When the choice has been made and has fallen as she hoped and desired,

her attitude clearly expresses Shakespeare's ideal of womanhood at this

period of his life. It is not Juliet's passionate self-abandonment, but

the perfect surrender in tenderness of the wise and delicate woman. For

her own sake she does not wish herself better than she is, but for him

"she would be trebled twenty times herself." She knows that she--

"Is an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd:

Happy in this, she is not yet so old

But she may learn; happier than this,

She is not bred so dull but she can learn;

Happiest of all is, that her gentle spirit

Commits itself to yours to be directed,

As from her lord, her governor, her king."

In such humility does she love this weak spendthrift; whose sole motive

in seeking her out was originally that of clearing off the debts in

which his frivolity had involved him. It thus happens, quaintly enough,

that what her father thought to prevent by his strange device, namely,

that Portia should be won by a mercenary suitor, is the very thing that

happens--though it is true that her personal charms throw his original

motive into the background.

In spite of Portia's womanly self-surrender in love, there is something

independent, almost masculine, in her character. She has the orphan

heiress's habit and power of looking after herself, directing others,

and acting on her own responsibility without seeking advice or taking

account of convention. The poet has borrowed traits from the Italian

novel in order to make her as prompt in counsel as she is magnanimous.

How much money does Antonio owe? she asks. Three thousand ducats? Give

the Jew six thousand, and tear up the bond.

Shakespeare has equipped her with the bright and victorious temperament

with which he henceforth, for a certain time, endows nearly all the

heroines of his comedies. To another of these ladies it is said,

"Without question, you were born in a merry hour." She answers, "No,

sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and

under that I was born." All these young women were born under a star

that danced. Even the most subdued of them overflows with the rapture

of existence.

Portia's nature is health, its utterance joy. Radiant happiness is

her element. She is descended from happiness, she has grown up in

happiness, she is surrounded with all the means and conditions of

happiness, and she distributes happiness with both hands. She is noble

to the heart's core. She is no swan born in the duck-yard, but is in

complete harmony with her surroundings and with herself.

Shylock's riches consist of gold and jewels, easy to conceal or to

transport at a moment's notice, but also inviting to robbery and

rapine. Antonio's riches consist in cargoes tossed on many seas, and

exposed to danger from storms and from pirates. What Portia owns she

owns in security: estates and palaces inherited from her fathers. There

has needed, perhaps, as much as a century of direct preparation for

the birth of such a creature. Her noble forefathers for generations

back must have led free and stainless lives, favoured by destiny,

prosperous and happy, in order to amass the riches which are her

pedestal, to gain the respect which is her throne, to gather the

household which forms her retinue, to decorate the palace in which she

rules as a princess, and to endow her mind with the high faculty and

culture befitting a reigning sovereign. She is healthy, though she is

delicate; she is gay, although she is mentally a head taller than any

of those around her; and she is young, although she is wise. She is of

a fresher stock than the nervous women of to-day. She is borne aloft

by an unfailing serenity of nature, which has never suffered any rude

disturbance. It manifests itself in her gaiety under circumstances of

painful uncertainty, in her self-control in overwhelming joy, and in

her promptitude of action in an unforeseen and threatening conjuncture.

She has inexhaustible resources in her soul, a profusion of ideas

and inspirations, as great a super-abundance of wit as of wealth. In

contradistinction to her lover, she never makes a display of what is

not her own to command. Hence her equilibrium and queenly repose. If

we do not realise this radiant joy of life in the inmost chambers of

her soul, we are apt, even from her first scene with Nerissa, to think

her jesting forced and her wit far-fetched, and are almost ready to

make the criticism that only a poor intelligence plays tricks with

speech and fantasticates in words. But when we have looked into the

depths of this well-spring of health, we understand how her thoughts

gush forth, flashing and plashing, as freely and inevitably as the jets

of a fountain rise into the air. She evokes and discards image after

image, as one plucks and throws away flowers in a luxuriant garden. She

delights to wreath and plait her words, as she wreaths and plaits her

hair.

It harmonises with her whole nature when she says (i. 2): "The brain

may devise laws for the blood; but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold

decree: such a hare is madness, the youth, to skip o'er the meshes of

good counsel, the cripple." Such phrases must be conceived as springing

from a delight in laughter and sport for the sport's sake; otherwise

they would be stiff and cumbrous. In the same way, such a sally as this

(iv. I)--

"Your wife would give you little thanks for that,

If she were by to hear you make the offer,"

must be taken as springing from a gleeful assurance of victory, else

it might seem to show callous indifference to Antonio's apparently

hopeless plight. There is an innate harmony in Portia's soul; but it is

full-toned, complex, and woven of strongly contrasted elements, so that

it requires some imagination to represent it to ourselves. There is

something in the harmonious subtlety of her physiognomy which reminds

us of Leonardo's female heads. Dignity and tenderness, the power to

command and to obey, acuteness such as thrives in courts, and simple

womanliness, an almost inflexible seriousness and an almost mischievous

gaiety, are here cunningly commingled and combined.

How Shakespeare himself would have us regard her may be gathered from

the enthusiasm with which he makes Jessica describe her to her lover

(iii. 5). When one young woman so warmly eulogises another, we may

safely assume that her merits are unimpeachable. "It is very meet," she

says,

"The Lord Bassanio live an upright life,

For, having such a blessing in his lady,

He finds the joys of heaven here on earth;

And, if on earth he do not mean it, then

In reason he should never come to heaven.

Why, if two gods should play some heavenly match,

And on the wager lay two earthly women,

And Portia one, there must be something else

Pawn'd with the other, for the poor rude world

Hath not her fellow."

The central figure of the play, however, in the eyes of modern readers

and spectators, is of course Shylock, though there can be no doubt

that he appeared to Shakespeare's contemporaries a comic personage,

and, since he makes his final exit before the last act, by no means

the protagonist. In the humaner view of a later age, Shylock appears

as a half-pathetic creation, a scapegoat, a victim; to the Elizabethan

public, with his rapacity and his miserliness, his usury and his

eagerness to dig for another the pit into which he himself falls,

he seemed, not terrible, but ludicrous. They did not even take him

seriously enough to feel any real uneasiness as to Antonio's fate,

since they all knew beforehand the issue of the adventure. They

laughed when he went to Bassanio's feast "in hate, to feed upon the

prodigal Christian;" they laughed when, in the scene with Tubal, he

suffered himself to be bandied about between exultation over Antonio's

misfortunes and rage over the prodigality of his runaway daughter; and

they found him odious when he exclaimed, "I would my daughter were

dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear!" He was, simply as a Jew,

a despised creature; he belonged to the race which had crucified God

himself; and he was doubly despised as an extortionate usurer. For the

rest, the English public--like the Norwegian public so lately as the

first half of this century--had no acquaintance with Jews except in

books and on the stage. From 1290 until the middle of the seventeenth

century the Jews were entirely excluded from England. Every prejudice

against them was free to flourish unchecked.

Did Shakespeare in a certain measure share these religious prejudices,

as he seems to have shared the patriotic prejudices against the Maid

of Orleans, if, indeed, he is responsible for the part she plays in

_Henry VI._? We may be sure that he was very slightly affected by them,

if at all. Had he made a more undisguised effort to place himself at

Shylock's standpoint, the censorship, on the one hand, would have

intervened, while, on the other hand, the public would have been

bewildered and alienated. It is quite in the spirit of the age that

Shylock should suffer the punishment which befalls him. To pay him out

for his stiff-necked vengefulness, he is mulcted not only of the sum he

lent Antonio, but of half his fortune, and is finally, like Marlowe's

_Jew of Malta_, compelled to change his religion. The latter detail

gives something of a shock to the modern reader. But the respect for

personal conviction, when it conflicted with orthodoxy, did not exist

in Shakespeare's time. It was not very long since Jews had been forced

to choose between kissing the crucifix and mounting the faggots; and

in Strasburg, in 1349, nine hundred of them had in one day chosen the

latter alternative. It is strange to reflect, too, that just at the

time when, on the English stage, one Mediterranean Jew was poisoning

his daughter, and another whetting his knife to cut his debtor's

flesh, thousands of heroic and enthusiastic Hebrews in Spain and

Portugal, who, after the expulsion of the 300,000 at the beginning of

the century, had secretly remained faithful to Judaism, were suffering

themselves to be tortured, flayed, and burnt alive by the Inquisition,

rather than forswear the religion of their race.

It is the high-minded Antonio himself who proposes that Shylock shall

be forced to become a Christian. This is done for his good; for

baptism opens to him the possibility of salvation after death; and his

Christian antagonists, who, by dint of the most childish sophisms,

have despoiled him of his goods and forced him to forswear his God,

can still pose as representing the Christian principle of mercy, in

opposition to one who has taken his stand upon the Jewish basis of

formal law.

That Shakespeare himself, however, in nowise shared the fanatical

belief that a Jew was of necessity damned, or could be saved by

compulsory conversion, is rendered clear enough for the modern reader

in the scene between Launcelot and Jessica (iii. 5), where Launcelot

jestingly avers that Jessica is damned. There is only one hope for her,

and that is, that her father may not be her father:--

"_Jessica_. That were a kind of bastard hope, indeed: so the

sins of my mother should be visited upon me.

"_Launcelot_. Truly then I fear you are damned both by

father and mother: thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I

fall into Charybdis, your mother. Well, you are gone both

ways.

"_Jes_. I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a

Christian.

"_Laun_. Truly, the more to blame he: we were Christians

enow before; e'en as many as could well live one by another.

This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs: if

we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a

rasher on the coals for money."

And Jessica repeats Launcelot's saying to Lorenzo:--

"He tells me flatly, there is no mercy for me in heaven,

because I am a Jew's daughter: and he says, you are no good

member of the commonwealth, for, in converting Jews to

Christians, you raise the price of pork."

No believer would ever speak in this jesting tone of matters that must

seem to him so momentous.

It is none the less astounding how much right in wrong, how much

humanity in inhumanity, Shakespeare has succeeded in imparting to

Shylock. The spectator sees clearly that, with the treatment he has

suffered, he could not but become what he is. Shakespeare has rejected

the notion of the atheistically-minded Marlowe, that the Jew hates

Christianity and despises Christians as fiercer money-grubbers than

himself. With his calm humanity, Shakespeare makes Shylock's hardness

and cruelty result at once from his passionate nature and his abnormal

position; so that, in spite of everything, he has come to appear in the

eyes of later times as a sort of tragic symbol of the degradation and

vengefulness of an oppressed race.

There is not in all Shakespeare a greater example of trenchant and

incontrovertible eloquence than Shylock's famous speech (iii. I):--

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands,

organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with

the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the

same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled

by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you

prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not

laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us,

shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we

will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what

is his humility? revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what

should his sufferance be by Christian example? why, revenge.

The villany you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go

hard but I will better the instruction."

But what is most surprising, doubtless, is the instinct of genius

with which Shakespeare has seized upon and reproduced racial

characteristics, and emphasised what is peculiarly Jewish in Shylock's

culture. While Marlowe, according to his custom, made his Barabas

revel in mythological similes, Shakespeare indicates that Shylock's

culture is founded entirely upon the Old Testament, and makes commerce

his only point of contact with the civilisation of later times. All

his parallels are drawn from the Patriarchs and the Prophets. With

what unction he speaks when he justifies himself by the example of

Jacob! His own race is always "our sacred nation," and he feels that

"the curse has never fallen upon it" until his daughter fled with

his treasures. Jewish, too, is Shylock's respect for, and obstinate

insistence on, the letter of the law, his reliance upon statutory

rights, which are, indeed, the only rights society allows him, and the

partly instinctive, partly defiant restriction of his moral ideas to

the principle of retribution. He is no wild animal; he is no heathen

who simply gives the rein to his natural instincts; his hatred is not

ungoverned; he restrains it within its legal rights, like a tiger in

its cage. He is entirely lacking, indeed, in the freedom and serenity,

the easy-going, light-hearted carelessness which characterises a

ruling caste in its virtues and its vices, in its charities as in its

prodigalities; but he has not a single twinge of conscience about

anything that he does; his actions are in perfect harmony with his

ideals.

Sundered from the regions, the social forms, the language, in which his

spirit is at home, he has yet retained his Oriental character. Passion

is the kernel of his nature. It is his passion that has enriched him;

he is passionate in action, in calculation, in sensation, in hatred,

in revenge, in everything. His vengefulness is many times greater

than his rapacity. Avaricious though he be, money is nothing to him

in comparison with revenge. It is not until he is exasperated by his

daughter's robbery and flight that he takes such hard measures against

Antonio, and refuses to accept three times the amount of the loan. His

conception of honour may be unchivalrous enough, but, such as it is,

his honour is not to be bought for money. His hatred of Antonio is far

more intense than his love for his jewels; and it is this passionate

hatred, not avarice, that makes him the monster he becomes.

From this Hebrew passionateness, which can be traced even in details

of diction, arises, among other things, his loathing of sloth and

idleness. To realise how essentially Jewish is this trait we need

only refer to the so-called Proverbs of Solomon. Shylock dismisses

Launcelot with the words, "Drones hive not with me." Oriental, rather

than specially Jewish, are the images in which he gives his passion

utterance, approaching, as they so often do, to the parable form.

(See, for example, his appeal to Jacob's cunning, or the speech in

vindication of his claim, which begins, "You have among you many a

purchased slave.") Specially Jewish, on the other hand, is the way in

which this ardent passion throughout employs its images and parables

in the service of a curiously sober rationalism, so that a sharp and

biting logic, which retorts every accusation with interest, is always

the controlling force. This sober logic, moreover, never lacks dramatic

impetus. Shylock's course of thought perpetually takes the form of

question and answer, a subordinate but characteristic trait which

appears in the style of the Old Testament, and reappears to this day in

representations of primitive Jews. One can feel through his words that

there is a chanting quality in his voice; his movements are rapid, his

gestures large. Externally and internally, to the inmost fibre of his

being, he is a type of his race in its degradation.

Shylock disappears with the end of the fourth act in order that no

discord may mar the harmony of the concluding scenes. By means of his

fifth act, Shakespeare dissipates any preponderance of pain and gloom

in the general impression of the play.

This act is a moonlit landscape thrilled with music. It is altogether

given over to music and moonshine. It is an image of Shakespeare's

soul at that point of time. Everything is here reconciled, assuaged,

silvered over, and borne aloft upon the wings of music.

The speeches melt into each other like voices in part-singing:--

"_Lorenzo_. The moon shines bright.--In such a night as this,

When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,

And they did make no noise, in such a night,

Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,

And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents,

Where Cressid lay that night.

_Jessica_. In such a night

Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew;

. . . . . . . .

_Lor_.

In such a night

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand;"

and so on for four more speeches--the very poetry of moonlight arranged

in antiphonies.

The conclusion of _The Merchant of Venice_ brings us to the threshold

of a term in Shakespeare's life instinct with high-pitched gaiety

and gladness. In this, his brightest period, he fervently celebrates

strength and wisdom in man, intellect and wit in woman; and these most

brilliant years of his life are also the most musical. His poetry, his

whole existence, seem now to be given over to music, to harmony.

He had been early familiar with the art of music, and must have heard

much music in his youth.[1] Even in his earliest plays, such as _The

Two Gentlemen of Verona_, we find a considerable insight into musical

technique, as in the conversation between Julia and Lucetta (i. 2). He

must often have heard the Queen's choir, and the choirs maintained by

noble lords and ladies, like that which Portia has in her palace. And

he no doubt heard much music performed in private. The English were

in his day, what they have never been since, a musical people. It was

the Puritans who cast out music from the daily life of England. The

spinet was the favourite instrument of the time. Spinets stood in the

barbers' shops, for the use of customers waiting their turn. Elizabeth

herself played on the spinet and the lute. In his Sonnet cxxviii.,

addressed to the lady whom he caressingly calls "my music," Shakespeare

has described himself as standing beside his mistress's spinet and

envying the keys which could kiss her fingers. In all probability

he was personally acquainted with John Dowland, the chief English

musician of the time, although the poem in which he is named, published

as Shakespeare's in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, is not by him, but by

Richard Barnfield.

In _The Taming of the Shrew_ (iii. I); written just before _The

Merchant of Venice_, he had utilised his knowledge of singing and

lute-playing in a scene of gay comedy. "The cause why music was

ordained," says Lucentio--

"Was it not to refresh the mind of man,

After his studies, or his usual pain?"

Its influence upon mental disease was also known to Shakespeare, and

noted both in _King Lear_ and in _The Tempest_. But here, in _The

Merchant of Venice_, where music is wedded to moonlight, his praise of

it takes a higher flight:--

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears: soft stillness, and the night,

Become the touches of sweet harmony."

And Shakespeare, who never mentions church music, which seems to have

had no message for his soul, here makes the usually unimpassioned

Lorenzo launch out into genuine Renaissance rhapsodies upon the music

of the spheres:--

"Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st,

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Sphere-harmony and soul-harmony, not bell-ringing or psalm-singing, are

for him the highest music.

Shakespeare's love of music, so incomparably expressed in the last

scenes of _The Merchant of Venice_, appears at other points in the

play. Thus Portia says, when Bassanio is about to make his choice

between the caskets (iii. 2):--

"Let music sound, while he doth make his choice;

Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,

Fading in music.

. . . . . . . .

He may win;

And what is music then? then music is

Even as the flourish when true subjects bow

To a new-crowned monarch."

It seems as though Shakespeare, in this play, had set himself to reveal

for the first time how deeply his whole nature was penetrated with

musical feeling. He places in the mouth of the frivolous Jessica these

profound words, "I am never merry when I hear sweet music." And he

makes Lorenzo answer, "The reason is, your spirits are attentive." The

note of the trumpet, he says, will calm a wanton herd of "unhandled

colts;" and Orpheus, as poets feign, drew trees and stones and floods

to follow him:--

"Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,

But music for the time doth change his nature.

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.--Mark the music."

This must not, of course, be taken too literally. But note the

characters whom Shakespeare makes specially unmusical: in this play,

Shylock, who loathes "the vile squeaking of the wry-necked fife;"

then Hotspur, the hero-barbarian; Benedick, the would-be woman-hater;

Cassius, the fanatic politician; Othello, the half-civilised African;

and finally creatures like Caliban, who are nevertheless enthralled by

music as though by a wizard's spell.

On the other hand, all his more delicate creations are musical. In the

First Part of _Henry IV_. (iii. I) we have Mortimer and his Welsh wife,

who do not understand each other's speech:--

"But I will never be a truant, love,

Till I have learn'd thy language; for thy tongue

Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penn'd,

Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,

With ravishing division, to her lute."

Musical, too, are the pathetic heroines, such as Ophelia and Desdemona,

and characters like Jaques in _As You Like It_, and the Duke and

Viola in _Twelfth Night_. The last-named comedy, indeed, is entirely

interpenetrated with music. The keynote of musical passion is struck in

the opening speech:--

"If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.--

That strain again! it had a dying fall:

O! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour."

Here, too, Shakespeare's love of the folk-song finds expression, when

he makes the Duke say (ii. 4):--

"Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,

That old and antique song, we heard last night;

Methought, it did relieve my passion much,

More than light airs, and recollected terms,

Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times:

Come; but one verse."

No less sensitive and devoted to music than the Duke in _Twelfth Night_

or Lorenzo in _The Merchant of Venice_ must their creator himself have

been in the short and happy interval in which, as yet unmastered by the

melancholy latent in his as in all deep natures, he felt his talents

strengthening and unfolding, his life every day growing fuller and

more significant, his inmost soul quickening with creative impulse and

instinct with harmony. The rich concords which bring _The Merchant of

Venice_ to a close symbolise, as it were, the feeling of inward wealth

and equipoise to which he had now attained.

[1] Förster: _Shakespeare und die Tonkunst, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, ii.

155; Karl Elze: _William Shakespeare_, p. 474; Henrik Schück: _William

Shakespere_ p. 313.

XXII

"_EDWARD III." AND "ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM"--SHAKESPEARE'S DICTION--THE

FIRST PART OF "HENRY IV."--FIRST INTRODUCTION OF HIS OWN EXPERIENCES

OF LIFE IN THE HISTORIC DRAMA--WHY THE SUBJECT APPEALED TO HIM--TAVERN

LIFE--SHAKESPEARE'S CIRCLE--SIR JOHN FALSTAFF--FALSTAFF AND THE

GRACIOSO OF THE SPANISH DRAMA--RABELAIS AND SHAKESPEARE--PANURGE AND

FALSTAFF_

There is extant a historical play, dating from 1596, entitled _The

Raigne of King Edward third. As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about

the Citie of London_, which several English students and critics,

among them Halliwell-Phillips, have attributed in part to Shakespeare,

arguing that the better scenes, at least, must have been carefully

retouched by him. Although the drama, as a whole, is not much more

Shakespearean in style than many other Elizabethan plays, and although

Swinburne, the highest of all English authorities, has declared the

piece to be the work of an imitator of Marlowe, yet there is a good

deal to be said in favour of the hypothesis that Shakespeare had some

hand in _Edward III_. His touch may be recognised in several passages;

and especially noteworthy are the following lines from a speech of

Warwick's:--

"A spacious field of reasons could I urge

Between his glory, daughter, and thy shame:

That poison shows worst in a golden cup;

Dark night seems darker by the lightning flash;

_Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,_

And every glory that inclines to sin,

The shame is treble by the opposite."

The italicised verse reappears as the last line of Shakespeare's Sonnet

xciv.; and as this Sonnet seems to refer (as we shall afterwards see)

to circumstances in Shakespeare's life which did not arise until 1600,

we cannot suppose that it was one of those written at an earlier date

and circulated in manuscript. The probability is that Shakespeare

simply reclaimed this line from a speech contributed by him to another

man's play.

It is natural that a foreign student should shrink from opposing his

judgment to that of English critics, where English diction and style

are in question. Nevertheless he is sometimes driven into dissent with

regard to the many Elizabethan plays which now one critic, and now

another, has attributed wholly or in part to Shakespeare. Take, for

instance, _Arden of Feversham,_ certainly one of the most admirable

plays of that rich period, whose merit impresses one even when one

reads it for the first time in uncritical youth. Swinburne writes of it

(_Study of Shakespeare_, p. 141):--

"I cannot but finally take heart to say, even in the absence

of all external or traditional testimony, that it seems to

me not pardonable merely nor permissible, but simply logical

and reasonable, to set down this poem, a young man's work on

the face of it, as the possible work of no man's youthful

hand but Shakespeare's."

However small my authority in comparison with Swinburne's upon such a

question as this, I find it impossible to share his view. Highly as I

esteem _Arden of Feversham_, I cannot believe that Shakespeare wrote

a single line of it. It was not like him to choose such a subject,

and still less to treat it in such a fashion. The play is a domestic

tragedy, in which a wife, after repeated attempts, murders her kind

and forbearing husband, in order freely to indulge her passion for

a worthless paramour. It is a dramatisation of an actual case, the

facts of which are closely followed, but at the same time animated

with great psychological insight. That Shakespeare had a distaste for

such subjects is proved by his consistent avoidance of them, except in

this problematical instance; whereas if he had once succeeded so well

with such a theme, he would surely have repeated the experiment. The

chief point is, however, that only in a few places, in the soliloquies,

do we find the peculiar note of Shakespeare's style--that wealth of

imagination, that luxuriant lyrism, which plays like sunlight over his

speeches. In _Arden of Feversham_ the style is a uniform drab.

Shakespeare's great characteristic is precisely the resilience which

he gives to every word and to every speech. We take one step on earth,

and at the next we are soaring in air. His verse always tends towards a

rich and stately melody, is never flat or commonplace. In the English

historical plays, his diction sometimes verges upon the style of the

ballad or romance. There is a continual undercurrent of emotion, of

enthusiasm, or of pure fantasy, which carries us away with it. We are

always far remote from the humdrum monotony of everyday speech. For

everyday speech is devoid of fantasy, and all Shakespeare's characters,

with the exception of those whose humour lies in their stupidity, have

a highly-coloured imagination.

We could find no better proof of this than the diction of the

great work which he undertakes immediately after _The Merchant of

Venice_--the First Part of _Henry IV._

Harry Percy in this play is placed in opposition to the magniloquent,

visionary, thaumaturgic Glendower, as the man of sober intelligence,

who keeps to the common earth, and believes only in what his senses

aver and his reason accepts. But there is nevertheless a spring within

him which need only be touched in order to send him soaring into almost

dithyrambic poetry. The King (i. 3) has called Mortimer a traitor;

whereupon Percy protests that it was no sham warfare that Mortimer

waged against Glendower:--

"To prove that true,

Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds,

Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took,

When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank,

In single opposition, hand to hand,

He did confound the best part of an hour

In changing hardiment with great Glendower.

Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,

Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood,

Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,

Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,

And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank

Blood-stained with these valiant combatants."

Thus Homer sings of the Scamander.

Worcester broaches to Percy an enterprise

"As full of peril and adventurous spirit,

As to o'er-walk a current, roaring loud,

On the unsteadfast footing of a spear;"

whereon Percy bursts forth:--

"Send danger from the east unto the west,

So honour cross it from the north to south,

And let them grapple:--O! the blood more stirs

To rouse a lion than to start a hare."

Northumberland then says of him that "Imagination of some great exploit

Drives him beyond the bounds of patience," and Percy answers:--

"By Heaven, methinks, it were an easy leap

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon,

Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,

And pluck up drowned honour by the locks."

What a profusion of imagery is placed in the mouth of this despiser

of rhetoric and music! From the comparatively weak metaphor of the

speaking wounds up to actual myth-making! The river, affrighted by the

bloody looks of the combatants, hides its crisp head in the reeds--a

naiad fantasy in classic style. Danger, rushing from east to west,

hurtles against Honour, crossing it from north to south--two northern

Valkyries in full career. The wreath of honour is hung on the crescent

moon--a metaphor from the tilting-yard, expressed in terms of fairy

romance. Drowned Honour is to be plucked up by the locks from the

bottom of the deep--having now become, by a daring personification, a

damsel who has fallen into the sea and must be rescued. And all this in

three short speeches!

Where this irrepressible vivacity of fancy is lacking, as in _Arden of

Feversham_, Shakespeare's sign-manual is lacking along with it. Even

when his style appears sober and measured, it is saturated with what

may be called latent fantasy (as we speak of latent electricity), which

at the smallest opportunity bursts its bounds, explodes, flashes forth

before our eyes like the figures in a pyrotechnic set-piece, and fills

our ears as with the music of a rushing, leaping waterfall.[1]

In 1598 appeared a Quarto with the following title: _The History of

Henrie the Fovrth; With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King

and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the

humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaffe. At London. Printed by P. S.

for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the

Angell_. 1598. This was the First Part of Shakespeare's _Henry IV_.,

which must have been written in 1597--the play in which Shakespeare

first attains his great and overwhelming individuality. At the age

of thirty-three, he stands for the first time at the summit of his

artistic greatness. In wealth of character, of wit, of genius, this

play has never been surpassed. Its dramatic structure is somewhat

loose, though closer knit and technically stronger than that of the

Second Part. But, as a poetical creation, it is one of the great

masterpieces of the world's literature, at once heroic and burlesque,

thrilling and side-splitting. And these contrasted elements are not,

as in Victor Hugo's dramas, brought into hard-and-fast rhetorical

antithesis, but move and mingle with all the freedom of life.

When it was written, the sixteenth century, that great period in the

history of the human spirit, was drawing to its close; but no one had

then conceived the cowardly idea of making the end of a century a sort

of symbol of decadence in energy and vitality. Never had the waves of

healthy self-confidence and productive power run higher in the English

people or in Shakespeare's own mind. _Henry IV._, and its sequel _Henry

V._, are written throughout in a major key which we have not hitherto

heard in Shakespeare, and which we shall not hear again.

Shakespeare finds the matter for these plays in Holinshed's Chronicle,

and in an old, quite puerile play, _The Famous Victories of Henry the

fifth, conteining the Honorable Battell of Agin-court,_ in which the

young Prince is represented as frequenting the company of roisterers

and highway robbers. It was this, no doubt, that suggested to him

the novel and daring idea of transferring direct to the stage, in

historical guise, a series of scenes from the everyday life of the

streets and taverns around him, and blending them with the dramatised

chronicle of the Prince whom he regarded as the national hero of

England. To this blending we owe the matchless freshness of the whole

picture.

For the rest, Shakespeare found scarcely anything in the foolish old

play, acted between 1580 and 1588, which could in any way serve his

purpose. He took from it only the anecdote of the box on the ear given

by the Prince of Wales to the Lord Chief-Justice, and a few names--the

tavern in Eastcheap, Gadshill, Ned, and the name, not the character, of

Sir John Oldcastle, as Falstaff was originally called.

Shakespeare felt himself attracted to the hero, the young Prince, by

some of the most deep-rooted sympathies of his nature. We have seen

how vividly and persistently the contrast between appearance and

reality preoccupied him; we saw it last in _The Merchant of Venice_.

In proportion as he was irritated and repelled by people who try to

pass for more than they are, by creatures of affectation and show,

even by women who resort to artificial colours and false hair in quest

of a beauty not their own, so his heart beat warmly for any one who

had appearances against him, and concealed great qualities behind an

unassuming and misinterpreted exterior. His whole life, indeed, was

just such a paradox--his soul was replete with the greatest treasures,

with rich humanity and inexhaustible genius, while externally he was

little better than a light-minded mountebank, touting, with quips and

quiddities, for the ha'pence of the mob. Now and then, as his Sonnets

show, the pressure of this outward prejudice so weighed upon him that

he came near to being ashamed of his position in life, and of the

tinsel world in which his days were passed; and then he felt with

double force the inward need to assure himself how great may be the

gulf between the apparent and the real worth of human character.

Moreover, this view of his material gave him an occasion, before

tuning the heroic string of his lyre, to put in a word for the right

of high-spirited youth to have its fling, and indirectly to protest

against the hasty judgments of narrow-minded moralists and Puritans.

He would here show that great ambitions and heroic energy could

pass unscathed through the dangers even of exceedingly questionable

diversions. This Prince of Wales was "merry England" and "martial

England" in one and the same person.

For the young noblemen among the audience, again, nothing could be more

attractive than to see this great King, in his youth, haunting such

resorts as they themselves frequented, and yet, as the best of them

also tried to do, preserving the consciousness of his high dignity, the

hope of a great future, and the determination to achieve renown, even

while associating with Falstaff and Bardolph, Dame Quickly and Doll

Tearsheet.

These young English aristocrats, who in Shakespeare appear under the

names of Mercutio and Benedick, Gratiano and Lorenzo, made pleasure

their pursuit through the whole of the London day. Dressed in silk or

ash-coloured velvet, and with gold lace on his cloak, the young man

of fashion began by riding to St. Paul's and promenading half-a-dozen

times up and down its middle aisle. He then "repaired to the Exchange,

and talked pretty Euphuisms to the citizens' daughters," or looked in

at the bookseller's to inspect the latest play-book or pamphlet against

tobacco. Next he rode to the ordinary where he had appointed to meet

his friends and dine. At dinner he discussed Drake's expedition to

Portugal, or Essex's exploits at Cadiz, or told how he had yesterday

broken a lance with Raleigh himself at the Tilt-yard. He would mingle

snatches of Italian and Spanish with his talk, and let himself be

persuaded after dinner, to recite a sonnet of his own composition. At

three he betook himself to the theatre, saw Burbage as Richard III.,

and applauded Kemp in his new jig; after which he would spend an hour

at the bear-garden. Then to the barber's, to have his hair and beard

trimmed, in preparation for the carouse of the evening at whichever

tavern he and his friends had selected--the "Mitre," the "Falcon," the

"Apollo," the "Boar's Head," the "Devil," or (most famous of all) the

"Mermaid," where the literary club, the Syren, founded by none other

than Sir Walter Raleigh himself, held its meetings.[2] In these places

the young aristocrat rubbed shoulders with the leading players, such as

Burbage and Kemp, and with the best-known men of letters, such as John

Lyly, George Chapman, John Florio, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, John

Marston, Thomas Nash, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare.

Thornbury has aptly remarked that the characteristic of the Elizabethan

age was its sociability. People were always meeting at St. Paul's,

the theatre, or the tavern. Family intercourse, on the other hand,

was almost unknown; women, as in ancient Greece, played no prominent

part in society. The men gathered at the tavern club to drink, talk,

and enjoy themselves. The festive bowl circulated freely, even more so

than in Denmark, which nevertheless passed for the toper's paradise.

(Compare the utterances on this subject in _Hamlet_, i. 4, and

_Othello_, ii. 3.) The taverns were, moreover, favourite places for the

rendezvous of court gallants with citizens' wives; fast young men would

bring their mistresses with them, and here, after supper, gambling went

on merrily.

At the taverns, writers and poets met in good fellowship, and carried

on wordy wars, battles of wit, sparkling with mirth and fantasy. They

were like tennis-rallies of words, in which the great thing was to tire

out your adversary; they were skirmishes in which the combatants poured

into each other whole volleys of conceits. Beaumont has celebrated them

in some verses to Ben Jonson, who, both as a great drinker and as an

entertaining _magister bibendi_, was much admired and fêted:--

"What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been

So nimble, and so full of subtile flame,

As if that every one from whence they came

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest

And had resolv'd to live a fool the rest

Of his dull life."

In his comedy _Every Man out of His Humour_ (v. 4), Ben Jonson has

introduced either himself or Marston, under the name of Carlo Buffone,

waiting alone for his friends at the "Mitre," and has placed these

words in Carlo's mouth when the waiter, George, has brought him the

wine he had ordered:--

"_Carlo (drinks)_. Ay, marry, sir, here's purity; O

George--I could bite off his nose for this now, sweet rogue,

he has drawn nectar, the very soul of the grape! I'll

wash my temples with some on't presently, and drink some

half a score draughts; 'twill heat the brain, kindle my

imagination, I shall talk nothing but crackers and fireworks

to-night. So, sir! please you to be here, sir, and I here:

so. (_Sets the two cups asunder, drinks with the one, and

pledges with the other, speaking for each of the cups, and

drinking alternately._)"

Well known and often quoted is the passage in Fuller's _Worthies_ as to

the many wit-combats between Shakespeare and the learned Ben:--

"Which two I behold like a _Spanish great Gallion_ and an

_English man of War_: Master _Johnson_ (like the former) was

built far higher in Learning; _Solid_, but _Slow_ in his

performances. _Shake-spear_, with the _English man of War_,

lesser in _bulk_, but lighter in _sailing_, could turn with

all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by

the quickness of his Wit and Invention."

Although Fuller was not himself present at these symposia, yet his

account of them bears the stamp of complete authenticity.

Among the members of the circle which Shakespeare in his youth

frequented, there must, of course, have been types of every kind, from

the genius down to the grotesque; and there were some, no doubt, in

whom the genius and the grotesque, the wit and the butt, must have

quaintly intermingled. As every great household had at that time its

_jester_, so every convivial circle had its clown or buffoon. The

jester was the terror of the kitchen--for he would steal a pudding the

moment the cook's back was turned--and the delight of the dinner-table,

where he would mimic voices, crack jokes, play pranks, and dissipate

the spleen of the noble company. The comic man of the tavern circle

was both witty himself and the cause of wit in others. He was always

the butt of the others' merriment, yet he always held his own in the

contest, and ended by getting the best of his tormentors.

To Shakespeare's circle Chettle must doubtless have belonged, that

Chettle who in bygone days had published Greene's _Groats-worth of

Wit_, and afterwards made amends to Shakespeare for Greene's coarse

attack upon him. In Dekker's tract, _A Knights Conjuring_, dating from

1607, he figures among the poets in Elysium, where he is introduced in

the following terms:--"In comes Chettle sweating and blowing, by reason

of his fatnes; to welcome whom, because hee was of olde acquaintance,

all rose vp, and fell presentlie on their knees, to drinck a health

to all the louers of Hellicon." Elze has conjectured, possibly with

justice, that in this puffing and sweating old tun of flesh, who is

so whimsically greeted with mock reverence by the whole gay company,

we have the very model from whom Shakespeare drew his demigod, the

immortal Sir John Falstaff, beyond comparison the gayest, most

concrete, and most entertaining figure in European comedy.

In his close-woven and unflagging mirthfulness, in the inexhaustible

wealth of drollery concentrated in his person, Falstaff surpasses all

that antiquity and the Middle Ages have produced in the way of comic

character, and all that the stage of later times can show.

There is in him something of the old Greek Silenus, swag-bellied and

infinitely jovial, and something of the _Vidushakas_ of the old Indian

drama, half court-fool, half friend and comrade to the hero. He unites

in himself the two comic types of the old Roman comedy, Artotrogus and

Pyrgopolinices, the parasite and the boastful soldier. Like the Roman

_scurra_, he leaves his patron to pay the reckoning, and in return

entertains him with his jests, and, like the _Miles Gloriosus_, he is

a braggart above all braggarts, a liar above all liars. Yet he is in

his single person richer and more entertaining than all the ancient

Silenuses and court-fools and braggarts and parasites put together.

In the century after he came into existence, Spain and France each

developed its own theatre. In France there is only one quaint and

amusing person, Moron in Molière's _La Princesse d'Élide_, who bears

some faint resemblance to Falstaff. In Spain, where the great and

delightful character of Sancho Panza affords the starting-point for the

whole series of comic figures in the works of Calderon, the _Gracioso_

stands in perpetual contrast to the hero, and here and there reminds

us for a moment of Falstaff, but always only as an abstraction of one

side or another of his nature, or because of some external similarity

of situation. In _La Dama Duende_ he is a drunkard and coward; in _La

Gran Cenobia_ he boasts fantastically, and, like Falstaff, becomes

entangled in his lies. In _La Puente de Mantible_ he actually becomes

(as it appears from the scenes with the Chief Justice and Colevile that

Falstaff also was) renowned and dreaded for his military valour; yet

he is, like Falstaff, extremely ill at ease when there is any fighting

to be done, often creeping into cover, hiding himself behind a bush,

or climbing a tree. In _La Hija del Ayre_ and _El Principe Constante_

he uses precisely the device adopted by Falstaff and certain lower

animals, of lying down and shamming death. Hernando in _Los Empeῆos de

un Acaso_ (like Molière's Moron) expresses sentiments very similar to

those of Falstaff in his celebrated discourse upon honour. Falstaff's

airs of protection, his bland fatherliness, we find in Fabio in _El

Secreto a Voces._ Thus single characteristics, detached sides of

Falstaff's character, have to do duty as complete personages. Calderon

as a rule looks with fatherly benevolence upon his Gracioso. Yet he

sometimes loses patience, as it were, with his buffoon's epicurean,

unchristian, and unchivalrous view of life. In _La Vida es Sueño_, for

instance, a cannon-ball kills poor Clarin, who has crept behind a bush

during the battle; the moral being that the coward does not escape

danger any more than the brave man. Calderon bestows on him a very

solemn funeral speech, almost as moral as King Henry's parting words to

Falstaff.

It is certain, of course, that neither Calderon nor Molière knew

anything of Shakespeare or of Falstaff; and Shakespeare, for his part,

was equally uninfluenced by any of his predecessors on the comic stage,

when he conceived his fat knight.

Nevertheless there is among Shakespeare's predecessors a great writer,

one of the greatest, with whom we cannot but compare him; to wit,

Rabelais, the masterspirit of the early Renaissance in France. He is,

moreover, one of the few great writers with whom Shakespeare is known

to have been acquainted. He alludes to him in _As You Like It_ (iii.

2), where Celia says, when Rosalind asks her a dozen questions and bids

her answer in one word: "You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first:

'tis a word too great for any mouth of this age's size."

If we compare Falstaff with Panurge, we see that Rabelais stands to

Shakespeare in the relation of a Titan to an Olympian god. Rabelais is

gigantic, disproportioned, potent, but formless. Shakespeare is smaller

and less excessive, poorer in ideas, though richer in fancies, and

moulded with the utmost firmness of outline.

Rabelais died at the age of seventy, ten years before Shakespeare was

born; there is between them all the difference between the morning and

the noon of the Renaissance. Rabelais is a poet, philosopher, polemist,

reformer, "even to the very fire exclusively," but always threatened

with the stake. Shakespeare's coarseness compared with Rabelais's is as

a manure-bed compared with the _Cloaca Maxima_. Burlesque uncleanness

pours in floods from the Frenchman's pen.

His Panurge is larger than Falstaff, as Utgard-Loki is larger than

Asa-Loki. Panurge, like Falstaff, is loquacious, witty, crafty, and

utterly unscrupulous, a humorist who stops the mouths of all around him

by unblushing effrontery. In war, Panurge is no more of a hero than

Falstaff, but, like Falstaff, he stabs the foemen who have already

fallen. He is superstitious, yet his buffoonery holds nothing sacred,

and he steals from the church-plate. He is thoroughly selfish, sensual,

and slothful, shameless, revengeful, and light-fingered, and as time

goes on becomes ever a greater poltroon and braggart.

Pantagruel is the noble knight, a king's son, like Prince Henry. Like

the Prince, he has one foible: he cannot resist the attractions of low

company. When Panurge is witty, Pantagruel cannot deny himself the

pleasure of laughing at his side-splitting drolleries.

But Panurge, unlike Falstaff, is a satire on the largest scale. In

representing him as a notable economist or master of finance, who

calls borrowing credit-creating, and has 63 methods of raising money

and 214 methods of spending it, Rabelais made him an abstract and

brief chronicle of the French court of his day. In giving him a

yearly revenue from his barony of "6,789,106,789 royaulx en deniers

certain," to say nothing of the fluctuating revenue of the locusts and

periwinkles, "montant bon an mal an de 2,435,768 a 2,435,769 moutons

à la grande laine," Rabelais was aiming his satire direct at the

unblushing extortion which was at that time the glory and delight of

the French feudal nobility.

Shakespeare does not venture so far in the direction of satire. He is

only a poet, and as a poet stands simply on the defensive. The only

power he can be said to attack is Puritanism (_Twelfth Night, Measure

for Measure_, etc.), and that only in self-defence. His attacks, too, are

exceedingly mild in comparison with those of the cavalier poets before

the victory of Puritanism and after the reopening of the theatres. But

Shakespeare was what Rabelais was not, an artist; and as an artist he

was a very Prometheus in his power of creating human beings.

As an artist he has also the exuberant fertility which we find in

Rabelais, even surpassing him in some respects. Max Müller has long

ago remarked upon the wealth of his vocabulary. In this he seems to

surpass all other writers. An Italian opera-libretto seldom contains

more than 600 or 700 words. A well-educated modern Englishman, in

social intercourse, will rarely use more than 3000 or 4000. It has been

calculated that acute thinkers and great orators in England are masters

of as many as 10,000 words. The Old Testament contains only 5642 words.

Shakespeare has employed more than 15,000 words in his poems and

plays; and in few of the latter do we find such overflowing fulness of

expression as in _Henry IV._

In the original form of the play, Falstaff's name, as already

mentioned, was Sir John Oldcastle. A trace of this remains in the

second scene of the first act (Part I.), where the Prince calls the fat

knight "my old lad of the castle." In the second scene of the second

act the line, "Away, good Ned, Falstaff sweats to death," is short of a

syllable, because the dissyllable Falstaff has been substituted for the

trisyllable Oldcastle. In the earliest Quarto of the Second Part, the

contraction _Old_. has been left before one of Falstaff's speeches; and

in Act ii. Sc. 2 of the same play, it is said of Falstaff that he was

page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, a position which the historic

Oldcastle actually held. Oldcastle, however, was so far from being the

boon companion depicted by Shakespeare that he was, at the instance

of Henry V. himself, handed over to the Ecclesiastical Courts as an

adherent of Wicklif's heresies, and roasted over a slow fire outside

the walls of London on Christmas morning 1417. His descendants having

protested against the degradation to which the name of their ancestor

was subjected in the play, the fat knight was rechristened. Therefore,

too, it is stated in the Epilogue to the Second Part that the author

intends to produce a further continuation of the story, "where, for

anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat ... _for Oldcastle died

a martyr, and this is not the man_."

Under the name of Falstaff he became, after the lapse of half a

century, the most popular of Shakespeare's creations. Between 1642 and

1694 he is more frequently mentioned than any other of Shakespeare's

characters. But it is noteworthy that in his own time, although

popular enough, he was not alluded to nearly so often as Hamlet, who,

up to 1642, is mentioned forty-five times to Falstaff's twenty; even

_Venus and Adonis_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ are mentioned oftener than

he, and _Lucrece_ quite as often.[3] The element of low comedy in his

figure made it, according to the notions of the day, obviously less

distinguished, and people stood too near to Falstaff to appreciate him

fully.

He was, as it were, the wine-god of merry England at the meeting of the

centuries. Never before or since has England enjoyed so many sorts of

beverages. There was ale, and all other kinds of strong and small beer,

and apple-drink, and honey-drink, and strawberry-drink, and three sorts

of mead (meath, metheglin, hydromel), and every drink was fragrant of

flowers and spiced with herbs. In white meath alone there was infused

rosemary and thyme, sweet-briar, pennyroyal, bays, water-cresses,

agrimony, marsh-mallow, liverwort, maiden-hair, betony, eye-bright,

scabious, ash-leaves, eringo roots, wild angelica, rib-wort, sennicle,

Roman wormwood, tamarisk, mother thyme, saxifrage, philipendula; and

strawberries and violet-leaves were often added. Cherry-wine and sack

were mixed with gillyflower syrup.[4]

There were fifty-six varieties of French wine in use, and thirty-six

of Spanish and Italian, to say nothing of the many home-made kinds.

But among the foreign wines none was so famous as Falstaff's favourite

sherris-sack. It took its name from Xeres in Spain, but differed from

the modern sherry in being a sweet wine. It was the best of its kind,

possessing a much finer bouquet than sack from Malaga or the Canary

Islands (Jeppe paa Bjerget's, "Canari-Sæk")[5] although these were

stronger and sweeter. Sweet as it was too, people were in the habit of

putting sugar into it. The English taste has never been very delicate.

Falstaff always put sugar into his wine. Hence his words when he is

playing the Prince while the Prince impersonates the king (Pt. First,

ii. 4):--"If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked." He puts

not only sugar but toast in his wine: "Go fetch me a quart of sack, put

a toast in it" _(Merry Wives_, iii. 5). On the other hand, he does not

like (as others did) to have it mulled with eggs: "Brew me a pottle of

sack ... simple of itself; I'll no pullet-sperm in my brewage" _(Merry

Wives_, iii. 5). And no less did he resent its sophistication with

lime, an ingredient which the vintners used to increase its strength

and make it keep: "You rogue, here's lime in this sack, too.... A

coward is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it" (I. _Henry IV_.,

ii. 4). Falstaff is as great a wine-knower and wine-lover as Silenus

himself. But he is infinitely more than that.

He is one of the brightest and wittiest spirits England has ever

produced. He is one of the most glorious creations that ever sprang

from a poet's brain. There is much rascality and much genius in him,

but there is no trace of mediocrity. He is always superior to his

surroundings, always resourceful, always witty, always at his ease,

often put to shame, but, thanks to his inventive effrontery, never put

out of countenance. He has fallen below his social position; he lives

in the worst (though also in the best) society; he has neither soul,

nor honour, nor moral sense; but he sins, robs, lies, and boasts, with

such splendid exuberance, and is so far above any serious attempt at

hypocrisy, that he seems unfailingly amiable whatever he may choose to

do. Therefore he charms every one, although he is a butt for the wit

of all. He perpetually surprises us by the wealth of his nature. He is

old and youthful, corrupt and harmless, cowardly and daring, "a knave

without malice, a liar without deceit; and a knight, a gentleman, and

a soldier, without either dignity, decency, or honour."[6] The young

Prince shows good taste in always and in spite of everything seeking

out his company.

How witty he is in the brilliant scene where Shakespeare is daring

enough to let him parody in advance the meeting between Prince Henry

and his offended father! And with what sly humour does Shakespeare,

through his mouth, poke fun at Lyly and Greene and the old play of King

Cambyses! How delightful is Falstaff's unabashed self-mockery when he

thus apostrophises the hapless merchants whom he is plundering:--

"Ah! whoreson caterpillars! bacon-fed knaves! they hate us youth: down

with them; fleece them.... Hang ye, gorbellied knaves. Are ye undone?

No, ye fat chuffs; I would your store were here! On, bacons, on! What!

ye knaves, young men must live."

And what humour there is in his habit of self-pitying regret that his

youth and inexperience should have been led astray:--

"I'll be damned for never a king's son in Christendom.... I have

forsworn his company hourly any time this two-and-twenty years, and

yet I am bewitched with the rogue's company.... Company, villainous

company, hath been the spoil of me."

But if he has not been led astray, neither is he the "abominable

misleader of youth" whom Prince Henry, impersonating the King, makes

him out to be. For to this character there belongs malicious intent, of

which Falstaff is innocent enough. It is unmistakable, however, that

while in the First Part of _Henry IV._ Shakespeare keeps Falstaff a

purely comic figure, and dissipates in the ether of laughter whatever

is base and unclean in his nature, the longer he works upon the

character, and the more he feels the necessity of contrasting the moral

strength of the Prince's nature with the worthlessness of his early

surroundings, the more is he tempted to let Falstaff deteriorate. In

the Second Part his wit becomes coarser, his conduct more indefensible,

his cynicism less genial; while his relation to the hostess, whom he

cozens and plunders, is wholly base. In the First Part of the play he

takes a whole-hearted delight in himself, in his jollifications, his

drolleries, his exploits on the highway, and his almost purposeless

mendacity; in the Second Part he falls more and more under the

suspicion of making capital out of the Prince, while he is found in

ever worse and worse company. The scheme of the whole, indeed, demands

that there shall come a moment when the Prince, who has succeeded to

the throne and its attendant responsibilities, shall put on a serious

countenance and brandish the thunderbolts of retribution.

But here, in the First Part, Falstaff is still a demi-god, supreme

alike in intellect and in wit. With this figure the popular drama which

Shakespeare represented won its first decisive battle over the literary

drama which followed in the footsteps of Seneca. We can actually hear

the laughter of the "yard" and the gallery surging around his speeches

like waves around a boat at sea. It was the old sketch of Parolles

in _Love's Labour's Won_ (see above, p. 49), which had here taken on

a new amplitude of flesh and blood. There was much to delight the

groundlings--Falstaff is so fat and yet so mercurial, so old and yet so

youthful in all his tastes and vices. But there was far more to delight

the spectators of higher culture, in his marvellous quickness of fence,

which can parry every thrust, and in the readiness which never leaves

him tongue-tied, or allows him to confess himself beaten. Yes, there

was something for every class of spectators in this mountain of flesh,

exuding wit at every pore, in this hero without shame or conscience,

in this robber, poltroon, and liar, whose mendacity is quite poetic,

Münchausenesque, in this cynic with the brazen forehead and a tongue as

supple as a Toledo blade. His talk is like Bellman's[7] after him:--

"A dance of all the gods upon Olympus,

With fauns and graces and the muses twined."

The men of the Renaissance revelled in his wit, much as the men of the

Middle Ages had enjoyed the popular legends of Reinecke Fuchs and his

rogueries.

Falstaff reaches his highest point of wit and drollery in that

typical soliloquy on honour, in which he indulges on the battlefield

of Shrewsbury (I. _Henry IV_., v. I), a soliloquy which almost

categorically sums him up, in contradistinction to the other leading

personages. For all the characters here stand in a certain relation to

the idea of honour--the King, to whom honour means dignity; Hotspur,

to whom it means the halo of renown; the Prince, who loves it as the

opposite of outward show; and Falstaff, who, in his passionate appetite

for the material good things of life, rises entirely superior to it and

shows its nothingness:--

"Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come

on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take

away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then?

No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. A trim

reckoning!--Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it?

No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But

will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer

it.--Therefore, I'll none of it: honour is a mere scutcheon; and so

ends my catechism."

Falstaff will be no slave to honour; he will rather do without it

altogether. He demonstrates in practice how a man can live without it,

and we do not miss it in him, so perfect is he in his way.

[1] It was this characteristic of Shakespeare's style, at the

period we are now considering, that so deeply influenced Goethe and the

contemporaries of his youth, Lenz and Klinger (and, in Denmark, Hauch

and Bredahl), determining the diction of their tragic dramas. Björnson

shows traces of the same influence in his _Maria Stuart_ and _Sigurd

Slembe._

[2] Thornbury: _Shakspere's England_, i. 104, _et seq_.

[3] _Fresh Allusions to Shakespeare_, p. 372.

[4] Thornbury: _Shakspere's England_, i. 227; Nathan Drake,

_Shakespeare and His Times_, ii. 131.

[5] Jeppe paa Bjerget, a Danish Abou Hassan or Christopher

Sly, is the hero of one of Holberg's most admirable comedies.

[6] Maurice Morgann: _An Essay on the Dramatic Character of

Sir John Falstaff,_ p. 150.

[7] From a poem by Tegnér on Bellman, the Swedish convivial

lyrist.

XXIII

_HENRY PERCY--THE MASTERY OF THE CHARACTER-DRAWING--HOTSPUR AND

ACHILLES_

In contrast to Falstaff, Shakespeare has placed the man whom his ally

Douglas expressly calls "the king of honour"--a figure as firmly

moulded and as great as the Achilles of the Greeks or Donatello's

Italian St. George--"the Hotspur of the North," an English national

hero quite as much as the young Prince.

The chronicle and the ballad of Douglas and Percy gave Shakespeare no

more than the name and the dates of a couple of battles. He seized upon

the name Harry Percy, and although its bearer was not historically of

the same age as Prince Henry, but as old as his father, the King, he

docked him of a score of years, with the poetical design of opposing

to the hero of the play a rival who should be his peer, and should at

first seem to outshine him.

Percy is above everything and every one avid of honour. It is he who

would have found it easy to pluck down honour from the moon or drag it

up from the depths of the sea. But he is of an open, confiding, simple

nature, with nothing of the diplomatist about him. He is hasty and

impetuous; his spur is never cold until he is dead. Under the mistaken

impression that women cannot keep their counsel, he is reticent towards

his wife, in whom he might quite well confide, since she adores him,

and calls him "the miracle of men." On the other hand, he suffers

himself to be driven by the King's sour suspiciousness into foolhardy

rebellion, and he is so simple-minded as to trust to his father and his

uncle Worcester, one of whom deserts him in the hour of need, while the

other plays a double game with him.

Shakespeare has thrown himself so passionately into the creation of

this character that he has actually painted for us Hotspur's exterior,

giving him a peculiar walk and manner of speech. The warmth of the

poet's sympathy has rendered his hero irresistibly attractive, and made

him, in his manliness, a pattern for the youth of the whole country.

Henry Percy enters (ii. 3) with a letter in his hand, and reads:--

"--'But, for mine own part, my lord, I could be well

contented to be there, in respect of the love I bear your

house.'--He could be contented,--why is he not then?

In respect of the love he bears our house:--he shows in

this, he loves his own barn better than he loves our

house. Let me see some more. 'The purpose you undertake is

dangerous;'--why, that's certain: 'tis dangerous to take

a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool,

out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.

'The purpose you undertake, is dangerous; the friends you

have named, uncertain; the time itself unsorted, and your

whole plot too light for the counterpoise of so great an

opposition.'--Say you so, say you so? _I say unto you again,

you are a shallow, cowardly hind, and you lie_. What a

lack-brain is this! By the Lord, our plot is as good a plot

as ever was laid; our friends true and constant: a good

plot, good friends, and full of expectation; an excellent

plot, very good friends....O! I could divide myself and go

to buffets, for moving such a dish of skimmed milk with so

honourable an action. Hang him! let him tell the King; we

are prepared. I will set forward to-night."

We can see him before our eyes, and hear his voice. He strides up and

down the room as he reads, and we can hear in the rhythm of his speech

that he has a peculiar gait of his own. Not for nothing is Henry Percy

called Hotspur; whether on foot or on horseback, his movements are

equally impetuous. Therefore his wife says of him after his death (II.

_Henry IV_., ii. 3):--

"He was, indeed, the glass

Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves.

_He had no legs, that practised not his gait."_

Everything is here consistent, the bodily movements and the tone of

speech. We can hear in Hotspur's soliloquy how his sentences stumble

over each other; how, without giving himself time to articulate his

words, he stammers from sheer impatience, and utters no phrase that

does not bear the stamp of his choleric temperament:--

"And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish,

Became the accents of the valiant;

For those that could speak low, and tardily,

Would turn their own perfection to abuse,

To seem like him: so that, in speech, in gait,

In diet, in affections of delight,

In military rules, humours of blood,

He was the mark and glass, copy and book,

That fashion'd others."

Shakespeare found no hint of these external traits in the chronicle. He

bodied forth Hotspur's idiosyncrasy with such ardour that everything,

down to his outward habit, shaped itself accordantly. Hotspur speaks

in impatient ejaculations; he is absent and forgetful out of sheer

passionateness. His characteristic impetuousness shows itself in such

little traits as his inability to remember the names he wants to cite.

When the rebels are portioning out the country between them, he starts

up with an oath because he has forgotten his map. When he has something

to relate, he is so absorbed in the gist of his matter, and so

impatient to get at it, that the intermediate steps escape his memory

(i. 3):--

"Why, look you, I am whipp'd and scourg'd with rods,

Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear

Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.

_In Richard's time,--what do ye call the place?--_

_A plague upon--it is in Glostershire:--_

_'T was where the madcap Duke his uncle kept,_

_His uncle York_,--where I first bow'd my knee

Unto this king of smiles, this Bolingbroke."

When another person speaks to him, he listens for a moment, but

presently his thoughts are away on their own affairs; he forgets where

he is and what is said to him; and when Lady Percy has finished her

long and moving appeal (ii. 3) with the words--

"Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,

And I must know it, else he loves me not,"

all the reply vouchsafed her is:--

"_Hotspur_. What, ho!

_Enter Servant._

Is Gilliams with the packet gone?

_Serv_. He is, my lord, an hour ago.

_Hot_. Hath Butler brought those horses from the sheriff?" &c.

Perpetually baulked of an answer, she at last cannot help coming out

with this caressing menace, which gives us in one touch the whole

relation between the pair of married lovers:--

"In faith, I'll break thy little finger, Harry,

An if thou wilt not tell me all things true."

And this absence of mind of Percy's is so far from being accidental or

momentary that it is the very trait which Prince Henry seizes upon to

characterise him (ii. 4):--

"I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North;

he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a

breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife,--'Fie

upon this quiet life! I want work.' 'O my sweet Harry,' says

she, 'how many hast thou killed to-day?' 'Give my roan horse

a drench,' says he, and answers, 'Some fourteen,' an hour

after; 'a trifle, a trifle.'"

Shakespeare has put forth all his poetic strength in giving to

Percy's speeches, and especially to his descriptions, the most

graphic definiteness of detail, and a naturalness which raises into

a higher sphere the racy audacity of Faulconbridge. Hotspur sets

about explaining (i. 3) how it happened that he refused to hand over

his prisoners to the King, and begins his defence by describing the

courtier who demanded them of him:--

"When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,

Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,

Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dress'd,

Fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin, new reap'd,

Show'd like a stubble-land at harvest-home.

He was perfumed like a milliner."

But he is not content with a general outline, or with relating what

this personage said with regard to the prisoners; he gives an example

even of his talk:--

"He made me mad,

To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,

And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman

Of guns, and drums, and wounds, God save the mark!

And telling me, the sovereign'st thing on earth

Was parmacity for an inward bruise;

And that it was great pity, so it was,

That villainous saltpetre should be digg'd

Out of the bowels of the harmless earth."

Why this spermaceti? Why this dwelling upon so trivial and ludicrous a

detail? Because it is a touch of reality and begets illusion. Precisely

because we cannot at first see the reason why Percy should recall so

trilling a circumstance, it seems impossible that the thing should be

a mere invention. And from this insignificant word all the rest of the

speech hangs as by a chain. If this be real, then all the rest is real,

and Henry Percy stands before our eyes, covered with dust and blood, as

on the field of Holmedon. We see the courtier at his side holding his

nose as the bodies are carried past, and we hear him giving the young

commander his medical advice and irritating him to the verge of frenzy.

With such solicitude, with such minute attention to tricks, flaws,

whims, humours, and habits, all deduced from his temperament, from the

rapid flow of his blood, from his build of body, and from his life

on horseback and in the field, has Shakespeare executed this heroic

character. Restless gait, stammering speech, forgetfulness, absence

of mind, he overlooks nothing as being too trivial. Hotspur portrays

himself in every phrase he utters, without ever saying a word directly

about himself; and behind his outward, superficial peculiarities, we

see into the deeper and more significant characteristics from which they

spring. These, too, are closely interwoven; these, too, reveal

themselves in his lightest words. We hear this same hero whom pride,

sense of honour, spirit of independence, and intrepidity inspire with

the sublimest utterances, at other times chatting, jesting, and even

talking nonsense. The jests and nonsense are an integral part of the

real human being; in them, too, one side of his nature reveals itself

(iii. I):--

"_Hotspur_. Come, Kate, I'll have your song too.

_Lady Percy_. Not mine, in good sooth.

_Hot_. Not yours, in good sooth! 'Heart! you swear like a

comfit-maker's wife. 'Not you, in good sooth;' and, 'As true

as I live;' and, 'As God shall mend me;' and, 'As sure as

day:'

. . . . . . . . . .

Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,

A good mouth-filling oath; and leave 'in sooth,'

And such protest of pepper-gingerbread,

To velvet-guards, and Sunday-citizens."

In a classical tragedy, French, German, or Danish, the hero is too

solemn to talk nonsense and too lifeless to jest.

In spite of his soaring energy and ambition, Hotspur is sober,

rationalistic, sceptical. He scoffs at Glendower's belief in spirits

and pretended power of conjuring them up (iii. I). His is to the inmost

fibre a truth-loving nature:--

"_Glend_. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

_Hot_. Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come, when you do call for them?

_Glend_. Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command the devil.

_Hot_. And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil,

By telling truth: tell truth, and shame the devil."

There is a militant rationalism in these words which was rare, very

rare, in Shakespeare's time, to say nothing of Hotspur's own.

He has also, no doubt, the defects of his qualities. He is contentious,

quarrels the moment he is thwarted over the division of booty that has

yet to be won, and then, having gained his point, gives up his share

in the spoils. He is jealous in his ambition, cannot bear to hear any

one else praised, and would like to see Harry of Monmouth poisoned

with a pot of ale, so tired is he of hearing him spoken of. He judges

hastily, according to appearances; he has the profoundest contempt for

the Prince of Wales on account of the levity of his life, and does not

divine what lies behind it. He of course lacks all æsthetic faculty.

He is a bad speaker, and sentiment is as foreign to him as eloquence.

He prefers his dog's howling to music, and declares that the turning

of brass candlesticks does not set his teeth on edge so much as the

rhyming of balladmongers.

Yet, with all his faults, he is the greatest figure of his time. Even

the King, his enemy, becomes a poet when he speaks of him (iii. 2):--

"Thrice hath this Hotspur, Mars in swathing-clothes,

This infant warrior, in his enterprises

Discomfited great Douglas: ta'en him once,

Enlarged him, and made a friend of him."

The King longs daily that he could exchange his son for

Northumberland's; Hotspur is worthier than Prince Henry to be heir to

the throne of England.

From first to last, from top to toe, Hotspur is the hero of the

feudal ages, indifferent to culture and polish, faithful to his

brother-in-arms to the point of risking everything for his sake, caring

neither for state, king, nor commons; a rebel, not for the sake of any

political idea, but because independence is all in all to him; a proud,

self-reliant, unscrupulous vassal, who, himself a sort of sub-king,

has deposed one king, and wants to depose the usurper he has exalted,

because he has not kept his promises. Clothed in renown, and ever more

insatiate of military honour, he is proud from independence of spirit

and truthful out of pride. He is a marvellous figure as Shakespeare has

projected him, stammering, absent, turbulent, witty, now simple, now

magniloquent. His hauberk clatters on his breast, his spurs jingle at

his heel, wit flashes from his lips, while he moves and has his being

in a golden nimbus of renown.

Individual as he is, Shakespeare has embodied in him the national type.

From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, Hotspur is an

Englishman. He unites the national impetuosity and bravery with sound

understanding; he is English in his ungallant but cordial relation

to his wife; in the form, of his chivalry, which is Northern, not

Romanesque; in his Viking-like love of battle for battle's and honour's

sake, apart from any sentimental desire for a fair lady's applause.

But Shakespeare's especial design was to present in him a master-type

of manliness. He is so profoundly, so thoroughly a man that he forms

the one counterpart in modern poetry to the Achilles of the Greeks.

Achilles is the hero of antiquity, Henry Percy of the Middle Ages. The

ambition of both is entirely personal and regardless of the common

weal. For the rest, they are equally noble and high-spirited. The one

point on which Hotspur is inferior to the Greek demigod is that of free

naturalness. His soul has been cramped and hardened by being strapped

into the harness of the feudal ages. Hero as he is, he is at the same

time a soldier, obliged and accustomed to be over-bold, forced to

restrict his whole activity to feuds and fights. He cannot weep like

Achilles, and he would be ashamed of himself if he could. He cannot

play the lyre like Achilles, and he would think himself bewitched if

he could be brought to admit that music sounded sweeter in his ears

than the baying of a dog or the mewing of a cat.[1] He compensates for

these deficiencies by the unyielding, restless, untiring energy of his

character, by the spirit of enterprise in his manly soul, and by his

healthy and amply justified pride. It is in virtue of these qualities

that he can, without shrinking, sustain comparison with a demigod.

So deep are the roots of Hotspur's character. Eccentric in externals,

he is at bottom typical. The untamed and violent spirit of feudal

nobility, the reckless and adventurous activity of the English race,

the masculine nature itself in its uncompromising genuineness, all

those vast and infinite forces which lie deep under the surface and

determine the life of a whole period, a whole people, and one half of

humanity, are at work in this character. Elaborated to infinitesimal

detail, it yet includes the immensities into which thought must plunge

if it would seek for the conditions and ideals of a historic epoch.

But in spite of all this, Henry Percy is by no means the hero of the

play. He is only the foil to the hero, throwing into relief the young

Prince's unpretentious nature, his careless sporting with rank and

dignity, his light-hearted contempt for all conventional honour, all

show and appearance. Every garland with which Hotspur wreathes his

helm is destined in the end to deck the brows of Henry of Wales. The

answer to Hotspur's question as to what has become of the madcap Prince

of Wales and his comrades, shows what colours Shakespeare has held in

reserve for the portraiture of his true hero. Even Vernon, an enemy of

the Prince, thus depicts his setting forth on the campaign (iv. I):--

"All furnished, all in arms,

All plum'd like estridges that wing the wind;

Bated like eagles having lately bath'd;

Glittering in golden coats, like images;

As full of spirit as the month of May,

And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;

Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.

I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,

His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,

Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury,

And vaulted with such ease into his seat,

As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds,

To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,

And witch the world with noble horsemanship."

[1]

"And Achilles at last _Brake suddenly forth into weeping_,

and turned from his comrades aside, And sat by the cold grey

sea, looking forth o'er the harvestless tide." _Iliad_, i.

348.

"So when to the tents and the ships of the Myrmidon host they had won,

They found him delighting his soul as rang to the sweep of his hand

His beautiful rich-wrought lyre with a silver cross-bar spanned,

Which he chose from the spoils of the war when he smote Eëtion's town.

Sweetly it rang as he sang old deeds of hero-renown."

_Iliad_, ix. 185.

So Greek and so musical is he who can yet give this answer to the dying

Hector's appeal:--

"'Knee me no knees, thou dog, neither prate of my parents to

me! Would God my spirit within me would leave my fury free

To carve the flesh of thee raw, and devour, for the deeds

thou hast done.'" _Iliad_, xxii. 345.

(Translated by Arthur S. Way.)

XXIV

_PRINCE HENRY--THE POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR SHAKESPEARE'S IMAGINATION--A

TYPICAL ENGLISH NATIONAL HERO--THE FRESHNESS AND PERFECTION OF THE PLAY_

Henry V. was, in the popular conception, the national hero of England.

He was the man whose glorious victories had brought France under

English rule. His name had a ring like that of Valdemar in Denmark,

bringing with it memories of a time of widespread dominion, which

the weakness of his successors had suffered to shrink again. As a

matter of history, Henry had been a soldier almost from his boyhood,

had been stationed on the Welsh borders from his sixteenth to his

one-and-twentieth year, and had afterwards, in London, enjoyed the full

confidence of his father and of the Parliament. But there was some

hint in the old chronicles of his having, in his youth, frequented

bad company and led a wild life which gave no foretaste of his coming

greatness. This hint had been elaborated in the old and worthless play,

_The Famous Victories_; and no more was needed to set Shakespeare's

imagination to work, and render it productive. He revelled in the idea

of representing the young Prince of Wales roistering among drunkards

and demireps, only to rise all the more brilliantly and superbly into

the irreproachable sovereign, the greatest soldier among England's

kings, the humiliator of France, the victor of Agincourt.

No doubt Shakespeare's imagination here started from a basis of

personal experience. As a young player and poet, he in all probability

lived a Bohemian life in London, not, indeed, of debauchery, but full

of such passions and dissipations as his vigorous temperament, his

overflowing vitality, and his position beyond the pale of staid and

respectable citizenship, would tend to throw in his way. The Sonnets,

which speak so plainly of vehement and fateful emotions on his part,

also hint at temptations which he did not resist. We read, for

instance, in Sonnet cxix.:--

"What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,

Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,

Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,

Still losing when I saw myself to win!

What wretched errors hath my heart committed,

Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!

How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,

In the distraction of this madding fever!"

And again in Sonnet cxxix.:--

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

. . . . . . . .

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."

This is the philosophy of the morrow, of the reaction. But Shakespeare

had also, no doubt, his hours of light-hearted enjoyment, when such

moralising reflections were far enough from his mind. We have evidence

of this in more than one anecdote. In the diary of John Manningham, of

the Middle Temple, the following entry occurs, under the date March 13,

1602:--

"Upon a tyme when Burbidge played Rich. 3, there was a

Citizen grone soe farr in liking with him, that before shee

went from the play shee appointed him to come that night

vnto hir by the name of Ri: the 3. Shakespeare ouerhearing

their conclusion went before, [and] was intertained .. ere

Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Rich, the 3d

was at the dore, Shakespeare caused returne to be made that

William the Conquerour was before Rich. the 3. Shakespere's

name was William."

Aubrey, who, however, did not write until 1680, is the authority,

supported by several others (Pope, Oldys, etc.), for the legend that

Shakespeare, on his yearly journeys from London to Stratford-on-Avon

and back, by way of Oxford and Woodstock, used to alight at the "Crown"

tavern, kept by one Davenant in Oxford, and there won the heart of his

hostess, the buxom and merry Mrs. Davenant, who "used much to delight

in his pleasant company." According to this tradition, the young

William Davenant, afterwards a poet of note, commonly passed in Oxford

for Shakespeare's son, and was said to bear some resemblance to him.

Sir William himself was not unwilling to have it believed that he was

"more than a poetic child only" of Shakespeare's.[1]

Be this as it may, Shakespeare had certainly sufficient personal

experience to enable him to sympathise with this princely youth, who,

despite the consciousness of his high aims, revels in his freedom,

shuns the court life and ceremonial which await him, throws his dignity

to the winds, riots in reckless high spirits, boxes the ears of the

Lord Chief-Justice, and has yet self-command enough to suffer arrest

without resistance, takes part in a tourney with a common wench's glove

in his helm--in short, does everything that most conflicts with his

people's sense of propriety and his father's doctrines of prudence, but

does it without coarseness, with a certain innocence, and without ever

having to reproach himself with any actual self-degradation. Henry IV.

misunderstands his son as completely as Frederick William of Prussia

misunderstood the young Frederick the Great.

We see him, indeed, plunging into the most boyish and thoughtless

diversions, in company with topers, tavern-wenches, and pot-boys; but

we see, also, that he is magnanimous, and full of profound admiration

for Harry Percy, that admiration for a rival of which Percy himself was

incapable. And he rises, ere long, above this world of triviality and

make-believe to the true height of his nature. His alert self-esteem,

his immovable self-confidence, can early be traced in minor touches.

When Falstaff asks him if "his blood does not thrill" to think of the

alliance between three such formidable foes as Percy, Douglas, and

Glendower, he dismisses with a smile all idea of fear. A little later,

he plays upon his truncheon of command as upon a fife. He has the great

carelessness of the great natures; he does not even lose it when he

feels himself unjustly suspected. At bottom he is a good brother, a

good son, a great patriot; and he has the makings of a great ruler.

He lacks Hotspur's optimism (which sees some advantage even in his

father's desertion), nor has he his impetuous pugnacity; yet we see

outlined in him the daring, typically English conqueror, adventurer,

and politician, unscrupulous, and, on occasion, cruel, undismayed

though the enemy outnumber him tenfold--the prototype of the men who, a

century and a half after Shakespeare's death, achieved the conquest of

India.

It is a pity that Shakespeare could find no other way of displaying

his military superiority to Percy than simply to make him a better

swordsman and let him kill his rival in single combat. This is a return

to the Homeric conception of martial prowess. It was by such traits as

this that Shakespeare repelled Napoleon. These things appeared to him

childish. He found more "politics" in Corneille.

With complete magnanimity, Prince Henry leaves to Falstaff the

honour of having slain Hotspur, that honour whose true nature forms

the central theme of the whole play, although the idea is nowhere

formulated in any individual speech. But after Henry Percy's death,

Shakespeare, strangely enough, sometimes actually transfers to Henry

Plantagenet his fallen rival's characteristics. He says, for example

(_Henry V_., iv. 3), "If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most

offending soul alive." He declares that he understands neither rhyme

nor metre. He woos his bride as ungallantly as Hotspur talks to his

Kate, and he answers the challenges of the French with a boastfulness

that throws Hotspur's into the shade. In _Henry V_. Shakespeare strikes

the key of pure panegyric. The play is a National Anthem in five acts.

We must remember that Shakespeare from the first could not treat this

character with perfect freedom. There is a touch of reverence, of

patriotic religion in his tone, even where he shows the Prince given

over to wild and wanton frolics. At the close of the Second Part of

_Henry IV_. he is already transformed by his sense of responsibility;

and he develops, as Henry V., a sincerely religious frame of mind,

based on personal humility and on the consciousness of his father's

defective right to the throne, which no one could ever have divined in

the light-hearted Prince Hal.

These later plays, however, are not to be compared with this First Part

of _Henry IV_., which in its day made so great and well-deserved a

success. It presented life itself in all its fulness and variety, great

typical creations and figures of racy reality, which, without standing

in symmetrical antithesis or parallelism to each other, moved freely

over the boards where a never-to-be-forgotten history was enacted. Here

no fundamental idea held tyrannical, sway, forcing every word that was

spoken into formal relation to the whole; here nothing was abstract.

No sooner has the rebellion been hatched in the royal palace than the

second act opens with a scene in an inn-yard on the Dover road. It is

just daybreak; some carriers cross the yard with their lanterns, going

to the stable to saddle their horses; they hail each other, gossip, and

tell each other how they have passed the night. Not a word do they say

about Prince Henry or Falstaff; they talk of the price of oats, and of

how "this house is turned upside down since Robin ostler died." Their

speeches have nothing to do with the action; they merely sketch its

locality and put the audience in tune for it; but seldom in poetry has

so much been effected in so few words. The night sky, with Charles's

Wain "over the new chimney," the flickering gleam of the lanterns in

the dirty yard, the fresh air of the early dawn, the misty atmosphere,

the mingled odour of damp peas and beans, of bacon and ginger, all

comes straight home to our senses. The situation takes hold of us with

all the irresistible force of reality.

Shakespeare must have written this drama with a feeling of almost

infallible inspiration and triumphant ease. We understand in reading

it what his contemporaries say of his manuscripts: he did not blot a

single line.

The political developments arising from Henry IV.'s wrongful seizure of

the throne of Richard II. afford the groundwork of the play.

The King, situated partly like Louis Philippe, partly like Napoleon

III., does all he can to obliterate the memory of his usurpation. But

he does not succeed. Why not? Shakespeare gives a twofold answer. First

there is the natural, human reason: the relation of characters and

circumstances. The King has risen by the "fell working" of his friends;

he is afraid of falling again before their power. His position forces

him to be mistrustful, and his mistrust repels every one from him,

first Mortimer, then Percy, then, as nearly as possible, his own son.

Secondly, we have the prescribed religious reason: that wrong avenges

itself, that punishment follows upon the heels of guilt--in a word,

the so-called principle of "poetic justice." If only to propitiate

the censorship and the police, Shakespeare could not but do homage to

this principle. It was bad enough that the theatres should be suffered

to exist at all; if they so far forgot themselves as to show vice

unpunished and virtue unrewarded, the playwright would have to be

sternly brought to his senses.

The character of the King is a masterpiece. He is the shrewd,

mistrustful, circumspect ruler, who has made his way to the throne by

dint of smiles and pressures of the hand, has employed every artifice

for making an impression, has first ingratiated himself with the

populace by his affability and has then been sparing of his personal

presence. Hence those words of his which so deeply impressed Sören

Kierkegaard,[2] who despised and acted in direct opposition to the

principle they formulated (Pt. i. iii. 2):--

"Had I so lavish of my presence been,

So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,

So stale and cheap to vulgar company,

Opinion, that did help me to the crown,

Had still kept loyal to possession,

And left me in reputeless banishment,

A fellow of no mark, nor likelihood.

By being seldom seen, I could not stir,

But like a comet I was wonder'd at."

He thus illustrates, from the point of view of an old diplomatist, the

injury his son does himself by flaunting it among his disreputable

associates.

Yet the son is not so unlike the father as the father believes.

Shakespeare has made him, in his own way, adopt a scarcely less

diplomatic policy: that of establishing a false opinion about himself,

letting himself pass for a frivolous debauchee, in order to make

all the deeper impression by his firmness and energy as soon as an

opportunity offers of showing what is in him. Even in his first

soliloquy (i. 2) he lays down this line of policy with a definiteness

which is psychologically feeble:--

"I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyok'd humour of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wondered at."

This self-consciousness on Henry's part was to some extent imposed

upon Shakespeare. Without it, he could scarcely have brought upon the

stage, in such questionable company, a prince who had become a national

hero. Yet if the Prince had acted with the cut-and-dried deliberation

of purpose which he here attributes to himself, we should have to write

him down an unmitigated charlatan.

Here, as in a former instance of psychological crudity--Richard III.'s

description of himself as a villain--we must allow for Shakespeare's

use of the soliloquy. He frequently regards it as an indispensable

stage-convention, which does not really reveal the inmost thoughts of

the speaker, but only serves to place the hearer at a certain point

of view, and to give him information which he needs. Furthermore,

such a soliloquy as this ought to be spoken with a good deal of

sophistical self-justification on the Prince's part, or else, as the

German actor, Josef Kainz, treats it, in a tone of gay raillery.

Finally, it is to be regarded as a first hint--rather a broad one,

it must be admitted--which Shakespeare gives us thus early in order

to get rid of the improbability he found in the Chronicle, where the

Prince is instantaneously and miraculously transformed through a

single resolve. The soliloquy is introduced at this point to ensure

the coherence of his character, lest the spectator should feel that

the Prince's conversion to a totally different manner of life was

mechanically tacked on and had no root in his inner nature. And it must

have been one of the chief attractions of the theme for Shakespeare

to show precisely this conversion. No doubt he enjoyed depicting his

hero's gay and thoughtless life, at war with all the morality which

is founded on mere social convention; but at least as great must have

been the pleasure he took, as a man of ripe experience, in vindicating

that morality which he now felt to be the determining factor in human

life--the morality of voluntary self-reform and self-control, without

which there can be no concentration of purpose or systematic activity.

When the new-crowned king will no longer recognise Falstaff, when he

repulses him with the words:--

"How ill white hairs become a fool and jester....

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest;

Presume not that I am the thing I was,"

he speaks out of Shakespeare's own soul. Behind the words there glows

a new-born warmth of feeling. The calm sense of justice of the island

king makes haste to express itself, and to refuse all further dallying

with evil. He grants Falstaff a maintenance and banishes him from his

presence. Shakespeare's hero is at this point a living embodiment of

that earnestness and sense of responsibility which the poet, whom one

of his greatest and ablest admirers (Taine) has represented as being

devoid of moral feeling, held to be the indispensable condition of all

high endeavour.

[1] This tradition seems in no way improbable, and its

probability is not diminished by the fact that an anecdote connected

with it has been shown by Halliwell-Phillips to be an old Joe Miller,

merely adapted to the case in point. "One day an old townsman,

observing the boy running homeward almost out of breath, asked him

whither he was posting in that heat and hurry. He answered to see his

_god_father Shakespeare. 'There is a good boy,' said the other; 'but

have a care that you don't take _God's_ name in vain'" (_Oldys_).

[2] A Danish ethical and theological thinker, a Northern

Pascal, said to have in some measure suggested to Ibsen the character

of Brand.

XXV

"_KING HENRY IV.," SECOND PART--OLD AND NEW CHARACTERS IN

IT--DETAILS--"HENRY V.," A NATIONAL DRAMA--PATRIOTISM AND

CHAUVINISM--THE VISION OF A GREATER ENGLAND_

The Second Part of _Henry IV_., which must have been written in 1598,

since Justice Silence is mentioned in Ben Jonson's _Every Man out of

his Humour_, acted in 1599, abounds, no less than the First Part, in

poetic power, but is only a dramatised chronicle, not a drama. In its

serious scenes, the play is more faithful to history than the First

Part, and it is not Shakespeare's fault that the historical characters

are here of less interest. In the comic scenes, which are very amply

developed, Shakespeare has achieved the feat of bringing Falstaff

a second time upon the stage without giving us the least sense of

anticlimax. He is incomparable as ever in his scenes with the Lord

Chief-Justice and with the women of the tavern; and when he goes down

into Gloucestershire in his character of recruiting-officer, he is

still at the height of his genius. As new comrades and foils to him,

Shakespeare has here created the two contemptible country Justices,

Shallow and Silence. Shallow is a masterpiece, a compact of mere

stupidity, foolishness, boastfulness, rascality, and senility; yet he

appears a genius in comparison with the ineffable Silence. Here, as

in the First Part, the poet evidently drew his comic types from the

life of his own day. Another very amusing new personage, who, like

Falstaff, was much imitated by the minor dramatists of the time, is

Falstaff's Ancient, the braggart Pistol, whose talk is an anthology of

playhouse bombast. This inept affectation not only makes him a highly

comic personage, but gives Shakespeare an opportunity of girding at

the robustious style of the earlier tragic poets, which had become

repulsive to him. He parodies Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ in Pistol's

outburst (ii. 4):--

"Shall packhorses,

And hollow pamper'd jades of Asia,

Which cannot go but thirty miles a-day,

Compare with Cæsars and with Cannibals,

And Trojan Greeks?"

The passage in _Tamburlaine_ (Second Part, ii. 4) runs thus:--

"Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia,

What? can ye draw but twenty miles a day?"

He makes fun of Peele's _Turkish Mahomet and Hyren the fair Greek_,

when Pistol, alluding to his sword, exclaims, "Have we not Hiren here?"

And again it is George Peele who is aimed at when Pistol says to the

hostess:--

"Then feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis;

Come, give's some sack."

In _The Battle of Alcazar_ (see above, p. 31), Muley Mahomet brings his

wife some flesh on the point of his sword and says--

"Hold thee, Calipolis, feed and faint no more!"

But Falstaff himself is, and must ever remain, the chief attraction of

the comic scenes. Never was the Fat Knight wittier than when he answers

the Lord Chief-Justice, who has told him that his figure bears "all the

characters of age" (i. 2):--

"My Lord, I was born about three of the clock in the

afternoon, with a white head, and something a round belly.

For my voice, I have lost it with hollaing and singing of

anthems. To approve my youth further, I will not: the truth

is, I am only old in judgment and understanding; and he that

will caper with me for a thousand marks, let him lend me the

money, and have at him."

The play is a mere bundle of individual passages, but each of these

passages is admirable. A great example is King Henry's soliloquy which

opens the third act, the profoundly imaginative apostrophe to sleep:--

"O thou dull god! why liest thou with the vile,

In loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly couch,

A watch-case, or a common 'larum bell?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge,

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deaf'ning clamours in the slippery clouds,

That with the hurly death itself awakes?

Canst thou, O partial sleep! give thy repose

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;

And in the calmest and most stillest night,

With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

Throughout this Second Part, the King, besieged by cares and living in

the shadow of death, is richer in thought and wisdom than ever before.

What he says, and what is said to him, seems drawn by the poet from the

very depths of his own experience, and addressed to men of the like

experience and thought. Every word of that first scene of the third act

is in the highest degree significant and admirable. It is here that

the King turns to what we now call geology (see above, p. 95) for an

image of the historical mutability of all things. When he mournfully

reminds his attendants that Richard II., whom he displaced, prophesied

a Nemesis to come from those who had helped him to the throne, and that

this Nemesis has now over-taken him, Warwick answers with the profound

and astonishingly modern reflection that history is apparently governed

by laws, and that each man's life--

"Figures the nature of the times deceas'd;

The which observ'd, a man may prophesy,

With a near aim, of the main chance of things

As yet not come to life."

To this the King returns the no less philosophical answer:--

"Are these things, then, necessities?

Then let us meet them like necessities."

But it is at the close of the fourth act, where news of the total

defeat of the rebels is brought to the dying King, that he utters what

is perhaps his most profoundly pessimistic speech, complaining that

Fortune never comes with both hands full, but "writes her fair words

still in foulest letters," so that life is like a feast at which either

the food or the appetite [or the guests] are always lacking.

From the moment of King Henry's death, Shakespeare concentrates all

his poetical strength upon the task of presenting in his great son the

pattern and ideal of English kingship. In all the earlier Histories the

King had grave defects; Shakespeare now applies himself, with warm and

undisguised enthusiasm, to the portrayal of a king without a flaw.

His _Henry V_. is a glorification of this national ideal. The five

choruses which introduce the acts are patriotic pæans, Shakespeare's

finest heroic lyrics; and the play itself is an epic in dialogue,

without any sort of dramatic structure, development, or conflict. It

is an English _ἐγκώμιον_, a dramatic monument, as was the _Persæ_ of

Æschylus for ancient Athens. As a work of creative art, it cannot

be compared with the two preceding Histories, to which it forms a

supplement. Its theme is English patriotism, and its appeal is to

England rather than to the world.

The allusion to Essex's command in Ireland in the prologue to the fifth act

gives us beyond a doubt the date of its first performance. Essex was

in Ireland from the 15th of April 1599 to the 28th of September in the

following year. As we find the play alluded to by other poets in 1600,

it must in all probability have been produced in 1599.

How strongly Shakespeare was impressed by the greatness of his theme

appears in his reiterated expressions of humility in approaching it.

He begins, like the epic poets of antiquity, with an invocation of

the Muse; he implores forgiveness, not only for the imperfection of

his scenic apparatus, but for the "flat unraised spirits" in which he

treats so mighty a theme. And in the prologue to the fourth act he

returns to the subject of his unworthiness and the pitiful limitations

of the stage. Throughout the choruses, he has done his utmost, by

dint of vivid imagery and lyric impetus and splendour, to make up for

the sacrifice of unity and cohesion involved in his faithfulness to

history. Shakespeare was evidently unconscious of the naïveté of the

lecture on the Salic law, establishing Henry's claim to the crown of

France, with which the Archbishop opens the play; no doubt he thought

it absolutely imposed upon him.

For he here strives to make Henry an epitome of all the virtues he

himself most highly values. Even in the last act of the Second Part

of _Henry IV._ he had endowed him with traits of irreproachable

kingly magnanimity. Henry confirms in his office the Chief-Justice,

who, in the execution of his duty, had arrested the Prince of Wales,

addresses him with the deepest respect, and even calls him "father."

In reality this Chief-Justice was dismissed at the King's accession.

_Henry V._ completes the evolution of the royal butterfly from

the larva and chrysalis stages of the earlier plays. Henry is at

once the monarch who always thinks royally, and never forgets his

pride as the representative of the English people; the man with no

pose or arrogance, who bears himself simply, talks modestly, acts

energetically, and thinks piously; the soldier who endures privations

like the meanest of his followers, is downright in his jesting and

his wooing, and enforces discipline with uncompromising strictness,

even as against his own old comrades; and finally, the citizen who

is accessible alike to small and great, and in whom the youthful

frolicsomeness of earlier days has become the humourist's relish for

a practical joke, like that which he plays off upon Williams and

Fluellen. Shakespeare shows him, like a military Haroun Al Raschid,

seeking personally to insinuate himself into the thoughts and feelings

of his followers; and--what is very unlike him--he manifests no

disapproval where the King sinks far below the ideal, as when he orders

the frightful massacre of all the French prisoners taken at Agincourt.

Shakespeare tries to pass the deed off as a measure of necessity.

The reason of this is that the spirit which here prevails is not pure

patriotism, but in many points a narrow Chauvinism. King Henry's two

speeches before Harfleur (iii. I and iii. 3) are bombastic, savage,

and threatening to the point of frothy bluster; and wherever Frenchmen

and Englishmen are brought into contrast, the French, even if they

at that time showed themselves inferior soldiers, are treated with

obvious injustice. With his sharp eye for national, as for personal

peculiarities, Shakespeare has of course seized upon certain weaknesses

of the French character; but for the most part his Frenchmen are mere

caricatures for the diversion of the gallery. Quite childish is the

way in which he makes the Frenchmen mix fragments of French in their

speeches. But it is consistent enough with the national and popular

design of the play that not a little of it should seem to be addressed

to the common, uneducated public--for instance, the scene in which the

miserable blusterer Pistol makes prisoner a French nobleman whom he has

succeeded in overawing, and that in which the young Princess Katherine

of France takes lessons in English from one of her ladies-in-waiting.

This passage (iii. 4) and the wooing scene between King Henry and the

Princess (v. 2) are incidentally interesting as giving us a good idea

of Shakespeare's acquaintance with French. No doubt he could read

French, but he must have spoken it very imperfectly. He is perhaps not

to blame for such blunders as _le possession_ and _à les anges._ On the

other hand, it was doubtless he who placed in the mouth of the Princess

such comically impossible expressions as these when Henry has kissed

her hand:--

_"Je ne veux point que vous abbaissez vostre grandeur, en

baisant le main d'une vostre indigne serviteur"._

And this:--

_"Les dames, et damoiselles, pour estre baisées devant leur

nopces, il n'est pas le costume de France."_

According to his custom, and in order to preserve continuity of style

with the foregoing plays, Shakespeare has interspersed _Henry V_.

with comic figures and scenes. Falstaff himself does not appear, his

death being announced at the beginning of the play; but the members

of his gang wander around, as living and ludicrous mementos of him,

until they disappear one by one by way of the gallows, so that nothing

may survive to recall the great king's frivolous youth. To console

us for their loss, we are here introduced to a new circle of comic

figures--soldiers from the different English-speaking countries which

make up what we now call the United Kingdom. Each of them speaks his

own dialect, in which resides much of the comic effect for English

ears. We have a Welshman, a Scot, and an Irishman. The Welshman is

intrepid, phlegmatic, somewhat pedantic, but all fire and flame for

discipline and righteousness; the Scot is immovable in his equilibrium,

even-tempered, sturdy, and trustworthy; the Irishman is a true Celt,

fiery, passionate, quarrelsome and apt at misunderstanding. Fluellen,

the Welshman, with his comic phlegm and manly severity, is the most

elaborate of these figures.

But in placing on the stage these representatives of the different

English-speaking peoples, Shakespeare had another and deeper purpose

than that of merely amusing his public with a medley of dialects. At

that time the Scots were still the hereditary enemies of England, who

always attacked her in the rear whenever she went to war, and the Irish

were actually in open rebellion. Shakespeare evidently dreamed of a

Greater England, as we nowadays speak of a Greater Britain. When he

wrote this play, King James of Scotland was busily courting the favour

of the English, and the question of the succession to the throne, when

the old Queen should die, was not definitely settled. Shakespeare

clearly desired that, with the coming of James, the old national hatred

between the Scotch and the English should cease. Essex, in Ireland,

was at this very time carrying out the policy which was to lead to

his destruction--that, namely, of smoothing away hatred by means of

leniency, and trying to come to an arrangement with the leader of the

Catholic rebellion. Southampton was with him in Ireland as his Master

of the Horse, and we cannot doubt that Shakespeare's heart was in the

campaign. Bates in this play (iv. I) probably expresses Shakespeare's

own political ideas when he says--

"Be friends, you English fools, be friends: we have French

[Spanish] quarrels enow, if you could tell how to reckon."

_Henry V_. is not one of Shakespeare's best plays, but it is one of

his most amiable. He here shows himself not as the almost superhuman

genius, but as the English patriot, whose enthusiasm is as beautiful

as it is simple, and whose prejudices, even, are not unbecoming. The

play not only points backward to the greatest period of England's past,

but forward to King James, who, as the Protestant son of the Catholic

Mary Stuart, was to put an end to religious persecutions, and who, as

a Scotchman and a supporter of the Irish policy of Essex, was for the

first time to show the world not only a sturdy England, but a powerful

Great Britain.

XXVI

_ELIZABETH AND FALSTAFF--THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR--THE PROSAIC AND

BOURGEOIS TONE OF THE PIECE--THE FAIRY SCENES_

Shakespeare must have written _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ immediately

after _Henry V_., probably about Christmas 1599; for Sir Thomas Lucy,

on whom the poet here takes his revenge, died in 1600, and it is

improbable that Shakespeare would have cared to gird at him after his

death. He almost certainly did not write the piece of his own motive,

but at the suggestion of one whose wish was a command. There is the

strongest internal evidence for the truth of the tradition which states

that the play was written at the request of Queen Elizabeth. The first

Quarto of 1602 has on its title-page the words, "As it hath been divers

times acted by the right honourable my Lord Chamberlain's servants.

Both before Her Majesty, and elsewhere." A century later (1702), John

Dennis, who published an adaptation of the play, writes, "I know very

well that it had pleased one of the greatest queens that ever was

in the world.... This comedy was written at her command and by her

direction, and she was so eager to see it acted, that she commanded it

to be finished in fourteen days." A few years later (1709) Rowe writes,

"She was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in

the two parts of _Henry IV_., that she commanded him to continue it for

one play more and show him in love. This is said to be the occasion of

his writing _The Merry Wives_. How well she was obeyed, the play itself

is an admirable proof."

Old Queen Bess can scarcely have been a great judge of art, or she

would not have conceived the extravagant notion of wanting to see

Falstaff in love; she would have understood that if there was anything

impossible to him it was this. She would also have realised that

his figure was already a rounded whole and could not be reproduced.

It is true that in the Epilogue to _Henry IV_. (which, however,

is probably not by Shakespeare) a continuation of the history is

promised, in which, "for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a

sweat, unless already he be killed with your hard opinions;" (but no

such continuation is to be found in _Henry V_.) evidently because

Shakespeare felt that Falstaff had played out his part. Neither is _The

Merry Wives_ the promised continuation, for Falstaff does not die, and

the action is conceived as an earlier episode in his life, though it is

entirely removed from its historical setting and brought forward into

the poet's own time, so unequivocally that there is even in the fifth

act a direct mention of "our radiant queen" in Windsor Castle.