"First, as you know, my house within the city

Is richly furnished with plate and gold:

Basins, and ewers, to lave her dainty hands;

My hangings all of Tyrian tapestry;

In ivory coffers I have stuff'd my crowns;

In cypress chests my arras, counterpoints,

Costly apparel, tents, and canopies,

Fine linen, Turkey cushions boss'd with pearl,

Valance of Venice gold in needlework,

Pewter and Iprass, and all things that belong

To house, or housekeeping."

Lady Morgan long ago remarked that she had seen literally all of these

articles of luxury in the palaces of Venice, Genoa, and Florence. Miss

Martineau, in ignorance alike of Brown's theory and Lady Morgan's

observation, expressed to Shakespeare's biographer, Charles Knight, her

feeling that the local colour of _The Taming of the Shrew_ and _The

Merchant of Venice_ displays such an intimate acquaintance, not only

with the manners and customs of Italy, but with the minutest details

of domestic life, that it cannot possibly have been gleaned from books

or from mere conversations with this man or that who happened to have

floated in a gondola.

On such a question as this, the decided impressions of feminine readers

are not without a certain weight.

Brown has pointed out as specifically Italian such small traits as

Iago's scoffing at the Florentine Cassio as "a great arithmetician," "a

counter-caster," the Florentines being noted as masters of arithmetic

and bookkeeping. Another such trait is the present of a dish of pigeons

which Gobbo, in _The Merchant of Venice,_ brings to his son's master.

Karl Elze, who has strongly insisted upon the probability of

Shakespeare's having travelled Italy in the year 1593, dwells

particularly upon his apparent familiarity with Venice. The name of

Gobbo is a genuine Venetian name, and suggests, moreover, the kneeling

stone figure, "Il Gobbo di Rialto," that forms the base of the

granite pillar to which, in former days, the decrees of the Republic

were affixed. Shakespeare knew that the Exchange was held on the

Rialto island. An especially weighty argument lies in the fact that

the study of the Jewish nature, to which his Shylock bears witness,

would have been impossible in England, where no Jews were permitted

by law to reside since their expulsion, begun in the time of Richard

Cœur-de-Lion, and completed in 1290. Not until Cromwell's time was the

embargo removed in a few cases. On the other hand, there were in Venice

more than eleven hundred Jews (according to Coryat, as many as from

five to six thousand).[1]

One of the most striking details as regards _The Merchant of Venice_

is this: Portia sends her servant Balthasar with an important message

to Padua, and orders him to ride quickly and meet her at "the common

ferry which trades to Venice." Now Portia's palace at Belmont may be

conceived as one of the summer residences, rich in art treasures, which the

merchant princes of Venice at that time possessed on the banks of the

Brenta. From Dolo, on the Brenta, it is twenty miles to Venice--just

the distance which Portia says that she must "measure" in order to

reach the city. If we conceive Belmont as situated at Dolo, it would be

just possible for the servant to ride rapidly to Padua, and on the way

back to overtake Portia, who would travel more slowly, at the ferry,

which was then at Fusina, at the mouth of the Brenta. How exactly

Shakespeare knew this, and how uncommon the knowledge was in his day,

is shown in the expressions he uses, and in the misunderstanding of

these expressions on the part of his printers and editors. The lines in

the fourth scene of the third act, as they appear in all the Quartos

and Folios, are these:--

"Bring them, I pray thee, with imagined speed

Unto the tranect, to the common ferry,

Which trades to Venice."

"Tranect," which means nothing, is, of course, a misprint for

"traject," an uncommon expression which the printers clearly did not

understand. This, as Elze has pointed out, is simply the Venetian word

_traghetto_ (Italian _tragitto_). How should Shakespeare have known

either of the word or the thing if he had not been on the spot?

Other details in the second of these plays, written immediately after

his conjectured return, strengthen this impression. In the Induction to

_The Taming of the Shrew_, where the nobleman proposes to show Sly his

pictures, there occur the lines:--

"We'll show thee Io as she was a maid,

And how she was beguiled and surpris'd,

As lively painted as the deed was done."

These lines, as Elze has justly urged, convey the impression that

Shakespeare had seen Correggio's famous picture of Jupiter and Io. This

is quite possible if he travelled in North Italy at the time suggested,

for from 1585 to 1600 the picture was in the palace of the sculptor

Leoni at Milan, and was constantly visited by travellers. If we add

that Shakespeare's numerous references to sea-voyages, storms at sea,

the agonies of sea-sickness, &c., together with his illustrations and

metaphors borrowed from provisions and dress at sea,[2] point to his

having made a sea-passage of some length,[3] we cannot but regard it

as highly probable that he possessed a closer knowledge of Italy than

could be gained from oral descriptions and from books.

It is impossible, however, to arrive at any certainty on the point.

His pictures of Italy are sometimes notably lacking in traits which

could scarcely have been overlooked by one who knew the places. And

the reader cannot but feel a certain scepticism when he observes

how scholars have converted every seeming piece of ignorance on

Shakespeare's part into a proof of his miraculous knowledge.

In virtue of this determination to make every apparent blot in

Shakespeare redound to his advantage, it could be shown that he had

been in Italy before he began to write plays at all. In _The Two

Gentlemen of Verona_ it is said that Valentine takes ship at Verona to

go to Milan. This seems to betray a gross ignorance of the geography

of Italy. Karl Elze, however, has discovered that in the sixteenth

century Verona and Milan were actually connected by a canal. In _Romeo

and Juliet_ the heroine says to Friar Laurence, "Shall I come again

at evening mass?" This sounds strange, as the Catholic Church knows

nothing of evening masses; but R. Simpson has discovered that they were

actually in use at that time, and especially in Verona. Shakespeare

probably knew no more of these details than he did of the fact that,

about 1270, Bohemia possessed provinces on the Adriatic, so that he

could with an easy conscience accept from Greene the voyage to the

coast of Bohemia in _The Winter's Tale_.

On the whole, scholars have been far too eager to find confirmation

of every trivial detail in Shakespeare's allusions to Italian

localities. Knight, for instance, declared that "the Sagittary,"

mentioned in _Othello_," was the residence at the arsenal of the

commanding officers of the navy and army of the Republic," and that

Shakespeare had "probably looked upon" the figure of an archer over

the gates; whereas it now appears that the commanding officer never

had any residence in the arsenal, and that no figure of an archer ever

existed there. Elze, again, has gone into most uncritical raptures over

Shakespeare's marvellously exact characterisation of Giulio Romano

_The Winter's Tale_, (v. 2) as that "rare Italian master who, had he

himself eternity, and could put breath into his works, would beguile

Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape." As a matter of

fact, Shakespeare has simply attributed to an artist whose fame had

reached his ears that characteristic which, as we have seen above,

he regarded as the highest in pictorial art. Giulio Romano, with his

crude superficiality, could not possibly have aroused his admiration

had he known his work. That he did not know it is sufficiently evident

from the fact that he has made him a sculptor, and praised him in that

capacity, and not as a painter.

Elze, confronted with this fact, takes refuge in a Latin epitaph on

Romano, quoted by Vasari, which speaks of "Corpora sculpta pictaque"

by him, and here again finds a testimony to Shakespeare's omniscience,

since he knew of works of sculpture by Romano which no one else has

seen or heard of. We can only see in this a new proof of the fact that

critical idolatry of departed greatness can now and then lead the

student as far astray as uncritical prejudice.

[1] A very few Jews were, indeed, tolerated in England in

spite of the prohibition, but it is not probable that Shakespeare knew

any of them.

[2] See _Pericles, The Tempest, Cymbeline_ (i. 7), _As You

Like It_ (ii. 7), _Hamlet_ (v. 2).

[3] It must be remembered that the sea route to Italy was

practically closed by Spanish cruisers.

XVII

_SHAKESPEARE TURNS TO HISTORIC DRAMA--HIS RICHARD II. AND MARLOWE'S

EDWARD II.--LACK OF HUMOUR AND OF CONSISTENCY OF STYLE--ENGLISH

NATIONAL PRIDE_

About the age of thirty, even men of an introspective disposition

are apt to turn their gaze outwards. When Shakespeare approaches his

thirtieth year, he begins to occupy himself in earnest with history,

to read the chronicles, to project and work out a whole series of

historical plays. Several years had now passed since he had revised

and furbished up the old dramas on the subject of Henry VI. This task

had whetted his appetite, and had cultivated his sense for historic

character and historic nemesis. Having now given expression to the high

spirits, the lyrism, and the passion of youth, in lyrical and dramatic

productions of scintillant diversity, he once more turned his attention

to the history of England. In so doing he obeyed a dual vocation, both

as a poet and as a patriot.

Shakespeare's plays founded on English history number ten in all, four

dealing with the House of Lancaster (_Richard II._, the two parts of

_Henry IV._ and _Henry V._) four devoted to the House of York (the

three parts of _Henry VI._ and _Richard III._), and two which stand

apart from the main series, _King John,_ of an earlier historic period,

and _Henry VIII._, of a later.

The order of production of these plays is, however, totally unconnected

with their historical order, which does not, therefore, concern us. At

the same time it is worthy of remark that all these plays (with the

single exception of _Henry VIII._) were produced in the course of one

decade, the decade in which England's national sentiment burst into

flower and her pride was at its highest. These English "histories"

are, however, of very unequal value, and can by no means be treated as

standing on one plane.

_Henry VI._ was a first attempt and a mere adaptation. Now, in the year

1594, Shakespeare attacks the theme of _Richard II.;_ and in this,

his first independent historical drama, we see his originality still

struggling with the tendency to imitation.

There were older plays on the subject of _Richard II._, but Shakespeare

does not seem to have made any use of them. The model he had in his

mind's eye was Marlowe's finest tragedy, his _Edward II._ Shakespeare's

play is, however, much more than a clever imitation of Marlowe's; it is

not only better composed, with a more concentrated action, but has also

a great advantage in the full-blooded vitality of its style. Marlowe's

style is here monotonously dry and sombre. Swinburne, moreover, has

done Shakespeare an injustice in preferring Marlowe's character-drawing

to that of _Richard II_.

The first half of Marlowe's drama is entirely taken up with the King's

morbid and unnatural passion for his favourite Gaveston; Edward's

every speech either expresses his grief at Gaveston's banishment and

his longing for his return, or consists of glowing outbursts of joy

on seeing him again. This passion makes Edward dislike his Queen and

loathe the Barons, who, in their aristocratic pride, contemn the

low-born favourite. He will risk everything rather than part from one

who is so dear to himself and so obnoxious to his surroundings. The

half-erotic fervour of his partiality renders the King's character

distasteful, and deprives him of the sympathy which the poet demands

for him at the end of the play.

For in the fourth and fifth acts, weak and unstable though he be,

Edward has all Marlowe's sympathies. There is, indeed, something moving

in his loneliness, his grief, and his brooding self-reproach. "The

griefs," he says,

"of private men are soon allay'd;

But not of kings. The forest deer, being struck,

Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds:

But when the imperial lion's flesh is gor'd,

He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw."

The simile is not true to nature, like Shakespeare's, but it forcibly

expresses the meaning of Marlowe's personage. Now and then he

reminds us of Henry VI. The Queen's relation to Mortimer recalls

that of Margaret to Suffolk. The abdication-scene, in which the King

first vehemently refuses to lay down the crown, and is then forced

to consent, gave Shakespeare the model for Richard the Second's

abdication. In the murder-scene, on the other hand, Marlowe displays

a reckless naturalism in the description and representation of the

torture inflicted on the King, an unabasheéd effect-hunting in the

contrast between the King's magnanimity, dread, and gratitude on the

one side, and the murderers' hypocritical cruelty on the other, which

Shakespeare, with his gentler nature and his almost modern tact, has

rejected. It is true that we find in Shakespeare several cases in

which the severed head of a person whom we have seen alive a moment

before is brought upon the stage. But he would never place before the

eyes of the public such a murder-scene as this, in which the King is

thrown down upon a feather-bed, a table is overturned upon him, and the

murderers trample upon it until he is crushed.

Marlowe's more callous nature betrays itself in such details, while

something of his own wild and passionate temperament has passed into

the minor characters of the play--the violent Barons, with the younger

Mortimer at their head--who are drawn with a firm hand. The time had

scarcely passed when a murder was reckoned an absolute necessity in a

drama. In 1581, Wilson, one of Lord Leicester's men, received an order

for a play which should not only be original and entertaining, but

should also include "all sorts of murders, immorality, and robberies."

_Richard II._ is one of those plays of Shakespeare's which have never

taken firm hold of the stage. Its exclusively political action and

its lack of female characters are mainly to blame for this. But it is

exceedingly interesting as his first attempt at independent treatment

of a historical theme, and it rises far above the play which served as

its model.

The action follows pretty faithfully the course of history as the poet

found it in Holinshed's Chronicle. The character of the Queen, however,

is quite unhistorical, being evidently invented by Shakespeare for the

sake of having a woman in his play. He wanted to gain sympathy for

Richard through his wife's devotion to him, and saw an opportunity for

pathos in her parting from him when he is thrown into prison. In 1398,

when the play opens, Isabella of France was not yet ten years old,

though she had nominally been married to Richard in 1396. Finally, the

King's end, fighting bravely, sword in hand, is not historical: he was

starved to death in prison, in order that his body might be exhibited

without any wound.

Shakespeare has vouchsafed no indication to facilitate the spectators'

understanding of the characters in this play. Their action often takes

us by surprise. But Swinburne has done Shakespeare a great wrong in

making this a reason for praising Marlowe at his expense, and exalting

the subordinate characters in _Edward II._ as consistent pieces of

character-drawing, while he represents as inconsistent and obscure such

a personage as Shakespeare's York. We may admit that in the opening

scene Norfolk's figure is not quite clear, but here all obscurity ends.

York is self-contradictory, unprincipled, vacillating, composite, and

incoherent, but in no sense obscure. He in the first place upbraids

the King with his faults, then accepts at his hands an office of the

highest confidence, then betrays the King's trust, while he at the same

time overwhelms the rebel Bolingbroke with reproaches, then admires

the King's greatness in his fall, then hastens his dethronement, and

finally, in virtuous indignation over Aumerle's plots against the new

King, rushes to him to assure him of his fidelity and to clamour for

the blood of his own son. There lies at the root of this conception

a profound political bitterness and an early-acquired experience.

Shakespeare must have studied attentively that portion of English

history which lay nearest to him, the shufflings and vacillations that

went on under Mary and Elizabeth, in order to have received so deep an

impression of the pitifulness of political instability.

The character of old John of Gaunt, loyal to his King, but still

more to his country, gives Shakespeare his first opportunity for

expressing his exultation over England's greatness and his pride in

being an Englishman. He places in the mouth of the dying Gaunt a

superbly lyrical outburst of patriotism, deploring Richard's reckless

and tyrannical policy. All comparison with Marlowe is here at an end.

Shakespeare's own voice makes itself clearly heard in the rhetoric of

this speech, which, with its self-controlled vehemence, its equipoise

in unrest, soars high above Marlowe's wild magniloquence. In the

thunderous tones of old Gaunt's invective against the King who has

mortgaged his English realm, we can hear all the patriotic enthusiasm

of young England in the days of Elizabeth:--

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress, built by Nature for herself,

Against infection, and the hand of war;

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands;

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth,

. . . . . . . . . .

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leas'd out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement, or pelting farm.

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ah! would the scandal vanish with my life,

How happy then were my ensuing death!" (ii. I).

Here we have indeed the roar of the young lion, the vibration of

Shakespeare's own voice.

But it is upon the leading character of the play that the poet has

centred all his strength; and he has succeeded in giving a vivid and

many-sided picture of the Black Prince's degenerate but interesting

son. As the protagonist of a tragedy, however, Richard has exactly

the same defects as Marlowe's Edward. In the first half of the play

he so repels the spectator' that nothing he can do in the second

half suffices to obliterate the unfavourable impression. Not only

has he, before the opening of the piece, committed such thoughtless

and politically indefensible acts as have proved him unworthy of the

great position he holds, but he behaves with such insolence to the

dying Gaunt, and, after his uncle's death, displays such a low and

despicable rapacity, that he can no longer appeal, as he does, to his

personal right. It is true that the right of which he holds himself

an embodiment is very different from the common earthly rights which

he has overridden. He is religiously, dogmatically convinced of his

inviolability as a king by the grace of God. But since this conviction,

in his days of prosperity, has brought with it no sense of correlative

duties to the crown he wears, it cannot touch the reader's sympathies

as it ought to for the sake of the general effect.

We see the hand of the beginner in the way in which the poet here

leaves characters and events to speak for themselves without any

attempt to range them in a general scheme of perspective. He conceals

himself too entirely behind his work. As there is no gleam of humour in

the play, so, too, there is no guiding and harmonising sense of style.

It is from the moment that the tide begins to turn against Richard

that he becomes interesting as a psychological study. After the manner

of weak characters, he is alternately downcast and overweening. Very

characteristically, he at one place answers Bolingbroke's question

whether he is content to resign the crown: "Ay, no;--no, ay." In

these syllables we see the whole man. But his temperament was highly

poetical, and misfortune reveals in him a vein of reverie. He is

sometimes profound to the point of paradox, sometimes fantastically

overwrought to the verge of superstitious insanity (see, for instance,

Act iii. 3). His brooding melancholy sometimes reminds us of Hamlet's--

"Of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let's choose executors, and talk of wills:

. . . . . . . .

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:--How

some have been depos'd, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd.

Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,

All murder'd:--for within the hollow crown,

That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

Keeps Death his court, and there the antick sits,

Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchise, be fear'd, and kill with looks" (iii. 2).

In these moods of depression, in which Richard gives his wit and

intellect free play, he knows very well that a king is only a human

being like any one else:--

"For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,

Need friends. Subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?" (iii. 2).

But at other times, when his sense of majesty and his monarchical

fanaticism master him, he speaks in a quite different tone:--

"Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord.

For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd,

To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,

God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay

A glorious angel" (iii. 2).

Thus, too, at their first meeting (iii. 3) he addresses the victorious

Henry of Hereford, to whom he immediately after "debases himself":--

"My master, God omnipotent.

Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf

Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike

Your children yet unborn, and unbegot,

That lift your vassal hands against my head,

And threat the glory of my precious crown."

Many centuries after Richard, King Frederick William IV. of Prussia

displayed just the same mingling of intellectuality, superstition,

despondency, monarchical arrogance, and fondness for declamation.

In the fourth and fifth acts, the character of Richard and the poet's

art rise to their highest point. The scene in which the groom, who

alone has remained faithful to the fallen King, visits him in his

dungeon, is one of penetrating beauty. What can be more touching than

his description of how the "roan Barbary," which had been Richard's

favourite horse, carried Henry of Lancaster on his entry into London,

"so proudly as if he had disdained the ground." The Arab steed here

symbolises with fine simplicity the attitude of all those who had

sunned themselves in the prosperity of the now fallen King.

The scene of the abdication (iv. I) is admirable by reason of the

delicacy of feeling and imagination which Richard displays. His speech

when he and Henry have each one hand upon the crown is one of the most

beautiful Shakespeare has ever written:--

"Now is this golden crown like a deep well,

That owes two buckets filling one another;

The emptier ever dancing in the air,

The other down, unseen, and full of water:

That bucket down, and full of tears, am I,

Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high."

This scene is, however, a downright imitation of the abdication-scene

in Marlowe. When Northumberland in Shakespeare addresses the dethroned

King with the word "lord," the King answers, "No lord of thine." In

Marlowe the speech is almost identical: "Call me not lord!"

The Shakespearian scene, it should be mentioned, has its history. The

censorship under Elizabeth would not suffer it to be printed, and it

first appears in the Fourth Quarto, of 1608.[1] The reason of this

veto was that Elizabeth, strange as it may appear, was often compared

with Richard II. The action of the censorship renders it probable that

it was Shakespeare's _Richard II._ (and not one of the earlier plays

on the same theme) which, as appears in the trial of Essex, was acted

by the Lord Chamberlain's Company before the conspirators, at their

leaders' command, on the evening before the outbreak of the rebellion

(February 7, 1601). There is nothing inconsistent with this theory in

the fact that the players then called it an old play, which was already

"out of use;" for the interval between 1593-94 and 1601 was sufficient,

according to the ideas of that time, to render a play antiquated. Nor

does it conflict with this view that in the last scenes of the play

the King is sympathetically treated. On the very points on which he

was comparable with Elizabeth there could be no doubt that he was in

the wrong; while Henry of Hereford figures in the end as the bearer of

England's future, and, for the not over-sensitive nerves of the period,

that was sufficient. He, who was soon to play a leading part in two

other Shakespearian dramas, is here endowed with all the qualities

of the successful usurper and ruler: cunning and insight, power of

dissimulation, ingratiating manners, and promptitude in action.

In a single speech (v. 3) the new-made Henry IV. sketches the character

of his "unthrifty son," Shakespeare's hero: he passes his time in

the taverns of London with riotous boon-companions, who now and then

even rob travellers on the highway; but, being no less daring than

dissolute, he gives certain "sparks of hope" for a nobler future.

[1] Its title runs, "The Tragedie of King Richard the Second:

with new additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of

King Richard, As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Maiesties

Seruantes, at the Globe. By William Shake-speare. At London. Printed

by W. W. For Mathew Law, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules

Church-yard, at the Signe of the Foxe. 1608."

XVIII

_RICHARD III. PSYCHOLOGY AND MONOLOGUES--SHAKESPEARE'S POWER OF

SELF-TRANSFORMATION--CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN--THE PRINCIPAL SCENES--THE

CLASSIC TENDENCY OF THE TRAGEDY_

In the year 1594-95 Shakespeare returns to the material which passed

through his hands during his revision of the Second and Third Parts of

_Henry VI_. He once more takes up the character of Richard of York,

there so firmly outlined; and, as in _Richard II._ he had followed in

Marlowe's footsteps, so he now sets to work with all his might upon

a Marlowesque figure, but only to execute it with his own vigour,

and around it to construct his first historic tragedy with well-knit

dramatic action. The earlier "histories" were still half epical; this

is a true drama. It quickly became one of the most effective and

popular pieces on the stage, and has imprinted itself on the memory of

all the world in virtue of the monumental character of its protagonist.

The immediate occasion of Shakespeare's taking up this theme was

probably the fact that in the year 1594 an old and worthless play on

the subject was published under the title of _The True Tragedy of

Richard III_. The publication of this play may have been clue to the

renewed interest in its hero awakened by the performances of _Henry VI._

It is impossible to assign a precise date to Shakespeare's play. The

first Quarto of _Richard II._ was entered in the Stationers' Register

oh the 29th August 1597, and the first edition of _Richard III_. was

entered on the 20th October of the same year. But there is no doubt

that its earliest form is of much older date. The diversities in its

style indicate that Shakespeare worked over the text even before it was

first printed; and the difference between the text of the first Quarto

and that of the first Folio bears witness to a radical revision having

taken place in the interval between the two editions. It is certainly

to this play that John Weever alludes when, in his poem, _Ad Gulielmum

Shakespeare,_ written as early as 1595, he mentions Richard among the

poet's creations.

From the old play of _Richard III_. Shakespeare took nothing at all,

or, to be precise, possibly one or two lines in the first scene of the

second act. He throughout followed Holinshed, whose Chronicle is here

copied word for word from Hall, who, in his turn, merely translated Sir

Thomas More's history of Richard III. We can even tell what edition

of Holinshed Shakespeare used, for he has copied a slip of the pen or

error of the press which appears in that edition alone. In Act v. scene

3, line 324, he writes:--

"Long kept in Bretagne at our _mother's_ cost,"

instead of _brother's_.

The text of _Richard III_. presents no slight difficulties to the

editors of Shakespeare. Neither the first Quarto nor the greatly

amended Folio is free from gross and baffling errors. The editors

of the Cambridge Edition have attempted to show that both the texts

are taken from bad copies of the original manuscripts. It would not

surprise us, indeed, that the poet's own manuscript, being perpetually

handled by the prompter and stage-manager, should quickly become so

ragged that now one page and now another would have to be replaced

by a copy. But the Cambridge editors have certainly undervalued the

augmented and amended text of the First Folio. James Spedding has shown

in an excellent essay _(The New Shakspere Society's Transactions_,

1875-76, pp. 1-119) that the changes which some have thought accidental

and arbitrary, and therefore not the work of the poet himself, are due

to his desire, sometimes to improve the form of the verse, sometimes

to avoid the repetition of a word, sometimes to get rid of antiquated

words and turns of phrase.

Every one who has been nurtured upon Shakespeare has from his youth

dwelt wonderingly upon the figure of Richard, that fiend in human

shape, striding, with savage impetuosity, from murder to murder, wading

through falsehood and hypocrisy to ever-new atrocities, becoming in

turn regicide, fratricide, tyrant, murderer of his wife and of his

comrades, until, besmirched with treachery and slaughter, he faces his

foes with invincible greatness.

When J. L. Heiberg refused to produce _Richard III_. at the Royal

Theatre in Copenhagen, he expressed a doubt whether "we could ever

accustom ourselves to seeing Melpomene's dagger converted into a

butcher's knife." Like many other critics before and after him,

he took exception to the line in Richard's opening soliloquy, "I

am determined to prove a villain." He doubted, justly enough, the

psychological possibility of this phrase; but the monologue, as a

whole, is a non-realistic unfolding of secret thoughts in words, and,

with a very slight change in the form of expression, the idea is by no

means indefensible. Richard does not mean that he is determined to be

what he himself regards as criminal, but merely declares with bitter

irony that, since he cannot "prove a lover To entertain these fair

well-spoken days," he will play the part of a villain, and give the

rein to his hatred for the "idle pleasures" of the time.

There is in the whole utterance a straightforwardness, as of a

programme, that takes us aback. Richard comes forward naïvely in the

character of Prologue, and foreshadows the matter of the tragedy. It

seems almost as though Shakespeare had determined to guard himself at

the outset against the accusation of obscurity which had possibly been

brought against his _Richard II_. But we must remember that ambitious

men in his day were less composite than in our times, and, moreover,

that he was not here depicting even one of his own contemporaries,

but a character which appeared to his imagination in the light of a

historical monster, from whom his own age was separated by more than a

century. His Richard is like an old portrait, dating from the time when

the physiognomy of dangerous, no less than of noble, characters was

simpler, and when even intellectual eminence was still accompanied by a

bull-necked vigour of physique such as in later times we find only in

the savage chieftains of distant corners of the world.

It is against such figures as this of Richard that the critics who

contest Shakespeare's rank as a psychologist are fondest of directing

their attacks. But Shakespeare was no miniature-painter. Minutely

detailed psychological painting, such as in our days Dostoyevsky has

given us, was not his affair; though, as he proved in _Hamlet_, he

could on occasion grapple with complex characters. Even here, however,

he gets his effect of complexity, not by unravelling a tangle of

motives, but by producing the impression of an inward infinity in the

character. It is clear that, in his age, he had not often the chance of

observing how circumstances, experience, and changing conditions cut

and polish a personality into shimmering facets. With the exception of

Hamlet, who in some respects stands alone, his characters have sides

indeed, but not facets.

Take, for instance, this Richard. Shakespeare builds him up from a

few simple characteristics: deformity, the potent consciousness of

intellectual superiority, and the lust for power. His whole personality

can be traced back to these simple elements.

He is courageous out of self-esteem; he plays the lover out of

ambition; he is cunning and false, a comedian and a blood-hound,

as cruel as he is hypocritical--and all in order to attain to that

despotism on which he has set his heart.

Shakespeare found in Holinshed's Chronicle certain fundamental traits:

Richard was born with teeth, and could bite before he could smile; he

was ugly; he had one shoulder higher than another; he was malicious and

witty; he was a daring and open-handed general; he loved secrecy; he

was false and hypocritical out of ambition, cruel out of policy.

All this Shakespeare simplifies and exaggerates, as every artist must.

Delacroix has finely said, "_L'art, c'est l'exagération à propos."_

The Richard of the tragedy is deformed; he is undersized and crooked,

has a hump on his back and a withered arm.

He is not, like so many other hunchbacks, under any illusion as to his

appearance. He does not think himself handsome, nor is he loved by the

daughters of Eve, in whom deformity is so apt to awaken that instinct

of pity which is akin to love.

No, Richard feels himself maltreated by Nature; from his birth upwards

he has suffered wrong at her hands, and in spite of his high and

strenuous spirit, he has grown up an outcast. He has from the first

had to do without his mother's love, and to listen to the gibes of

his enemies. Men have pointed at his shadow and laughed. The dogs

have barked at him as he halted by. But in this luckless frame dwells

an ambitious soul. Other people's paths to happiness and enjoyment

are closed to him. But he will rule; for that he was born. Power is

everything to him, his fixed idea. Power alone can give him his revenge

upon the people around him, whom he hates, or despises, or both. The

glory of the diadem shall rest upon the head that crowns this misshapen

body. He sees its golden splendour afar off. Many lives stand between

him and his goal; but he will shrink from no falsehood, no treachery,

no bloodshed, if only he can reach it.

Into this character Shakespeare transforms himself in imagination. It

is the mark of the dramatic poet to be always able to get out of his

own skin and into another's. But in later times some of the greatest

dramatists have shrunk shuddering from the out-and-out criminal, as

being too remote from them. For example, Goethe. His wrong-doers are

only weaklings, like Weislingen or Clavigo; even his Mephistopheles

is not really evil. Shakespeare, on the other hand, made the effort

to feel like Richard. How did he set about it? Exactly as we do when

we strive to understand another personality; for example, Shakespeare

himself. He imagines himself into him; that is to say, he projects his

mind into the other's body and lives in it for the time being. The

question the poet has to answer is always this: How should I feel and

act if I were a prince, a woman, a conqueror, an outcast, and so forth?

Shakespeare takes, as his point of departure, the ignominy inflicted by

Nature; Richard is one of Nature's victims. How can Shakespeare feel

with him here--Shakespeare, to whom deformity of body was unknown,

and who had been immoderately favoured by Nature? But he, too, had

long endured humiliation, and had lived under mean conditions which

afforded no scope either to his will or to his talents. Poverty is

itself a deformity; and the condition of an actor was a blemish like a

hump on his back. Thus he is in a position to enter with ease into the

feelings of one of Nature's victims. He has simply to give free course

to all the moods in his own mind which have been evoked by personal

humiliation, and to let them ferment and run riot.

Next comes the consciousness of superiority in Richard, and the lust

of power which springs from it. Shakespeare cannot have lacked the

consciousness of his personal superiority, and, like every man of

genius, he must have had the lust of power in his soul, at least as

a rudimentary organ. Ambitious he must assuredly have been, though

not after the fashion of the actors and dramatists of our day. Their

mere jugglery passes for art, while his art was regarded by the great

majority as mere jugglery. His artistic self-esteem received a check in

its growth; but none the less there was ambition behind the tenacity

of purpose which in a few years raised him from a servitor in the

theatre to a shareholder and director, and which led him to develop

the greatest productive talent of his country, till he outshone all

rivals in his calling, and won the appreciation of the leaders of

fashion and taste. He now transposed into another sphere of life, that

of temporal rule, a habit of mind which was his own. The instinct

of his soul, which never suffered him to stop or pause, but forced

him from one great intellectual achievement to another, restlessly

onward from masterpiece to masterpiece--the fierce instinct, with its

inevitable egoism, which led him in his youth to desert his family, in

his maturity to amass property without any tenderness for his debtors,

and _(per fas et nefas_) to attain his modest patent of gentility--this

instinct enables him to understand and feel that passion for power

which defies and tramples upon every scruple. And all the other

characteristics (for example, the hypocrisy, which in the Chronicle

holds the foremost place) he uses as mere instruments in the service of

ambition.

Note how he has succeeded in individualising this passion. It is

hereditary. In the Second Part of _Henry VI_. (iii. I) Richard's

father, the Duke of York, says--

"Let pale-fac'd fear keep with the mean-born man,

And find no harbour in a royal heart.

Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought,

And not a thought but thinks on dignity.

. . . . . . . .

Well, nobles, well; 't is politicly done,

To send me packing with an host of men:

I fear me, you but warm the starved snake,

Who, cherish'd in your breasts, will sting your hearts."

In the Third Part of _Henry VI_., Richard shows himself the true son of

his father. His brother runs after the smiles of women; he dreams only

of might and sovereignty. If there was no crown to be attained, the

world would have no joy to offer him. He says himself (iii. 2)--

"Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb:

And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,

She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,

To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub;

To make an envious mountain on my back.

. . . . . . . .

To disproportion me in every part;

Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp,

That carries no impression like the dam.

And am I then a man to be belov'd?

O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought!

Then, since this earth affords no joy to me

But to command, to check, to o'erbear such

As are of better person than myself,

I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown."

The lust of power is an inward agony to him. He compares himself to a

man "lost in a thorny wood, That rends the thorns and is rent by the

thorns;" and he sees no way of deliverance except to "hew his way out

with a bloody axe." Thus is he tormented by his desire for the crown of

England; and to achieve it he will "drown more sailors than the mermaid

shall;... Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could;... add colours to

the chameleon;... And send the murd'rous Machiavel to school." (The

last touch is an anachronism, for Richard died fifty years before _The

Prince_ was published.)

If this is to be a villain, then a villain he is. And for the sake

of the artistic effect, Shakespeare has piled upon Richard's head

far more crimes than the real Richard can be historically proved to

have committed. This he did, because he had no doubt of the existence

of such characters as rose before his imagination while he read in

Holinshed of Richard's misdeeds. He believed in the existence of

villains--a belief largely undermined in our days by a scepticism

which greatly facilitates the villains' operations. He has drawn

more villains than one: Edmund in _Lear_, who is influenced by his

illegitimacy as Richard is by his deformity, and the grand master of

all evil, Iago in _Othello_.

But let us get rid of the empty by-word villain, which Richard applies

to himself. Shakespeare no doubt believed theoretically in the

free-will which can choose any course it pleases, and villainy among

the rest; but none the less does he in practice assign a cause to every

effect.

On three scenes in this play Shakespeare evidently expended particular

care--the three which imprint themselves on the memory after even a

single attentive reading.

The first of these scenes is that in which Richard wins over the Lady

Anne, widow of one of his victims, Prince Edward, and daughter-in-law

of another, Henry VI. Shakespeare has here carried the situation to its

utmost extremity. It is while Anne is accompanying the bier of the

murdered Henry VI. that the murderer confronts her, stops the funeral

procession with drawn sword, calmly endures all the outbursts of

hatred, loathing, and contempt with which Anne overwhelms him, and,

having shaken off her invectives like water from a duck's back,

advances his suit, plays his comedy of love, and there and then so

turns the current of her will that she allows him to hope, and even

accepts his ring.

The scene is historically impossible, since Queen Margaret took Anne

with her in her flight after the battle of Tewkesbury, and Clarence

kept her in concealment until two years after the death of Henry VI.,

when Richard discovered her in London. It has, moreover, something

astonishing, or rather bewildering, about it at the first reading,

appearing as though written for a wager or to outdo some predecessor.

Nevertheless it is by no means unnatural. What may with justice be

objected to it is that it is unprepared. The mistake is, that we are

first introduced to Anne in the scene itself, and can consequently

form no judgment as to whether her action does or does not accord with

her character. The art of dramatic writing consists almost entirely in

preparing for what is to come, and then, in spite of, nay, in virtue

of the preparation, taking the audience by surprise. Surprise without

preparation loses half its effect.

But this is only a technical flaw which so great a master would in

riper years have remedied with ease. The essential feature of the

scene is its tremendous daring and strength, or, psychologically

speaking, the depth of early-developed contempt for womankind into

which it affords us a glimpse. For the very reason that the poet has

not given any individual characteristics to this woman, it seems as

though he would say: Such is feminine human nature. It is quite evident

that in his younger years he, was not so much alive to the beauties

of the womanly character as he became at a later period of his life.

He is fond of drawing unamiable women like Adriana in _The Comedy of

Errors,_ violent and corrupt women like Tamora in _Titus Andronicus_,

and Margaret in _Henry VI_., or scolding women like Katherine in _The

Taming of the Shrew_. Here he gives us a picture of peculiarly feminine

weakness, and personifies in Richard his own contempt for it.

Exasperate a woman against you (he seems to say), do her all the

evil you can think of, kill her husband, deprive her thereby of

the succession to a crown, fill her to overflowing with hatred and

execration--then if you can only cajole her into believing that in all

you have done, crimes and everything, you have been actuated simply

and solely by burning passion for her, by the hope of approaching her

and winning her hand--why, then the game is yours, and sooner or later

she will give in. Her vanity cannot hold out. If it is proof against

ten measures of flattery, it will succumb to a hundred; and if even

that is not enough, then pile on more. Every woman has a price at

which her vanity is for sale; you have only to dare greatly and bid

high enough. So Shakespeare makes this crook-backed assassin accept

Anne's insults without winking and retort upon them his declaration of

love--he at once seems less hideous in her eyes from the fact that his

crimes were committed for her sake. Shakespeare makes him hand her his

drawn sword, to pierce him to the heart if she will; he is sure enough

that she will do nothing of the sort. She cannot withstand the intense

volition in his glance; he hypnotises her hatred; the exaltation with

which his lust of power inspires him bewilders and overpowers her, and

he becomes almost beautiful in her eyes when he bares his breast to

her revenge. She yields to him under the influence of an attraction in

which are mingled dizziness, terror, and perverted sensuality. His very

hideousness becomes a stimulus the more. There is a sort of fearful

billing-and-cooing in the stichomythy in the style of the antique

tragedy, which begins:--

"_Anne_. I would I knew thy heart.

_Gloucester_. 'Tis figured in my tongue.

_Anne_. I fear me both are false.

_Gloucester_. Then never man was true."

But triumph seethes in his veins--

"Was ever woman in this humour wooed?

Was ever woman in this humour won?"

--triumph that he, the hunchback, the monster, has needed but to

show himself and use his polished tongue in order to stay the curses

on her lips, dry the tears in her eyes, and awaken desire in her

soul. This courtship has procured him the intoxicating sensation of

irresistibility.

The fact of the marriage Shakespeare found in the Chronicle; and he led

up to it in this brilliant fashion because his poetic instinct told

him to make Richard great, and thereby possible as a tragic hero. In

reality, he was by no means so dæmonic. His motive for paying court to

Anne was sheer cupidity. Both Clarence and Gloucester had schemed to

possess themselves of the vast fortune left by the Earl of Warwick,

although the Countess was still alive and legally entitled to the

greater part of it. Clarence, who had married the elder daughter, was

certain of his part in the inheritance, but Richard thought that by

marrying the younger daughter, Prince Edward's widow, he would secure

the right to go halves. By aid of an Act of Parliament, the matter

was arranged so that each of the brothers received his share in the

booty. For this low rapacity in Richard, Shakespeare has substituted the

hunchback's personal exultation on finding himself a successful wooer.

Nevertheless, it was not his intention to represent Richard as superior

to all feminine wiles. This opening scene has its counterpart in the

passage (iv. 4) where the King, after having rid himself by poison of

the wife he has thus won, proposes to Elizabeth, the widow of Edward

IV., for the hand of her daughter.

The scene has the air of a repetition. Richard has made away with

Edward's two sons in order to clear his path to the throne. Here again,

then, the murderer woos the nearest kinswoman of his victims, and, in

this case, through the intermediary of their mother. Shakespeare has

lavished his whole art on this passage. Elizabeth, too, expresses the

deepest loathing for him. Richard answers that, if he has deprived her

sons of the throne, he will now make amends by raising her daughter

to it. Here also the dialogue takes the form of a stichomythy, which

clearly enough indicates that these passages belong to the earliest

form of the play:--

"_King Richard_. Infer fair England's peace by this alliance.

_Queen Elizabeth_. Which she shall purchase with still

lasting war.

_K. Rich_. Tell her, the king, that may command, entreats.

_Q. Eliz_. That at her hands, which the kings' King forbids."

Richard not only asserts the purity and strength of his feelings, but

insists that by this marriage alone can he be prevented from bringing

misery and destruction upon thousands in the kingdom. Elizabeth

pretends to yield, and Richard bursts forth, just as in the first act--

"Relenting fool, and shallow changing woman!"

But it is he himself who is overreached. Elizabeth has only made a show

of acquiescence in order immediately after to offer her daughter to his

mortal foe.

The second unforgetable passage is the Baynard's Castle scene in the

third act. Richard has cleared away all obstacles on his path to the

throne. His elder brother Clarence is murdered--drowned in a butt of

wine. Edward's young sons are presently to be strangled in prison.

Hastings has just been hurried to the scaffold without trial or form of

law. The thing is now to avoid all appearance of complicity in these

crimes, and to seem austerely disinterested with regard to the crown.

To this end he makes his rascally henchman, Buckingham, persuade the

simple-minded and panic-stricken Lord Mayor of London, with other

citizens of repute, to implore him, in spite of his seeming reluctance,

to mount the throne. Buckingham prepares Richard for their approach

(iii. 7):--

"Intend some fear;

Be not you spoke with but by mighty suit:

And look you get a prayer-book in your hand,

And stand between two churchmen, good my lord:

For on that ground I'll make a holy descant:

And be not easily won to our requests;

Play the maid's part, still answer nay, and take it."

Then come the citizens. Catesby bids them return another time. His

grace is closeted with two right reverend fathers; he is "divinely

bent to meditation," and must not be disturbed in his devotions by any

"worldly suits." They renew their entreaties to his messenger, and

implore the favour of an audience with his grace "in matter of great

moment."

Not till then does Gloucester show himself upon the balcony between two

bishops.

When, at the election of 1868, which turned upon the Irish Church

question, Disraeli, a very different man from Richard, was relying on

the co-operation of both English and Irish prelates, _Punch_ depicted

him in fifteenth-century attire, standing on a balcony, prayer-book

in hand, with an indescribable expression of sly humility, while two

bishops, representing the English and the Irish Church, supported him

on either hand. The legend ran, in the words of the Lord Mayor: "See

where his grace stands 'tween two clergymen!"--whereupon Buckingham

remarks--

"Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,

To stay him from the fall of vanity;

And, see, a book of prayer in his hand,

True ornament to know a holy man."

The deputation is sternly repulsed, until Richard at last lets mercy

stand for justice, and recalling the envoys of the City, yields to

their insistence.

The third master-scene is that in Richard's tent on Bosworth Field (v.

3). It seems as though his hitherto immovable self-confidence had been

shaken; he feels himself weak; he will not sup. "Is my beaver easier

than it was? ... Fill me a bowl of wine.... Look that my staves be

sound and not too heavy." Again: "Give me a bowl of wine."

"I have not that alacrity of spirit,

Nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have."

Then, in a vision, as he lies sleeping on his couch, with his armour

on and his sword-hilt grasped in his hand, he sees, one by one, the

spectres of all those he has done to death. He wakens in terror. His

conscience has a thousand tongues, and every tongue condemns him as a

perjurer and assassin:--

"I shall despair.--There is no creature loves me;

And if I die no soul shall pity me."

These are such pangs of conscience as would sometimes beset even the

strongest and most resolute in those days when faith and superstition

were still powerful, and when even one who scoffed at religion and

made a tool of it had no assurance in his heart of hearts. There is in

these words, too, a purely human sense of loneliness and of craving for

affection, which is valid for all time.

Most admirable is the way in which Richard summons up his manhood and

restores the courage of those around him. These are the accents of one

who will give despair no footing in his soul:--

"Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe;"

and there is in his harangue to the soldiers an irresistible roll

of fierce and spirit-stirring martial music; it is constructed like

strophes of the _Marseillaise_:--

"Remember whom you are to cope withal;--

A sort of vagabonds, rascals, runaways.

_(Que veut cette horde d'esclaves?)_

You having lands, and bless'd with beauteous wives,

They would restrain the one, distain the other.

_(Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes.)_

Let's whip these stragglers o'er the seas again."

But there is a ferocity, a scorn, a popular eloquence in Richard's

words, in comparison with which the rhetoric of the _Marseillaise_

seems declamatory, even academic. His last speeches are nothing less

than superb:--

"Shall these enjoy our lands? lie with our wives?

Ravish our daughters?--_[Drum afar off_.] Hark; I hear their

drum.

Fight, gentlemen of England! fight, bold yeomen!

Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head!

Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood:

Amaze the welkin with your broken staves!

_Enter a Messenger_.

What says Lord Stanley? will he bring his power?

_Mess_. My lord, he doth deny to come.

_K. Rich_. Off with his son George's head!

_Norfolk_. My lord, the enemy is pass'd the marsh:

After the battle let George Stanley die.

_K. Rich_. A thousand hearts are great within my bosom.

Advance our standards! set upon our foes!

Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,

Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!

Upon them! Victory sits on our helms.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

_K. Rich_. A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

_Catesby_. Withdraw, my lord; I'll help you to a horse.

_K. Rich_. Slave! I have set my life upon a cast,

And I will stand the hazard of the die.

I think there be six Richmonds in the field;

Five have I slain to-day, instead of him.--

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!"

In no other play of Shakespeare's, we may surely say, is the leading

character so absolutely predominant as here. He absorbs almost the

whole of the interest, and it is a triumph of Shakespeare's art that

he makes us, in spite of everything, follow him with sympathy. This

is partly because several of his victims are so worthless that their

fate seems well deserved. Anne's weakness deprives her of our sympathy,

and Richard's crime loses something of its horror when we see how

lightly it is forgiven by the one who ought to take it most to heart.

In spite of all his iniquities, he has wit and courage on his side--a

wit which sometimes rises to Mephistophelean humour, a courage which

does not fail him even in the moment of disaster, but sheds a glory

over his fall which is lacking to the triumph of his coldly correct

opponent. However false and hypocritical he may be towards others, he

is no hypocrite to himself. He is chemically free from self-delusion,

even applying to himself the most derogatory terms; and this candour

in the depths of his nature appeals to us. It must be said for him,

too, that threats and curses recoil from him innocuous, that neither

hatred nor violence nor superior force can dash his courage. Strength

of character is such a rare quality that it arouses sympathy even in a

criminal. If Richard's reign had lasted longer, he would perhaps have

figured in history as a ruler of the type of Louis XI.: crafty, always

wearing his religion on his sleeve, but far-seeing and resolute. As a

matter of fact, in history as in the drama, his whole time was occupied

in defending himself in the position to which he had fought his way,

like a bloodthirsty beast of prey. His figure stands before us as his

contemporaries have drawn it: small and wiry, the right shoulder higher

than the left, wearing his rich brown hair long in order to conceal

this malformation, biting his under-lip, always restless, always with

his hand on his dagger-hilt, sliding it up and down in its sheath,

without entirely drawing it. Shakespeare has succeeded in throwing a

halo of poetry around this tiger in human shape.

The figures of the two boy princes, Edward's sons, stand in the

strongest contrast to Richard. The eldest child already shows greatness

of soul, a kingly spirit, with a deep feeling for the import of

historic achievement. The fact that Julius Cæsar built the Tower, he

says, even were it not registered, ought to live from age to age. He

is full of the thought that while Cæsar's "valour did enrich his wit,"

yet it was his wit "that made his valour live," and he exclaims with

enthusiasm, "Death makes no conquest of this conqueror." The younger

brother is childishly witty, imaginative, full of boyish mockery for

his uncle's grimness, and eager to play with his dagger and sword. In

a very few touches Shakespeare has endowed these young brothers with

the most exquisite grace. The murderers "weep like to children in their

death's sad story":--

"Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

And, in their summer beauty, kiss'd each other."

Finally, the whole tragedy of Richard's life and death is enveloped, as

it were, in the mourning of women, permeated with their lamentations.

In its internal structure, it bears no slight resemblance to a Greek

tragedy, being indeed the concluding portion of a tetralogy.

Nowhere else does Shakespeare approach so nearly to the classicism on

the model of Seneca which had found some adherents in England.

The whole tragedy springs from the curse which York, in the Third Part

of _Henry VI_. (i. 4), hurls at Margaret of Anjou. She has insulted her

captive enemy, and given him in mockery a napkin soaked in the blood of

his son, the young Rutland, stabbed to the heart by Clifford.

Therefore she loses her crown and her son, the Prince of Wales. Her

lover, Suffolk, she has already lost. Nothing remains to attach her to

life.

But now it is her turn to be revenged.

The poet has sought to incarnate in her the antique Nemesis, has given

her supernatural proportions and set her free from the conditions of

real life. Though exiled, she has returned unquestioned to England,

haunts the palace of Edward IV., and gives free vent to her rage and

hatred in his presence and that of his kinsfolk and his courtiers.

So, too, she wanders around under Richard's rule, simply and solely

to curse her enemies--and even Richard himself is seized with a

superstitious shudder at these anathemas.

Never again did Shakespeare so depart from the possible in order to

attain a scenic effect. And yet it is doubtful whether the effect is

really attained. In reading, it is true, these curses strike us with

extraordinary force; but on the stage, where she only disturbs and

retards the action, and takes no effective part in it, Margaret cannot

but prove wearisome.

Yet, though she herself remains inactive, her curses are effectual

enough. Death overtakes all those on whom they fall--the King and his

children, Rivers and Dorset, Lord Hastings and the rest.

She encounters the Duchess of York, the mother of Edward IV., Queen

Elizabeth, his widow, and finally Anne, Richard's daringly-won and

quickly-repudiated wife. And all these women, like a Greek chorus, give

utterance in rhymed verse to imprecations and lamentations of high

lyric fervour. In two passages in particular (ii. 2 and iv. I) they

chant positive choral odes in dialogue form. Take as an example of the

lyric tone of the diction these lines (iv. I):--.

"_Duchess of York [To Dorset_.] Go thou to Richmond, and

good fortune guide thee!--

[_To Anne_.] Go thou to Richard, and good angels tend thee!

[_To Q. Elizabeth_.] Go thou to sanctuary, and good thoughts

possess thee!--

I to my grave, where peace and rest lie with me!

Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen,

And each hour's joy wrack'd with a week of teen."

Such is this work of Shakespeare's youth, firm, massive, and masterful

throughout, even though of very unequal merit. Everything is here

worked out upon the surface; the characters themselves tell us what

sort of people they are, and proclaim themselves evil or good, as the

case may be. They are all transparent, all self-conscious to excess.

They expound themselves in soliloquies, and each of them is judged in a

sort of choral ode. The time is yet to come when Shakespeare no longer

dreams of making his characters formally hand over to the spectators

the key to their mystery--when, on the contrary, with his sense of the

secrets and inward contradictions of the spiritual life, he sedulously

hides that key in the depths of personality.

XIX

_SHAKESPEARE LOSES HIS SON--TRACES OF HIS GRIEF IN KING JOHN--THE

OLD PLAY OF THE SAME NAME--DISPLACEMENT OF ITS CENTRE OF

GRAVITY--ELIMINATION OF RELIGIOUS POLEMICS--RETENTION OF THE NATIONAL

BASIS--PATRIOTIC SPIRIT--SHAKESPEARE KNOWS NOTHING OF THE DISTINCTION

BETWEEN NORMANS AND ANGLO-SAXONS, AND IGNORES THE MAGNA CHARTA_

In the Parish Register of Stratford-on-Avon for 1596, under the heading

of burials, we find this entry, in a clear and elegant handwriting:--

"_August_ 11, _Hamnet filius William Shakespeare._"

Shakespeare's only son was born on the 2nd of February 1585; he was

thus only eleven and a half when he died.

We cannot doubt that this loss was a grievous one to a man of

Shakespeare's deep feeling; doubly grievous, it would seem, because it

was his constant ambition to restore the fallen fortunes of his family,

and he was now left without an heir to his name.

Traces of what his heart must have suffered appear in the work he now

undertakes, _King John_, which seems to date from 1596-97.

One of the main themes of this play is the relation between John

Lackland, who has usurped the English crown, and the rightful heir,

Arthur, son of John's elder brother, in reality a boy of about fourteen

at the date of the action, but whom Shakespeare, for the sake of poetic

effect, and influenced, perhaps, by his private preoccupations of the

moment, has made considerably younger, and consequently more childlike

and touching.

The King has got Arthur into his power. The most famous scene in the

play is that (iv. I) in which Hubert de Burgh, the King's chamberlain,

who has received orders to sear out the eyes of the little captive,

enters Arthur's prison with the irons, and accompanied by the two

servants who are to bind the child to a chair and hold him fast while

the atrocity is being committed. The little prince, who has no mistrust

of Hubert, but only a general dread of his uncle's malice, as yet

divines no danger, and is full of sympathy and childlike tenderness.

The passage is one of extraordinary grace:--

"_Arthur_ You are sad.

_Hubert_. Indeed, I have been merrier.

_Arth_. Mercy on me

Methinks, nobody should be sad but I:

. . . . . . . .

I would to Heaven,

I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert.

_Hub. [Aside_.] If I talk to him, with his innocent prate

He will awake my mercy, which lies dead:

Therefore I will be sudden, and despatch.

_Arth_. Are you sick, Hubert? you look pale to-day.

In sooth, I would you were a little sick,

That I might sit all night, and watch with you:

I warrant, I love you more than you do me."

Hubert gives him the royal mandate to read:--

"_Hubert_. Can you not read it? is it not fair writ?

_Arthur_. Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect.

Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes?

_Hub_. Young boy, I must.

_Arth_ . And will you?

_Hub_ . And I will.

_Arth_. Have you the heart? When your head did but ache,

I knit my handkerchief about your brows,

(The best I had, a princess wrought it me,)

And I did never ask it you again;

And with my hand at midnight held your head."

Hubert summons the executioners, and the child promises to sit still

and offer no resistance if only he will send these "bloody men" away.

One of the servants as he goes out speaks a word of pity, and Arthur is

in despair at having "chid away his friend." In heart-breaking accents

he begs mercy of Hubert until the iron has grown cold, and Hubert has

not the heart to heat it afresh.

Arthur's entreaties to the rugged Hubert to spare his eyes, must have

represented in Shakespeare's thought the prayers of his little Hamnet

to be suffered still to see the light of day, or rather Shakespeare's

own appeal to Death to spare the child--prayers and appeals which were

all in vain.

It is, however, in the lamentations of Arthur's mother, Constance, when

the child is carried away to prison (iii. 4), that we most clearly

recognise the accents of Shakespeare's sorrow:--

"_Pandulph_. Lady, you utter madness, and not sorrow.

_Constance_. I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine.

If I were mad, I should forget my son,

Or madly think, a babe of clouts were he.

I am not mad: too well, too well I feel

The different plague of each calamity."

She pours forth her anguish at the thought of his sufferings in

prison:--

"Now will canker sorrow eat my bud,

And chase the native beauty from his cheek,

And he will look as hollow as a ghost,

As dim and meagre as an ague's fit,

And so he'll die.

. . . . . . . . .

_Pandulph_. You hold too heinous a respect of grief.

_Constance_. He talks to me, that never had a son.

_K. Philip_. You are as fond of grief as of your child."

_Const_. Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form."

It seems as though Shakespeare's great heart had found an outlet for

its own sorrows in transfusing them into the heart of Constance.

Shakespeare used as the basis of his _King John_ an old play on the

same subject published in 1591.[1] This play is quite artless and

spiritless, but contains the whole action, outlines all the characters,

and suggests almost all the principal scenes. The poet did not

require to trouble himself with the invention of external traits. He

could concentrate his whole effort upon vitalising, spiritualising,

and deepening everything. Thus it happens that this play, though

never one of his most popular (it seems to have been but seldom

performed during his lifetime, and remained in manuscript until the

appearance of the First Folio), nevertheless contains some of his

finest character-studies and a multitude of pregnant, imaginative, and

exquisitely worded speeches.

The old play was a mere Protestant tendency-drama directed against

Catholic aggression, and full of the crude hatred and coarse

ridicule of monks and nuns characteristic of the Reformation period.

Shakespeare, with his usual tact, has suppressed the religious

element, and retained only the national and political attack upon

Roman Catholicism, so that the play had no slight actuality for the

Elizabethan public. But he has also displaced the centre of gravity of

the old play. Everything in Shakespeare turns upon John's defective

right to the throne: therein lies the motive for the atrocity he plans,

which leads (although it is not carried out as he intended) to the

barons' desertion of his cause.

Despite its great dramatic advantages over _Richard II_., the play

surfers from the same radical weakness, and in an even greater

degree: the figure of the King is too unsympathetic to serve as the

centre-point of a drama. His despicable infirmity of purpose, which

makes him kneel to receive his crown at the hands of the same Papal

legate whom he has shortly before defied in blusterous terms; his

infamous scheme to assassinate an innocent child, and his repentance

when he sees that its supposed execution has alienated the chief

supporters of his throne--all this hideous baseness, unredeemed by

any higher characteristics, leads the spectator rather to attach

his interest to the subordinate characters, and thus the action is

frittered away before his eyes. It lacks unity, because the King is

powerless to hold it together.

He himself is depicted for all time in the masterly scene (iii. 3)

where he seeks, without putting his thought into plain words, to make

Hubert understand that he would fain have Arthur murdered:--

"Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes,

Hear me without thine ears, and make reply

Without a tongue, using conceit alone,

Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words:

Then, in despite of brooded-watchful day,--

I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts.

But, ah! I will not:--yet I love thee well."

Hubert protests his fidelity and devotion. Even if he were to die for

the deed, he would execute it for the King's sake. Then John's manner

becomes hearty, almost affectionate. "Good Hubert, Hubert!" he says

caressingly. He points to Arthur, bidding Hubert "throw his eye on yon

young boy;" and then follows this masterly dialogue:--

"I'll tell thee what, my friend,

He is a very serpent in my way;

And wheresoe'er this foot of mine doth tread,

He lies before me. Dost thou understand me?

Thou art his keeper.

_Hub_. And I'll keep him so,

That he shall not offend your majesty.

_K. John_. Death.

_Hub_. My Lord.

_K. John_. A grave.

_Hub_. He shall not live.

_K. John_. Enough

_I could be merry now_. Hubert, I love thee;

Well, I'll not say what I intend for thee:

Remember.--Madam, fare you well:

I'll send those powers o'er to your majesty.

_Elinor_. My blessing go with thee!"

The character that bears the weight of the piece, as an acting play, is

the illegitimate son of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, Philip Faulconbridge. He

is John Bull himself in the guise of a mediæval knight, equipped with

great strength and a racy English humour, not the wit of a Mercutio, a

gay Italianising cavalier, but the irrepressible ebullitions of rude

health and blunt gaiety befitting an English Hercules. The scene in

the first act, in which he appears along with his brother, who seeks

to deprive him of his inheritance as a Faulconbridge on the ground of

his alleged illegitimacy, and the subsequent scene with his mother,

from whom he tries to wring the secret of his paternity, both appear

in the old play; but in it everything that the Bastard says is in grim

earnest--the embroidery of wit belongs to Shakespeare alone. It is he

who has placed in Faulconbridge's mouth such sayings as this:--

"Madam, I was not old Sir Robert's son:

Sir Robert might have eat his part in me

Upon Good Friday, and ne'er broke his fast."

And it is quite in Shakespeare's spirit when the son, after her

confession, thus consoles his mother:--

"Madam, I would not wish a better father.

Some sins do bear their privilege on earth,

And so doth yours."

In later years, at a time when his outlook upon life was darkened,

Shakespeare accounted for the villainy of Edmund, in _King Lear_ and

for his aloofness from anything like normal humanity, on the ground

of his irregular birth; in the Bastard of this play, on the contrary,

his aim was to present a picture of all that health, vigour, and

full-blooded vitality which popular belief attributes to a "Love-child."

The antithesis to this national hero is Limoges, Archduke of Austria,

in whom Shakespeare, following the old play, has mixed up two entirely

distinct personalities: Vidomar, Viscount of Limoges, at the siege of

one of whose castles Richard Cœur-de-Lion was killed, in 1199, and

Leopold V., Archduke of Austria, who had kept Cœur-de-Lion in prison.

Though the latter, in fact, died five years before Richard, we here

find him figuring as the dastardly murderer of the heroic monarch.

In memory of this deed he wears a lion's skin on his shoulders, and

thus brings down upon himself the indignant scorn of Constance and

Faulconbridge's taunting insults:--

"_Constance_. Thou wear a lion's hide! doff it for shame,

And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.

_Austria_. O, that a man should speak those words to me!

_Bastard_. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.

_Aust_. Thou dar'st not say so, villain, for thy life.

_Bast_. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs."

Every time the Archduke tries to get in a word of warning or counsel,

Faulconbridge silences him with this coarse sarcasm.

Faulconbridge is at first full of youthful insolence, the true mediæval

nobleman, who despises the burgess class simply as such. When the

inhabitants of Angiers refuse to open their gates either to King John

or to King Philip of France, who has espoused the cause of Arthur, the

Bastard is so indignant at this peace-loving circumspection that he

urges the kings to join their forces against the unlucky town, and cry

truce to their feud until the ramparts are levelled to the earth. But

in the course of the action he ripens more and more, and displays ever

greater and more estimable qualities--humanity, right-mindedness, and a

fidelity to the King which does not interfere with generous freedom of

speech towards him.

His method of expression is always highly imaginative, more so than

that of the other male characters in the play. Even the most abstract

ideas he personifies. Thus he talks (iii. I) of--

"Old Time, the clock-setter, that bald sexton Time."

In the old play whole scenes are devoted to his execution of the

task here allotted him of visiting the monasteries of England and

lightening the abbots' bursting money-bags. Shakespeare has suppressed

these ebullitions of an anti-Catholic fervour, which he did not share.

On the other hand, he has endowed Faulconbridge with genuine moral

superiority. At first he is only a cheery, fresh-natured, robust

personality, who tramples upon all social conventions, phrases, and

affectations; and indeed he preserves to the last something of that

contempt for "cockered silken wantons" which Shakespeare afterwards

elaborates so magnificently in Henry Percy. But there is real greatness

in his attitude when, at the close of the play, he addresses the

vacillating John in this manly strain (v. I):--

"Let not the world see fear, and sad distrust,

Govern the motion of a kingly eye:

Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire;

Threaten the threatener, and outface the brow

Of bragging horror: so shall inferior eyes,

That borrow their behaviours from the great,

Grow great by your example, and put on

The dauntless spirit of resolution."

Faulconbridge is in this play the spokesman of the patriotic spirit.

But we realise how strong was Shakespeare's determination to make this

string sound at all hazards, when we find that the first eulogy of

England is placed in the mouth of England's enemy, Limoges, the slayer

of Cœur-de-Lion, who speaks (ii. I) of--

"that pale, that white'-fac'd shore,

Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides,

And coops from other lands her islanders,

... that England, hedg'd in with the main,

That water-walled bulwark, still secure

And confident from foreign purposes."

How slight is the difference between the eulogistic style of the two

mortal enemies, when Faulconbridge, who has in the meantime killed

Limoges, ends the play with a speech, which is, however, only slightly

adapted from the older text:--

"This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.

. . . . . . . .

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true."

Next to Faulconbridge, Constance is the character who bears the weight

of the play; and its weakness arises in great part from the fact that

Shakespeare has killed her at the end of the third act. So lightly is

her death treated, that it is merely announced in passing by the mouth

of a messenger. She does not appear at all after her son Arthur is put

out of the way, possibly because Shakespeare feared to lengthen the

list of sorrowing and vengeful mothers already presented in his earlier

histories.

He has treated this figure with a marked predilection, such as he

usually manifests for those characters which, in one way or another,

forcibly oppose every compromise with lax worldliness and euphemistic

conventionality. He has not only endowed her with the most passionate

and enthusiastic motherly love, but with a wealth of feeling and of

imagination which gives her words a certain poetic magnificence. She

wishes that "her tongue were in the thunder's mouth, Then with a

passion would she shake the world" (iii. 4). She is sublime in her

grief for the loss of her son:--

"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,

For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop.

To me, and to the state of my great grief,

Let kings assemble;

. . . . . .

Here I and sorrows sit;

Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.

_Seats herself on the ground."_

Yet Shakespeare is already preparing us, in the overstrained violence

of these expressions, for her madness and death.

The third figure which fascinates the reader of _King John_ is that of

Arthur. All the scenes in which the child appears are contained in the

old play of the same name, and, among the rest, the first scene of the

second act, which seems to dispose of Fleay's conjecture that the first

two hundred lines of the act were hastily inserted after Shakespeare

had lost his son. Nevertheless almost all that is gracious and touching

in the figure is due to the great reviser. The old text is at its best

in the scene where Arthur meets his death by jumping from the walls of

the castle. Shakespeare has here confined himself for the most part

to free curtailment; in the old _King John_, his fatal fall does not

prevent Arthur from pouring forth copious lamentations to his absent

mother and prayers to "sweete Iesu." Shakespeare gives him only two

lines to speak after his fall.

In this play, as in almost all the works of Shakespeare's younger

years, the reader is perpetually amazed to find the finest poetical and

rhetorical passages side by side with the most intolerable euphuistic

affectations. And we cannot allege the excuse that these are legacies

from the older play. On the contrary, there is nothing of the kind

to be found in it; they are added by Shakespeare, evidently with the

express purpose of displaying delicacy and profundity of thought. In

the scenes before the walls of Angiers, he has on the whole kept close

to the old drama, and has even followed faithfully the sense of all the

more important speeches. For example, it is a citizen on the ramparts,

who, in the old play, suggests the marriage between Blanch and the

Dauphin; Shakespeare merely re-writes his speech, introducing into it

these beautiful lines (ii. 2):--

"If lusty love should go in quest of beauty,

Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch?

If zealous love should go in search of virtue,

Where should he find it purer than in Blanch?

If love ambitious sought a match of birth,

Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanch?"

The surprising thing is that the same hand which has just written

these verses should forthwith lose itself in a tasteless tangle of

affectations like this:--

"Such as she is, in beauty, virtue, birth,

Is the young Dauphin every way complete:

If not complete of, say, he is not she;

And she again wants nothing, to name want,

If want it be not, that she is not he:"

and this profound thought is further spun out with a profusion of

images. Can we wonder that Voltaire and the French critics of the

eighteenth century were offended by a style like this, even to the

point of letting it blind them to the wealth of genius elsewhere

manifested?

Even the touching scene between Arthur and Hubert is disfigured by

false cleverness of this sort. The little boy, kneeling to the man who

threatens to sear out his eyes, introduces, in the midst of the most

moving appeals, such far-fetched and contorted phrases as this (iv.

I):--

"The iron of itself, though heat red-hot,

Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears,

And quench this fiery indignation

Even in the matter of mine innocence;

Nay, after that, consume away in rust,

But for containing fire to harm mine eye."

And again, when Hubert proposes to reheat the iron:--

"An if you do, you will but make it blush,

And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert."

The taste of the age must indeed have pressed strongly upon

Shakespeare's spirit to prevent him from feeling the impossibility of

these quibbles upon the lips of a child imploring in deadly fear that

his eyes may be spared to him.

As regards their ethical point of view, there is no essential

difference between the old play and Shakespeare's. The King's defeat

and painful death is in both a punishment for his wrongdoing. There has

only been, as already mentioned, a certain displacement of the centre

of gravity. In the old play, the dying John stammers out an explicit

confession that from the moment he surrendered to the Roman priest he

has had no more happiness on earth; for the Pope's curse is a blessing,

and his blessing a curse. In Shakespeare the emphasis is laid, not upon

the King's weakness in the religio-political struggle, but upon the

wrong to Arthur. Faulconbridge gives utterance to the fundamental idea

of the play when he says (iv. 3):--

"From forth this morsel of dead royalty,

The life, the right, and truth of all this realm

Is fled to heaven."

Shakespeare's political standpoint is precisely that of the earlier

writer, and indeed, we may add, of his whole age.

The most important contrasts and events of the period he seeks to

represent do not exist for him. He naïvely accepts the first kings of

the House of Plantagenet, and the Norman princes in general, as English

national heroes, and has evidently no suspicion of the deep gulf that

separated the Normans from the Anglo-Saxons down to this very reign,

when the two hostile races, equally oppressed by the King's tyranny,

began to fuse into one people. What would Shakespeare have thought had

he known that Richard Cœur-de-Lion's favourite formula of denial was

"Do you take me for an Englishman?" while his pet oath, and that of his

Norman followers, was "May I become an Englishman if--," &c.?

Nor does a single phrase, a single syllable, in the whole play, refer

to the event which, for all after-times, is inseparably associated with

the memory of King John--the signing of the Magna Charta. The reason of

this is evidently, in the first place, that Shakespeare kept close to

the earlier drama, and, in the second place, that he did not attribute

to the event the importance it really possessed, did not understand

that the Magna Charta laid the foundation of popular liberty, by

calling into existence a middle class which supported even the House

of Tudor in its struggle with an overweening oligarchy. But the chief

reason why the Magna Charta is not mentioned was, no doubt, that

Elizabeth did not care to be reminded of it. She was not fond of any

limitations of her royal prerogative, and did not care to recall the

defeats suffered by her predecessors in their struggles with warlike

and independent vassals. And the nation was willing enough to humour

her in this respect. People felt that they had to thank her government

for a great national revival, and therefore showed no eagerness either

to vindicate popular rights against her, or to see them vindicated

in stage-history. It was not until long after, under the Stuarts,

that the English people began to cultivate its constitution. The

chronicle-writers of the period touch very lightly upon the barons'

victory over King John in the struggle for the Great Charter; and

Shakespeare thus followed at once his own personal bias with regard to

history, and the current of his age.

[1] The full title runs thus: "The Troublesome Raigne of

_John_, King of _England,_ with the discouerie of King Richard

Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named The Bastard Fawconbridge): also

the death of King John at Swinstead Abbey. As it was (sundry times)

publikely acted by the Queenes Maiesties Players, in the honorable

Citie of London."

XX

"_THE TAMING OF THE SHREW" AND "THE MERCHANT OF VENICE"--SHAKESPEARE'S

PREOCCUPATION WITH THOUGHTS OF PROPERTY AND GAIN--HIS GROWING

PROSPERITY--HIS ADMISSION TO THE RANKS OF THE "GENTRY"--HIS PURCHASE OF

HOUSES AND LAND--MONEY TRANSACTIONS AND LAWSUITS_

The first plays in which we seem to find traces of Italian travel are

_The Taming of the Shrew_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, the former

written at latest in 1596, the latter almost certainly in that or the

following year.

Enough has already been said of _The Taming of the Shrew._ It is

only a free and spirited reconstruction of an old piece of scenic

architecture, which Shakespeare demolished in order to erect from its

materials a spacious and airy hall. The old play itself had been highly

popular on the stage; it took new life under Shakespeare's hands. His

play is not much more than a farce, but it possesses movement and

fire, and the leading male character, the somewhat coarsely masculine

Petruchio, stands in amusing and typical contrast to the spoilt,

headstrong, and passionate little woman whom he masters.

_The Merchant of Venice_, Shakespeare's first important comedy, is a

piece of work of a very different order, and is elaborated to a very

different degree. There is far more of his own inmost nature in it than

in the light and facile farce.

No doubt he found in Marlowe's _Jew of Malta_ the first, purely

literary, impulse towards _The Merchant of Venice_. In Marlowe's play

the curtain rises upon the chief character, Barabas, sitting in his

counting-house, with piles of gold before him, and revelling in the

thought of the treasures which it takes a soliloquy of nearly fifty

lines to enumerate--pearls like pebble-stones, opals, sapphires,

amethysts, jacinths, topazes, grass-green emeralds, beauteous rubies

and sparkling diamonds. At the beginning of the play, he is possessed

of all the riches wherewith the Genie of the Lamp endowed Aladdin,

which have at one time or another sparkled in the dreams of all poor

poets.

Barabas is a Jew and usurer, like Shylock. Like Shylock, he has a

daughter who is in love with a poor Christian; and, like him, he

thirsts for revenge. But he is a monster, not a man. When he has been

misused by the Christians, and robbed of his whole fortune, he becomes

a criminal fit only for a fairy-tale or for a madhouse: he uses his own

daughter as an instrument for his revenge, and then poisons her along

with all the nuns in whose cloister she has taken refuge. Shakespeare

was attracted by the idea of making a real man and a real Jew out of

this intolerable demon in a Jew's skin.

But this slight impulse would scarcely have set Shakespeare's genius

in motion had it found him engrossed in thoughts and images of an

incongruous nature. It took effect upon his mind because it was at

that moment preoccupied with the ideas of acquisition, property,

money-making, wealth. He did not, like the Jew, who was in all

countries legally incapable of acquiring real estate, dream of gold and

jewels; but, like the genuine country-born Englishman he was, he longed

for land and houses, meadows and gardens, money that yielded sound

yearly interest, and, finally, a corresponding advancement in rank and

position.

We have seen with what indifference he treated his plays, how little he

thought of winning fame by their publication. All the editions of them

which appeared in his lifetime were issued without his co-operation,

and no doubt against his will, since the sale of the books did not

bring him in a farthing, but, on the contrary, diminished his profits

by diminishing the attendance at the theatre on which his livelihood

depended. Furthermore, when we see in his Sonnets how discontented he

was with his position as an actor, and how humiliated he felt at the

contempt in which the stage was held, we cannot doubt that the calling

into which he had drifted in his needy youth was in his eyes simply and

solely a means of making money. It is true that actors like himself

and Burbage were, in certain circles, welcomed and respected as men

who rose above their calling; but they were admitted on sufferance,

they had not full rights of citizenship, they were not "gentlemen."

There is extant a copy of verses by John Davies of Hereford, beginning,

"_Players_, I love yee, and your _Qualitie_" with a marginal note

citing as examples "W. S., R. B." [William Shakespeare, Richard

Burbage]; but they are clearly looked upon as exceptions:--

"And though the _stage_ doth staine pure gentle _bloud,_

Yet generous yee are in _minde_ and _moode"._

The calling of an actor, however, was a lucrative one. Most of the

leading players became well-to-do, and it seems clear that this was

one of the reasons why they were evilly regarded. In _The Return from

Parnassus_ (1606), Kemp assures two Cambridge students who apply to him

and Burbage for instruction in acting, that there is no better calling

in the world, from a financial point of view, than that of the player.

In a pamphlet of the same year, _Ratsey's Ghost_, the executed thief,

with a satirical allusion to Shakespeare, advises a strolling player

to buy property in the country when he is tired of play-acting, and by

that means attain honour and dignity. In an epigram entitled _Theatrum

Licentia_ (in _Laquei Ridiculosi_, 1616), we read of the actor's

calling:--

"For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow

And brings them damnable excessive gains."

The primary object of Shakespeare's aspirations was neither renown

as a poet nor popularity as an actor, but worldly prosperity, and

prosperity regarded specially as a means of social advancement. He

had taken greatly to heart his father's decline in property and civic

esteem; from youth upwards he had been passionately bent on restoring

the sunken name and fame of his family. He had now, at the age of only

thirty-two, amassed a small capital, which he began to invest in the

most advantageous way for the end he had in view--that of elevating

himself above his calling.

His father had been afraid to cross the street lest he should be

arrested for debt. He himself, as a youth, had been whipped and

consigned to the lock-up at the command of the lord of the manor. The

little town which had witnessed this disgrace should also witness

the rehabilitation. The townspeople, who had heard of his equivocal

fame as an actor and playwright, should see him in the character of

a respected householder and landowner. At Stratford and elsewhere,

those who had classed him with the proletariat should recognise in

him a _gentleman._ According to a tradition which Rowe reports on the

authority of Sir William Davenant, Lord Southampton is said to have

laid the foundation of Shakespeare's prosperity by a gift of £1.000.

Though Bacon received more than this from Essex, the magnitude of the

sum discredits the tradition--it is equivalent to something like £5000

in modern money. No doubt the young Earl gave the poet a present in

acknowledgment of the dedication of his two poems; for the poets of

that time did not live on royalties, but on their dedications. But as

the ordinary acknowledgment of a dedication was only £5, a gift of even

£50 would have been reckoned princely. What is practically certain is,

that Shakespeare was early in a position to become a shareholder in the

theatre; and he evidently had a special talent for putting the money

he earned to profitable use. His firm determination to work his way up

in the world, combined with the Englishman's inborn practicality, made

him an excellent man of business; and he soon develops such a decided

talent for finance as only two other great national writers, probably,

have ever possessed--to wit, Holberg and Voltaire.

It is from the year 1596 onwards that we find evidences of his

growing prosperity. In this year his father, no doubt prompted and

supplied with means by Shakespeare himself, makes application to the

Heralds' College for a coat-of-arms, the sketch of which is preserved,

dated October 1596. The conferring of a coat-of-arms implied formal

admittance into the ranks of "the gentry." It was necessary before

either father or son could append the word "gentleman" _(armiger_) to

his name, as we find Shakespeare doing in legal documents after this

date, and in his will. But Shakespeare himself was not in a position to

apply for a coat-of-arms. That was out of the question--a player was

far too mean a person to come within the cognisance of heraldry. He

therefore adopted the shrewd device of furnishing his father with means

for making the application on his own behalf.

According to the ideas and regulations of the time, indeed, not even

Shakespeare senior had any real right to a coat-of-arms. But the

Garter-King-at-Arms for the time being, Sir William Dethick, was an

exceedingly compliant personage, probably not inaccessible to pecuniary

arguments. He was sharply criticised in his own day, and indeed at

last superseded, on account of the facility with which he provided

applicants with armorial bearings, and we possess his defence in

this very matter of the Shakespeare coat-of-arms. All sorts of small

falsehoods were alleged; for instance, that John Shakespeare had,

twenty years before, had "his auncient cote of arms assigned to him,"

and that he was then "Her Majestie's officer and baylefe," whereas his

office had in fact been merely municipal. Nevertheless, there must

have been some hitch in the negotiations, for in 1597 John Shakespeare

is still described as _yeoman_, and not until 1599 did the definite

assignment of the coat-of-arms take place, along with the permission

(of which the son, however, did not avail himself) to impale the

Shakespeare arms with those of the Arden family. The coat-of-arms

is thus described:--"Gould on a bend sable a speare of the first,

the poynt steeled, proper, and for creast or cognizance, a faulcon,

his wings displayed, argent, standing on a wreathe of his coullors,

supporting a speare gould steled as aforesaid." The motto runs (with a

suspicion of irony), _Non sans droict_. Yet to what insignia had not

_he_ the right!

In the spring of 1597, William Shakespeare bought the mansion of New

Place, the largest, and at one time the handsomest, house in Stratford,

which had now fallen somewhat out of repair, and was therefore sold

at the comparatively low price of £60. He thoroughly restored the

house, attached two gardens to it, and soon extended his domain by

new purchases of land, some of it arable; for we see that during the

corn-famine of 1598 (February), he appears on the register as owner of

ten quarters of corn and malt--that is to say, the third largest stock

in the town. The house stood opposite the Guild Chapel, the sound of

whose bells must have been among his earliest memories.

At the same time he gives his father money to revive the lawsuit

against John Lambert concerning the property of Asbies, mortgaged

nineteen years before--that lawsuit whose unfavourable issue young

Shakespeare had taken so much to heart, as we have seen, that he

introduced a gibe at the Lambert family into the Induction to _The

Taming of the Shrew_, now just completed.

A letter of January 24, 1597-8, written by a certain Abraham Sturley in

Stratford to his brother-in-law, Richard Quiney, whose son afterwards

married Shakespeare's youngest daughter, shows that the poet already

passed for a man of substance, since one of his fellow-townsmen sends

him a message recommending him, instead of buying land at Shottery, to

lease part of the Stratford tithes. This would be advantageous both to

him and to the town, for the purchase of tithes was generally a good

investment, and the character of the purchaser was of importance to

the town, since a portion of the sum raised went into the municipal

treasury.[1]

It appears, however, that the purchase-money required was still beyond

Shakespeare's means, for not until seven years later, in 1605, does he

buy, for the considerable sum of £440, a moiety of the lease of the

tithes of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. These

tithes originally belonged to the Church, but passed to the town in

1554, and from 1580 onwards were farmed by private persons. As might

have been expected, the purchase of them involved Shakespeare in

several lawsuits.

In a letter of 1598 or 1599, Adrian Quiney, of Stratford, writes to

his son Richard, who looked after the interests of his fellow-townsmen

in the capital: "Yff yow bargen with Wm. Sha. or receve money therfor,

brynge youre money homme that yow maye." This Richard Quiney is the

writer of the only extant letter addressed to Shakespeare (probably

never despatched), in which he begs his "loveinge contreyman," in

moving and pious terms, for a loan of £30, promising security and

interest. Another letter from Sturley, dated November 4, 1598, mentions

the news "that our countriman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us monei,

which I will like of as I shall heare when, and wheare, and howe."

All these documents render it sufficiently apparent that Shakespeare

did not share the loathing of interest which it was the fashion of

his day to affect, and which Antonio, in _The Merchant of Venice_,

flaunts in the face of Shylock. The taking of interest was at that time

regarded as forbidden to a Christian, but was usual nevertheless; and

Shakespeare seems to have charged the current rate, namely, ten per

cent.

During the following, years he continued to acquire still more land.

In 1602 he buys, at Stratford, arable land of the value of no less

than £320, and pays £60 for a house and a piece of ground. In 1610 he

adds twenty acres to his property. In 1612, in partnership with three

others, he buys a house and garden in London for £140.

And Shakespeare was a strict man of business. We find him proceeding

by attorney against a poor devil named Philip Rogers of Stratford,

who in the years 1603-4 had bought small quantities of malt from him

to the total value of £1, 19s. 10d., and who had besides borrowed two

shillings of him. Six shillings he had repaid; and Shakespeare now sets

the law in motion to recover the balance of £1, 15s. 10d. In 1608-9 he

again brings an action against a Stratford debtor. This time he gets a

verdict for £6, with £1, 4s. of costs; and as the debtor has absconded,

Shakespeare proceeds against his security.

All these details show, in the first place, how closely Shakespeare

kept up his connection with Stratford during his residence in London.

By the year 1599 he has succeeded in restoring the credit of his

family. He has made his poor, debt-burdened father a gentleman with a

coat-of-arms, and has himself become one of the largest and richest

landowners in his native place. He continues steadily to increase his

capital and his property at Stratford; and it is obviously a mere

corollary to this whole course of action that he should, while still in

the full vigour of manhood, leave London, the theatre, and literature

behind him, to return to Stratford and pass his last years as a

prosperous landowner.

We next observe Shakespeare's eagerness to rise above his calling

as a player. From 1599 onwards, he had the satisfaction of being

able to write himself down: _Wm. Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon

in the County of Warwick, gentleman_. But it must not, of course,

be understood that he was now in a position of equality with men

of genuinely noble birth. So little was this the case, that even

in the "Epistle Dedicatorie" to the Folio of 1623, the two actors,

his comrades, who issue the book, describe him as the "servant" of

the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, whose "dignity" they know to

be "greater than to descend to the reading of these trifles." They

nevertheless inscribe the "trifles" to the "incomparable paire of

brethren" out of gratitude for the great "indulgence" and "favour"

which they had "used" to the deceased poet.

The chief interest, however, of these old contracts and business

letters lies in the insight they give us into a region of Shakespeare's

soul, the existence of which, in their absence, we should never have

divined. We see that he may very well have been thinking of himself

when he makes Hamlet (v. I) say beside Ophelia's open grave: "This

fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his

recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this

the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his

fine pate full of fine dirt?"

And--to return to our point of departure--we see that when Shakespeare,

in _The Merchant of Venice_, makes the whole play turn upon the

different relations of different men to property, position, and

wealth, the problem was one with which he was at the moment personally

preoccupied.

[1] Sturley writes:--"This is one speciall remembrance from ur

fathers motion. Itt semeth bi him that our countriman, Mr. Shaksper,

is willinge to disburse some monei upon some od yarde land or other

att Shotterie or neare about us; he thinketh it a veri fitt patterne

to move him to deale in the matter of our tithes. Bi the instruccions

u can geve him theareof, and bi the frendes he can make therefore, we

thinke it a faire marke for him to shoote att, and not unpossible to

hitt. It obtained would advance him in deede, and would do us muche

good."

XXI

_THE MERCHANT OF VENICE--ITS SOURCES--ITS CHARACTERS, ANTONIO, PORTIA,

SHYLOCK--MOONLIGHT AND MUSIC--SHAKESPEARE'S RELATION TO MUSIC_

We learn from Ben Jonson's _Volpone_ (iv. I) that the traveller who

arrived in Venice first rented apartments, and then applied to a Jew

dealer for the furniture. If the traveller happened to be a poet, he

would thus have an opportunity, which he lacked in England, of studying

the Jewish character and manner of expression. Shakespeare seems to

have availed himself of it. The names of the Jews and Jewesses who

appear in _The Merchant of Venice_ he has taken from the Old Testament.

We find in Genesis (x. 24) the name Salah (Hebrew Schelach; at that

time appearing as the name of a Maronite from Lebanon: Scialac) out

of which Shakespeare has made Shylock; and in Genesis (xi. 29) there

occurs the name Iscah (she who looks out, who spies), spelt "Jeska" in

the English translations of 1549 and 1551, out of which he made his

Jessica, the girl whom Shylock accuses of a fondness for "clambering up

to casements" and "thrusting her head into the public street" to see

the masquers pass.

Shakespeare's audiences were familiar with several versions of the

story of the Jew who relentlessly demanded the pound of flesh pledged

to him by his Christian debtor, and was at last sent empty and baffled

away, and even forced to become a Christian. The story has been found

in Buddhist legends (along with the adventure of the Three Caskets,

here interwoven with it), and many believe that it came to Europe from

India. It may, however, have migrated in just the opposite direction.

Certain it is, as one of Shakespeare's authorities points out, that the

right to take payment in the flesh of the insolvent debtor was admitted

in the Twelve Tables of ancient Rome. As a matter of fact, this antique

trait was quite international, and Shakespeare has only transferred it

from old and semi-barbarous times to the Venice of his own day.

The story illustrates the transition from the unconditional enforcement

of strict law to the more modern principle of equity. Thus it afforded

an opening for Portia's eloquent contrast between justice and mercy,

which the public understood as an assertion of the superiority of

Christian ethics to the Jewish insistence on the letter of the law.

One of the sources on which Shakespeare drew for the figure of Shylock,

and especially for his speeches in the trial scene, is _The Orator_

of Alexander Silvayn. The 95th Declamation of this work bears the

title: "Of a Jew who would for his debt have a pound of the flesh of a

Christian." Since an English translation of Silvayn's book by Anthony

Munday appeared in 1596, and _The Merchant of Venice_ is mentioned by

Meres in 1598 as one of Shakespeare's works, there can scarcely be any

doubt that the play was produced between these dates.

In _The Orator_ both the Merchant and the Jew make speeches, and the

invective against the Jew is interesting in so far as it gives a

lively impression of the current accusations of the period against the

Israelitish race:--

"But it is no marvaile if this race be so obstinat and

cruell against us, for they doe it of set purpose to offend

our God whom they have crucified: and wherefore? Because he

was holie, as he is yet so reputed of this worthy Turkish

nation: but what shall I say? Their own bible is full of

their rebellion against God, against their Priests, Judges,

and leaders. What did not the verie Patriarks themselves,

from, whom they have their beginning? They sold their

brother...." &c.

Shakespeare's chief authority, however, for the whole play was

obviously the story of Gianetto, which occurs in the collection

entitled _Il Pecorone_, by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, published in Milan

in 1558.

A young merchant named Gianetto comes with a richly laden ship to a

harbour near the castle of Belmonte, where dwells a lovely young widow.

She has many suitors, and is, indeed, prepared to surrender her hand

and her fortune, but only on one condition, which no one has hitherto

succeeded in fulfilling, and which is stated with mediæval simplicity

and directness. She challenges the aspirant, at nightfall, to share

her bed and make her his own; but at the same time she gives him a

sleeping-draught which plunges him in profound unconsciousness from

the moment his head touches the pillow, so that at daybreak he has

forfeited his ship and its cargo to the fair lady, and is sent on his

way, despoiled and put to shame.

This misfortune happens to Gianetto; but he is so deeply in love that

he returns to Venice and induces his kind foster-father, Ansaldo, to

fit out another ship for him. But his second visit to Belmonte ends

no less disastrously, and in order to enable him to make a third

attempt his foster-father is forced to borrow 10,000 ducats from a

Jew, upon the conditions which we know. By following the advice of

a kindly-disposed waiting-woman, the young man this time escapes

the danger, becomes a happy bridegroom, and in his rapture forgets

Ansaldo's obligation to the Jew. He is not reminded of it until the

very day when it falls due, and then his wife insists that he shall

instantly start for Venice, taking with him a sum of 100,000 ducats.

She herself presently follows, dressed as an advocate, and appears in

Venice as a young lawyer of great reputation, from Bologna. The Jew

rejects every proposition for the deliverance of Ansaldo, even the

100,000 ducats. Then the trial-scene proceeds, just as in Shakespeare;

Gianetto's young wife delivers judgment, like Portia; the Jew receives

not a stiver, and dares not shed a drop of Ansaldo's blood. When

Gianetto, in his gratitude, offers the young advocate the whole 100,000

ducats, she, as in the play, demands nothing but the ring which

Gianetto has received from his wife; and the tale ends with the same

gay unravelling of the sportive complication, which gives Shakespeare

the matter for his fifth act.

Being unable to make use of the condition imposed by the fair lady of

Belmonte in _Il Pecorone_, Shakespeare cast about for another, and

found it in the _Gesta Romanorum_, in the tale of the three caskets, of

gold, silver, and lead. Here it is a young girl who makes the choice

in order to win the Emperor's son. The inscription on the golden

casket promises that whoever chooses that shall find what he deserves.

The girl rejects this out of humility, and rightly, since it proves

to contain dead men's bones. The inscription on the silver casket

promises to whoever chooses it what his nature craves. The girl rejects

that also; for, as she says naïvely, "My nature craves for fleshly

delights." Finally, the leaden casket promises that whoever chooses it

shall find what God has decreed for him; and it proves to be full of

jewels.

In Shakespeare, Portia, in accordance with her father's will, makes her

suitors choose between the three caskets (here furnished with other

legends), of which the humblest contains her portrait.

It is not probable that Shakespeare made any use of an older play, now

lost, of which Stephen Gosson, in his _School of Abuse_ (1579), says

that it represented "the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and the bloody

mindes of usurers."

The great value of _The Merchant of Venice_ lies in the depth and

seriousness which Shakespeare has imparted to the vague outlines of

character presented by the old stories, and in the ravishing moonlight

melodies which bring the drama to a close.

In Antonio, the royal merchant, who, amid all his fortune and

splendour, is a victim to melancholy and spleen induced by forebodings

of coming disaster, Shakespeare has certainly expressed something of

his own nature. Antonio's melancholy is closely related to that which,

in the years immediately following, we shall find in Jaques in _As You

Like It_, in the Duke in _Twelfth Night_, and in Hamlet. It forms a

sort of mournful undercurrent to the joy of life which at this period

is still dominant in Shakespeare's soul.--It leads, after a certain

time, to the substitution of dreaming and brooding heroes for those

men of action and resolution who, in the poet's brighter youth, had

played the leading parts in his dramas. For the rest, despite the

princely elevation of his nature, Antonio is by no means faultless. He

has insulted and baited Shylock in the most brutal fashion on account

of his faith and his blood. We realise the ferocity and violence

of the mediæval prejudice against the Jews when we find a man of

Antonio's magnanimity so entirely a slave to it. And when, with a

little more show of justice, he parades his loathing and contempt for

Shylock's money-dealings, he strangely (as it seems to us) overlooks

the fact that the Jews have been carefully excluded from all other

means of livelihood, and have been systematically allowed to scrape

together gold in order that their hoards may always be at hand when

circumstances render it convenient to plunder them. Antonio's attitude

towards Shylock cannot possibly be Shakespeare's own. Shylock cannot

understand Antonio, and characterises him (iii. 3) in the words--

"This is the fool that lent out money gratis."

But Shakespeare himself did not belong to this class of fools. He has

endowed Antonio with an ideality which he had neither the resolution

nor the desire to emulate. Such a man's conduct towards Shylock

explains the outcast's hatred and thirst for revenge.

Shakespeare has lavished peculiar and loving care upon the figure of

Portia. Both in the circumstances in which she is placed at the outset,

and in the conjuncture to which Shylock's bond gives rise, there is

a touch of the fairy tale. In so far, the two sides of the action

harmonise well with each other. Now-a-days, indeed, we are apt to

find rather too much of the nursery story in the preposterous will by

which Portia is bound to marry whoever divines the very simple answer

to a riddle--to the effect that a showy outside is not always to be

trusted. The fable of the three caskets pleased Shakespeare so much as

a means of expressing and enforcing his hatred of all empty show that

he ignored the grotesque improbability of the method of selecting a

bridegroom.

His thought seems to have been: Portia is not only nobly born; she

is thoroughly genuine, and can therefore be won only by a suitor who

rejects the show for the substance. This is suggested in Bassanio's

long speech before making his choice (iii. 2). If there is anything

that Shakespeare hated with a hatred somewhat disproportionate to the

triviality of the matter, a hatred which finds expression in every

stage of his career, it is the use of rouge and false hair. Therefore

he insists upon the fact that Portia's beauty owes nothing to art; with

others the case is different:--

"Look on beauty,

And you shall see 'tis purchas'd by the weight;

. . . . . . . .

So are those crisped snaky golden locks,

Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,

Upon supposed fairness, often known

To be the dowry of a second head,

The skull that bred them, in the sepulchre."

And he deduces the moral:--

"Thus ornament is but the guiled shore

To a most dangerous sea."

Before the choice, Portia dares not openly avow her feelings towards

Bassanio, but does so nevertheless by means of a graceful and sportive

slip of the tongue:--

"Beshrew your eyes,

They have o'erlook'd me, and divided me:

One half of me is yours, the other half yours,--

Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,

And so all yours!"

Bassanio answers by begging permission to make instant choice between

the caskets, since he lives upon the rack until his fate is sealed;

whereupon Portia makes some remarks as to confessions on the rack,

which seem to allude to an occurrence of a few years earlier, the

barbarous execution of Elizabeth's Spanish doctor, Don Roderigo Lopez,

in 1594, after two ruffians had been racked into making confessions

which, no doubt falsely, incriminated him. Portia says jestingly--

"Ay, but I fear, you speak upon the rack,

Where men, enforced, do speak anything;"

and Bassanio answers--

"Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth."