King, he says--

"As, by a lower but loving likelihood.

Were now the general of our gracious empress

(As, in good time, he may) from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,

How many would the peaceful city quit,

To welcome him!"

We have seen, moreover, how early and how intimate was his connection

with the young Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated the only two

books which he himself gave to the press.

It must have been from young aristocrats such as these that Shakespeare

acquired his aristocratic method of regarding the course of history.

How else could he regard it? A large part of the middle class was

hostile to him, despised his calling, and treated him as one outside

the pale; the clergy condemned and persecuted him; the common people

were in his eyes devoid of judgment. The ordinary life of his day did

not, on the whole, appeal to him. We find him totally opposed to the

realistic dramatisation of everyday scenes and characters, to which

many contemporary poets devoted themselves. This sort of truth to

nature was foreign to him, so foreign that he suffered for lack of

it. Towards the close of his artistic career he was outstripped in

popularity by the realists of the day.

His heroes are princes and noblemen, the kings and barons of England.

It is always they, in his eyes, who make history, of which he shows

throughout a naïvely heroic conception. In the wars which he presents,

it is always an individual leader and hero on whom everything depends.

It is Henry V. who wins the day at Agincourt, just as in Homer it is

Achilles who conquers before Troy. Yet the whole issue of these wars

depended upon the foot-soldiers. It was the English archers, 14,000 in

number, who at Agincourt defeated the French army of 50,000 men, with

a loss of only 1600, as against 10,000 on the other side. Shakespeare

certainly did not divine that it was the rise of the middle classes and

their spirit of enterprise that constituted the strength of England

under Elizabeth. He regarded his age from the point of view of the man

who was accustomed to see in richly endowed and princely young noblemen

the very crown of humanity, the patrons of all lofty effort, and the

originators of all great achievements. And, with his necessarily scanty

historic culture, he saw bygone periods, of Roman as well as of English

history, in the same light as his own times.

This tendency appears already in the second part of _Henry VI._ Note

the picture of Jack Cade's rebellion (iv. 2), which contains some

inimitable touches:--

"_Cade_. Be brave then; for your captain is brave, and vows

reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny

loaves sold for a penny; the three-hooped pot shall have

ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer.

All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my

palfrey go to grass. And, when I am king (as king I will

be),--

"_All_. God save your majesty!

"_Cade_. I thank you, good people:--there shall be no money;

all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them

all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and

worship me their lord.

"_Dick_. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

"_Cade_. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable

thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made

parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo

a man?

. . . . . . . . . . . .

"_Enter some, bringing in the Clerk of Chatham_.

"_Smith_. The clerk of Chatham: he can write and read, and

cast accompt.

"_Cade_. O monstrous!

"_Smith_. We took him setting of boys' copies.

"_Cade_. Here's a villain!

"_Smith_. Has a book in his pocket, with red letters in't.

. . . . . . . . . . .

"_Cade_. Let me alone.--Dost thou use to write thy name, or

hast thou a mark to thyself, like an honest plain-dealing

man?

"_Clerk_. Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up,

that I can write my name.

"_All_. He hath confessed: away with him! he's a villain and

a traitor.

"_Cade_. Away with him, I say: hang him with his pen and

ink-horn about his neck."

What is so remarkable and instructive in these brilliant scenes is that

Shakespeare here, quite against his custom, departs from his authority.

In Holinshed, Jack Cade and his followers do not appear at all as the

crazy Calibans whom Shakespeare depicts. The chief of their grievances,

in fact, was that the King alienated the crown revenues and lived on

the taxes; and, moreover, they complained of abuses of all sorts in the

execution of the laws and the raising of revenue. The third article

of their memorial stands in striking contrast to their action in the

play; for it points out that nobles of royal blood (probably meaning

York) are excluded from the King's "dailie presence," while he gives

advancement to "other meane persons of lower nature," who close the

King's ears to the complaints of the country, and distribute favours,

not according to law, but for gifts and bribes. Moreover, they complain

of interferences with freedom of election, and, in short, express

themselves quite temperately and constitutionally. Finally, in more

than one passage of the complaint, they give utterance to a thoroughly

English and patriotic resentment of the loss of Normandy, Gascony,

Aquitaine, Anjou, and Maine.

But it did not at all suit Shakespeare to show a Jack Cade at the head

of a popular movement of this sort. He took no interest in anything

constitutional or parliamentary. In order to find the colours he wanted

for the rebellion, he hunts up in Stow's _Summarie of the Chronicles

of England_ the picture of Wat Tyler's and Jack Straw's risings under

Richard II., two outbursts of wild communistic enthusiasm, reinforced

by religious fanaticism. From this source he borrows, almost word for

word, some of the rebels' speeches. In these risings, as a matter of

fact, all "men of law, justices, and jurors" who fell into the hands of

the leaders were beheaded, and all records and muniments burnt, so that

owners of property might not in future have the means of establishing

their rights.

This contempt for the judgment of the masses, this anti-democratic

conviction, having early taken possession of Shakespeare's mind, he

keeps on instinctively seeking out new evidences an its favour, new

testimonies to its truth; and therefore he transforms facts, where they

do not suit his view, on the model of other facts which do.

[1] See Appendix to _Diary of Philip Henslowe_ (Shakspere

Society's Publications).

[2] A figure of Hercules with the globe on his shoulders served

as sign to the Globe Theatre.

XVI

_THE THEATRES CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF THE PLAGUE--DID SHAKESPEARE VISIT

ITALY?--PASSAGES WHICH FAVOUR THIS CONJECTURE_

From the autumn of 1592 until the summer of 1593 all the London

theatres were closed. That frightful scourge, the plague, from which

England had so long been free, was raging in the capital. Even the

sittings of the Law Courts had to be suspended. At Christmas 1592 the

Queen refrained from ordering any plays at court, and the Privy Council

had at an earlier date issued a proclamation forbidding all public

theatrical performances, on the reasonable ground that convalescents,

weary of their long confinement, made haste to resort to such

entertainments before they were properly out of quarantine, and thus

spread the contagion.

The matter has a particular bearing upon the biography of Shakespeare,

since, if he ever travelled on the continent of Europe, it was probably

at this period, while the theatres were closed.

That it must have been now, if ever, there can be no great doubt. But

it remains exceedingly difficult to determine whether Shakespeare ever

crossed the Channel.

We have noticed what an attraction Italy possessed for him, even from

the beginning of his career. To this _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and

_Romeo and Juliet_ bear witness. But in these plays we as yet find

nothing which points definitely to the conclusion that the poet had

seen with his own eyes the country in which his action is placed. It is

different with the dramas of Italian scene which Shakespeare produces

about the year 1596--the adaptation of the old _Taming of a Shrew_

and _The Merchant of Venice_; it is different, too, with _Othello_,

which comes much later. Here we find definite local colour, with such

an abundance of details pointing to actual vision that it is hard to

account for them otherwise than by assuming a visit on the poet's part

to such cities as Verona, Venice, and Pisa.

It is on the face of it highly probable that Shakespeare should wish to

see Italy as soon as he could find an opportunity. To the Englishman

of that day Italy was the goal of every longing. It was the great home

of culture. Men studied its literature and imitated its poetry. It was

the beautiful land where dwelt the joy of life. Venice in especial

exercised a fascination stronger than that of Paris. It needed no great

wealth to make a pilgrimage to Italy. One could travel inexpensively,

perhaps on foot, like that Coryat who discovered the use of the fork;

one could pass the night at cheap hostelries. Many of the distinguished

men of the time are known to have visited Italy--men of science, like

Bacon, and afterwards Harvey; authors and poets like Lyly, Munday,

Nash, Greene, and Daniel, the form of whose sonnets determined that

of Shakespeare's. Among the artists of Shakespeare's time, the

widely-travelled Inigo Jones had made a stay in Italy. Most of these

men have themselves given us some account of their travels; but as

Shakespeare has left us no biographical records whatever, the absence

of any direct mention of such a journey on his part is of little

moment, if other significant facts can be adduced in its favour.

And such facts are not wanting.

There were in Shakespeare's time no guide-books for the use of

travellers. What he knows, then, of foreign lands and their customs he

cannot have gathered from such sources. Of Venice, which Shakespeare

has so livingly depicted, no description was published in England until

after he had written his _Merchant of Venice_. Lewkenor's description

of the city (itself a mere compilation at second hand) dates from 1598,

Coryat's from 1611, Moryson's from 1617.

In Shakespeare's _Taming of the Shrew_, we notice with surprise not

only the correctness of the Italian names, but the remarkable way

in which, at the very beginning of the play, several Italian cities

and districts are characterised in a single phrase. Lombardy is "the

pleasant garden of great Italy;" Pisa is "renowned for grave citizens;"

and here the epithet "grave" is especially noteworthy, since many

testimonies concur to show that it was particularly characteristic

of the inhabitants of Pisa. C. A. Brown, in _Shakespeare's

Autobiographical Poems,_ has pointed out the remarkable form of the

betrothal of Petruchio and Katherine (namely, that her father joins

their hands in the presence of two witnesses), and observes that this

form was not English, but peculiarly Italian. It is not to be found in

the older play, the scene of which, however, is laid in Athens.

Special attention was long ago directed to the following speech at the

end of the second act, where Gremio reckons up all the goods and gear

with which his house is stocked:--