The poet must have set himself unwillingly to the fulfilment of the

"radiant queen's" barbarous wish, and tried to make the best of

a bad business. He was compelled entirely to ruin his inimitable

Falstaff, and degrade the fat knight into an ordinary avaricious,

wine-bibbing, amatory old fool. Along with him, he resuscitated the

whole merry company from _Henry V_., who had all come to an unpleasant

end--Bardolph, Pistol, Nym, and Dame Quickly--making the men repeat

themselves with a difference, endowing Pistol with the splendid phrase,

"The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open," and giving to

Dame Quickly softened and more commonplace lineaments. From the Second

Part of _Henry IV._ too, he introduces Justice Shallow, placing him in

a less friendly relation to Falstaff, and giving him a highly comic

nephew, Slender, who, in his vanity and pitifulness, is like a first

sketch for Sir Andrew Aguecheek in _Twelft Night_.

His task was now to entertain a queen and a court "with their hatred of

ideas, their insensibility to beauty, their hard, efficient manners,

and their demand for impropriety."[1] As it amused the London populace

to see kings and princes upon the stage, so it entertained the Queen

and her court to have a glimpse into the daily life of the middle

classes, so remote from their own, to look into their rooms, and hear

their chat with the doctor and the parson, to see a picture of the

prosperity and contentment which flourished at Windsor right under the

windows of the Queen's summer residence, and to witness the downright

virtue and merry humour of the red-cheeked, buxom townswomen. Thus

was the keynote of the piece determined. Thus it became more prosaic

and bourgeois than any other play of Shakespeare's. _The Merry Wives_

is indeed the only one of his works which is almost entirely written

in prose, and the only one of his comedies in which, the scene being

laid in England, he has taken as his subject the contemporary life of

the English middle classes. It is not quite unlike the more farcical

of Molière's comedies, which also were often written with an eye to

royal and courtly audiences. All the more significant is the fact

that Shakespeare has found it impossible to content himself with

thus dwelling on the common earth, and has introduced at the close

a fairy-dance and fairy-song, as though from the _Midsummer Night's

Dream_ itself, executed, it is true, by children and young girls

dressed up as elves, but preserving throughout the air and style of

genuine fairy scenes.

Shakespeare had just been trying his hand in _Henry V._ at writing the

broken English spoken by a Welshman and by a Frenchman. He knew that

at court, where people prided themselves on the purest pronunciation

of their mother-tongue, he would find an audience exceedingly alive

to the comic effects thus obtained, and he therefore, while he was in

the vein, introduced into this hasty and occasional production two

not unkindly caricatures--the Welsh priest, Sir Hugh Evans, in whom

he perhaps immortalised one of his Stratford schoolmasters, and the

French Doctor Caius, a thoroughly farcical eccentric, who pronounces

everything awry.

The hurry with which Shakespeare wrote this comedy has led him into

some confusion as to the process of time. In Act iii. 4, when Dame

Quickly is sent to Falstaff to make a second appointment with him, it

is the afternoon of the second day; in the following scene, when she

comes to him, it is the morning of the third day. But this haste has

also given the play an unusually dramatic swing and impetus; it is

quite free from the episodes in which the poet is at other times apt to

loiter.

Nevertheless Shakespeare has here woven together no fewer than three

different actions--Falstaff's advances to the two Merry Wives,

Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page, and all the consequences of his ill-timed

rendezvous; the rivalry between the foolish doctor, the imbecile

Slender, and young Fenton for the hand of fair Anne Page; and finally,

the burlesque duel between the Welsh priest and the French doctor,

which is devised and set afoot by the jovial Windsor innkeeper.

Shakespeare has himself invented much more than usual of the

complicated intrigue. But Falstaff's concealment in the buck-basket was

suggested by a similar incident in Fiorentino's _Il Pecorone_, from

which Shakespeare had already borrowed in the _Merchant of Venice_; and

the idea of making Falstaff incessantly confide his designs and his

rendezvous to the husband of the lady in question came from another

Italian story by Straparola, which had been published some ten years

earlier, under the title of _Two Lovers of Pisa_, in Tarlton's _News of

Purgatory_.

The invention is not always very happy. For instance, it is a highly

unpleasing and improbable touch that Ford, as Master Brook, should

bribe Falstaff to procure him possession of the woman (his own wife)

whom he affects to desire, and whom Falstaff also is pursuing.

Ford's jealousy, moreover, is altogether too stupid and crude in its

manifestations. But we have especially to deplore that the nature of

the intrigue and the moral tendency to be impressed on the play should

have made Falstaff, who used to be quickness and ingenuity personified,

so preternaturally dense that his incessant defeats afford his

opponents a very poor triumph.

He is ignorant of everything it would have been his interest to

know, and he is perpetually committing afresh the same inconceivable

blunders. It is foolish enough, in the first place, to write two

identical love-letters to two women in the same little town, who, as

he ought to know, are bosom friends. It is incredibly stupid of him

to walk three times in succession straight into the coarse trap which

they set for him; in doing so he betrays such a monstrous vanity that

we find it impossible to recognise in him the ironical Falstaff of the

Histories. It is inexpressibly guileless of him never to conceive the

slightest suspicion of "Master Brook," who, being his only confidant,

is therefore the only man who can have betrayed him to the husband.

And finally, it is not only childish, but utterly inconsistent with

the keen understanding of the earlier Falstaff, that he should believe

in the supernatural nature of the beings who pinch him and burn him by

night in the park.

On the other hand, the old high spirits and the old wit now and again

flame forth in him, and a few of his speeches to Shallow, to Pistol, to

Bardolph and others are exceedingly amusing. He shows a touch of his

old self when, after having been soused in the water along with the

foul linen, he protests that drowning is "a death that I abhor, for the

water swells a man, and what a thing should I have been when I had been

swelled!" And he has a highly humorous outburst in the last act (v. 5)

when he declares, "I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the

oil that is in me should set hell on fire." But what are these little

flashes in comparison with the inexhaustible whimsicality of the true

Falstaff!

The play is more consistently farcical than any earlier comedy of

Shakespeare's, _The Taming of the Shrew_ not excepted. The graceful

and poetical passages are few. We have in Mr. and Mrs. Page a pleasant

English middle-class couple; and though the young lovers, Fenton and

Anne Page, have only one short scene together, they display in it

some attractive qualities. Anne Page is an amiable middle-class girl

of Shakespeare's day, one of the healthy and natural young women whom

Wordsworth has celebrated in the nineteenth century. Fenton, who is

said (though, we cannot believe it) to have been at one time a comrade

of Prince Hal and Poins, is certainly attached to her; but it is very

characteristic that Shakespeare, with his keen sense for the value of

money, sees nothing to object to in the fact that Fenton, as he frankly

confesses, was first attracted to Anne by her wealth. This is the same

trait which we found in another wooer, Bassanio, of a few years earlier.

Finally, there is real poetry in the short fairy scene of the last act.

The poet here takes his revenge for the prose to which he has so long

been condemned. It is full of the aromatic wood-scents of Windsor Park

by night. What is altogether most valuable in _The Merry Wives_ is its

strong smack of the English soil. The play appeals to us, in spite of

the drawbacks inseparable from a work hastily written to order, because

the poet has here for once remained faithful to his own age and his own

country, and has given us a picture of the contemporary middle-class;

in its sturdy and honest worth, which even the atmosphere of farce

cannot quite obscure.

[1] Dowden: _Shakspere--his Mind and Art_, p. 370.

XXVII

_SHAKESPEARE'S MOST BRILLIANT PERIOD--THE FEMININE TYPES BELONGING TO

IT--WITTY AND HIGHBORN YOUNG WOMEN--MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING--SLAVISH

FAITHFULNESS TO HIS SOURCES--BENEDICK AND BEATRICE--SPIRITUAL

DEVELOPMENT--THE LOW-COMEDY FIGURES_

Shakespeare now enters upon the stage in his career in which his wit

and brilliancy of spirit reach a perfection hitherto unattained. It

seems as though these years of his life had been bathed in sunshine.

They certainly cannot have been years of struggle, and still less

of sorrow; there must have been a sort of lull in his existence--a

tranquil zone, as it were, in the troubled waters of life. He seems for

a short time to have revelled in his own genius with a sort of pensive

happiness, to have drunk exhilarating draughts of his own inspiration.

He heard the nightingales warbling in the sacred grove of his spirit.

His whole nature burst into flower.

In the Republican Calendar one of the months was named Floreal.

There is such a flower-month in almost every human life; and this is

Shakespeare's.

He was doubtless in love at this time--as he had probably been all

his life through--but his love was not an overmastering passion like

Romeo's, nor did it depress him with that half-despairing feeling of

the unworthiness of its object which he betrays in his Sonnets; nor,

again, was it the airy ecstasy of youthful imagination that ran riot

in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. No, it was a happy love, which filled

his head as well as his heart, accompanied with joyous admiration for

the wit and vivacity of the beloved one, for her graciousness and

distinction. Her coquetry is gay, her heart is excellent, and her

intelligence so quick that she seems to be wit incarnate in the form of

a woman.

In his early years he had presented not a few unamiable, mannish

women in his comedies, and not a few ambitious, bloodthirsty, or

corrupt women in his serious plays--figures such as Adriana and the

shrewish Katharine on the one hand, Tamora and Margaret of Anjou on the

other hand, who have all a stiff-necked will, and a certain violence

of manners. In the later years of his ripe manhood he displays a

preference for young women who are nothing but soul and tenderness,

silent natures without wit or sparkle, figures such as Ophelia,

Desdemona, and Cordelia.

Between these two strongly-marked groups we come upon a bevy of

beautiful young women, who all have their heart in the right place, but

whose chief attraction lies in their sparkling quickness of wit. They

are often as lovable as the most faithful friend can be, and witty as

Heinrich Heine himself, though with another sort of wit. We feel that

Shakespeare must have admired with all his heart the models from whom

he drew these women, and must have rejoiced in them as one brilliant

mind rejoices in another. These types of delicate and aristocratic

womanhood cannot possibly have had plebeian models.

In his first years in London, Shakespeare, as an underling in a company

of players, can have had no opportunity of associating with other

women than, firstly, those who sat for his Mistress Quickly and Doll

Tearsheet; secondly, those passionate and daring women who make the

first advances to actors and poets; and, thirdly, those who served as

models for his "Merry Wives," with their sound bourgeois sense and not

over delicate gaiety. But the ordinary citizen's wife or daughter of

that day offered the poet no sort of spiritual sustenance. They were,

as a rule, quite illiterate. Shakespeare's younger daughter could not

even write her own name.

But he was presently discovered by men like Southampton and Pembroke,

cordially received into their refined and thoroughly cultivated

circle, and in all probability presented to the ladies of these noble

families. Can we doubt that the tone of conversation among these

aristocratic ladies must have enchanted him, that he must have rejoiced

in the nobility and elegance of their manners, and that their playful

freedom of speech must have afforded him an object for imitation and

idealisation?

The great ladies of that date were exceedingly accomplished. They had

been educated as highly as the men, spoke Italian, French, and Spanish

fluently, and were not infrequently acquainted with Latin and Greek.

Lady Pembroke, Sidney's sister, the mother of Shakespeare's patron, was

regarded as the most intellectual woman of her time, and was equally

celebrated as an author and as a patroness of authors. And these ladies

were not oppressed by their knowledge or affected in their speech,

but natural, rich in ideas as in acquirements, free in their wit, and

sometimes in their morals; so that we can easily understand how a

daring, high-bred, womanly intelligence should have been, for a series

of years, the object which it most delighted Shakespeare to portray. He

supplements this intellectual superiority, in varying measures, with

independence, goodness of heart, pride, humility, tenderness, the joy

of life; so that from the central conception there radiates a fan-like

semicircle of different personalities. It was of such women that he had

dreamt when he sketched his Rosaline in _Loves Labour's Lost_. Now he

knew them, as he had already shown in Portia, the first of the group.

In spite of his latent melancholy, he is now highly-favoured and happy,

this young man of thirty-five; the sun of his career is in the sign

of the Lion,; he feels himself strong enough to sport with the powers

of life, and he now writes nothing but comedies. He does not take the

trouble to invent them; he employs his old method of carving a play

out of this or that mediocre romantic novel, or he revises inferior

old pieces. As a rule, he goes thus to work: he retains without a

qualm those traits in his fable which are fantastic, improbable,

even repulsive to a more delicate taste--such points are always

astonishingly unimportant in his eyes; he sometimes transfers to his

play undigested masses of the material before him, with no care for

psychological plausibility; but he seizes upon some leading situation

in the novel, or upon some single character in the earlier play, and

he animates this situation or this character, or (it may be) added

characters of his own invention, with the whole fervour of his soul,

until the speeches shine forth as in letters of fire, and sparkle with

wit or glow with passion.

Thus, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, he retains a fable which offers

almost insuperable difficulties to satisfactory poetical treatment, and

nevertheless produces, partly outside of its framework, poetical values

of the first order.

The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on the 4th of August

1600, and appeared in the same year under the title: _Much Adoe about

Nothing. As it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the Right

Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants. Written by William

Shakespeare_. It must thus have been written in 1599 or 1600; and we

find, too, in its opening scene, certain allusions that accord with

this date. Thus Leonato's speech, "A victory is twice itself when the

achiever brings home full numbers," and Beatrice's "You had musty

victual," are both thought to point to Essex's campaign in Ireland.

Shakespeare has taken the details of his plot from several Italian

sources. From the first book of Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso_ (the story

of Ariodante and Genevra), which was translated in 1591, and had

already provided the material for a play performed before the Queen

in 1582, he borrowed the idea of a malevolent nobleman persuading

a youthful lover that his lady is untrue to him, and suborning a

waiting-woman to dress like her mistress, and receive a nocturnal

visit by means of a ladder placed against her lady's window, so that

the bridegroom, watching the scene from a distance, may accept it as

proof of the calumny, and so break off the match. All the other details

he took from a novel of Bandello's, the story of Timbreo of Cardona.

Timbreo is represented by Claudio; through the medium of a friend, he

woos the daughter of Leonato, a nobleman of Messina. The intrigue which

separates the young pair is woven by Girondo (in Shakespeare, Don John)

just as in the play, but with a more adequate motive, since Girondo

himself is in love with the lady. She faints when she is accused, is

given out to be dead, and there is a sham funeral, as in the play. But

in the story it is represented that the whole of Messina espouses her

cause and believes in her innocence, while in the play Beatrice alone

remains true to her young kinswoman. The truth is discovered and the

engagement renewed, just as in Shakespeare.

Only for a much cruder habit of mind than that which prevails among

people of culture in our days can this story provide the motive for a

comedy. The very title indicates a point of view quite foreign to us.

The implication is that since Hero was innocent, and the accusation a

mere slander; since she was not really dead, and the sorrow for her

loss was therefore groundless; and since she and Claudio are at last

married, as they might have been at first--therefore the whole thing

has been much ado about nothing, and resolves itself in a harmony which

leaves no discord behind.

The ear of the modern reader is otherwise attuned. He recognises,

indeed, that Shakespeare has taken no small pains to make this fable

dramatically acceptable. He appreciates the fact that here again, in

the person of Don John, the poet has depicted mere unmixed evil, and

has disdained to supply a motive for his vile action in any single

injury received, or desire unsatisfied. Don John is one of the sour,

envious natures which suck poison from all sources, because they suffer

from the perpetual sense of being unvalued and despised. He is, for

the moment, constrained by the forbearance with which his victorious

brother has treated him, but "if he had his mouth he would bite." And

he does bite, like the cur and coward he is, and makes himself scarce

when his villainy is about to be discovered. He is an ill-conditioned,

base, and tiresome scoundrel; and, although he conscientiously does

evil for evil's sake, we miss in him all the defiant and brilliantly

sinister qualities which appear later on in Iago and in Edmund. There

is little to object to in Don John's repulsive scoundrelism; at most we

may say that it is a strange motive-power for a comedy. But to Claudio

we cannot reconcile ourselves. He allows himself to be convinced, by

the clumsiest stratagem, that his young bride, in reality as pure

and tender as a flower, is a faithless creature, who deceives him

the very day before her marriage. Instead of withdrawing in silence,

he prefers, like the blockhead he is, to confront her in the church,

before the altar, and in the hearing of every one overwhelm her with

coarse speeches and low accusations; and he induces his patron, the

Prince Don Pedro, and, even the lady's own father, Leonato, to join

him in heaping upon the unhappy bride their idiotic accusations.

When, by the advice of the priest, her relatives have given her out

as dead, and the worthy old Leonato has lied up hill and down dale

about her hapless end, Claudio, who now learns too late that he has

been duped, is at once taken into favour again. Leonato only demands

of him--in, accordance with the mediæval fable--that he shall declare

himself willing to marry whatever woman he (Leonato) shall assign to

him. This he promises, without a word or thought about Hero; whereupon

she is placed in his arms. The original spectators, no doubt, found

this solution satisfactory; a modern audience is exasperated by it,

very much as Nora, in _A Doll's House_, is exasperated on finding that

Helmer, after the danger has passed away, regards all that has happened

in their souls as though it had never been, merely because the sky

is clear again. If ever man was unworthy a woman's love, that man is

Claudio. If ever marriage was odious and ill-omened, this is it. The

old taleteller's invention has been too much even for Shakespeare's art.

When we moderns, however, think of _Much Ado about Nothing,_ it is not

this distasteful story that rises before our mind's eye. It is Benedick

and Beatrice, and the intrigue in which they are involved. The light

from these figures, and especially from that of Beatrice, irradiates

the play, and we understand that Shakespeare was forced to make Claudio

so contemptible, because by that means alone could the enchanting

personality of Beatrice shine forth in its fullest splendour.

Beatrice is a great lady of the Renaissance in her early youth,

overflowing with spirits and energy, brightly, defiantly virginal,

inclined, in the wealth of her daring wit, to a somewhat aggressive

raillery, and capable of unabashed freedom of speech, astounding to our

modern taste, but permitted by their education to the foremost women of

that age. Her behaviour to Benedick, whom she cannot help perpetually

twitting and teasing, is as headstrong and refractory as Katharine's

treatment of Petruchio.

Her diction is marvellous, glittering with unrestrained fantasy. For

instance, after she has assured her uncle (ii. I) that she "is on

her knees every morning and evening" to be spared the infliction of

a husband, since a man with a beard and a man without one would be

equally intolerable to her, she proceeds--

"_Beatrice_. ... Therefore I will even take sixpence in

earnest of the bear-ward, and lead his apes into hell.

"_Leonato_. Well, then, go you into hell?

"_Beat_. No; but to the gate; and there will the devil meet

me, like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and say,

'Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven; here's no

place for you maids:' so deliver I up my apes, and away to

Saint Peter for the heavens; he shows me where the bachelors

sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long."

She holds that--

"Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a

measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty,

like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding,

mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry;

and then comes repentance, and with his bad legs falls into

the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his

grave."

Therefore she exclaims with roguish irony--

"Good Lord, for alliance!--Thus goes every one to the world

but I, and I am sun-burnt. I may sit in a corner, and cry

heigh-ho for a husband!"

In her battles with Benedick she outdoes him in fantasy, both congruous

and incongruous, or burlesque. Here, again, Shakespeare has evidently

taken Lyly as his model, and has tried to reproduce the polished facets

of his dialogue, while at the same time correcting its unnaturalness,

and giving it fresh life. And Beatrice follows up her victory over

Benedick, even when he is no longer her interlocutor, with a freedom

which is now-a-days unthinkable in a young girl:--

"_D. Pedro_. You have put him down, lady; you have put him

down.

"_Beat_. So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I

should prove the mother of fools."

But this unbridled whimsicality conceals the energetic virtues of a

firm and noble character. When her poor cousin is falsely accused and

cruelly put to shame; when those who should have been her natural

protectors fall away from her, and even outside spectators like

Benedick waver and lean to the accuser's side; then it is Beatrice

alone who, unaffected even for an instant by the slander, indignantly

and passionately takes up her cause, and shows herself faithful,

high-minded, right-thinking, far-seeing, superior to them all--a pearl

of a woman.

By her side Shakespeare has placed Benedick, a Mercutio redivivus; a

youth who is the reverse of amatory, opposed to a maiden who is the

reverse of tender. He abhors betrothal and marriage quite as vehemently

as she, and is, from the man's point of view, no less scornful of all

sentimentality than she, from the woman's; so that he and she, from

the first, stand on a warlike footing with each other. In virtue of a

profound and masterly psychological observation, Shakespeare presently

makes these two fall suddenly in love with each other, over head and

ears, for no better reason than that their friends persuade Benedick

that Beatrice is secretly pining for love of him, and Beatrice that

Benedick is mortally enamoured of her, accompanying this information

with high-flown eulogies of both. Their thoughts were already occupied

with each other; and now the amatory fancy flames forth in both of

them all the more strongly, because it has so long been banked down.

And here, where everything was of his own invention and he could move

quite freely, Shakespeare has with delicate ingenuity brought the

pair together, not by means of empty words, but in a common cause,

Beatrice's first advance to Benedick taking place in the form of an

appeal to him for chivalrous intervention in behalf of her innocent

cousin.

The reversal in the mutual relations of Benedick and Beatrice is,

moreover, highly interesting in so far as it is probably the first

instance of anything like careful character-development which we

have as yet encountered in any single play of Shakespeare's. In the

earlier comedies there was nothing of the kind, and the chronicle-plays

afforded no opportunity for it. The characters had simply to be

brought into harmony with the given historical events, and in every

case Shakespeare held firmly to the character-scheme once laid down.

Neither _Richard III_. nor _Henry V_. presents any spiritual history;

both kings, in the plays which take their names from them, are one and

the same from first to last. Enough has already been said of Henry's

change of front with respect to Falstaff in _Henry IV_.; we need only

remark further that here the old play of _The Famous Victories_[1]

unmistakably pointed the way to Shakespeare. But this melting of all

that is hard and frozen in the natures of Benedick and Beatrice is

without a parallel in any earlier work, and is quite plainly executed

_con amore_. And the real substance of the play lies not in the plot

from which it takes its name, but in the relation between these two

characters, freely invented by Shakespeare,

Some other characters Shakespeare has added, and they are among the

most admirable of his comic creations: the peace-officer Dogberry,

and his subordinate Verges. Dogberry is a country constable, simple

as a child, and vain as a peacock--a well-meaning, timid, honest,

good-natured blockhead. To show that, in those days, such functionaries

were almost as helpless in real life as they are here represented,

Henrik Schück has cited a letter from Elizabeth's Prime Minister, Lord

Burghley, in which he relates how, in 1586, on a journey from London

into the county, he found at the gate of every town ten or twelve

persons armed with long poles. On inquiring, he learned that they

were stationed there to seize three young men, unknown. Asked what

description they had received of the malefactors, they replied that one

of them was said to have a crooked nose. "And have you no other mark to

recognise them by?" "No," was the answer. Moreover, they always stood

so openly in a body, that no criminal could fail to give them a wide

berth.

Dogberry is still less formidable than this detective force. Here are

the wise and wary instructions which he gives to his watchmen:--

"_Dogberry_. If you meet a thief, you may suspect him, by

virtue of your office, to be no true man; and, for such kind

of men, the less you meddle or make with them, why, the more

is for your honesty.

"2 _Watch_. If we know him to be a thief, shall we not lay

hands on him?

"_Dogb_. Truly, by your office you may; but, I think, they

that touch pitch will be defiled. The most peaceable way for

you, if you do take a thief, is, to let him show himself

what he is, and steal out of your company."

[1] In this play the king says:--

"Ah, Tom, your former life greeves me,

And makes me to abandon and abolish your company for ever,

And therefore not upon pain of death to approach my presence

By ten miles' space, then if I heare well of you,

It may be I will do somewhat for you."

In Shakespeare:--

"Till then I banish thee on pain of death

As I have done the rest of my misleaders,

Not to come near our person by ten mile.

For competence of life I will allow you."

XXVIII

_THE INTERVAL OF SERENITY--AS YOU LIKE IT--THE ROVING SPIRIT--THE

LONGING FOR NATURE--JAQUES AND SHAKESPEARE--THE PLAY A FEAST OF WIT_

Never had Shakespeare produced with such rapidity and ease as in this

bright and happy interval of two or three years. It is positively

astounding to note all that he accomplished in the year 1600, when

he stood, not exactly at the height of his poetical power, for that

steadily increased, but at the height of his poetical serenity. Among

the exquisite comedies he now writes, _As You Like It_ is one of the

most exquisite.

The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, along with _Much Ado

About Nothing_, on the 4th of August 1600, and must in all probability

have been written in that year. Meres does not mention it, in 1598, in

his list of Shakespeare's plays; it contains (as already noted, page

36) a quotation from Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_, published in 1598--

"Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?"

a quotation, by the way, which sums up the matter of the comedy; and we

find in Celia's words (i. 2), "Since the little wit that fools have was

silenced," an allusion to the public and judicial burning of satirical

publications which took place on the 1st of June 1599. As there does

not seem to be room in the year 1599 for more works than we have

already assigned to it, _As You Like It_ must be taken as dating from

the first half of the following year.

As usual, Shakespeare took from another poet the whole material of this

enchanting comedy. His contemporary, Thomas Lodge (who, after leaving

Oxford, became first a player and playwright in London, then a lawyer,

then a doctor and writer on medical subjects, until he died of the

plague in the year 1625), had in 1590 published a pastoral romance,

with many poems interspersed, entitled _Euphues golden Legacie, found

after his death in his Cell at Silexedra_,[1] which he had written,

as he sets forth in his Dedication to Lord Hunsdon, "to beguile the

time" on a voyage to the Canary Islands. The style is laboured and

exceedingly diffuse, a true pastoral style; but Lodge had that gift of mere

external invention in which Shakespeare, with all his powers, was so

deficient. All the different stories which the play contains or touches

upon are found in Lodge, and likewise all the characters, with the

exception of Jaques, Touchstone, and Audrey. Very remarkable to the

attentive reader is Shakespeare's uniform passivity with regard to

what he found in his sources, and his unwillingness to reject or alter

anything, combined as it is with the most intense intellectual activity

at the points upon which he concentrates his strength.

We find in _As You Like It_, as in Lodge, a wicked Duke who has

expelled his virtuous brother, the lawful ruler, from his domains.

The banished Duke, with his adherents, has taken refuge in the Forest

of Arden, where they live as free a life as Robin Hood and his merry

men, and where they are presently sought out by the Duke's daughter

Rosalind and her cousin Celia, the daughter of the usurper, who will

not let her banished friend wander forth alone. In the circle of

nobility subordinate to the princes, there is also a wicked brother,

Oliver, who seeks the life of his virtuous younger brother, Orlando,

a hero as modest and amiable as he is brave. He and Rosalind fall in

love with each other the moment they meet, and she makes sport with him

throughout the play, disguised as a boy. These scenes should probably

be acted as though he half recognised her. At last all ends happily.

The wicked Duke most conveniently repents; the wicked brother is all

of a sudden converted (quite without rhyme or reason) when Orlando,

whom he has persecuted, kills a lioness--a lioness in the Forest of

Arden!--which is about to spring upon him as he lies asleep. And the

caitiff is rewarded (no less unreasonably), either for his villainy or

for his conversion, with the hand of the lovely Celia.

This whole story is perfectly unimportant; Shakespeare, that is to

say, evidently cared very little about it. We have here no attempt at

a reproduction of reality, but one long festival of gaiety and wit, a

soulful wit that vibrates into feeling.

First and foremost, the play typifies Shakespeare's longing, the

longing of this great spirit, to get away from the unnatural city

life, away from the false and ungrateful city folk, intent on business

and on gain, away from flattery and falsehood and deceit, out into

the country, where simple manners still endure, where it is easier to

realise the dream of full freedom, and where the scent of the woods

is so sweet. There the babble of the brooks has a subtler eloquence

than any that is heard in cities; there the trees and even the stones

say more to the wanderer's heart than the houses and streets of the

capital; there he finds "good in everything."

The roving spirit has reawakened in his breast--the spirit which in

bygone days sent him wandering with his gun through Charlcote Park--and

out yonder in the lap of Nature, but in a remoter, richer Nature than that

which he has known, he dreams of a communion between the best and

ablest men, the fairest and most delicate women, in ideal fantastic

surroundings, far from the ugly clamours of a public career, and the

oppression of everyday cares. A life of hunting and song, and simple

repasts in the open air, accompanied with witty talk; and at the same

time a life full to the brim with the dreamy happiness of love. And

with this life, the creation of his roving spirit, his gaiety and his

longing for Nature, he animates a fantastic Forest of Arden.

But with this he is not content. He dreams out the dream, and feels

that even such an ideal and untrammelled life could not satisfy that

strange and unaccountable spirit lurking in the inmost depths of his

nature, which turns everything into food for melancholy and satire.

From this rib, then, taken from his own side, he creates the figure

of Jaques, unknown to the romance, and sets him wandering through his

pastoral comedy, lonely, retiring, self-absorbed, a misanthrope from

excess of tenderness, sensitiveness, and imagination.

Jaques is like the first light and brilliant pencil-sketch for Hamlet.

Taine, and others after him, have tried to draw a parallel between

Jaques and Alceste--of all Molière's creations, no doubt, the one who

contains most of his own nature. But there is no real analogy between

them. In Jaques everything wears the shimmering hues of wit and

fantasy, in Alceste everything is bitter earnest. Indignation is the

mainspring of Alceste's misanthropy. He is disgusted at the falsehood

around him, and outraged to see that the scoundrel with whom he is

at law, although despised by every one, is nevertheless everywhere

received with open arms. He declines to remain in bad company, even in

the hearts of his friends; therefore he withdraws from them. He loathes

two classes of people:

"Les uns parcequ'ils sont méchants et malfaisants,

Et les autres pour être aux méchants complaisants."

These are the accents of Timon of Athens, who hated the wicked for

their wickedness, and other men for not hating the wicked.

It is, then, in Shakespeare's Timon, of many years later, that we can

alone find an instructive parallel to Alceste. Alceste's nature is

keenly logical, classically French; it consists of sheer uncompromising

sincerity and pride, without sensibility and without melancholy.

The melancholy of Jaques is a poetic dreaminess. He is described to us

(ii. I) before we see him. The banished Duke has just been blessing

the adversity which drove him out into the forest, where he is exempt

from the dangers of the envious court. He is on the point of setting

forth to hunt, when he learns that the melancholy Jaques repines at the

cruelty of the chase, and calls him in that respect as great a usurper

as the brother who drove him from his dukedom. The courtiers have found

him stretched beneath an oak, and dissolved in pity for a poor wounded

stag which stood beside the brook, and "heaved forth such groans That

their discharge did stretch his leathern coat Almost to bursting."

Jaques, they continue, "moralised this spectacle into a thousand

similes:"--

"Then, being there alone,

Left and abandon'd of his velvet friends;

"'Tis right,' quoth he; 'thus misery doth part

The flux of company.' Anon, a careless herd,

Full of the pasture, jumps along by him,

And never stays to greet him. 'Ay,' quoth Jaques,

'Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens;

'Tis just the fashion: wherefore do you look

Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?"

His bitterness springs from a too tender sensibility, a sensibility

like that of Sakya Mouni before him, who made tenderness to animals

part of his religion, and like that of Shelley after him, who, in his

pantheism, realised the kinship between his own soul and that of the

brute creation.

Thus we are prepared for his entrance. He introduces himself into the

Duke's circle (ii. 7) with a glorification of the fool's motley. He has

encountered Touchstone in the forest, and is enraptured with him. The

motley fool lay basking in the sun, and when Jaques said to him, "Good

morrow, fool!" he answered, "Call me not fool till heaven have sent me

fortune." Then this sapient fool drew a dial from his pocket, and said

very wisely--

"'It is ten o'clock:

Thus may we see,' quoth he, I how the world wags:

'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,

And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,

And thereby hangs a tale.'"

"O noble fool!" Jaques exclaims with enthusiasm. "A worthy fool!

Motley's the only wear."

In moods of humorous melancholy, it must have seemed to Shakespeare as

though he himself were one of these jesters, who had the privilege of

uttering truths to great people and on the stage, if only they did not

blurt them out directly, but disguised them under a mask of folly. It

was in a similar mood that Heinrich Heine, centuries later, addressed

to the German people these words: "Ich bin dein Kunz von der Rosen,

dein Narr."

Therefore it is that Shakespeare makes Jaques exclaim--

"O, that I were a fool!

I am ambitious for a motley coat."

When the Duke answers, "Thou shalt have one," he declares that it is

the one thing he wants, and that the others must "weed their judgments"

of the opinion that he is wise:--

"I must have liberty

Withal, as large a charter as the wind,

To blow on whom I please; for so fools have:

And they that are most galled with my folly,

They most must laugh.

. . . . . . . .

Invest me in my motley: give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through

Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,

If they will patiently receive my medicine."

It is Shakespeare's own mood that we hear in these words. The voice is

his. The utterance is far too large for Jaques: he is only a mouthpiece

for the poet. Or let us say that his figure dilates in such passages as

this, and we see in him a Hamlet _avant la lettre_.

When the Duke, in answer to this outburst, denies Jaques' right to

chide and satirise others, since he has himself been "a libertine,

As sensual as the brutish sting itself," the poet evidently defends

himself in the reply which he places in the mouth of the melancholy

philosopher:--

"Why, who cries out on pride,

That can therein tax any private party?

Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea,

Till that the weary very means do ebb?

What woman in the city do I name,

When that I say, the city-woman bears

The cost of princes on unworthy shoulders?

Who can come in, and say that I mean her,

When such a one as she, such is her neighbour?"

This exactly anticipates Holberg's self-defence in the character of

Philemon in _The Fortunate Shipwreck_. The poet is evidently rebutting

a common prejudice against his art. And as he makes Jaques an advocate

for the freedom which poetry must claim, so also, he employs him as a

champion of the actor's misjudged calling, in placing in his mouth the

magnificent speech on the Seven Ages of Man. Alluding, no doubt, to the

motto of _Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem_, inscribed under the Hercules

as Atlas, which was the sign of the Globe Theatre, this speech opens

with the words:--

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts."

Ben Jonson is said to have inquired, in an epigram against the motto of

the Globe Theatre, where the spectators were to be found if all the men

and women were players? And an epigram attributed to Shakespeare gives

the simple answer that all are players and audience at one and the

same time. Jaques' survey of the life of man is admirably concise and

impressive. The last line--

"Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything "--

with its half French equivalent for "without," is imitated from the

_Henriade_ of the French poet Gamier, which was not translated, and

which Shakespeare must consequently have read in the original.

This same Jaques, who gives evidence of so wide an outlook over human

life, is in daily intercourse, as we have said, nervously misanthropic

and formidably witty. He is sick of polite society, pines for solitude,

takes leave of a pleasant companion with the words: "I thank you for

your company; but, good faith, I had as lief have been myself alone."

Yet we must not take his melancholy and his misanthropy too seriously.

His melancholy is a comedy-melancholy, his misanthropy is only the

humourist's craving to give free vent to his satirical inspirations.

And there is, as aforesaid, only a certain part of Shakespeare's inmost

nature in this Jaques, a Shakespeare of the future, a Hamlet in germ,

but not that Shakespeare who now bathes in the sunlight and lives in

uninterrupted prosperity, in growing favour with the many, and borne

aloft by the admiration and goodwill of the few. We must seek for this

Shakespeare in the interspersed songs, in the drollery of the fool, in

the lovers' rhapsodies, in the enchanting babble of the ladies. He is,

like Providence, everywhere and nowhere.

When Celia says (i. 2), "Let us sit and mock the good house-wife,

Fortune, from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed

equally," she strikes, as though with a tuning-fork, the keynote of the

comedy. The sluice is opened for that torrent of jocund wit, shimmering

with all the rainbows of fancy, which is now to rush seething and

swirling along.

The Fool is essential to the scheme: for the Fool's stupidity is the

grindstone of wit, and the Fool's wit is the touchstone of character.

Hence his name.

The ways of the real world, however, are not forgotten. The good make

enemies by their very goodness, and the words of the old servant Adam

(Shakespeare's own part) to his young master Orlando (ii. 3), sound

sadly enough:--

"Your praise is come too swiftly home before you.

Know you not, master, to some kind of men

Their graces serve them but as enemies?

No more do yours: your virtues, gentle master,

Are sanctified, and holy traitors to you.

O, what a world is this, when what is comely

Envenoms him that bears it!"

But soon the poet's eye is opened to a more consolatory

life-philosophy, combined with an unequivocal contempt for

school-philosophy. There seems to be a scoffing allusion to a book of

the time, which was full of the platitudes of celebrated philosophers,

in Touchstone's speech to William (v. I), "The heathen philosopher,

when he had desire to eat a grape, would open his lips when he put

it into his mouth, meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and

lips to open;" but no doubt there also lurks in this speech a certain

lack of respect for even the much-belauded wisdom of tradition. The

relativity of all things, at that time a new idea, is expounded with

lofty humour by the Fool in his answer to the question what he thinks

of this pastoral life (iii. 2):--

"Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself it is a good life,

but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught.

In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in

respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now, in

respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in

respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a

spare life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there

is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach.

Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?"

The shepherd's answer makes direct sport of philosophy, in the style of

Molière's gibe, when he accounts for the narcotic effect of opium by

explaining that the drug possesses a certain _facultas dormitativa:--_

"_Corin_. No more, but that I know, the more one sickens,

the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money,

means, and content, is without three good friends; that the

property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn; that good

pasture makes fat sheep, and that a great cause of the night

is lack of the sun....

"_Touchstone_. Such a one is a natural philosopher."

This sort of philosophy leads up, as it were, to Rosalind's sweet

gaiety and heavenly kindness.

The two cousins, Rosalind and Celia, seem at first glance like

variations of the two cousins, Beatrice and Hero, in the play

Shakespeare has just finished. Rosalind and Beatrice in particular

are akin in their victorious wit. Yet the difference between them is

very great; Shakespeare never repeats himself. The wit of Beatrice is

aggressive and challenging; we see, as it were, the gleam of a rapier

in it. Rosalind's wit is gaiety without a sting; the gleam in it is of

"that sweet radiance" which Oehlenschläger attributed to Freia; her

sportive nature masks the depth of her love. Beatrice can be brought

to love because she is a woman, and stands in no respect apart from

her sex; but she is not of an amatory nature. Rosalind is seized with

a passion for Orlando the instant she sets eyes on him. From the

moment of Beatrice's first appearance she is defiant and combative, in

the highest of spirits. We are introduced to Rosalind as a poor bird

with a drooping wing; her father is banished, she is bereft of her

birth-right, and is living on sufferance as companion to the usurper's

daughter, being, indeed, half a prisoner in the palace, where till

lately she reigned as princess. It is not until she has donned the

doublet and hose, appears in the likeness of a page, and wanders at her

own sweet will in the open air and the greenwood, that she recovers

her radiant humour, and roguish merriment flows from her lips like the

trilling of a bird.

Nor is the man she loves, like Benedick, an overweening gallant with

a sharp tongue and an unabashed bearing. This youth, though brave as

a hero and strong as an athlete, is a child in inexperience, and so

bashful in the presence of the woman who instantly captivates him, that

it is she who is the first to betray her sympathy for him, and has

even to take the chain from her own neck and hang it around his before

he can so much as muster up courage to hope for her love. So, too, we

find him passing his time in hanging poems to her upon the trees, and

carving the name of Rosalind in their bark. She amuses herself, in her

page's attire, by making herself his confidant, and pretending, as it

were in jest, to be his Rosalind. She cannot bring herself to confess

her passion, although she can think and talk (to Celia) of no one but

him, and although his delay of a few minutes in keeping tryst with

her sets her beside herself with impatience. She is as sensitive as

she is intelligent, in this differing from Portia, to whom, in other

respects, she bears some resemblance, though she lacks her persuasive

eloquence, and is, on the whole, more tender, more virginal. She faints

when Oliver, to excuse Orlando's delay, brings her a handkerchief

stained with his blood; yet has sufficient self-mastery to say with a

smile the moment she recovers, "I pray you tell your brother how well I

counterfeited." She is quite at her ease in her male attire, like Viola

and Imogen after her. The fact that female parts were played by youths

had, of course, something to do with the frequency of these disguises.

Here is a specimen of her wit (iii. 2). Orlando has evaded the page's

question what o'clock it is, alleging that there are no clocks in the

forest.

"_Rosalind_. Then, there is no true lover in the forest;

else sighing every minute, and groaning every hour, would

detect the lazy foot of Time as well as a clock.

"_Orlando_. And why not the swift foot of

Time? had not that been as proper?

"_Ros_. By no means, sir. Time travels in divers paces with

divers persons. I'll tell you, who Time ambles withal, who

Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he

stands still withal.

"_Orl_. I pr'ythee, who doth he trot withal?

"_Ros_. Marry, he trots hard with a young maid, between the

contract of her marriage, and the day it is solemnised: if

the interim be but a se'nnight, Time's pace is so hard that

it seems the length of seven years.

"_Orl_. Who ambles Time withal?

"_Ros_. With a priest that lacks Latin, and a rich man that

hath not the gout; for the one sleeps easily, because he

cannot study; and the other lives merrily, because he feels

no pain....

"_Orl_. Who doth he gallop withal?

"_Ros_. With a thief to the gallows; for though he go as

softly as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon there.

"_Orl_. Who stays it still withal?

"_Ros_. With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep between

term and term, and then they perceive not how Time moves."

She is unrivalled in vivacity and inventiveness. In every answer she

discovers gunpowder anew, and she knows how to use it to boot. She

explains that she had an old uncle who warned her against love and

women, and, from the vantage-ground of her doublet and hose, she

declares--

"I thank God, I am not a woman, to be touched with so many

giddy offences, as he hath generally taxed their whole sex

withal.

"_Orl_. Can you remember any of the principal evils that he

laid to the charge of women?

"_Ros_. There were none principal: they were all like

one another, as half-pence are; every one fault seeming

monstrous, till its fellow fault came to match it.

"_Orl_. I pr'ythee, recount some of them.

"_Ros_. No; I will not cast away my physic but on those that

are sick. There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses

our young plants with carving Rosalind on their barks;

hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles; all,

forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind: if I could meet

that fancy-monger, I would give him some good counsel, for

he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him."

Orlando admits that he is the culprit, and they are to meet daily that

she may exorcise his passion. She bids him woo her in jest, as though

she were indeed Rosalind, and answers (iv. I):

"_Ros_. Well, in her person, I say--I will not have you.

"_Orl_. Then, in mine own person, I die.

"_Ros_. No, 'faith, die by attorney. The poor world is

almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there

was not any man died in his own person, _videlicet_, in a

love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian

club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one

of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many

a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been

for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but

forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with

the cramp, was drowned, and the foolish chroniclers of that

age found it was--Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies:

men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them,

but not for love."

What Rosalind says of women in general applies to herself in

particular: you will never find her without an answer until you find

her without a tongue. And there is always a bright and merry fantasy in

her answers. She is literally radiant with youth, imagination, and the

joy of loving so passionately and being so passionately beloved. And it

is marvellous how thoroughly feminine is her wit. Too many of the witty

women in books written by men have a man's intelligence. Rosalind's wit

is tempered by feeling.

She has no monopoly of wit in this Arcadia of Arden. Every one in the

play is witty, even the so-called simpletons. It is a festival of wit.

At some points Shakespeare seems to have followed no stricter principle

than the simple one of making each interlocutor outbid the other in wit

(see, for example, the conversation between Touchstone and the country

wench whom he befools). The result is that the piece is bathed in a

sunshiny humour. And amid all the gay and airy wit-skirmishes, amid

the cooing love-duets of all the happy youths and maidens, the poet

intersperses the melancholy solos of his Jaques:--

"I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the

musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud;

nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is

politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all

these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,

extracted from many objects."

This is the melancholy which haunts the thinker and the great creative

artist; but in Shakespeare it as yet modulated with ease into the most

engaging and delightful merriment.

[1] Reprinted in Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library, ed. 1875, part i.

vol. ii.

XXIX

_CONSUMMATE SPIRITUAL HARMONY--TWELFTH NIGHT--JIBES AT PURITANISM--THE

LANGUISHING CHARACTERS--VIOLA'S INSINUATING GRACE--FAREWELL TO MIRTH_

If the reader would picture to himself Shakespeare's mood during this

short space of time at the end of the old century and beginning of

the new, let him recall some morning when he has awakened with the

sensation of complete physical well-being, not only feeling no definite

or indefinite pain or uneasiness, but with a positive consciousness

of happy activity in all his organs: when he drew his breath lightly,

his head was clear and free, his heart beat peacefully: when the mere

act of living was a delight: when the soul dwelt on happy moments

in the past and dreamed of joys to come. Recall such a moment, and

then conceive it intensified an hundredfold--conceive your memory,

imagination, observation, acuteness, and power of expression a hundred

times multiplied--and you may divine Shakespeare's prevailing mood in

those days, when the brighter and happier sides of his nature were

turned to the sun.

There are days when the sun seems to have put on a new and festal

splendour, when the air is like a caress to the cheek, and when the

glamour of the moonlight seems doubly sweet; days when men appear

manlier and wittier, women fairer and more delicate than usual, and

when those who are disagreeable and even odious to us appear, not

formidable, but ludicrous--so that we feel ourselves exalted above the

level of our daily life, emancipated and happy. Such days Shakespeare

was now passing through.

It is at this period, too, that he makes sport of his adversaries the

Puritans without bitterness, with exquisite humour. Even in _As You

Like It_ (iii. 2), we find a little allusion to them, where Rosalind

says, "O most gentle Jupiter!--what tedious homily of love have you

wearied your parishioners withal, and never cried, 'Have patience, good

people!'" In his next play, the typical, solemn, and self-righteous

Puritan is held up to ridicule in the Don Quixote-like personage of the

moralising and pompous Malvolio, who is launched upon a billowy sea of

burlesque situations. Of course the poet goes to work with the greatest

circumspection. Sir Toby has made some inquiry about Malvolio, to which

Maria answers (ii. 3):--

"_Maria_. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan.

"_Sir Andrew_. O! if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog.

"_Sir Toby_. What, for being a Puritan? thy exquisite

reason, dear knight?

"_Sir And_. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have

reason good enough.

"_Mar_. The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything

constantly but a time-pleaser; an affectioned ass, that cons

state without book, and utters it by great swarths."

Not otherwise does Molière expressly insist that Tartuffe is not a

clergyman, and Holberg that Jacob von Tyboe is not an officer.

A forged letter, purporting to be written by his noble mistress, is

made to fall into Malvolio's hands, in which she begs for his love, and

instructs him, as a sign of his affection towards her, always to smile,

and to wear cross-gartered yellow stockings. He "smiles his face into

more lines than are in the new map [of 1598] with the augmentation of

the Indies;" he wears his preposterous garters in the most preposterous

fashion. The conspirators pretend to think him mad, and treat him

accordingly. The Clown comes to visit him disguised in the cassock

of Sir Topas the curate. "Well," says the mock priest (not without

intention on the poet's part), when Maria gives him the gown, "I'll put

it on, and I will dissemble myself in't; and I would I were the first

that ever dissembled in such a gown."

It is to Malvolio, too, that the merry and mellow Sir Toby, amid the

applause of the Clown, addresses the taunt:--

"_Sir Toby_. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,

there shall be no more cakes and ale?

"_Clown_. Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i' the

mouth too."

In these words, which were one day to serve as a motto to Byron's _Don

Juan_, there lies a gay and daring declaration of rights.

_Twelfth Night, or What you Will_, must have been written in 1601,

for in the above-mentioned diary kept by John Manningham, of the

Middle Temple, we find this entry, under the date February 2, 1602:

"At our feast wee had a play called Twelve Night, or what you will,

much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus, but most

like and neere to that in Italian called _Inganni_. A good practise

in it to make the steward beleeve his lady widdowe was in love with

him," &c. That the play cannot have been written much earlier is

proved by the fact that the song, "Farewell, dear heart, since I must

needs be gone," which is sung by Sir Toby and the Clown (ii. 3), first

appeared in a song-book (_The Booke of Ayres_) published by Robert

Jones, London, 1601. Shakespeare has altered its wording very slightly.

In all probability _Twelfth Night_ was one of the four plays which

were performed before the court at Whitehall by the Lord Chamberlain's

company at Christmastide, 1601-2, and no doubt it was acted for the

first time on the evening from which it takes its name.

Among several Italian plays which bore the name of _Gl'Inganni_ there

is one by Curzio Gonzaga, published in Venice in 1592, in which a

sister dresses herself as her brother and takes the name of Cesare--in

Shakespeare, Cesario--and another, published in Venice in 1537, the

action of which bears a general resemblance to that of _Twelfth Night_.

In this play, too, passing mention is made of one "Malevolti," who may

have suggested to Shakespeare the name Malvolio.

The matter of the play is found in a novel of Bandello's, translated

in Belleforest's _Histoires Tragiques_; and also in Barnabe Rich's

translation of Cinthio's _Hecatomithi_, published in 1581, which

Shakespeare appears to have used. The whole comic part of the action,

and the characters of Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the

Clown, are of Shakespeare's own invention.

There occurs in Ben Jonson's _Every Man out of his Humour_ a speech

which seems very like an allusion to _Twelfth Night;_ but as Jonson's

play is of earlier date, the speech, if the allusion be not fanciful,

must have been inserted later.[1]

As was to be expected, _Twelfth Night_ became exceedingly popular. The

learned Leonard Digges, the translator of Claudian, enumerating in

his verses, "Upon Master William Shakespeare" (1640), the poet's most

popular characters, mentions only three from the comedies, and these

from _Much Ado_ and _Twelfth Night_. He says:--

"Let but _Beatrice_

And _Benedicke_ be seene, loe in a trice

The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full

To hear _Malvoglio_, that crosse garter'd Gull."

_Twelfth Night_ is perhaps the most graceful and harmonious comedy

Shakespeare ever wrote. It is certainly that in which all the notes the

poet strikes, the note of seriousness and of raillery, of passion, of

tenderness, and of laughter, blend in the richest and fullest concord.

It is like a symphony in which no strain can be dispensed with, or like

a picture veiled in a golden haze, into which all the colours resolve

themselves. The play does not overflow with wit and gaiety like its

predecessor; we feel that Shakespeare's joy of life has culminated and

is about to pass over into melancholy; but there is far more unity in

it than in _As You Like It_, and it is a great deal more dramatic.

A. W. Schlegel long ago made the penetrating observation that, in the

opening speech of the comedy, Shakespeare reminds us how the same word,

"fancy," was applied in his day both to love and to fancy in the modern

sense of the term; whence the critic argued, not without ingenuity,

that love, regarded as an affair of the imagination rather than of the

heart, is the fundamental theme running through all the variations of

the play. Others have since sought to prove that capricious fantasy is

the fundamental trait in the physiognomy of all the characters. Tieck

has compared the play to a great iridescent butterfly, fluttering

through pure blue air, and soaring in its golden glory from the

many-coloured flowers into the sunshine.

Twelfth Night, in Shakespeare's time, brought the Christmas festivities

of the upper classes to an end; among the common people they usually

lasted until Candlemas. On Twelfth Night all sorts of sports took

place. The one who chanced to find a bean baked into a cake was hailed

as the Bean King, chose himself a Bean Queen, introduced a reign of

unbridled frivolity, and issued whimsical commands, which had to be

punctually obeyed. Ulrici has sought to discover in this an indication

that the play represents a sort of lottery, in which Sebastian, the

Duke, and Maria chance to win the great prize. The bibulous Sir Toby,

however, can scarcely be regarded as a particularly desirable prize for

Maria; and the second title of the play, _What you Will_, indicates

that Shakespeare did not lay any stress upon the _Twelfth Night_.

This comedy is connected by certain filaments with its predecessor,

_As You Like It_. The passion which Viola, in her male attire, awakens

in Olivia, reminds us of that with which Rosalind inspires Phebe.

But the motive is quite differently handled. While Rosalind gaily

and unfeelingly repudiates Phebe's burning love, Viola is full of

tender compassion for the lady whom her disguise has led astray. In

the admirably worked-up confusion between Viola and her twin brother

Sebastian, an effect from the _Comedy of Errors_ is repeated; but the

different circumstances and method of treatment make this motive also

practically new.

With a careful and even affectionate hand, Shakespeare has elaborated

each one of the many characters in the play.

The amiable and gentle Duke languishes, sentimental and fancy-sick,

in hopeless enamourment. He is devoted to the fair Countess Olivia,

who will have nothing to say to him, and whom he none the less

besieges with his suit. An ardent lover of music, he turns to it for

consolation; and among the songs sung to him by the Clown and others,

there occurs the delicate little poem, of wonderful rhythmic beauty,

"Come away, come away, death." It exactly expresses the soft and

melting mood in which his days pass, lapped in a nerveless melancholy.

To the melody abiding in it we may apply the lovely words spoken by

Viola of the melody which preludes it:--

"It gives a very echo to the seat

Where love is throned."

In his fruitless passion, the Duke has become nervous and excitable,

inclined to violent self-contradictions. In one and the same scene (ii.

4) he first says that man's love is

"More giddy and unfirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn"

than woman's; and then, a little further on, he says of his own love--

"There is no woman's sides

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart

So big to hold so much: they lack retention."

The Countess Olivia forms a pendant to the Duke; she, like him, is

full of yearning melancholy. With an ostentatious exaggeration of

sisterly love, she has vowed to pass seven whole years veiled like a

nun, consecrating her whole life to sorrow for her dead brother. Yet we

find in her speeches no trace of this devouring sorrow; she jests with

her household, and rules it ably and well, until, at the first sight of

the disguised Viola, she flames out into passion, and, careless of the

traditional reserve of her sex, takes the most daring steps to win the

supposed youth. She is conceived as an unbalanced character, who passes

at a bound from exaggerated hatred for all worldly things to total

forgetfulness of her never-to-be-forgotten sorrow. Yet she is not comic

like Phebe; for Shakespeare has indicated that it is the Sebastian

type, foreshadowed in the disguised Viola, which is irresistible to

her; and Sebastian, we see, at once requites the love which his sister

had to reject. Her utterance of her passion, moreover, is always

poetically beautiful.

Yet while she is sighing in vain for Viola, she necessarily appears as

though seized with a mild erotic madness, similar to that of the Duke:

and the folly of each is parodied in a witty and delightful fashion

by Malvolio's entirely ludicrous love for his mistress, and vain

confidence that she returns it. Olivia feels and says this herself,

where she exclaims (iii. 4)--

"Go call him hither.--I am as mad as he

If sad and merry madness equal be."

Malvolio's figure is drawn in very few strokes, but with incomparable

certainty of touch. He is unforgetable in his turkey-like pomposity,

and the heartless practical joke which is played off upon him is

developed with the richest comic effect. The inimitable love-letter,

which Maria indites to him in a handwriting like that of the Countess,

brings to light all the lurking vanity in his nature, and makes

his self-esteem, which was patent enough before, assume the most

extravagant forms. The scene in which he approaches Olivia, and

triumphantly quotes the expressions in the letter, "yellow stockings,"

and "cross-gartered," while every word confirms her in the belief that

he is mad, is one of the most effective on the comic stage. Still more

irresistible is the scene (iv. 2) in which Malvolio is imprisoned as a

madman in a dark room, while the Clown outside now assumes the voice

of the Curate, and seeks to exorcise the devil in him, and again, in

his own voice, converses with the supposed Curate, sings songs, and

promises Malvolio to carry messages for him. We have here a comic _jeu

de théâtre_ of the first order.

In harmony with the general tone of the play, the Clown is less witty

and more musical than Touchstone in _As You Like It._ He is keenly

alive to the dignity of his calling: "Foolery, sir, does walk about

the orb like the sun: it shines everywhere." He has many delightful

sayings, as for example, "Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage,"

or the following demonstration (v. I) that one is the better for one's

foes, and the worse for one's friends:--

"Marry, sir, my friends praise me, and make an ass of me; now, my

foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir, I profit

in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused: so that,

conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two

affirmatives, why then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my

foes."

Shakespeare even departs from his usual practice, and, as though to

guard against any misunderstanding on the part of his public, makes

Viola expound quite dogmatically that it "craves a kind of wit" to play

the fool (iii. I):--

"He must observe their mood on whom he jests,

The quality of persons, and the time,

And, like the haggard, check at every feather

That comes before his eye. This is a practice

As full of labour as a wise man's art."

The Clown forms a sort of connecting-link between the serious

characters and the exclusively comic figures of the play--the pair of

knights, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who are entirely

of Shakespeare's own invention. They are sharply contrasted. Sir

Toby, sanguine, red-nosed, burly, a practical joker, always ready

for "a hair of the dog that bit him," a figure after the style of

Bellman;[2] Sir Andrew, pale as though with the ague, with thin, smooth,

straw-coloured hair, a wretched little nincompoop, who values himself

on his dancing and fencing, quarrelsome and chicken-hearted, boastful

and timid in the same breath, and grotesque in his every movement. He

is a mere echo and shadow of the heroes of his admiration, born to be

the sport of his associates, their puppet, and their butt; and while

he is so brainless as to think it possible he may win the love of the

beautiful Olivia, he has at the same time an inward suspicion of his

own stupidity which now and then comes in refreshingly: "Methinks

sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian or an ordinary man has;

but I am a great eater of beef, and, I believe, that does harm to my

wit" (i. 3). He does not understand the simplest phrase he hears, and

is such a mere reflex and parrot that "I too" is, as it were, the

watchword of his existence. Shakespeare has immortalised him once for

all in his reply when Sir Toby boasts that Maria adores him (ii. 3), "I

was adored once too." Sir Toby sums him up in the phrase:

"For Andrew, if he were opened, and you find so much blood in his liver

as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the rest of the anatomy."

The central character in _Twelfth Night_ is Viola, of whom her brother

does not say a word too much when, thinking that she has been drowned,

he exclaims, "She bore a mind that envy could not but call fair."

Shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, her first wish is to enter

the service of the young Countess; but learning that Olivia is

inaccessible, she determines to dress as a page (a eunuch) and approach

the young unmarried Duke, of whom she has heard her father speak with

warmth. He at once makes the deepest impression upon her heart, but

being ignorant of her sex, does not dream of what is passing within

her; so that she is perpetually placed in the painful position of being

employed as a messenger from the man she loves to another woman. She

gives utterance to her love in carefully disguised and touching words

(ii. 4):--

"My father had a daughter lov'd a man,

As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship.

_Duke_. And what's her history?

_Vio_. A blank, my lord. She never told her love,--

But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,

Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in thought:

And, with a green and yellow melancholy,

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief."

But the passion which possesses her makes her a more eloquent messenger

of love than she designs to be. To Olivia's question as to what she

would do if she loved her as her master does, she answers (i. 5):--

"Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon my soul within the house;

Write loyal cantons of contemned love,

And sing them loud even in the dead of night;

Holla your name to the reverberate hills,

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out, Olivia! O! you should not rest

Between the elements of air and earth,

But you should pity me."

In short, if she were a man, she would display all the energy which the

Duke lacks. No wonder that, against her own will, she awakens Olivia's

love. She herself, as a woman, is condemned to passivity; her love

is wordless, deep, and patient. In spite of her sound understanding,

she is a creature of emotion. It is a very characteristic touch

when, in the scene (iii. 5) where Antonio, taking her for Sebastian,

recalls the services he has rendered, and begs for assistance in his

need, she exclaims that there is nothing, not even "lying vainness,

babbling drunkenness, or any taint of vice," that she hates so much

as ingratitude. However bright her intelligence, her soul from first

to last outshines it. Her incognito, which does not bring her joy as

it does to Rosalind, but only trouble and sorrow, conceals the most

delicate womanliness. She never, like Rosalind or Beatrice, utters an

audacious or wanton word. Her heart-winning charm more than makes up

for the high spirits and sparkling humour of the earlier heroines. She

is healthful and beautiful, like these her somewhat elder sisters;

and she has also their humorous eloquence, as she proves in her first

scene with Olivia. Yet there rests upon her lovely figure a tinge of

melancholy. She is an impersonation of that "farewell to mirth" which

an able English critic discerns in this last comedy of Shakespeare's

brightest years.[3]

[1] There is some (ironic) discussion of a possible criticism

that might be brought against a playwright: "That the argument of his

comedy might have been of some other nature, as of a duke to be in love

with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke's son,

and the son to love the lady's waiting-maid; some such cross wooing,

with a clown to their serving-man...."

[2] See the footnote 7 in chapter XXII:

"A dance of all the gods upon Olympus,

With fauns and graces and the muses twined."

From a poem by Tegnér on Bellman, the Swedish convivial lyrist.

[3] "It is in some sort a farewell to mirth, and the mirth

is of the finest quality, an incomparable ending. Shakespeare

has done greater things, but he has never done anything more

delightful."--_Arthur Symons._

XXX

_THE REVOLUTION IN SHAKESPEARE'S SOUL--THE GROWING MELANCHOLY OF THE

FOLLOWING PERIOD--PESSIMISM, MISANTHROPY_

For the time is now approaching when mirth, and even the joy of life,

are extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds have massed themselves

on his mental horizon--their nature we can only divine--and gnawing

sorrows and disappointments have beset him. We see his melancholy

growing and extending; we observe its changing expressions, without

knowing its causes. This only we know, that the stage which he

contemplates with his mind's eye, like the material stage on which he

works, is now hung with black. A veil of melancholy descends over both.

He no longer writes comedies, but sends a train of gloomy tragedies

across the boards which so lately echoed to the laughter of Beatrice

and Rosalind.

From this point, for a certain period, all his impressions of life and

humanity become ever more and more painful. We can see in his Sonnets

how even in earlier and happier years a restless passionateness had

been constantly at war with the serenity of his soul, and we can note

how, at this time also, he was subject to accesses of stormy and

vehement unrest. As time goes on, we can discern in the series of his

dramas how not only what he saw in public and political life, but also

his private experience, began to inspire him, partly with a burning

compassion for humanity, partly with a horror of mankind as a breed of

noxious wild animals, partly, too, with loathing for the stupidity,

falsity, and baseness of his fellow-creatures. These feelings gradually

crystallise into a large and lofty contempt for humanity, until, after

a space of eight years, another revolution occurs in his prevailing

mood. The extinguished sun glows forth afresh, the black heaven

has become blue again, and the kindly interest in everything human

has returned. He attains peace at last in a sublime and melancholy

clearness of vision. Bright moods, sunny dreams from the days of

his youth, return upon him, bringing with them, if not laughter, at

least smiles. High-spirited gaiety has for ever vanished; but his

imagination, feeling itself less constrained than of old by the laws

of reality, moves lightly and at ease, though a deep earnestness now

underlies it, and much experience of life.

But this inward emancipation from the burthen of earthly life does not

occur, as we have said, until about eight years after the point which

we have now reached.

For a little time longer the strong and genial joy of life is still

dominant in his mind. Then it begins to darken, and, after a short

tropical twilight, there is night in his soul and in all his works.

In the tragedy of _Julius Cæsar_ there still reigns only a manly

seriousness. The theme seems to have attracted him on account

of the analogy between the conspiracy against Cæsar and the

conspiracy against Elizabeth. Despite the foolish precipitancy of

their action, the leaders of this conspiracy, men like Essex and

his comrade Southampton, had Shakespeare's full personal sympathy;

and he transferred some of that sympathy to Brutus and Cassius. He

created Brutus under the deeply-imprinted conviction that unpractical

magnanimity, like that of his noble friends, is unfitted to play an

effective part in the drama of history, and that errors of policy

revenge themselves at least as sternly as moral delinquencies.

In _Hamlet_ Shakespeare's growing melancholy and bitterness take the

upper hand. For the hero, as for the poet, youth's bright outlook upon

life has been overclouded. Hamlet's belief and trust in mankind have

gone to wreck. Under the disguise of apparent madness, the melancholy

life-lore which Shakespeare, at his fortieth year, had stored up within

him, here finds expression in words of spiritual profundity such as had

not yet been thought or uttered in Northern Europe.

We catch a glimpse at this point of one of the subsidiary causes of

Shakespeare's melancholy. As actor and playwright he stands in a more

and more strained relation to the continually growing Free Church

movement of the age, to Puritanism, which he comes to regard as

nothing but narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy. It was the deadly enemy

of his calling; it secured, even in his lifetime, the prohibition of

theatrical performances in the provinces, a prohibition which after his

death was extended to the capital. From _Twelfth Night_ onwards, an

unremitting war against Puritanism, conceived as hypocrisy, is carried

on through _Hamlet,_ through the revised version of _All's Well that

Ends Well_, and through _Measure for Measure_, in which his wrath

rises to a tempestuous pitch, and creates a figure to which Molière's

Tartuffe can alone supply a parallel.

What struck him so forcibly in these years was the pitifulness of

earthly life, exposed as it is to disasters, not allotted by destiny,

but brought about by a conjunction of stupidity with malevolence.

It is especially the power of malevolence that now looms large before

his eyes. We see this in Hamlet's astonishment that it is possible for a

man "to smile and smile and be a villain." Still more strongly is it

apparent in _Measure for Measure_ (v. I):--

"Make not impossible

That which but seems unlike. 'Tis not impossible,

But one, the wicked'st caitiff on the ground,

May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,

As Angelo; even so may Angelo,

In all his dressings, characts, titles, forms,

Be an arch-villain."

It is this line of thought that leads to the conception of Iago,

Goneril, and Regan, and to the wild outbursts of Timon of Athens.

_Macbeth_ is Shakespeare's first attempt, after _Hamlet_, to explain

the tragedy of life as a product of brutality and wickedness in

conjunction--that is, of brutality multiplied and raised to the

highest power by wickedness. Lady Macbeth poisons her husband's mind.

Wickedness instils drops of venom into brutality, which, in its inward

essence, may be either weakness, or brave savagery, or stupidity

of manifold kinds. Whereupon brutality falls a-raving, and becomes

terrible to itself and others.

The same formula expresses the relation between Othello and Iago.

_Othello_ was a monograph. _Lear_ is a world-picture. Shakespeare turns

from _Othello_ to _Lear_ in virtue of the artist's need to supplement

himself, to follow up every creation with its counterpart or foil.

_Lear_ is the greatest problem Shakespeare had yet proposed to himself,

all the agonies and horrors of the world compressed into five short

acts. The impression of _Lear_ may be summed up in the words: a

world-catastrophe. Shakespeare is no longer minded to depict anything

else. What is echoing in his ears, what is filling his mind, is the

crash of a ruining world.

This becomes even clearer in his next play, _Antony and Cleopatra._

This subject enabled him to set new words to the music within him.

In the history of Mark Antony he saw the deep downfall of the old

world-republic--the might of Rome, austere and rigorous, collapsing at

the touch of Eastern luxury.

By the time Shakespeare had written _Antony and Cleopatra,_ his

melancholy had deepened into pessimism. Contempt becomes his abiding

mood, an all-embracing scorn for mankind, which impregnates every drop

of blood in his veins, but a potent and creative scorn, which hurls

forth thunderbolt after thunderbolt. _Troilus and Cressida_ strikes at

the relation of the sexes, _Coriolanus_ at political life; until all

that, in these years, Shakespeare has endured and experienced, thought

and suffered, is concentrated into the one great despairing figure of

Timon of Athens, "misanthropos," whose savage rhetoric is like a dark

secretion of clotted blood and gall, drawn off to assuage pain.

BOOK SECOND

I

_INTRODUCTION--THE ENGLAND OF ELIZABETH IN SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH_

Everything had flourished in the England of Elizabeth while Shakespeare

was young. The sense of belonging to a people which, with great

memories and achievements behind it, was now making a decisive and

irresistible new departure--the consciousness of living in an age when

the glorious culture of antiquity was being resuscitated, and when

great personalities were vindicating for England a lofty and assured

position, alike in the practical and in the intellectual departments

of life--these feelings mingled in his breast with the vernal glow of

youth itself. He saw the star of his fatherland ascending, with his own

star in its train.

It seemed to him as though men and women had in that day richer

abilities, a more daring spirit, and fuller powers of enjoyment than

they had possessed in former times. They had more fire in their blood,

more insatiable longings, a keener appetite for adventure, than the

men and women of the past. They knew how to rule with courage and

wisdom, like the Queen and Lord Burghley; how to live nobly and fight

gloriously, to love with passion and sing with enthusiasm, like the

beautiful hero of the younger generation, Sir Philip Sidney, who found

an early Achilles-death. They were bent on enjoying existence with all

their senses, comprehending it with all their powers, revelling in

wealth and splendour, in beauty and wit; or they set forth to voyage

round the world, to see its marvels, conquer its treasures, give their

names to new countries, and display the flag of England on unknown seas.

Statesmanship and generalship were represented among them by the men

who, in these years, had humbled Spain, rescued Holland, held Scotland

in awe. They were sound and vigorous natures. Although they all had the

literary proclivities of the Renaissance, they were before everything

practical men, keen observers of the signs of the times, firm and wary

in adversity, in prosperity prudent and temperate.

Shakespeare had seen Spenser's faithful friend, Sir Walter Raleigh,

next to himself and Francis Bacon the most brilliant and interesting

Englishman of his day, after covering himself with renown as a soldier,

a viking, and a discoverer, win the favour of Elizabeth as a courtier,

and the admiration of the people as a hero and poet. Shakespeare no

doubt laid to heart these lines in his elegy on Sidney:--

"England doth hold thy limbs, that bred the same;

Flanders thy valour, where it last was tried;

The camp thy sorrow, where thy body died:

Thy friends thy want; the world thy virtues' fame."

For Raleigh, too, was a poet, as well as an orator and historian.

"We picture him to ourselves," says Macaulay, "sometimes reviewing

the Queen's guard, sometimes giving chase to a Spanish galleon, then

answering the chiefs of the country party in the House of Commons, then

again murmuring one of his sweet lovesongs too near the ears of her

Highness's maids of honour, and soon after poring over the Talmud, or

collating Polybius with Livy."[1]

And Shakespeare had seen the young Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who

in 1577, when only ten years old, had made a sensation at court by

wearing his hat in the Queen's presence and denying her request for

a kiss; at the age of eighteen win renown for himself as a cavalry

general under Leicester in the Netherlands, and at the age of twenty

depose Raleigh from the highest place in Elizabeth's favour. He

played "cards or one game or another with her ... till birds' sing

in the morning." She shut herself up with him in the daytime, while

the Venetian and French ambassadors, who had already learnt to wait

at locked doors in the time of his step-father, Leicester, jested

with each other in the anteroom as to whether mounting guard in this

fashion ought to be called _tener la mula_ or _tenir la chandelle_.

And Essex demanded that Raleigh should be sacrificed to his youthful

devotion. As captain of the guard, Raleigh had to stand at the door

with a drawn sword, in his brown and orange uniform, while the handsome

youth whispered to the spinster Queen of fifty-four things which set

her heart beating. He made all the mischief he could between her and

Raleigh. She assured him that he had no reason to "disdain" a man like

that. But Essex asked her--so he himself writes--"Whether he could have

comfort to give himself over to the service of a mistress that was in

awe of such a man;" "and," he continues, "I think he, standing at the

door, might very well hear the worst I spoke of him."

This impetuosity characterised Essex throughout his career; but he

soon developed great qualities, of which his first appearances gave no

promise; and when Shakespeare made his acquaintance, probably in the

year 1590, his personality must have been extremely winning. Himself a

poet, he no doubt knew how to value _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and

its author. In all probability, Shakespeare even at this time found

a protector in the young nobleman, and afterwards made acquaintance

through him with his kinsman Southampton, six years younger than

himself. Essex had already distinguished himself as a soldier. In May

1589 he had been the first Englishman to wade ashore upon the coast

of Portugal, and in the lines before Lisbon he had challenged any

of the Spanish garrison to single combat in honour of his queen and

mistress. In July 1591 he joined the standard of Henry of Navarre with

an auxiliary force of 4000 men; he shared all the hardships of the

common soldiers; during the siege of Rouen he challenged the leader

of the enemy's forces to single combat; and then by his incapacity he

dissipated all the results of the campaign. His army melted away to

almost nothing.

He was at home during the following years, when Shakespeare probably

came to know him well, and to appreciate his chivalrous nature, his

courage and talent, his love of poetry and science, and his helpfulness

towards men of ability, such as Francis Bacon and others. He therefore,

no doubt, followed with more than the ordinary patriotic interest the

expedition of the English fleet to Cadiz in 1596, in which the two old

antagonists, Raleigh and Essex, were to fight side by side. Raleigh

here won a brilliant victory over the great galleons of the Spanish

fleet, burning them all except two, which he captured; while on the

following day, when a severe wound in the leg prevented Raleigh from

taking part in the action, Essex, at the head of his troops, stormed

and sacked the town of Cadiz. In his despatches to Elizabeth, Raleigh

praised Essex for this exploit. He became the hero of the day; his name

was in every mouth, and he was even eulogised from the pulpit of St.

Paul's.

It was indeed a great age. England's world-wide power was founded at

the expense of defeated and humiliated Spain; England's world-wide

commerce and industry came into existence. Before Elizabeth came to

the throne, Antwerp had been the metropolis of commerce; during her

reign, London took that position. The London Exchange was opened in

1571; and twenty years later, English merchants all the world over had

appropriated to themselves the commerce which had formerly been almost

entirely in the hands of the Hanseatic Towns. London urchins hung about

the wharves of the Thames, listening to the marvels related by seamen

who had made the voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to Hindostan.

Sunburnt, scarred, and bearded men haunted the taverns; they had

crossed the ocean, lived in the Bermuda Islands, and brought negroes

and Red Indians and great monkeys home with them. They told tales

of the golden Eldorado, and of real and imaginary perils in distant

quarters of the globe.

This peaceful development of commerce and industry had taken place

simultaneously with the development of naval and military power. And

the scientific and poetical culture of England advanced with equal

strides. While mariners had brought home tidings of many an unknown

shore, scholars also had made voyages of discovery in Greek and Roman

letters; and while they praised and translated authors unheard of

before, dilettanti brought forward and interpreted Italian and Spanish

poets who served as models of invention and delicacy. The world, which

had hitherto been a little place, had suddenly grown vast; the horizon,

which had been narrow, widened out all of a sudden, and every mind was

filled with hopes for the days to come.

It had been a vernal season, and it was a vernal mood that had uttered

itself in the songs of the many poets. In our days, when the English

language is read by hundreds of millions, the poets of England may be

quickly counted. In those days the country possessed something like

three hundred lyric and dramatic poets, who, with potent productivity,

wrote for a reading public no larger than that of Denmark to-day;

for of the six millions of the population, four millions could not

read. But the talent for writing verses was as widespread among the

Englishmen of that time as the talent for playing the piano among

German ladies of to-day. The power of action and the gift of song did

not exclude each other.

But the blossoming springtide had been short, as springtide always is.

[1] Macaulay, _Essays_--"Burleigh and his Times."

II

_ELIZABETH'S OLD AGE_

At the dawn of the new century the national mood had already altered.

Elizabeth herself was no longer the same. There had always been a dark

side to her nature, but it had passed almost unnoticed in the splendour

which national prosperity, distinguished men, great achievements and

fortunate events had shed around her person. Now things were changed.

She had always been excessively vain; but her coquettish pretences to

youth and beauty reached their height after her sixtieth year. We have

seen how, when she was sixty, Raleigh, from his prison, addressed a

letter to Sir Robert Cecil, intended for her eyes, in which he sought

to regain her favour by comparing her to Venus and Diana. When she was

sixty-seven, Essex's sister, in a supplication for her brother's life,

wrote of that brother's devotion to "her beauties," which did not merit

so hard a punishment, and of her "excellent beauties and perfections,"

which "ought to feel more compassion." In the same year the Queen took

part, masked, in a dance at Lord Herbert's marriage; and she always

looked for expressions of flattering astonishment at the youthfulness

of her appearance.

When she was sixty-eight, Lord Mountjoy wrote to her of her "faire

eyes," and begged permission to "fill his eyes with their onely deere

and desired object." This was the style which every one had to adopt

who should have the least prospect of gaining, preserving, or regaining

her favour.

In 1601 Lord Pembroke, then twenty-one years old, writes to Cecil (or,

in other words, to Elizabeth, in her sixty-eighth year) imploring

permission once more to approach the Queen, "whose incomparable beauty

was the onely sonne of my little world."

When Sir Roger Aston, about this time, was despatched with letters

from James of Scotland to the Queen, he was not allowed to deliver

them in person, but was introduced into an ante-chamber from which,

through open door-curtains, he could see Elizabeth dancing alone to

the music of a little violin,--the object being that he should tell

his master how youthful she still was, and how small the likelihood

of his succeeding to her crown for many a long day.[1] One can readily

understand, then, how she stormed with wrath when Bishop Rudd, so early

as 1596, quoted in a sermon Kohélet's verses as to the pains of age,

with unmistakable reference to her.

She was bent on being flattered without ceasing and obeyed without

demur. In her lust of rule, she knew no greater pleasure than when one

of her favourites made a suggestion opposed to one of hers, and then

abandoned it. Leicester had employed this means of confirming himself

in her favour, and had bequeathed it to his successors. So strong was

her craving to enjoy incessantly the sensation of her autocracy, that

she would intrigue to set her courtiers up in arms against each other,

and would favour first one group and then the other, taking pleasure

in their feuds and cabals. In her later years her court was one of the

most corrupt in the world. The only means of prospering in it were

those set forth in Roger Ascham's distich:

"Cog, lie, flatter and face

Four ways in court, to win men grace."

The two main parties were those of Cecil and Essex. Whoever gained the

favour of one of these great lords, be his merits what they might, was

opposed by the other party with every weapon in their power.

In some respects, however, Elizabeth in her later years had made

progress in the art of government. So weak had been her faith in the

warlike capabilities of her country, and so potent, on the other hand,

her avarice, that she had neglected to make preparation for the war

with Spain, and had left her gallant seamen inadequately equipped; but

after the victory over the Spanish Armada she ungrudgingly devoted

all the resources of her treasury to the war, which survived her and

extended well into the following century. This war had forced Elizabeth

to take a side in the internal religious dissensions of the country.

She was the head of the Church, regarded ecclesiastical affairs as

subject to her personal control, and, so far as she was able, would

suffer no discussion of religious questions in the House of Commons.

Like her contemporary Henri Quatre of France, she was in her heart

entirely indifferent to religion, had a certain general belief in God,

but thought all dogmas mere cobwebs of the brain, and held one rite

neither better nor worse than another. They both regarded religious

differences exclusively from the political point of view. Henry ended

by becoming a Catholic and assuring his former co-religionists freedom

of conscience. Elizabeth was of necessity a Protestant, but tolerance

was an unknown doctrine in England. It was an established principle that

every subject must accept the religion of the State.

Authoritarian to her inmost fibre, Elizabeth had a strong bent

towards Catholicism. The circumstances of her life had placed her in

opposition to the Papal power, but she was fond of describing herself

to foreign ambassadors as a Catholic in all points except subjection

to the Pope. She did not even make any secret of her contempt for

Protestantism, whose head she was, and whose support she could not for

a moment dispense with. She felt it a humiliation to be regarded as a

co-religionist of the French, Scotch, or Dutch heretics. She looked

down upon the Anglican Bishops whom she had herself appointed, and

they, in their worldliness, deserved her scorn. But still deeper was

her detestation of all sectarianism within the limits of her Church,

and especially of Puritanism in all its forms. If she did not in the

first years of her reign indulge in open persecution of the Puritans,

it was only because she was as yet dependent on their support; but as

soon as she felt herself firmly seated on her throne, she established,

in spite of the stiff-necked opposition of Parliament, the jurisdiction

of the Bishops on all matters of ecclesiastical politics, and suffered

Puritan writers to be condemned to death or lifelong imprisonment for

free but quite innocent expressions of opinion regarding the relation

of the State to religion.

Her greatness had mainly reposed upon the insight she had shown in the

choice of her counsellors and commanders. But the most distinguished

of those who had shed glory on her throne died one after the other in

the last decade of the century. The first to die was Walsingham, one

of her most disinterested servants, whom she had repaid with black

ingratitude. He had done her great and loyal services, and had saved

her life at the time of the last conspiracy, which led to the execution

of Mary Stuart. Then she lost such notable members of her Council as

Lord Hunsdon and Sir Francis Knowles; then Lord Burghley himself, the

true ruler of England during her reign; and finally, Sir Francis Drake,

the great naval hero of the war with Spain. She felt herself lonely and

deserted. She no longer took any pleasure in the position of power to

which England had attained under her rule. In spite of all she could

do to conceal it, she began to feel the oppression of age, and to

see how little real affection those men felt for her who were always

posing in the light of adorers. She was the last of her line, and the

thought of her successor was so intolerable to her, that she deferred

his final nomination until she lay on her death-bed. But it availed her

nothing; she knew very well that her ministers and courtiers, during

the last years of her life, were in constant and secret communication

with James of Scotland. They would kneel in the dust as she passed

with exclamations of enchantment at her youthful appearance, and then

rise, brush the dust from their knees, and write to James that the

Queen looked ghastly and could not possibly last long. They did all

they possibly could to conceal from her their Scotch intrigues; but she

divined what went on behind her back, even if she did not realise the

extent to which it was carried, or know definitely which of her most

trusted servants were shrinking from nothing that could assure them the

favour of James. For example, she did not suspect Robert Cecil of the

double game he was carrying on, at the very time when he was doing his

best to drive Essex to desperation and secure his punishment for an

act of disobedience scarcely more heinous in the Queen's eyes than his

own underhand dealings. But she felt herself isolated in the midst of

a crowd of courtiers impatiently awaiting the new era that was to dawn

after her death. She realised that the men who still flattered her had

never been attached to her for her own sake, and she specially resented

the fact that they no longer seemed even to fear her.

One result of this deep dejection was that she gave her tyrannical

tendencies a freer course than before, and became less and less

inclined to forbearance or mercy towards those who had once been dear

to her but had fallen into disgrace.

She had always taken it very ill when one of her favourites showed

any inclination towards matrimony, and they had therefore always been

forced to marry secretly, though that did not in the end save them from

her displeasure. Now her despotism rose to such a pitch that she wanted

to control the marriages even of those courtiers who had never enjoyed

her favour.

One of the things which Shakespeare doubtless took most to heart at the

end of the old century and beginning of the new was the hard fate which

overtook his distinguished and highly valued patron Southampton. This

nobleman had fallen in love with Essex's cousin, the Lady Elizabeth

Vernon. The Queen forbade him to marry her, but he would not relinquish

his bride. He was hot-headed and high-spirited. Young as he was, he had

boarded and taken a Spanish ship of war in the course of the expedition

commanded by his friend Essex. Once, in the palace itself, when

Southampton, Raleigh, and another courtier had been laughing and making

a noise over a game of primero, the captain of the guard, Ambrose

Willoughby, called them to order because the Queen had gone early to

bed; whereupon Southampton struck this high official in the face and

actually had a bout of fisticuffs with him. Such being his character,

we cannot wonder that he contracted a private marriage in spite of the

prohibition (August 1598). Elizabeth sent him to pass his honeymoon in

the Tower, and thenceforth viewed him with high disfavour.

His close relationship to Essex led to a new outburst of the Queen's

displeasure. When Essex took command of the army in Ireland in

1599, he appointed Southampton his General of Horse; but simply out

of resentment for Southampton's disobedience in the matter of his

marriage, the Queen forced Essex to rescind the appointment.

One must bear in mind, among other things, this attitude of the Queen

towards Shakespeare's first patron in order to understand the evident

coolness of his feeling towards Elizabeth. He did not, for example,

join in the threnodies of the other English poets on her death, and

even after Chettle had expressly urged him,[2] refrained from writing

a single line in her praise. He probably read her character much as

Froude did in our own day.

Froude admits that she was "supremely brave," and was turned aside from

her purposes by no care for her own life, though she was "perpetually a

mark for assassination." He admits, too, that she lived simply, worked

hard, and ruled her household with economy. "But her vanity was as

insatiable as it was commonplace.... Her entire nature was saturated

with artifice. Except when speaking some round untruths, Elizabeth

never could be simple. Her letters and her speeches were as fantastic

as her dress, and her meaning as involved as her policy. She was

unnatural even in her prayers, and she carried her affectations into

the presence of the Almighty.... Obligations of honour were not only

occasionally forgotten by her, but she did not seem to understand what

honour meant."[3]

At the point we have now reached in Shakespeare's life, the event

occurred which, of all external circumstances of his time, seems

to have made the deepest impression upon his mind: the ill-starred

rebellion of Essex and Southampton, the execution of the former, and

the latter's condemnation to imprisonment for life.

[1] Arthur Weldon: _The Court and Character of King James_,

1650; quoted by Drake, ii. 149.

[2]

"Nor doth the silver-tongued _Melicert_

Drop from his honied muse one sable teare

To mourne her death that graced his desert,

And to his laies opend her Royall eare.

Shepheard, remember our _Elizabeth_,

And sing her Rape, done by that _Tarquin_, Death."

[3] Froude: _History of England_, vol. xii. Conclusion.

III

_ELIZABETH, ESSEX, AND BACON_

In order rightly to understand these events a short retrospect is

necessary.

We have seen how Essex in 1587 ousted Raleigh from the Queen's favour.

From the very first he united with the insinuating tone of the adorer

the domineering attitude of the established favourite. This was new

to her, and for a considerable time obviously impressed more than it

irritated her.

Here is an instance, from the early days of their relationship. Essex's

sister, Penelope, had, against her will, been married to Lord Rich.

She was adored by Sir Philip Sidney, who sang of her as his Stella,

and their mutual passion was an open secret. The Maiden Queen, who was

always very strict as to the moral purity of those around her, during

a visit which she paid with Essex to the Earl of Warwick at North Hall

in 1587, took offence at the presence of Lady Rich, and insisted that

she should leave the house. Essex declared that the Queen subjected him

and his sister to this insult "only to please that knave Raleigh," and

left the house at midnight along with Lady Rich. He wanted to join the

army in the Netherlands, but the Queen, finding that she could not do

without him, had him brought back again.

At the time of the Armada, therefore, the Queen kept him at court,

much against his own will. Nor would he have been allowed to take

part in the war of 1589 if he had not secretly made his escape from

England, leaving behind him a letter to the Queen and Council to the

effect that "he would return alive at no one's bidding." An angry

letter from Elizabeth forced him, however, to come back after he had

distinguished himself before Lisbon. They were then reconciled, but the

practical-minded Queen immediately demanded of him the repayment of a

sum of £3000 which she had lent him, so that he was forced to sell his

mansion of Keyston. He received in return "the farm of sweet wines," a

very lucrative monopoly, the withdrawal of which many years afterwards

led to the boiling over of his discontent.

We have seen how his secret marriage in 1590 enraged the Queen, who

at once vented her wrath upon his bride. Presently, however, he was

once more in favour, and in the middle of the French campaign of 1591,

Elizabeth recalled him to England for a week, which was passed in all

sorts of festivities. She wept when he returned to the army, and laid

upon him an injunction, to which he paid very little heed, that he must

on no account incur any personal danger.

During the subsequent four years which Essex passed in England,

occupied with his plans of ambition, it became clear to him that

Burghley's son, Sir Robert Cecil, was the chief obstacle to his

advancement. All of those, therefore, who for one reason or another

hated the house of Cecil, cast in their lot with Essex. Thus it

happened that Cecil's cousin, Francis Bacon, who had in vain besought

first the father and then the son for some profitable office, became

a close personal adherent of Essex. It was necessary to make choice

of one party or the other if you were to hope for any preferment. In

the years 1593 and 1594, accordingly, we find Essex again and again

importuning Elizabeth for offices for Bacon. She had no very great

confidence in Bacon, and bore him a grudge, moreover, because he had

incautiously spoken in Parliament against a Government measure; so

that Essex, to his great annoyance and disgust, met with a refusal to

all his applications. As a consolation to his client, he made him a

present of land to the value of not less than £1800. That was the price

for which Bacon sold the property; Essex had believed it to be worth

more.[1] This gift, we see, was nearly twice as large as that which

Southampton is reported to have made to Shakespeare (see above, p. 152).

Henceforward Bacon is to be regarded as an attentive and officious

adherent of Essex, while Essex makes it a point of honour to obtain for

him every recognition, preferment, and advantage. Again and again Bacon

places his pen at the disposal of Essex. There are extant three long

letters from Essex to his young cousin Lord Rutland, dated 1596, giving

him excellent advice as to how to reap most profit from his first

Continental tour, on which he was then setting out. In many passages

of these letters we recognise Bacon's ideas, and in some his style,

his acknowledged writings containing almost identical parallels. The

probability is that in these, as in many subsequent instances, Bacon

supplied Essex with the ideas and the first draft of the letters. Well

knowing that the Queen's dissatisfaction with Essex arose chiefly from

his desire for military glory and the popularity which follows in its

train--well knowing, too, that Essex's enemies at court were always

representing this ambition to the Queen as a hindrance to the peace

with Spain, which nevertheless must one day be concluded--Bacon thought

it a good move for his protector to display unequivocally his care for

the occupations of peace, the acquisition of useful knowledge, and

other unmilitary advantages, in letters which, although private, were

likely enough to come into her Majesty's hands.

Francis Bacon's brother, Anthony, about the same time attached

himself closely (and more faithfully) to Essex. Through him the Earl

established communications with all the foreign courts, so that for a

time his knowledge of European affairs rivalled that of the Foreign

Ministry itself.

The zeal which Essex had displayed in unravelling Doctor Roderigo

Lopez's suspected plot against Elizabeth (see above, p. 191) had placed

him very high in her renewed favour. His heroic exploits at Cadiz ought

to have strengthened his position; but his adversary, Robert Cecil,

had during his absence acquired new power, and the rapacious Elizabeth

complained of the smallness of the booty (it amounted to £13,000). As

a matter of fact, Essex alone had wanted to follow up the advantage

gained, and to seize the Indian fleet, which was allowed to escape: he

had been out-voted in the council of war.

In order to overcome this new resentment on the Queen's part, Bacon,

who regarded his fate as bound up in that of the Earl, wrote a letter

to Essex (dated October 4, 1596), full of good advice with respect

to the attitude he ought to adopt towards Elizabeth, especially

in order to disabuse her mind of the idea that his disposition

was ungovernable--advice which Bacon himself, with his courtier

temperament, might easily enough have followed, but which was too hard

for the downright Essex, who had no sooner made humble submission than

his pride again brought arrogant expressions to his lips.

At the close of the year 1596 Bacon's protector was accused by his

client's mother, Lady Bacon, of misconduct with one of the ladies of

the court. He denied the charge, but confessed to "similar errors."

In 1597 Essex, who had been longing for a new command, undertook an

expedition to the Azores with twenty ships and 6000 men--an enterprise

which, largely owing to his inexperience and unfortunate leadership,

was entirely unsuccessful. On his return he was very coldly received

by the Queen, especially on the ground that towards the end of the

expedition he had behaved ill to Raleigh, his colleague in command.

In order to make his peace with Elizabeth, he sent her insinuating

letters; but he was mortally offended when the eminent services of the

old Lord Howard were rewarded by the appointment of Lord High Admiral.

As the victor of Cadiz, he regarded himself as the one possible man

for this distinction, which gave Howard precedence over him. He

bemoaned his fate, however, to such purpose that he soon after secured

the appointment of Earl Marshal of England, which in turn gave him

precedence over Howard. He received a very valuable present--worth

£7000--and for the first and last time induced the Queen to grant an

audience to his mother, Lady Lettice, whose marriage with Leicester,

twenty-three years before, was not yet forgiven, although in 1589, at

the age of forty-nine, she had married a third husband, Sir Christopher

Blount.

But Essex was not long at peace with the Queen and Court. In 1598 he

was accused of illicit relations with no fewer than four ladies of the

court (Elizabeth Southwell, Elizabeth Brydges, Mrs. Russell, and Lady

Mary Howard), and the charge seems to have been well founded. At the

same time violent dissensions broke out as to whether an attempt should

or should not be made to bring the war with Spain to a close. Essex

carried the day, and it was continued. It was at this time that he

wrote a pamphlet defending himself warmly from the charge of desiring

war at any price. It was not published until 1602, under the title:

_An apology of the Earle of Essex against those which jealously and

maliciously tax him to be the hinderer of the peace and quiet of his

country._

To the Queen's birthday of this year (November 17, 1598) belongs an

anecdote which shows what ingenuity Essex displayed in annoying his

rival. As was the custom of the day, the leading courtiers tilted at

the ring in honour of her Majesty, and each knight was required to

appear in some disguise. It was known, however, that Sir Walter Raleigh

would ride in his own uniform of orange-tawny medley, trimmed with

black budge of lamb's wool. Essex, to vex him, came to the lists with

a body-guard of two thousand retainers all dressed in orange-tawny,

so that Raleigh and his men seemed only an insignificant division of

Essex's splendid retinue.[2]

No later than June or July 1598 there occurred a new scene between

Essex and the Queen in the Council, the most unpleasant and grotesque

passage which had yet taken place between them. The occasion was

trifling, being nothing more than the choice of an official to be

despatched to Ireland. Essex was in the habit of permitting himself

every liberty towards Elizabeth; and it was now, or soon after, that,

as Raleigh relates, he told her "that her conditions were as crooked as

her carcase." Certain it is that, on this occasion, he turned his back

to her with an expression of contempt. She retorted by giving him a box

on the ear and bidding him "Go and be hanged." He laid his hand upon

his sword-hilt, declared that he would not have suffered such an insult

from Henry the Eighth himself, and held aloof from the court for months.

Not till October was Essex forgiven, and even then with no heartiness

or sincerity. The Irish rebellion, however, had to be put down, so

a truce was called to all trivial quarrels. O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone,

had got together an army, as he had often done before, and the whole

island was in revolt. Public opinion, for no sufficient reason, pointed

to Essex as the only man who could deal with the rebels. He, on his

part, was by no means eager to accept the mission. It was of the

utmost importance for every courtier, and especially for the head of a

party, not to be out of the Queen's sight more than was imperatively

necessary. There was every reason to fear that his enemies of the

opposite party would avail themselves of his absence in order so to

blacken him in the eyes of his omnipotent mistress that he would

never regain her favour. Elizabeth, at this juncture, like Louis XIV.

in the following century, was monarch and constitution in one. Her

displeasure meant ruin, her favour was the only source of prosperity.

Therefore Essex did all he could to secure permission to return from

the front whenever he pleased, in order to report personally to the

Queen; and it was therefore that, in the following year, when he was

forbidden to leave his post, he threw caution to the winds, and defied

the prohibition. He knew that he was lost unless he could speak to

Elizabeth face to face.

In March 1599 Essex took the command of the English troops; he was to

suppress the rebellion and grant Tyrone his life only on condition

of his complete surrender. But instead of carrying out his orders,

which were to attack the rebels in their stronghold, Ulster, Essex

remained for long inactive, and at last marched into Munster. One of

his subordinate officers, Sir Henry Harington, suffered a disgraceful

defeat, partly through his own incompetence, partly through the

cowardice of his officers and men. He was tried by court-martial in

Dublin, and he himself, and every tenth man of his command, were shot.

The summer slipped away, and in its course the 16,000 men with whom

Essex had come to Ireland were reduced by sickness and desertion to

a quarter of their original number. Under these circumstances, Essex

again deferred his march upon Ulster, so that the Queen, who was

excessively displeased, expressly forbade him to return from Ireland

without her permission.

When at last, in the beginning of September 1599, he confronted with

his shrunken forces Tyrone's unbreathed army, which had taken up a

strong position to await the coming of the English, he abandoned

his plan of attack, invited Tyrone to a parley, had half an hour's

conversation with him on the 6th of September, and concluded a fourteen

weeks' armistice, to be renewed every six weeks until the 1st of May.

According to his own account, he promised Tyrone that this treaty

should not be placed in writing, lest it should fall into the hands of

the Spaniards and be used against him.