[3] "E se io non àrò l'arte del navicare per l'onde del mare

del vostro valoroso ingegno, quello mi scuserà, nè si sdegnierà del

mio disaguagliarsigli, nè desiderrà da me quello che in me non è:

perchè chi è solo in ogni cosa, in cosa alcuna non può aver compagni.

Però la vostra Signoria, luce del secol nostro unica al mondo, non puo

sodisfarsi di opera d'alcuno altro, non avendo pari nè simile à sè,"

&c.

[4] "E io non nato, o vero nato morto mi reputerei, e direi in

disgrazia del cielo e della terra, se per la vostra non avessi visto e

creduto vostra Signoria accettare volentieri alcune delle opere mie."

"Avete data la copia de' sopradetti Madrigali a messer Tomaso ... che

se m'uscissi della mente, credo che súbito cascherei morto."

[5]

"Accio ch'i' abbi, e non già per mie merto,

desiato mio dolce signiore

Per sempre nell' indegnie e pronte braccia."

[6] This line, however, is obviously suggested by the famous passage in

_Macbeth_ (Act v.)--

"My way of life

Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf."

[7] Several passages in the Sonnets suggest that Pembroke must have

conferred substantial gifts upon Shakespeare--for example, that

expression "wealth" in Sonnet xxxvii., "your bounty" in Sonnet liii.,

and "your own dear-purchased right" in Sonnet cxvii.

[8] "Anzi posso prima dimenticare il cibo di ch'io vivo, che nutrisce

solo il corpo infelicemente, che il nome vostro, che nutrisce il corpo

e l'anima, riempiendo l'uno e l'altro di tanta dolcezza, che nè noia nè

timor di morte, mentre la memoria mi vi serba, posso sentire."

[9] _Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft_, Band xiii. S.

158.

VIII

_JULIUS CÆSAR--ITS FUNDAMENTAL DEFECT_

It is afternoon, a little before three o'clock. Whole fleets of

wherries are crossing the Thames, picking their way among the swans

and the other boats, to land their passengers on the south bank of

the river. Skiff after skiff puts forth from the Blackfriars stair,

full of theatre-goers who have delayed a little too long over their

dinner and are afraid of being too late; for the flag waving over the

Globe Theatre announces that there is a play to-day. The bills upon

the street-posts have informed the public that Shakespeare's _Julius

Cæsar_ is to be presented, and the play draws a full house. People

pay their sixpences and enter; the balconies and the pit are filled.

Distinguished and specially favoured spectators take their seats on the

stage behind the curtain. Then sound the first, the second, and the

third trumpet-blasts, the curtain parts in the middle, and reveals a

stage entirely hung with black.

Enter the tribunes Flavius and Marullus; they scold the rabble and

drive them home because they are loafing about on a week-day without

their working-clothes and tools--in contravention of a London police

regulation which the public finds so natural that they (and the poet)

can conceive it as in force in ancient Rome. At first the audience is

somewhat restless. The groundlings talk in undertones as they light

their pipes. But the Second Citizen speaks the name of Cæsar. There are

cries of "Hush! hush!" and the progress of the play is followed with

eager attention.

It was received with applause, and soon became very popular. Of this

we have contemporary evidence. Leonard Digges, in the poem quoted

above (p. 233), vaunts its scenic attractiveness at the expense of Ben

Jonson's Roman plays:--

"So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,

And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were

_Brutus and Cassius_: oh how the Audience

Were ravish'd, with what new wonder they went thence,

When some new day they would not brooke a line

Of tedious (though well laboured) _Catiline_."

The learned rejoiced in the breath of air from ancient Rome which met

them in these scenes, and the populace was entertained and fascinated

by the striking events and heroic characters of the drama. A quatrain

in John Weever's _Mirror of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir Iohn

Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham,_ tells how

"The many-headed multitude were drawne

By _Brutus_ speech, that _Cæsar_ was ambitious,

When eloquent _Mark Antonie_ had showne

His vertues, who but _Brutus_ then was vicious?"

There were, indeed, numerous plays on the subject of Julius Cæsar--they

are mentioned in Gosson's _Schoole of Abuse_, 1579, in _The Third Blast

of Retraite from Plaies_, 1580, in Henslowe's Diary, 1594 and 1602, in

_The Mirrour of Policie_, 1598, &c.--but Weever's words do not apply

to any of those which have come down to us. It can therefore scarcely

be doubted that they refer to Shakespeare's drama; and as the poem

appeared in 1601, it affords us almost decisive evidence as to the date

of _Julius Cæsar_. In all probability, it was in the same year that the

play was written and produced. Weever, indeed, says in his dedication

that his poem was "some two yeares agoe made fit for print;" but even

if this be true, the lines above quoted may quite well have been

inserted later. There are several reasons for believing that _Julius

Cæsar_ can scarcely have been produced earlier than 1601. The years

1599 and 1600 are already so full of work that we can scarcely assign

to them this great tragedy as well; and internal evidence indicates

that the play must have been written about the same time as _Hamlet,_

to which its style offers so many striking resemblances.

The immediate success of the play is proved by this fact, among

others, that it at once called forth a rival production on the same

theme. Henslow notes in his diary that in May 1602, on behalf of Lord

Nottingham's company, he paid five pounds for a drama called _Cæsar's

Fall_ to the poets Munday, Drayton, Webster, Middleton, and another.

It was evidently written to order. And as _Julius Cæsar_, in its

novelty, was unusually successful, so, too, we find it still reckoned

one of Shakespeare's greatest and profoundest plays, unlike the English

"Histories" in standing alone and self-sufficient, characteristically

composed, forming a rounded whole in spite of its apparent scission

at the death of Cæsar, and exhibiting a remarkable insight into Roman

character and the life of antiquity.

What attracted Shakespeare to this theme? And, first and foremost, what

_is_ the theme? The play is called _Julius Cæsar_, but it was obviously

not Cæsar himself that attracted Shakespeare. The true hero of the

piece is Brutus; he it is who has aroused the poet's fullest interest.

We must explain to ourselves the why and wherefore.

The answer is to be found in the point of time at which the play

was written. It was that eventful year when Shakespeare's earliest

friends among the great, Essex and Southampton, had set on foot their

foolhardy conspiracy against Elizabeth, and when their attempted

insurrection had ended in the death of the one, the imprisonment of

the other. He had seen how proud and nobly-disposed characters might

easily be seduced into political error, and tempted to rebellion, on

the plea of independence. It is true that there was little enough

resemblance of detail between the mere palace-revolution designed

by Essex, which should free him from his subjection to the Queen's

incalculable caprices, and the attempt of the Roman patricians to

liberate an aristocratic republic, by assassination, from the yoke of

a newly-founded despotism. The point of resemblance lay in the mere

fact of the imprudent and ill-starred attempt to effect a subversion of

public order.

Add to this the fact that Shakespeare, in the present stage of his

career, displays a certain preference for characters who, in spite of

noble qualities, have fortune against them and are unable to bring

their projects to a successful issue. While he himself was still

fighting for his position, Henry V., the man of practical genius,

the born victor and conqueror, had been his ideal; now that he stood

on firm ground, and was soon to reach the height of his reputation,

he seems to have turned with a sort of melancholy predilection to

characters like Brutus and Hamlet, who, in spite of the highest

endowments, proved unequal to the tasks proposed to them.[1]. They

appealed to him as profound dreamers and high-minded idealists. He

found something of their nature, too, in his own.

A good score of years earlier, in 1579, North's version of Plutarch's

parallel biographies had been published, not translated from the

original, but from the French translation of Amyot. In this book

Shakespeare found his material.

His method of using this material differs considerably from his

treatment of his other authorities. From a chronicler like Holinshed

he, as a rule, takes nothing but the course of events, the outline

of the leading personages and such anecdotes as suit his purpose.

From novelists like Bandello or Cinthio he takes the main lines of

the action, but relies almost entirely on his own invention for the

characters and the dialogue. From the earlier plays, which he adapts

or re-casts, such as _The Taming of a Shrew, King John, The Famous

Victories_ of Henry V., and _King Leir_ (the original _Hamlet_ is

unfortunately not preserved), he transfers into his own work every

scene and speech that is worth anything; but in the cases in which

we can make the comparison, there is little enough that he finds

available. Here, on the other hand, we find a curious and instructive

example of his method of work when he most faithfully followed his

original. We realise that the more developed the art and the more

competent the psychology of the writer before him, the more closely did

Shakespeare tread in his footsteps.

Here for the first time he found himself in touch with a wholly

civilised spirit--not seldom childlike in his antique simplicity, but

still no mean artist. Jean Paul, with some exaggeration, yet not quite

extravagantly, has called Plutarch the biographical Shakespeare of

world-history.

The whole drama of _Julius Cæsar_ may be read in Plutarch. Shakespeare

had before him three Lives--those of Cæsar, Brutus, and Mark Antony.

Read them consecutively, and you find in them every detail of _Julius

Cæsar_.

Let us take some examples from the first act of the play. It begins

with the tribunes' jealousy of the favour in which Cæsar stands with

the common people; and everything down to the minutest trait is taken

from Plutarch. The same with what follows: Mark Antony's repeated offer

of the crown to Cæsar at the feast of the Lupercal, and his unwilling

refusal of it. So too with Cæsar's suspicions of Cassius; Cæsar's

speech on his second entrance--

"Let me have men about me that are fat,

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous,"--

occurs word for word in Plutarch; the anecdote, indeed, made such an

impression on him that he has repeated it three times in different

Lives. We find, furthermore, in the Greek historian, how Cassius

gradually involves Brutus in the conspiracy; how papers exhorting

Brutus to action are thrown into his house; the deliberations as to

whether Antony is to die along with Cæsar, and Brutus's mistaken

judgment of Antony's character; Portia's complaint at being excluded

from her husband's confidence; the proof of courage which she gives

by plunging a knife into her thigh; all the omens and prodigies that

precede the murder; the sacrificial ox without a heart; the fiery

warriors fighting in the clouds; Calphurnia's warning dream; Cæsar's

determination not to go to the Senate on the Ides of March; Decius

[Decimus] Brutus's endeavour to change his purpose; the fruitless

efforts of Artemidorus to restrain him from facing the danger, etc.,

etc. It is all in Plutarch, point for point.

Here and there we find small and subtle divergences from the original,

which may be traced now to Shakespeare's temperament, now to his

view of life, and again to his design in the play. Plutarch, for

example, has not Shakespeare's contempt for the populace, and does not

make them so senselessly fickle. Then, again, he gives no hint for

Brutus's soliloquy before taking the final resolution (II. I). For

the rest, wherever it is possible, Shakespeare employs the very words

of North's translation. Nay, more, he accepts the characters, such as

Brutus, Portia, Cassius, just as they stand in Plutarch. His Brutus is

absolutely the same as Plutarch's; his Cassius is a man of somewhat

deeper character.

In dealing with the great figure of Cæsar, which gives the play

its name, Shakespeare follows faithfully the detached, anecdotic

indications of Plutarch; but he, strangely enough, seems altogether

to miss the remarkable impression we receive from Plutarch of Cæsar's

character, which, for the rest, the Greek historian himself was not

in a position fully to understand. We must not forget the fact, of

which Shakespeare of course knew nothing, that Plutarch, who was born

a century after Cæsar's death, at a time when the independence of

Greece was only a memory, and the once glorious Hellas was part of a

Roman province, wrote his comparative biographies to remind haughty

Rome that Greece had a great man to oppose to each of her greatest

sons. Plutarch was saturated with the thought that conquered Greece was

Rome's lord and master in every department of the intellectual life.

He delivered Greek lectures in Rome and could not speak Latin, while

every Roman spoke Greek to him and understood it as well as his native

tongue. Significantly enough, Roman literature and poetry do not exist

for Plutarch, though he incessantly cites Greek authors and poets. He

never mentions Virgil or Ovid. He wrote about his great Romans as an

enlightened and unprejudiced Pole might in our days write about great

Russians. He, in whose eyes the old republics shone transfigured, was

not specially fitted to appreciate Cæsar's greatness.

Shakespeare, having so arranged his drama that Brutus should be

its tragic hero, had to concentrate his art on placing him in the

foreground, and making him fill the scene. The difficulty was not

to let his lack of political insight (in the case of Antony), or

of practical sense (in his quarrel with Cassius), detract from the

impression of his superiority. He had to be the centre and pivot

of everything, and therefore Cæsar was diminished and belittled to

such a degree, unfortunately, that this matchless genius in war and

statesmanship has become a miserable caricature.

We find in other places clear indications that Shakespeare knew very

well what this man was and was worth. Edward's young son, in _Richard

III_., speaks with enthusiasm of Cæsar as that conqueror whom death has

not conquered; Horatio, in the almost contemporary _Hamlet_, speaks

of "mightiest Julius" and his death; and Cleopatra, in _Antony and

Cleopatra_, is proud of having been the mistress of Cæsar. It is true

that in _As You Like It_ the playful Rosalind uses the expression,

"Cæsar's thrasonical brag," with reference to the famous _Veni, vidi,

vici,_ but in an entirely jocose context and acceptation.

But here! here Cæsar has become in effect no little of a braggart,

and is compounded, on the whole, of anything but attractive

characteristics. He produces the impression of an invalid. His

liability to the "falling sickness," is emphasised. He is deaf of one

ear. He has no longer his old strength. He faints when the crown is

offered to him. He envies Cassius because he is a stronger swimmer.

He is as superstitious as an old woman. He rejoices in flattery,

talks pompously and arrogantly, boasts of his firmness and is for

ever wavering. He acts incautiously and unintelligently, and does not

realise what threatens him, while every one else sees it clearly.

Shakespeare dared not, says Gervinus, arouse too great interest in

Cæsar; he had to throw into relief everything about him that could

account for the conspiracy; and, moreover, he had Plutarch's distinct

statement that Cæsar's character had greatly deteriorated shortly

before his death. Hudson practically agrees with this, holding that

Shakespeare wished to present Cæsar as he appeared in the eyes of the

conspirators, so that "they too might have fair and equal judgment at

our hands;" admitting, for the rest, that "Cæsar was literally too

great to be seen by them," and that "Cæsar is far from being himself

in these scenes; hardly one of the speeches put in his mouth can be

regarded as historically characteristic." Thus Hudson arrives at the

astonishing result that "there is an undertone of irony at work in the

ordering and tempering of this composition," explaining that, "when

such a shallow idealist as Brutus is made to overtop and outshine the

greatest practical genius the world ever saw," we are bound to assume

that the intention is ironical.

This is the emptiest cobweb-spinning. There is no trace of irony in

the representation of Brutus. Nor can we fall back upon the argument

that Cæsar, after his death, becomes the chief personage of the drama,

and as a corpse, as a memory, as a spirit, strikes down his murderers.

How can so small a man cast so great a shadow! Shakespeare, of course,

intended to show Cæsar as triumphing after his death. He has changed

Brutus's evil genius, which appears to him in the camp and at Philippi,

into Cæsar's ghost; but this ghost is not sufficient to rehabilitate

Cæsar in our estimation.

Nor is it true that Cæsar's greatness would have impaired the unity

of the piece. Its poetic value, on the contrary, suffers from his

pettiness. The play might have been immeasurably richer and deeper than

it is, had Shakespeare been inspired by a feeling of Cæsar's greatness.

Elsewhere in Shakespeare one marvels at what he has made out of poor

and meagre material. Here, history was so enormously rich, that his

poetry has become poor and meagre in comparison with it.

Just as Shakespeare (if the portions of the first part of _Henry VI_.

which deal with La Pucelle are by him) represented Jeanne d'Arc with

no sense for the lofty and simple poetry that breathed around her

figure--national prejudice and old superstition blinding him--so he

approached the characterisation of Cæsar with far too light a heart,

and with imperfect knowledge and care. As he had made Jeanne d'Arc a

witch, so he makes Cæsar a braggart. Cæsar!

If, like the schoolboys of later generations, he had been given Cæsar's

_Gallic War_ to read in his childhood, this would not have been

possible to him. Is it conceivable that, in what he had heard about

the Commentaries, he had naïvely seized upon and misinterpreted the

fact that Cæsar always speaks of himself in the third person, and calls

himself by his name?

Let us compare for a moment this posing self-worshipper of

Shakespeare's with the picture of Cæsar which the poet might easily

have formed from his Plutarch alone, thus explaining Cæsar's rise to

the height of autocracy on which he stands at the beginning of the

play, and at the same time the gradual piling up of the hatred to which

he succumbed. On the very second page of the life of Cæsar he must have

read the anecdote of how Cæsar, when quite a young man, on his way back

from Bithynia, was taken prisoner by Cilician pirates. They demanded a

ransom of twenty talents (about £4000). He answered that they clearly

did not know who their prisoner was, promised them fifty talents, sent

his attendants to different towns to raise this sum, and remained with

only a friend and two servants among these notoriously bloodthirsty

bandits. He displayed the greatest contempt for them, and freely

ordered them about; he made them keep perfectly quiet when he wanted

to sleep; for the thirty-eight days he remained among them he treated

them as a prince might his bodyguard. He went through his gymnastic

exercises, and wrote poems and orations in the fullest security. He

often assured them that he would certainly have them hanged, or rather

crucified. When the ransom arrived from Miletus, the first use he made

of his liberty was to fit out some ships, attack the pirates, take them

all prisoners, and seize upon their booty. Then he carried them before

the Prætor of Asia, Junius, whose business it was to punish them.

Junius, out of avarice, replied that he would take time to reflect

what should be done with the prisoners; whereupon Cæsar returned to

Pergamos, where he had left them in prison, and kept his word by having

them all crucified.

What has become of this masterfulness, this grace, and this iron will,

in Shakespeare's Cæsar?

"I fear him not:

Yet if my name were liable to fear,

I do not know the man I should avoid

So soon as that spare Cassius.

. . . . . .

I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd

Than what I fear, for always I am Cæsar."

It is well that he himself makes haste to say so, otherwise one would

scarcely believe it. And does one believe it, after all?

As Shakespeare conceives the situation, the Republic which Cæsar

overthrew might have continued to exist but for him, and it was a

criminal act on his part to destroy it.

But the old aristocratic Republic had already fallen to pieces when

Cæsar welded its fragments into a new monarchy. Sheer lawlessness

reigned in Rome. The populace was such as even the rabble of our

own great cities can give no conception of: not the brainless mob,

for the most part tame, only now and then going wild through mere

stupidity, which in Shakespeare listens to the orations over Cæsar's

body and tears Cinna to pieces; but a populace whose innumerable hordes

consisted mainly of slaves, together with the thousands of foreigners

from all the three continents, Phrygians from Asia, Negroes from

Africa, Iberians and Celts from Spain and France, who flocked together

in the capital of the world. To the immense bands of house-slaves

and field-slaves, there were added thousands of runaway slaves who

had committed theft or murder at home, lived by robbery on the way,

and now lay hid in the purlieus of the city. But besides foreigners

with no means of support and slaves without bread, there were swarms

of freedmen, entirely corrupted by their servile condition, for whom

freedom, whether combined with helpless poverty or with new-made

riches, meant only the freedom to do harm. Then there were troops of

gladiators, as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own,

and entirely at the beck and call of whoever would pay them. It was

from ruffians of this class that a man like Clodius had recruited

the armed gangs who surrounded him, divided like regular soldiers

into decuries and centuries under duly appointed commanders. These

bands fought battles in the Forum with other bands of gladiators or

of herdsmen from the wild regions of Picenum or Lombardy, whom the

Senate imported for its own protection. There was practically no

street police or fire-brigade. When public disasters happened, such

as floods or conflagrations, people regarded them as portents and

consulted the augurs. The magistrates were no longer obeyed; consuls

and tribunes were attacked, and sometimes even killed. In the Senate

the orators covered each other with abuse, in the Forum they spat in

each other's faces. Regular battles took place on the Campus Martius

at every election, and no man of position ever appeared in the streets

without a bodyguard of gladiators and slaves. "If we try to conceive

to ourselves," wrote Mommsen in 1857, "a London with the slave

population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the

non-industrial character of the modern Rome, and agitated by politics

after the fashion of the Paris of 1848, we shall acquire an approximate

idea of the republican glory, the departure of which Cicero and his

associates in their sulky letters deplore."[2]

Compare with this picture Shakespeare's conception of an ambitious

Cæsar striving to introduce monarchy into a well-ordered republican

state!

What enchanted every one, even his enemies, who came in contact

with Cæsar, was his good-breeding, his politeness, the charm of his

personality. These characteristics made a doubly strong impression upon

those who, like Cicero, were accustomed to the arrogance and coarseness

of Pompey, so-called the Great. However busy he might be, Cæsar had

always time to think of his friends and to jest with them. His letters

are gay and amiable. In Shakespeare, when he is not familiar, he is

pompous.

For the space of twenty-five years, Cæsar, as a politician, had by

every means in his power opposed the aristocratic party in Rome. He had

early resolved to make himself, without the employment of force, the

master of the then known world, assured as he was that the Republic

would fall to pieces of its own accord. Not until his prætorship in

Spain had he displayed ability as a soldier and administrator outside

the every-day round of political life. Then suddenly, when everything

seems to be prospering with him, he breaks away from it all, leaves

Rome, and passes into Gaul. At the age of forty-four, he enters upon

his military career, and becomes perhaps the greatest commander known

to history, an unrivalled conqueror and organiser, revealing, in middle

life, a whole host of unsuspected and admirable qualities. Shakespeare

conveys no idea of the wealth and many-sidedness of his gifts. He makes

him belaud himself with unceasing solemnity (II. 2):--

"Cæsar shall forth: the things that threaten'd me

Ne'er look'd but on my back; when they shall see

The face of Cæsar, they are vanishèd."

Cæsar had nothing of the stolid pomposity and severity which

Shakespeare attributes to him. He united the rapid decision of the

general with the man of the world's elegance and lofty indifference to

trifles. He liked his soldiers to wear glittering weapons and to adorn

themselves. "What does it matter," he said, "though they use perfumes?

They fight none the worse for that." And soldiers who under other

leaders did not surpass the average became invincible under him.

He, who in Rome had been the glass of fashion, was so careless of his

comfort in the field that he often slept under the open sky, and ate

rancid oil without so much as a grimace; but richly-decked tables

always stood in his tents, and all the golden youth, for whom Gaul was

at that time what America became in the days of the first discoverers,

made their way from Rome to his camp. It was the most wonderful camp

ever seen, crowded with men of elegance and learning, young writers and

poets, wits and thinkers, who, in the midst of the greatest and most

imminent dangers, busied themselves with literature, and sent regular

reports of their meetings and conversations to Cicero, the acknowledged

arbiter of the literary world of Rome. During the brief space of

Cæsar's expedition into Britain, he writes two letters to Cicero.

Their relation, in its different phases, in some ways reminds us of

the relation between Frederick the Great and Voltaire. What a paltry

picture does Shakespeare draw of Cicero as a mere pedant!--

"_Cassius_. Did Cicero say anything?

"_Casca_. Ay, he spoke Greek.

"_Cassius_. To what effect?

"_Casca_. Nay, an I tell you that, I'll ne'er look you in

the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one

another, and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it

was Greek to me."

Amid labours of every sort, his life always in danger, incessantly

fighting with warlike enemies, whom he beats in battle after battle,

Cæsar writes his grammatical works and his Commentaries. His dedication

to Cicero of his work _De Analogia_ is a homage to literature no less

than to him: "You have discovered all the treasures of eloquence and

been the first to employ them.... You have achieved the crown of all

honours, a triumph the greatest generals may envy; for it is a nobler

thing to remove the barriers of the intellectual life than to extend

the boundaries of the Empire." These are the words of the man who has

just beaten the Helvetii, conquered France and Belgium, made the first

expedition into Britain, and so effectually repelled the German hordes

that they were for long innocuous to the Rome which they had threatened

with destruction.

How little does this Cæsar resemble the pompous and highflown puppet of

Shakespeare:--

"Danger knows full well

That Cæsar is more dangerous than he.

We are two lions litter'd in one day,

And I the elder and more terrible."

Cæsar could be cruel at times. In his wars, he never shrank from taking

such revenges as should strike terror into his enemies. He had the

whole senate of the Veneti beheaded. He cut the right hand off every

one who had borne arms against him at Uxellodunum. He kept the gallant

Vercingetorix five years in prison, only to exhibit him in chains at

his triumph and then to have him executed.

Yet, where severity was unnecessary, he was tolerance and mildness

itself. Cicero, during the civil war, went over to the camp of Pompey,

and after the defeat of that party sought and received forgiveness.

When he afterwards wrote a book in honour of Cæsar's mortal enemy Cato,

who killed himself so as not to have to obey the dictator, and thereby

became the hero of all the republicans, Cæsar wrote to Cicero: "In

reading your book, I feel as though I myself had become more eloquent."

And yet in his eyes Cato was only an uncultured personage and a fanatic

for an obsolete order of things. When a slave, out of tenderness for

his master, refused to hand Cato his sword wherewith to kill himself,

Cato gave him such a furious blow in the face that his hand was dyed

with blood. Such a trait must have spoiled for Cæsar the impressiveness

of this suicide.

Cæsar was not content with forgiving almost all who had borne arms

against him at Pharsalia; he gave many of them, and among the rest

Brutus and Cassius, an ample share of his power. He tried to protect

Brutus before the battle and heaped honours upon him after it. Again

and again Brutus came forward in opposition to Cæsar, and even, in

his conscientious quixotism, took part against him with Pompey,

although Pompey had had his father assassinated. Cæsar forgave him

this and everything else; he was never tired of forgiving him. He

had, it appears, transferred to Brutus the love of his youth for

Brutus's mother Servilia, Cato's sister, who had been passionately and

faithfully devoted to Cæsar. Voltaire, in his _Mort de César_, makes

Cæsar hand to Brutus a letter just received from the dying Servilia,

in which she begs Cæsar to watch well over their son. Plutarch relates

that on one occasion, at the time of Catiline's conspiracy, a letter

was brought to Cæsar in the Senate. Cato, seeing him rise and go

apart to read it, gave open utterance to the suspicion that it was a

missive from the conspirators. Cæsar laughingly handed him the letter,

which contained declarations of love from his sister; whereupon Cato,

enraged, burst out with the epithet "Drunkard!"--the direst term of

abuse a Roman could employ. (Ben Jonson has introduced this anecdote in

his _Catiline_, v. 6.)

Brutus inherited his uncle Cato's hatred for Cæsar. A certain brutality

was united with a noble stoicism in these two last Roman republicans

of the time of the Republic's downfall. The rawness of antique Rome

survived in Cato's nature, and Brutus, in his conduct towards the

towns of the Asiatic provinces, was nothing but a bloodthirsty usurer,

who, in the name of a man of straw (Scaptius) extorted from them his

exorbitant interests with threats of fire and sword. He had lent to

the inhabitants of the town of Salamis a sum of money at 48 per cent.

On their failure to pay, he kept their Senate so closely besieged by a

squadron of cavalry that five senators died of starvation. Shakespeare,

in his ignorance, attributes no such vices to Brutus, but makes him

simple and great, at Cæsar's expense.

Cæsar as opposed to Cato--and afterwards as opposed to Brutus--is

the many-sided genius who loves life and action and power, in

contradistinction to the narrow Puritan who hates such emancipated

spirits, partly on principle, partly from instinct.

What a strange misunderstanding that Shakespeare--himself a lover

of beauty, intent on a life of activity, enjoyment, and satisfied

ambition, who always stood to Puritanism in the same hostile relation

in which Cæsar stood--should out of ignorance take the side of

Puritanism in this case, and so disqualify himself from extracting from

the rich mine of Cæsar's character all the gold contained in it. In

Shakespeare's Cæsar we find nothing of the magnanimity and sincerity

of the real man. He never assumed a hypocritical reverence towards the

past, not even on questions of grammar. He grasped at power and seized

it, but did not, as in Shakespeare, pretend to reject it. Shakespeare

has let him keep the pride which he in fact displayed, but has made it

unbeautiful, and eked it out with hypocrisy.

This further trait, too, in Cæsar's character Shakespeare has failed

to understand. When at last, after having conquered on every side,

in Africa as in Asia, in Spain as in Egypt, he held in his hands

the sovereign power which had been the object of his twenty years'

struggle, it had lost its attraction for him. Knowing that he was

misunderstood and hated by those whose respect he prized the most,

he found himself compelled to make use of men whom he despised, and

contempt for humanity took possession of his mind. He saw nothing

around him but greed and treachery. Power had lost all its sweetness

for him, life itself was no longer worth living, worth preserving.

Hence his answer when he was besought to take measures against his

would-be assassins: "Rather die once than tremble always!" and he went

to the Senate on the 15th of March without arms and without a guard. In

the tragedy, the motives which ultimately lure him thither are the hope

of a title and a crown, and the fear of being esteemed a coward.

Those foolish persons who attribute Shakespeare's works to Francis

Bacon argue, amongst other things, that such an insight into Roman

antiquity as is manifested in _Julius Cæsar_ could be attained by no

one who did not possess Bacon's learning. On the contrary, this play

is obviously written by a man whose learning was in no sense on a

level with his genius, so that its faults, no less than its merits,

afford a proof, however superfluous, that Shakespeare himself was the

author of Shakespeare's works. Bunglers in criticism never realise to

what an extent genius can supply the place of book-learning, and how

vastly greater is its importance. But, on the other hand, one is bound

to declare unequivocally that there are certain domains in which no

amount of genius can compensate for reconstructive insight and study

of recorded fact, and where even the greatest genius falls short when

it tries to create out of its own head, or upon a scanty basis of

knowledge.

Such a domain is that of historical drama, when it deals with periods

and personalities in regard to which recorded fact surpasses all

possible imagination. Where history is stranger and more poetic than

any poetry, more tragic than any antique tragedy, there the poet

requires many-sided insight in order to rise to the occasion. It was

because of Shakespeare's lack of historical and classical culture that

the incomparable grandeur of the figure of Cæsar left him unmoved. He

depressed and debased that figure to make room for the development

of the central character in his drama--to wit, Marcus Brutus, whom,

following Plutarch's idealising example, he depicted as a stoic of

almost flawless nobility.

[1] Compare Dowden, _Shakspere_, p. 280.

[2] Mommsen, _History of Rome_, translated by W. P. Dickson, ed. 1894,

vol. v. p. 371. Gaston Boissier, _Cicéron et ses Amis_, p. 224

IX

_JULIUS CÆSAR--THE MERITS OF THE DRAMA--BRUTUS_

None but a naïve republican like Swinburne can believe that it was by

reason of any republican enthusiasm in Shakespeare's soul that Brutus

became the leading character. He had assuredly no systematic political

conviction, and manifests at other times the most loyal and monarchical

habit of mind.

Brutus was already in Plutarch the protagonist of the Cæsar tragedy,

and Shakespeare followed the course of history as represented by

Plutarch, under the deep impression that an impolitic revolt, like

that of Essex and his companions, can by no means stem the current

of the time, and that practical errors revenge themselves quite as

severely as moral sins--nay, much more so. The psychologist was now

awakened in him, and he found it a fascinating task to analyse and

present a man who finds a mission imposed upon him for which he is by

nature unfitted. It is no longer outward conflicts like that in _Romeo

and Juliet_ between the lovers and their surroundings, or in _Richard

III._, between Richard and the world at large, that fascinate him in

this new stage of his development, but the inner processes and crises

of the spiritual life.

Brutus has lived among his books and fed his mind upon Platonic

philosophy; therefore he is more occupied with the abstract political

idea of republican freedom, and the abstract moral conception of the

shame of enduring a despotism, than with the actual political facts

before his eyes, or the meaning of the changes which are going on

around him. This man is vehemently urged by Cassius to place himself at

the head of a conspiracy against his fatherly benefactor and friend.

The demand throws his whole nature into a ferment, disturbs its

harmony, and brings it for ever out of equilibrium.

On Hamlet also, who is at the same time springing to life in

Shakespeare's mind, the spirit of his murdered father imposes the duty

of becoming an assassin, and the claim acts as a stimulus, a spur to

his intellectual faculties, but as a solvent to his character; so

close is the resemblance between the situation of Brutus, with his

conflicting duties, and the inward strife which we are soon to find in

Hamlet.

Brutus is at war with himself, and therefore forgets to show others

attention and the outward signs of friendship. His comrades summon him

to action, but he hears no answering summons from within. As Hamlet

breaks out into the well known words:--

"The time is out of joint:--O, cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right!"

so also Brutus shrinks with horror from his task. He says (I. 2):--

"Brutus had rather be a villager

Than to repute himself a son of Rome

Under these hard conditions as this time

Is like to lay upon us."

His noble nature is racked by these doubts and uncertainties.

From the moment Cassius has spoken to him, he is sleepless. The rugged

Macbeth becomes sleepless after he has killed the King--"Macbeth has

murdered sleep." Brutus, with his delicate, reflective nature, bent

on obeying only the dictates of duty, is calm after the murder, but

sleepless before it. His preoccupation with the idea has altered

his whole manner of being; his wife does not know him again. She

tells how he can neither converse nor sleep, but strides up and down

with his arms folded, sighing and lost in thought, does not answer

her questions, and, when she repeats them, waves her off with rough

impatience.

It is not only his gratitude to Cæsar that keeps Brutus in torment;

it is especially his uncertainty as to what Cæsar's intentions really

are. Brutus sees him, indeed, idolised by the people and endowed

with supreme power; but as yet Cæsar has never abused it. He concurs

with Cassius's view that when Cæsar declined the crown he in reality

hankered after it; but, after all, they have nothing to go upon but his

supposed desire:--

"To speak truth of Cæsar,

I have not known when his affections sway'd

More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof

That lowliness is young ambition's ladder."

If Cæsar is to be slain, then, it is not for what he has done, but for

what he may do in the future. Is it permissible to commit a murder upon

such grounds?

In Hamlet we find this variant of the difficulty: Is it certain that

the king murdered Hamlet's father? May not the ghost have been a

hallucination, or the devil himself?

Brutus feels the weakness of his basis of action the more clearly

the more he leans towards the murder as a political duty. And

Shakespeare has not hesitated to attribute to him, high-minded as he

is, that doctrine of expediency, so questionable in the eyes of many,

which declares that a necessary end sanctifies impure means. Two

separate times, once when he is by himself, and once in addressing the

conspirators, he recommends political hypocrisy as judicious and

serviceable. In the soliloquy he says (II. I):--

"And, since the quarrel

Will bear no colour for the thing he is,

Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,

Would run to these and these extremities."

To the conspirators his words are:--

"And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,

Stir up their servants to an act of rage,

And after seem to chide 'em."

That is to say, the murder is to be carried out with as much decency as

possible, and the murderers are afterwards to pretend that they deplore

it.

As soon as the murder is resolved upon, however, Brutus, assured of

the purity of his motives, stands proud and almost unconcerned in the

midst of the conspirators. Far too unconcerned, indeed; for though he

has not shrunk in principle from the doctrine that one cannot will the

end without willing the means, he yet shrinks, upright and unpractical

as he is, from employing means which seem to him either too base or too

unscrupulous. He will not even suffer the conspirators to be bound by

oath: "Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous." They are to trust

each other without the assurance of an oath, and to keep their secret

unsworn. And when it is proposed that Antony shall be killed along with

Cæsar, a necessary step, to which, as a politician, he was bound to

consent, he rejects it, in Shakespeare as in Plutarch, out of humanity:

"Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius." He feels that his

will is as clear as day, and suffers at the thought of employing the

methods of night and darkness:

"O Conspiracy!

Sham'st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,

When evils are most free? O, then, by day

Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough

To mask thy monstrous visage?"

Brutus is anxious that a cause which is to be furthered by

assassination should achieve success without secrecy and without

violence. Goethe has said: "Only the man of reflection has a

conscience." The man of action cannot have one while he is acting. To

plunge into action is to place oneself at the mercy of one's nature

and of external powers. One acts rightly or wrongly, but always upon

instinct--often stupidly, sometimes, it may be, brilliantly, never with

full consciousness. Action implies the in considerateness of instinct,

or egoism, or genius; Brutus, on the other hand, is bent on acting with

every consideration.

Kreyssig, and after him Dowden, have called Brutus a Girondin, in

opposition to his brother-in-law, Cassius, a sort of Jacobin in antique

dress. The comparison is just only in regard to the lesser or greater

inclination to the employment of violent means; it halts when we

reflect that Brutus lives in the rarefied air of abstractions, face to

face with ideas and principles, while Cassius lives in the world of

facts; for the Jacobins were quite as stiff-necked theorists as any

Girondin. Brutus, in Shakespeare, is a strict moralist, excessively

cautious lest any stain should mar the purity of his character, while

Cassius does not in the least aspire to moral flawlessness. He is

frankly envious of Cæsar, and openly avows that he hates him; yet

he is not base; for envy and hatred are in his case swallowed up by

political passion, strenuous and consistent. And, unlike Brutus, he

is a good observer, looking right through men's words and actions

into their souls. But as Brutus is the man whose name, birth, and

position as Cæsar's intimate friend, point him out to be the head

of the conspiracy, he is always able to enforce his impolitic and

short-sighted will.

When we find that Hamlet, who is so full of doubts, never for a moment

doubts his right to kill the king, we must remember that Shakespeare

had just exhausted this theme in his characterisation of Brutus.

Brutus is the ideal whom Shakespeare, like all men of the better sort,

cherished in his soul--the man whose pride it is before everything to

keep his hands clean and his mind high and free, even at the cost of

failure in his undertakings and the wreck of his tranquillity and of

his fortunes.

He does not care to impose an oath upon the others; he is too proud.

If they want to betray him, let them! These others, it is true, may

be moved by their hatred of the great man, and eager to quench their

malice in his blood; he, for his part, admires him, and will sacrifice,

not butcher him. The others fear the consequences of suffering Antony

to address the people; but Brutus has explained to the people his

reasons for the murder, so Antony may now eulogise Cæsar as much as

he pleases. Did not Cæsar deserve eulogy? Does not he himself desire

that Cæsar shall lie honoured, though punished, in his grave? He is too

proud to keep a watch upon Antony, who has approached him in friendly

fashion, though at the same time in the character of Cæsar's friend;

therefore he leaves the Forum before Antony begins his speech. Such

moods are familiar to many. Many another has acted in this apparently

unwise way, proudly reckless of consequences, moved by the dislike

of the magnanimous man for all that savours of base cautiousness.

Many a one, for example, has told the truth where it was stupid to

do so, or has let slip an opportunity of revenge because he despised

his enemy too much to seek compensation for his injuries, though he

thereby neglected to render him innocuous for the future. An intense

realisation of the necessity for confidence, or, on the other hand, of

the untrustworthiness of friends and the contemptibleness of enemies,

may easily lead one to despise every measure of prudence.

It was upon the basis of an intense feeling of this nature that

Shakespeare created Brutus. With the addition of humour and a touch of

genius he would be Hamlet, and he becomes Hamlet. With the addition of

despairing bitterness and misanthropy he would be Timon, and he becomes

Timon. Here he is the man of uncompromising character and principle,

who is too proud to be prudent and too bad an observer to be practical;

and this man is so situated that not only the life and death of another

and of himself, but the welfare of the State, and even, as it appears,

that of the whole civilised world, depend upon the resolution at which

he arrives.

At Brutus's side Shakespeare places the figure which forms his female

counterpart, the kindred spirit who has become one with him, his cousin

and wife, Cato's daughter married to Cato's disciple. He has here, and

here alone, given us a picture of the ideal marriage as he conceived it.

In the scene between Brutus and Portia the poet takes up afresh a

motive which he has handled once before--the anxious wife beseeching

her husband to initiate her into his great designs. It first appears

in _Henry IV_., Part I., where Lady Percy implores her Harry to let

her share his counsels. (See above, p. 189) The description which she

gives of Hotspur's manner and conduct exactly corresponds to Portia's

description of the transformation which has taken place in Brutus. Both

husbands, indeed, are nursing a similar project. But Lady Percy learns

nothing. Her Harry no doubt loves her, loves her now and then, between

two skirmishes, briskly and gaily; but there is no sentiment in his

love for her, and he never dreams of any spiritual communion between

them.

When Portia, in this case, begs her husband to tell her what is

weighing on his mind, he at first, indeed, replies with evasions about

his health; but on her vehemently declaring that she feels herself

degraded by this lack of confidence (Shakespeare has but slightly

softened the antique frankness of the words which Plutarch places

in her mouth), Brutus answers her with warmth and beauty. And when

(again as in Plutarch) she tells of the proof she has given of her

steadfastness by thrusting a knife into her thigh and never complaining

of the "voluntary wound," he bursts forth with the words which Plutarch

places in his mouth:--

"O ye gods,

Render me worthy of this noble wife,"

and promises to tell her everything.

Neither Shakespeare nor Plutarch, however, regards his facile

communicativeness as a mark of prudence. For it is not Portia's fault

that it does not betray everything. When it comes to the point, she can

neither hold her tongue nor control herself. She betrays her anxiety

and uneasiness to the boy Lucius, and herself exclaims:--

"I have a man's mind, but a woman's might.

How hard it is for women to keep counsel!"

This reflection is obviously not Portia's, but an utterance of

Shakespeare's own philosophy of life, which he has not cared to keep to

himself. In Plutarch she even falls down as though dead, and the news

of her death surprises Brutus just before the time appointed for the

murder of Cæsar, so that he needs all his self-control to save himself

from breaking down.

From the character with which Shakespeare has thus endowed Brutus

spring the two great scenes which carry the play.

The first is the marvellously-constructed scene, the turning-point of

the tragedy, in which Antony, speaking with Brutus's consent over the

body of Cæsar, stirs up the Romans against the murderers of the great

imperator.

Even Brutus's own speech Shakespeare has moulded with the rarest

art. Plutarch relates that when Brutus wrote Greek he cultivated a

"compendious" and laconic style, of which the historian adduces a

string of examples. He wrote to the Samians: "Your councels be long,

your doings be slow; consider the end." And in another epistle: "The

Xanthians, despising my good wil, haue made a graue of dispaire; and

the Patareians, that put themselves into my protection, have lost no

iot of their liberty: and therefore whilst you haue libertie, either

chuse the iudgement of the Patareians or the fortune of the Xanthians."

See now, what Shakespeare has made out of these indications:--

"Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my cause, and

be silent, that you may hear: believe me for mine honour,

and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe.

... If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of

Cæsar's, to him I say, that Brutus' love to Cæsar was no

less than his. If, then, that friend demand, why Brutus rose

against Cæsar, this is my answer:--Not that I loved Cæsar

less, but that I loved Rome more."

And so on, in this style of laconic antithesis. Shakespeare has made a

deliberate effort to assign to Brutus the diction he had cultivated,

and, with his inspired faculty of divination, has, as it were,

reanimated it:--

"As Cæsar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I

rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he

was ambitious, I slew him."

With ingenious and yet noble art the speech culminates in the question,

"Who is here so vile that will not love his country! If any, speak; for

him have I offended." And when the crowd answers, "None, Brutus, none,"

he chimes in with the serene assurance, "Then none have I offended."

The still more admirable oration of Antony is in the first place

remarkable for the calculated difference of style which it displays.

Here we have no antitheses, no literary eloquence; but a vernacular

eloquence of the most powerful demagogic type. Antony takes up the

thread just where Brutus has dropped it, expressly assures his hearers

at the outset that this is to be a speech over Cæsar's bier, but

not to his glory, and emphasises to the point of monotony the fact

that Brutus and the other conspirators are all, all honourable men.

Then the eloquence gradually works up, subtle and potent, in its

adroit crescendo, and yet in truth exalted by something which is not

subtlety: glowing enthusiasm for Cæsar, scathing indignation against

his assassins. The contempt and anger are at first masked, out of

consideration for the mood of the populace, which has for the moment

been won over by Brutus; then the mask is raised a little, then a

little more and a little more, until, with a wild gesture, it is torn

off and thrown aside.

Here again Shakespeare has utilised in a masterly fashion the hints he

found in Plutarch, scanty as they were:--

"Afterwards, when Cæsar's body was brought into the

market-place, Antonius, making his funeral oration in praise

of the dead, according to the auncient custome of Rome,

and perceiuing that his words moued the common people to

compassion: he framed his eloquence to make their harts

yerne the more."

Mark what Shakespeare has made of this::--

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears:

I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Cæsar. The noble Brutus

Hath told you, Cæsar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Cæsar answered it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,

(For Brutus is an honourable man,

So are they all, all honourable men),

Come I to speak in Cæsar's funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man."

Then Antony goes on to insinuate doubts as to Cæsar's ambition, and

tells how he rejected the kingly diadem, rejected it three times. Was

this ambition? Thereupon he suggests that Cæsar, after all, was once

beloved, and that there is no reason why he should not be mourned. Then

with a sudden outburst:--

"O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason!--Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with Cæsar,

And I must pause till it come back to me."

Next comes an appeal to their pity for this greatest of men, whose

word but yesterday might have stood against the world, and who now

lies so low that the poorest will not do him reverence. It would be

wrong to make his speech inflammatory, a wrong towards Brutus and

Cassius "who--as you know--are honourable men" (mark the jibe in the

parenthetic phrase); no, he will rather do wrong to the dead and to

himself. But here he holds a parchment--he assuredly will not read

it--but if the people came to know its contents they would kiss dead

Cæsar's wounds, and dip their handkerchiefs in his sacred blood. And

then, when cries for the reading of the will mingle with curses upon

the murderers, he stubbornly refuses to read it. Instead of doing so,

he displays to them Cæsar's cloak with all the rents in it.

What Plutarch says here is:--

"To conclude his Oration, he unfolded before the whole

assembly the bloudy garments of the dead, thrust through in

many places with their swords, and called the malefactors

cruell and cursed murtherers."

Out of these few words Shakespeare has made this miracle of invective:--

"You all do know this mantle! I remember

The first time ever Cæsar put it on:

'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,

That day he overcame the Nervii.

Look! in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:

See, what a rent the envious Casca made:

Through this, the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd;

And, as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,

Mark how the blood of Cæsar followed it,

As rushing out of doors, to be resolv'd

If Brutus so unkindly knock'd, or no;

For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar's angel.

Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar lov'd him!

This was the most unkindest cut of all;

For when the noble Cæsar saw him stab,

Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,

Quite vanquish'd him: then burst his mighty heart;

And, in his mantle muffling up his face,

Even at the base of Pompey's statua,

Which all the while ran blood, great Cæsar fell.

O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!

Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,

Whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us.

O! now you weep; and, I perceive, you feel

The dint of pity: these are gracious drops.

Kind souls! what, weep you, when you but behold

Our Cæsar's vesture wounded? Look you here,

Here is himself, marr'd, as you see, with traitors."

He uncovers Cæsar's body; and not till then does he read the will,

overwhelming the populace with gifts and benefactions. This climax is

of Shakespeare's own invention.

No wonder that even Voltaire was so struck with the beauty of this

scene, that for its sake he translated the first three acts of the

play. At the end of his own _Mort de César_, too, he introduced a

feeble imitation of the scene; and he had it in his mind when, in his

_Discours sur la Tragédie_, dedicated to Bolingbroke, he expressed so

much enthusiasm and envy for the freedom of the English stage.

In the last two acts, Brutus is overtaken by the recoil of his deed.

He consented to the murder out of noble, disinterested and patriotic

motives; nevertheless he is struck down by its consequences, and pays

for it with his happiness and his life. The declining action of the

last two acts is--as is usual with Shakespeare--less effective and

fascinating than the rising action which fills the first three; but it

has one significant, profound, and brilliantly constructed and executed

scene--the quarrel and reconciliation between Brutus and Cassius in the

fourth act, which leads up to the appearance of Cæsar's ghost.

This scene is significant because it gives a many-sided picture of the

two leading characters--the sternly upright Brutus, who is shocked at

the means employed by Cassius to raise the money without which their

campaign cannot be carried on, and Cassius, a politician entirely

indifferent to moral scruples, but equally unconcerned as to his own

personal advantage. The scene is profound because it presents to us the

necessary consequences of the law-defying, rebellious act: cruelty,

unscrupulous policy, and lax tolerance of dishonourable conduct in

subordinates, when the bonds of authority and discipline have once been

burst. The scene is brilliantly constructed because, with its quick

play of passion and its rising discord, which at last passes over into

a cordial and even tender reconciliation, it is dramatic in the highest

sense of the word.

The fact that Brutus was in Shakespeare's own mind the true hero of the

tragedy appears in the clearest light when we find him ending the play

with the eulogy which Plutarch, in his life of Brutus, places in the

mouth of Antony; I mean the famous words:--

"This was the noblest Roman of them all:

All the conspirators, save only he,

Did that they did in envy of great Cæsar;

He only, in a general honest thought

And common good to all, made one of them.

His life was gentle; and the elements

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up,

And say to all the world, 'This was a man!'"

The resemblance between these words and a celebrated speech of Hamlet's

is unmistakable. Everywhere in _Julius Cæsar_ we feel the proximity of

_Hamlet_. The fact that Hamlet hesitates so long before attacking the

King, finds so many reasons to hold his hand, is torn with doubts as

to the act and its consequences, and insists on considering everything

even while he upbraids himself for considering so long--all this is

partly due, no doubt, to the circumstance that Shakespeare comes to

him directly from Brutus. His Hamlet has, so to speak, just seen what

happened to Brutus, and the example is not encouraging, either with

respect to action in general, or with respect to the murder of a

stepfather in particular.

It is not difficult to conceive that Shakespeare may at this period

have been subject to moments of scepticism, in which he could scarcely

understand how any one could make up his mind to act, to assume

responsibility, to set in motion the rolling stone which is the type

of every action. If we once begin to brood over the incalculable

consequences of an action and all that circumstance may make of it,

all action on a great scale becomes impossible. Therefore it is that

very few old men understand their youth; they dare not and could not

act again as, in their recklessness of consequences, they acted then.

Brutus forms the transition to Hamlet, and Hamlet no doubt grew up in

Shakespeare's mind during the working out of _Julius Cæsar_.

The stages of transition are perhaps these: the conspirators, in egging

Brutus on to the murder, are always reminding him of the elder Brutus,

who pretended madness and drove out the Tarquins. This may have led

Shakespeare to dwell upon his character as drawn by Livy, which had

always been exceedingly popular. But Brutus the elder is an antique

Hamlet; and the very name of Hamlet, as he found it in the older play

and in Saxo, seems always to have haunted Shakespeare. It was the name

he had given to the little boy whom he lost so early.

X

_BEN JONSON AND HIS ROMAN PLAYS_

In precisely the same year as Shakespeare, his famous brother-poet,

Ben Jonson, made his first attempt at a dramatic presentation of Roman

antiquity. His play, _The Poetaster_, was written and acted in 1601.

Its purpose is the literary annihilation of two playwrights, Marston

and Dekker, with whom the author was at feud; but its action takes

place in the time of Augustus; and Jonson, in spite of his satire on

contemporaries, no doubt wanted to utilise his thorough knowledge

of ancient literature in giving a true picture of Roman manners. As

Shakespeare's _Julius Cæsar_ was followed by two other tragedies of

antique Rome, _Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_, so Ben Jonson

also wrote two other plays on Roman themes, the tragedies of _Sejanus_

and _Catiline_. It is instructive to compare his method of treatment

with Shakespeare's; but a general comparison of the two creative

spirits must precede this comparison of artistic processes in a single

limited field.

Ben Jonson was nine years younger than Shakespeare, born in 1573, a

month after the death of his father, the son of a clergyman whose

forefathers had belonged to "the gentry." He was a child of the town,

while Shakespeare was a child of the country; and the fact is not

without significance, though town and country were not then so clearly

opposed to each other as they are now. When Ben was two years old,

his mother married a worthy masterbricklayer, who did what he could

to procure his step-son a good education, so that, after passing some

years at a small private school, he was sent to Westminster. Here

the learned William Camden, his teacher, introduced him to the two

classical literatures, and seems, moreover, to have exercised a not

altogether fortunate influence upon his subsequent literary habits; for

it was Camden who taught him first to write out in prose whatever he

wanted to express in verse. Thus the foundation was laid at school, not

only of his double ambition to shine as a scholar and a poet, or rather

as a scholar-poet, but also of his heavy and rhetorically emphatic

verse.

In spite of his worship of learning, his dislike to all handicraft, and

his unfitness for practical work, he was forced by poverty to break

off his studies in order to enter the employment of his bricklayer

stepfather--a fact which, in his subsequent literary feuds, always

procured him the nickname of "the bricklayer." He could not long endure

this occupation, went as a soldier to the Netherlands, killed one of

the enemy in single combat, under the eyes of both camps, returned to

London and married--almost as early as Shakespeare--at the age of only

nineteen. Twenty-six years later, in his conversations with Drummond,

he called his wife "a shrew, yet honest." He seems to have been an

affectionate father, but had the misfortune to survive his children.

He was strong and massive in body, racy and coarse, full of self-esteem

and combative instincts, saturated with the conviction of the scholar's

high rank and the poet's exalted vocation, full of contempt for

ignorance, frivolity, and lowness, classic in his tastes, with a bent

towards careful structure and leisurely development of thought in

all that he wrote, and yet a true poet in so far as he was not only

irregular in his life and quite incapable of saving any of the money he

now and then earned, but was, moreover, subject to hallucinations: once

saw Carthaginians and Romans fighting on his great toe, and, on another

occasion, had a vision of his son with a bloody cross on his brow,

which was supposed to forbode his death.

Like Shakespeare, he sought to make his bread by entering the theatre

and appearing as an actor. To him, as to Shakespeare, old pieces of the

repertory were entrusted to be rewritten, expanded, and furbished up.

Thus as late as 1601-2 he made a number of very able additions, in the

style of the old play, to that _Spanish Tragedy_ of Kyd's, which must

in many ways have been in Shakespeare's mind during the composition of

_Hamlet_.

He did this work on the commission of Henslow, for whose company, which

competed with Shakespeare's, he worked regularly from 1597 onwards. He

collaborated with Dekker in a tragedy, and had a hand in other plays;

in short, he made himself useful to the theatre as best he could, but

did not, like Shakespeare, acquire a share in the enterprise, and thus

never became a man of substance. He was to the end of his life forced

to rely for his income upon the liberality of royal and noble patrons.

The end of 1598 is doubly significant in Ben Jonson's life. In

September he killed in a duel another of Henslow's actors, a certain

Gabriel Spencer (who seems to have challenged him), and was therefore

branded on the thumb with the letter T (Tyburn). A couple of months

later, this occurrence having evidently led to a break in his

connection with Henslow's company, his first original play, _Every Man

in his Humour_, was acted by the Lord Chamberlain's men. According to a

tradition preserved by Rowe, and apparently trustworthy, the play had

already been refused, when Shakespeare happened to see it and procured

its acceptance. It met with the success it deserved, and henceforward

the author's name was famous.

Even in the first edition of this play he makes Young Knowell speak

with warm enthusiasm of poetry, of the dignity of the sacred art of

invention, and express that hatred for every profanation of the Muses

which appears so frequently in later works, finding, perhaps, its most

vehement utterance in _The Poetaster_, where the young Ovid eulogises

his art in opposition to the scorn of his father and others. From the

first, too, he made no concealment of his strong sense of being at once

a high-priest of art, and, in virtue of his learning, an Aristarchus

of taste. He not only scorned all attempts to tickle the public ear,

but, with the firm and superior attitude of a teacher, he again and

again imprinted on spectators and readers what Goethe has expressed

in the well-known words: "Ich schreibe nicht, Euch zu gefallen; Ihr

sollt was lernen." Again and again he claimed for his own person the

sanctity and inviolability of art, and attacked his inferior rivals

unsparingly, with ferocious rather than witty satire. His prologues and

epilogues are devoted to a self-acclamation which was entirely foreign

to Shakespeare's nature. Asper in _Every Man out of his Humour_ (1599),

Crites in _Cynthia's Revels_ (1600), and Horace in _The Poetaster_

(1601), are so many pieces of self-idolising self-portraiture.

All who, in his judgment, degrade art are made to pay the penalty

in scathing caricatures. In _The Poetaster_, for example, his

taskmaster, Henslow, is presented under the name of Histrio as a

depraved slave-dealer, and his colleagues Marston and Dekker are

held up to ridicule under Roman names, as intrusive and despicable

scribblers. Their attacks upon the admirable poet Horace, whose name

and personality the extremely dissimilar Ben Jonson has arrogated to

himself, spring from contemptible motives, and receive a disgraceful

punishment.

This whole warfare must not be taken too seriously. The worthy

Ben could be at the same time an indignant moralist and a genial

boon-companion. We presently find him taking service afresh with the

very Henslow whom he has just treated with such withering contempt;

and though his attack of 1601 had been met by a most malicious retort

in Marston and Dekker's _Satiromastix_, he, three years afterwards,

accepts the dedication of Marston's _Malcontent_, and in 1605

collaborates with this lately-lampooned colleague and with Chapman in

the comedy of _Eastward Ho!_ One could not but think of the German

proverb, "Pack schlagt sich, Pack vertragt sich," were it not that

Jonson's action at this juncture reveals him in anything but a vulgar

light. Marston and Chapman having been thrown into prison for certain

gibes at the Scotch in this play, which had come to the notice of the

King, and being reported to be in danger of having their noses and

ears cut off, Ben Jonson, of his own free will, claimed his share

in the responsibility and joined them in prison. At a supper which,

after their liberation, he gave to all his friends, his mother clinked

glasses with him, and at the same time showed him a paper, the contents

of which she had intended to mix with his drink in prison if he had

been sentenced to mutilation. She added that she herself would not have

survived him, but would have taken her share of the poison. She must

have been a mother worthy of such a son.

While Ben lay in durance on account of his duel, he had been converted

to Catholicism by a priest who attended him--a conversion at which his

adversaries did not fail to jeer. He does not seem, however, to have

embraced the Catholic dogma with any great fervour, for twelve years

later he once more changes his religion and returns to the Protestant

Church. Equally characteristic of Ben and of the Renaissance is his own

statement, preserved for us by Drummond, that at his first communion

after his reconciliation with Protestantism, in token of his sincere

return to the doctrine which gave laymen, as well as priests access to

the chalice, he drained at one draught the whole of the consecrated

wine.

Not without humour, moreover--to use Jonson's own favourite word--is

his story of the way in which Raleigh's son, to whom he acted as

governor during a tour in France (while Raleigh himself was in

the Tower), took a malicious pleasure in making his mentor dead

drunk, having him wheeled in a wheelbarrow through the streets of

Paris, and showing him off to the mob at every street corner. Ben's

strong insistence on his spiritual dignity was not infrequently

counterbalanced by an extreme carelessness of his personal dignity.

With all his weaknesses, however, he was a sturdy, energetic, and

high-minded man, a commanding, independent, and very comprehensive

intelligence; and from 1598, when he makes his first appearance on

Shakespeare's horizon, throughout the rest of his life, he was, so

far as we can see, the man of all his contemporaries whose name was

oftenest mentioned along with Shakespeare's. In after days, especially

outside England, the name of Ben Jonson has come to sound small enough

in comparison with the name of solitary greatness with which it was

once bracketed; but at that time, although Jonson was never so popular

as Shakespeare, they were commonly regarded in literary circles as the

dramatic twin-brethren of the age. For us it is still more interesting

to remember that Ben Jonson was one of the few with whom we know that

Shakespeare was on terms of constant familiarity, and, moreover, that

he brought to this intercourse a set of definite artistic principles,

widely different from Shakespeare's own. Though his society may

have been somewhat fatiguing, it must nevertheless have been both

instructive and stimulating to Shakespeare, since Ben was greatly his

superior in historical and linguistic knowledge, while as a poet he

pursued a totally different ideal.

Ben Jonson was a great dramatic intelligence. He never, like the other

poets of his time, took this or that novel and dramatised it as it

stood, regardless of its more or less incoherent structure, its more or

less flagrant defiance of topographical, geographical, or historical

reality. With architectural solidity--was he not the step-son of a

master-builder?--he built up his dramatic plan out of his own head,

and, being a man of great learning, he did his best to avoid all

incongruities of local colour. If he is now and then negligent in this

respect--if the characters in _Volpone_ now and then talk as if they

were in London, not in Venice, and those in _The Poetaster_ as if they

were in England, not in Rome--it is because of his satiric purpose, and

not at all by reason of the indifference to such considerations which

characterises all other dramatists of the time, Shakespeare not the

least.

The fundamental contrast between them can be most shortly expressed

in the statement that Ben Jonson accepted the view of human nature

set forth in the classic comedies and the Latin tragedies. He

does not represent it as many-sided, with inward developments and

inconsistencies, but fixes character in typical forms, with one

dominant trait thrown into high relief. He portrays, for example, the

crafty parasite, or the eccentric who cannot endure noise, or the

braggart captain, or the depraved anarchist (Catiline), or the stern

man of honour (Cato)--and all these personalities are neither more nor

less than the labels imply, and act up to their description always and

in all circumstances. The pencil with which he draws is hard, but he

wields it with such power that his best outlines subsist through the

centuries, unforgettable, despite their occasional oddity of design,

in virtue of the indignation with which wickedness and meanness

are branded, and the racy merriment with which the caricatures are

sketched, the farces worked out.

Some of Molière's farces may now and then remind us of Jonson's, but,

as regards the pitiless intensity of the satire, we shall find no

counterpart to his _Volpone_ until we come in our own times to Gogol's

_Revisor_.

The Graces stood by Shakespeare's cradle, not by Jonson's; and yet this

heavy-armed warrior has now and then attained to grace as well--has now

and then given a holiday to his sound systematic intelligence and his

solidly-constructed logic, and, like a true poet of the Renaissance,

soared into the rarer atmosphere of pure fantasy.

He shows himself very much at home in the allegorical masques which

were performed at court festivals; and in the pastoral play _The

Sad Shepherd_ which seems to have been written upon his death-bed,

he proved that even in the purely romantic style he could challenge

comparison with the best writers of his day. Yet it is not in this

sphere that he displays his true originality. It is in his keen and

faithful observation of the conditions and manners of his time, which

Shakespeare left on one side, or depicted only incidentally and

indirectly. The London of Elizabeth lives again in Jonson's plays; both

the lower and higher circles, but especially the lower: the haunters of

taverns and theatres, the men of the riverside and the markets, rogues

and vagabonds, poets and players, watermen and jugglers, bear-leaders

and hucksters, rich city dames, Puritan fanatics and country squires,

English oddities of every class and kind, each speaking his own

language, dialect, or jargon. Shakespeare never kept so close to the

life of the day.

It is especially Johnson's scholarship that must have made his

society full of instruction for Shakespeare. Ben's acquirements were

encyclopædic, and his acquaintance with the authors of antiquity was

singularly complete and accurate. It has often been remarked that he

was not content with an exhaustive knowledge of the leading writers

of Greece and Rome. He knows not only the great historians, poets,

and orators, such as Tacitus and Sallust, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and

Cicero, but sophists, grammarians, and scholiasts, men like Athenæus,

Libanius, Philostratus, Strabo, Photius. He is familiar with fragments

of Æolic lyrists and Roman epic poets, of Greek tragedies and Roman

inscriptions; and, what is still more remarkable, he manages to make

use of all his knowledge. Whatever in the ancients he found beautiful

or profound or stimulating, that he wove into his work. Dryden says of

him in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy":--

"The greatest man of the last age (Ben Jonson) was willing

to give place to the ancients in all things: he was not only

a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of

all the others; you track him everywhere in their snow. If

Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal had

their own from him, there are few serious thoughts which are

new in him.... But he has done his robberies so openly, that

one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades

authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other

poets is only victory in him."

Certain it is that an uncommon learning and an extraordinary memory

supplied him with an immense store of small touches, poetical and

rhetorical details, which he could not refrain from incorporating in

his plays.

Yet his mass of learning was not of a merely verbal or rhetorical

nature; he knew things as well as words. Whatever subject he treats of,

be it alchemy, or witchcraft, or cosmetics in the time of Tiberius, he

handles it with competence and has its whole literature at his fingers'

ends. He thus becomes universal like Shakespeare, but in a different

way. Shakespeare knows, firstly, all that cannot be learnt from books,

and in the second place, whatever can be gleaned by genius from a

casual utterance, an intelligent hint, a conversation with a man of

high acquirements. Besides this, he knows the literature which was at

that time within the reach of a quick-witted and studious man without

special scholarship. Ben Jonson, on the other hand, is a scholar by

profession. He has learnt from books all that the books of his day--for

the most part, of course, the not too numerous survivals of the classic

literatures--could teach a man who made scholarship his glory. He not

only possesses knowledge, but he knows whence he has acquired it; he

can cite his authorities by chapter and paragraph, and he sometimes

garnishes his plays with so many learned references that they bristle

with notes like an academic thesis.

Colossal, coarse-grained, vigorous, and always ready for the fray, with

his gigantic burden of learning, he has been compared by Taine to one

of those war-elephants of antiquity which bore on their backs a whole

fortress, with garrison, armoury, and munitions, and under the weight

of this panoply could yet move as quickly as a fleet-footed horse.

It must have been intensely interesting for their comrades at the

Mermaid to listen to the discussions between Jonson and Shakespeare,

to follow two such remarkable minds, so differently organised and

equipped, when they debated, in jest or earnest, this or that historic

problem, this or that moot point in æsthetics; and no less interesting

is it for us, in our days, to compare their almost contemporaneous

dramatic treatment of Roman antiquity. We might here expect Shakespeare

to have the worst of it, since he, according to Jonson's well-known

phrase, had "small Latine and less Greek;" while Ben was as much

at home in ancient Rome as in the London of his day, and, with his

altogether masculine talent, could claim a certain kinship with the

Roman spirit.

And yet even here Shakespeare stands high above Jonson, who, with all

his learning and industry, lacks his great contemporary's sense for the

fundamental element in human nature, to which the terms good and bad do

not apply, and has, besides, very few of those unforeseen inspirations

of genius which constitute Shakespeare's strength, and make up for all

the gaps in his knowledge. Jonson, moreover, could not modulate into

the minor key, and is thus unable to depict the inmost subtleties of

feminine character.

None the less would it be unjust to make Jonson, as the Germans are

apt to do, nothing but a foil to Shakespeare. We must, in mere equity,

bring out the points at which he attains to real greatness.

Although the scene of _The Poetaster_ is laid in Rome in the days of

Augustus, the play eludes comparison with Shakespeare's Roman dramas in

so far as its costume is partly a mere travesty under which Ben Jonson

defends himself against his contemporaries Marston and Dekker, who also

figure, of course, in a Roman disguise. Even here, however, he has done

his best to give an accurate picture of antique Roman manners, and

has applied to the task all his learning, with rather too little aid,

perhaps, from his fancy. His comic figures, for instance, the intrusive

Crispinus and the foolish singer Hermogenes, are taken bodily from

Horace's Satires (Book i. Satires 3 and 9); but both these pleasant

caricatures are executed with vigour and life.

Ben Jonson has in this play woven together three different actions, one

only of which has a symbolic meaning outside the frame of the picture.

In the first place, he presents Ovid's struggle for leave to follow his

poetic vocation, his suspected love-affair with Augustus's daughter,

Julia, and his banishment from the court when Augustus discovers the

intrigue between the young poet and his child. In the second place, he

introduces us into the house of the rich bourgeois Albius, who has been

ill-advised enough to marry one of the emancipated great ladies of the

period, Chloe by name, and who, by her help, obtains admission to court

society. Chloe's house is a meeting-place for all the love-poets of the

period, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Cornelius Gallus, and the ladies

who favour them; and Jonson has succeeded very fairly in suggesting

the free tone of conversation prevalent in those circles, which

was doubtless reproduced in many circles of London life during the

Renaissance. Finally, we have a representation--Jonson's chief object

in writing the play--of the conspiracy of the bad and envious poets

against Horace, which culminates in a formal impeachment. The Emperor

himself, and the famous poets of his court, form a sort of tribunal

before which the case is tried. Horace is acquitted on every count,

and the accusers are sentenced to a punishment entirely in the spirit

of the Aristophanic comedy--so foreign to Shakespeare--Crispinus being

forced to take a pill of hellebore, which makes him vomit up all the

affected or merely novel words he has used, which appear to Ben Jonson

ridiculous. Some of them--for example the first two, "retrograde" and

"reciprocal"--have nevertheless survived in modern English. In spite of

its allegorical character, the episode is not deficient in an almost

too pungent realism.

The most Roman of all these scenes are doubtless those in which the

gallantry between the young men and the ladies, and the snobbery which

forces its way into Augustus's court, are freely represented. Less

Roman, by reason of their too palpable tendency, are the scenes in

which Augustus appears in the circle of his court poets. No serious

attempt is made to portray the Emperor's character, and the speeches

placed in the mouths of the poets are very clearly designed simply for

the glorification of poetry in general, and Ben Jonson in particular.

The sins of which his enemies were always accusing him were "self-love,

arrogancy, impudence, and railing," together with "filching by

translation." As he explains in the defensive dialogue which he

appended to his play, it was his purpose--

"To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest

Of those great master-spirits, did not want

Detractors then, or practisers against them."

He makes foolish persons find injurious allusions to themselves, and

even insults to the Emperor, in entirely innocent poems of Horace's,

and shows how the Emperor orders them to be whipped as backbiters.

Horace's literary relation to the Greeks, be it noted, was not unlike

that of Ben Jonson himself to the Latin writers.

A special interest attaches for us to the passage in the fifth act,

where, immediately before Virgil's entrance, the different poets, at

the suggestion of the Emperor, express their judgment of his genius,

and where Horace, after warmly protesting against the common belief

that one poet is necessarily envious of another, joins in the general

eulogy of his great rival. There is this remarkable circumstance about

the encomiums on Virgil, here placed in the mouths of Gallus, Tibullus,

and Horace, that while some of them are appropriate enough to the real

Virgil (else all verisimilitude would have been sacrificed), others

seem unmistakably to point away from Virgil towards one or other famous

contemporary of Jonson's own. Look for a moment at these speeches (v.

I):--

"_Tibullus_. That which he hath writ

Is with such judgment labour'd, and distill'd

Through all the needful uses of our lives,

That could a man remember but his lines,

He should not touch at any serious point,

But he might breathe his spirit out of him.

_Augustus_. You mean, he might repeat part of his works

As fit for any conference he can use?

_Tibullus_. True, royal Cæsar.

_Horace_. His learning savours not the school-like gloss

That most consists in echoing words and terms,

And soonest wins a man an empty name;

Nor any long or far-fetch'd circumstance

Wrapp'd in the curious generalties of arts,

But a direct and analytic sum

Of all the worth and first effects of arts.

And for his poesy, 'tis so ramm'd with life,

That it shall gather strength of life, with being,

And live hereafter more admired than now."

Can we conceive that Ben Jonson had not Shakespeare in his eye as he

wrote these speeches, which apply better to him than to any one else?

It is true that a Shakespeare scholar of such authority as the late C.

M. Ingleby, the compiler of _Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse_, has

declared against this theory, together with Nicholson and Furnivall.

But none of them has brought forward any conclusive argument to

prevent us from following Ben Jonson's admirer, Gifford, and his

impartial critic, John Addington Symonds, in accepting these speeches

as allusions to Shakespeare. It is useless to be for ever citing the

passage in _The Return from Parnassus_, as to the "purge" Shakespeare

has given Ben Jonson, in proof that there was an open feud between

them, when, in fact, there is no evidence whatever of any hostility

on Shakespeare's part; and the very stress laid on the assertion that

Horace, as a poet, is innocent of envy towards a famous and popular

colleague, makes it unreasonable to take the eulogies as applying

solely to the real Virgil, whom they fit so imperfectly. Of course

it by no means follows that we are to conceive every word of these

eulogies as unreservedly applied to Shakespeare; the speeches seem to

have been purposely left somewhat vague, so that they might at once

point to the ancient poet and suggest the modern. But out of the mists

of the characterisation certain definite contours stand forth; and the

physiognomy which they form, the picture of the great teacher in all

earthly affairs, rich, not in book-learning, but in the wisdom of life,

whose poetry is so vital that it will live through the ages with an

ever-intenser life--this portrait we know and recognise as that of the

genius with the great, calm eyes under the lofty brow.

Ben Jonson's _Sejanus_, which dates from 1603, only two years after

_The Poetaster_, is a historical tragedy of the time of Tiberius, in

which the poet, without any reference to contemporary personalities,

sets forth to depict the life and customs of the imperial court. It is

as an archæologist and moralist, however, that he depicts them, and his

method is thus very different from Shakespeare's. He not only displays

a close acquaintance with the life of the period, but penetrates

through the outward forms to its spirit. He is animated, indeed, by a

purely moral indignation against the turbulent and corrupt protagonist

of his tragedy, but his wrath does not prevent him from giving a

careful delineation of the figure of Sejanus in relation to its

surroundings, by means of thoughtfully-designed and even imaginative

individual scenes. Jonson does not, like Shakespeare, display from

within the character of this unscrupulous and audacious man, but he

shows the circumstances which have produced it, and its modes of action.

The difference between Jonson's and Shakespeare's method is not that

Jonson pedantically avoids the anachronisms which swarm in _Julius

Cæsar_. In both plays, for instance, watches are spoken of.[1] But Ben,

on occasion, can paint a scene of Roman life with as much accuracy

as we find in a picture by Alma Tadema or a novel by Flaubert. For

example, when he depicts an act of worship and sacrifice in the

Sacellum or private chapel of Sejanus's house (v. 4), every detail of

the ceremonial is correct. After the Herald (Præco) has uttered the

formula, "Be all profane far hence," and horn and flute players have

performed their liturgical music, the priest (Flamen) exhorts all to

appear with "pure hands, pure vestments, and pure minds;" his acolytes

intone the complementary responses; and while the trumpets are again

sounded, he takes honey from the altar with his finger, tastes it, and

gives it to the others to taste; goes through the same process with

the milk in an earthen vessel; and then sprinkles milk over the altar,

"kindleth his gums," and goes with the censer round the altar, upon

which he ultimately places it, dropping "branches of poppy" upon the

smouldering incense. In justification of these traits, Jonson gives no

fewer than thirteen footnotes, in which passages are cited from a very

wide range of Latin authors. Kalisch has counted the notes appended to

this play, and finds 291 in all. The ceremonial is here employed to

introduce a scene in which "great Mother Fortune," to whom the libation

is made, averts her face from Sejanus, and thereby portends his fall;

whereupon, in an access of fury, he overturns her statue and altar.

Another scene, constructed with quite as much learning, and far more

able and remarkable, is that which opens the second Act. Livia's

physician, Eudemus, has been suborned by Sejanus to procure him a

meeting with the princess, and, moreover, to concoct a potent poison

for her husband. In the act of assisting his mistress to rouge her

cheek, and recommending her an effective "dentrifice" and a "prepared

pomatum to smooth the skin," he answers her casual questions as to who

is to present the poisoned cup to Drusus and induce him to drink it.

Here, again, Ben Jonson's mastery of detail displays itself. Eudemus's

remark, for example, that the "ceruse" on Livia's cheeks has faded in

the sun, is supported by a reference to an epigram of Martial, from

which it appears that this cosmetic was injured by heat. But here all

these details are merged in the potent general impression produced by

the dispassionate and business-like calmness with which the impending

murder is arranged in the intervals of a disquisition upon those

devices of the toilet which are to enchain the contriver of the crime.

Ben Jonson possesses the undaunted insight and the vigorous

pessimism which render it possible to represent Roman depravity and

wild-beast-like ferocity under the first Emperors without extenuation

and without declamation. He cannot, indeed, dispense with a sort of

chorus of honourable Romans, but they express themselves, as a rule,

pithily and without prolixity; and he has enough sense of art and of

history never to let his ruffians and courtesans repent.

Now and then he even attains to a Shakespearian level. The scene in

which Sejanus approaches Eudemus first with jesting talk, and then,

with wily insinuations, worms himself into his acquaintance and makes

him his creature, while Eudemus, with crafty servility, shows that

he can take a half-spoken hint, and, without for a moment committing

himself, offers his services as pander and assassin--this passage is in

no way inferior to the scene in Shakespeare's _King John_ in which the

King suggests to Hubert the murder of Arthur.

The most remarkable scene, however, is that (v. 10) in which the Senate

is assembled in the Temple of Apollo to hear messages from Tiberius

in his retreat at Capri. The first letter confers upon Sejanus "the

tribunitial dignity and power," with expressions of esteem, and the

Senate loudly acclaims the favourite. Then the second letter is read.

It is expressed in a strangely contorted style, begins with some

general remarks on public policy, hypocritical in tone, then turns,

like the first, to Sejanus, and, to the astonishment of all, dwells

with emphasis upon his low origin and the rare honours to which he has

been preferred. Already the hearers are alarmed; but the impression is

obliterated by new sentences of flattery. Then unfavourable opinions

and judgments regarding the favourite are cited and dwelt upon with

a certain complacency; then they are refuted with some vehemence;

finally, they are brought forward again, and this time in a manner

unmistakably hostile to Sejanus. Immediately the senators who have

swarmed around him withdraw from his neighbourhood, leaving him in the

centre of an empty space; and the reading continues until Laco enters

with the guards who are to arrest the hitherto all-powerful favourite

and lead him away. We can find no parallel to this reading of the

letter and the vacillations it produces among the cringing senators,

save in Antony's speech over the body of Cæsar and the consequent

revulsion in the attitude and temper of the Roman mob. Shakespeare's

scene is more vividly projected, and shines with the poet's humour;

Jonson's scene is elaborated with grim energy, and worked out with the

moralist's bitterness. But in the dramatic movement of the moralist's

scene, no less than of the poet's, antique Rome lives again.

Jonson's _Catiline_, written some time later, appeared in 1611, and

was dedicated to Pembroke. Although executed on the same principles,

it is on the whole inferior to _Sejanus_; but it is better fitted for

comparison with _Julius Cæsar_ in so far as its action belongs to the

same period, and Cæsar himself appears in it. The second act of the

tragedy is in its way a masterpiece. As soon as Jonson enters upon

the political action proper, he transcribes endless speeches from

Cicero, and becomes intolerably tedious; but so long as he keeps to the

representation of manners, and seeks, as in his comedies, to paint a

quite unemotional picture of the period, he shows himself at his best.

This second act takes place at the house of Fulvia, the lady who,

according to Sallust, betrayed to Cicero the conspirators' secret. The

whole picture produces an entirely convincing effect. She first repels

with unfeeling coldness an intrusive friend and protector, Catiline's

fellow-conspirator, Curius; but when he at last turns away in anger,

telling her that she will repent her conduct when she finds herself

excluded from participation in an immense booty which will fall to the

share of others, she calls him back, full of curiosity and interest,

becomes suddenly friendly, and even caressing, and wrings from him

his secret, instantly recognising, however, that Cicero will pay for

it without stint, and that this money is considerably safer than the

sum which might fall to her share in a general revolution. Her visit

to Cicero, with his craftily friendly interrogatory, first of her,

and then of her lover Curius, whom he summons and converts into one

of his spies, deserves the highest praise. These scenes contain the

concentrated essence of Sallust's _Catiline_ and of Cicero's Orations

and Letters. The Cicero of this play rises high above the Cicero to

whom Shakespeare has assigned a few speeches. Cæsar, on the other

hand, comes off no better at Ben Jonson's hands than at Shakespeare's.

The poet was obviously determined to show a certain independence of

judgment in the way in which he has treated Sallust's representation

both of Cæsar and of Cicero. Sallust, whom Jonson nevertheless follows

in the main, is hostile to Cicero and defends Cæsar. The worthy Ben, on

the other hand, was, as a man of letters, a sworn admirer of Cicero,

while in Cæsar he sees only a cold, crafty personage, who sought to

make use of Catiline for his own ends, and therefore joined forces with

him, but repudiated him when things went wrong, and was so influential

that Cicero dared not attack him when he rooted out the conspiracy.

Thus the great Caius Julius did not touch Jonson's manly heart any more

than Shakespeare's. He appears throughout in an extremely unsympathetic

light, and no speech, no word of his, portends his coming greatness.

Of this greatness Jonson had probably no deep realisation. It

is surprising enough to note that the scholars and poets of the

Renaissance, in so far as they took sides in the old strife between

Cæsar and Pompey, were all on Pompey's side. Even in the seventeenth

century, in France, under a despotism more absolute than Cæsar's, the

men who were familiar with antique history, and who, for the rest, vied

with each other in loyalty and king-worship, were unanimously opposed

to Cæsar. Strange as it may seem, it is not until our century, with

its hostility to despotism and its continuous advance in the direction

of democracy, that Cæsar's genius has been fully appreciated, and the

benefits his life conferred on humanity have been thoroughly understood.

The personal relation between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare is not to this

day quite clearly ascertained. It was for long regarded as distinctly

hostile, no one doubting that Jonson, during his great rival's

lifetime, cherished an obstinate jealousy towards him. More recently,

Jonson's admirers have argued with warmth that cruel injustice has been

done him in this respect. So far as we can now judge, it appears that

Jonson honestly recognised and admired Shakespeare's great qualities,

but at the same time felt a displeasure he never could quite conquer

at seeing him so much more popular as a dramatist, and--as was only

natural--regarded his own tendencies in art as truer and better

justified.

In the preface to _Sejanus_ (edition of 1605) Jonson uses an expression

which, as the piece was acted by Shakespeare's company, and Shakespeare

himself appeared in it, was long interpreted as referring to him.

Jonson writes:--

"Lastly, I would inform you that this book, in all numbers,

is not the same with that which was acted on the public

stage, wherein a second pen had good share; in place of

which, I have rather chosen to put weaker, and, no doubt,

less pleasing, of mine own, than to defraud so happy a

genius of his right by my loathed usurpation."

The words "so happy a genius," in particular, together with the

other circumstances, have directed the thoughts of commentators to

Shakespeare. Mr. Brinsley Nicholson, however (in the _Academy_, Nov.

14th, 1874), has shown it to be far more probable that the person

alluded to is not Shakespeare, but a very inferior poet, Samuel

Sheppard. The marked politeness of Jonson's expressions may be due to

his having inflicted on his collaborator a considerable disappointment,

almost an insult, by omitting his portion of the work, and at the same

time excluding his name from the title-page. It seems, at any rate,

that Samuel Sheppard felt wounded by this proceeding, since, more

than forty years later, he claimed for himself the honour of having

collaborated in _Sejanus_, in a verse which is ostensibly a panegyric

on Jonson.[2] Symonds, so late as 1888, nevertheless maintains in his

_Ben Jonson_ that the preface most probably refers to Shakespeare; but

he does not refute or even mention Nicholson's carefully-marshalled

argument.

It is not, however, of great importance to decide whether a compliment

in one of Jonson's prefaces is or is not addressed to Shakespeare,

since we have ample evidence in the warm eulogy and mild criticism

in his _Discoveries_, and in the enthusiastic poem prefixed to the

First Folio, that the crusty Ben (who, moreover, is said to have been

Shakespeare's boon companion on his last convivial evening) regarded

him with the warmest feelings, at least towards the close of his life

and after his death.

This does not exclude the probability that Jonson's radically different

literary ideals may have led him to make incidental and sometimes

rather tart allusions to what appeared to him weak or mistaken in

Shakespeare's work.

There is no foundation for the theory which has sometimes been

advanced, that the passage in _The Poetaster_ ridiculing Crispinus's

coat of arms is an allusion to Shakespeare. It is beyond all doubt

that the figure of Crispinus was exclusively intended for Marston; he

himself, at any rate, did not for a moment doubt it. For the rest,

Jonson's ascertained or conjectured side-glances at Shakespeare are

these:--

In the prologue to _Every Man in his Humour_, which can scarcely have

been spoken when the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's

company, not only is realistic art proclaimed the true art, in

opposition to the romanticism which prevailed on the Shakespearian

stage, but a quite definite attack is made on those who

"With three rusty swords,

And help of some few foot and half-foot words,

Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars."

And this is followed by a really biting criticism of the works of other

playwrights, concluding--

"There's hope left then,

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men."

The possible jibe at _Twelfth Night_ in _Every Man out of his Humour_

(iii. I) has already been mentioned (_ante_, p. 272). That, too, must

be of late insertion, and is at worst extremely innocent.

Much has been made of the passage in _Volpone_ (iii. 2) where Lady

Politick Would-be, speaking of Guarini's _Pastor Fido_, says:--

"All our English writers

Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly:

Almost as much as from Montagnié."

This has been interpreted as an accusation of plagiarism, some pointing

it at the well-known passage in _The Tempest_, where Shakespeare has

annexed some lines, from Montaigne's Essays; others at _Hamlet_, which

has throughout many points of contact with the French philosopher. But

_The Tempest_ was undoubtedly written long after _Volpone_, and the

relation of _Hamlet_ to Montaigne is such as to render it scarcely

conceivable that an accusation of plagiarism could be founded upon it.

Here again Jonson seems to have been groundlessly suspected of malice.

Jacob Feis (_Shakespeare and Montaigne_, p. 183) would fain see in

Nano's song about the hermaphrodite Androgyno a shameless attack upon

Shakespeare, simply because the names Pythagoras and Euphorbus appear

in it (_Volpone_, i. I), as they do in the well-known passage in Meres;

but this accusation is entirely fantastic. Equally unreasonable is it

of Feis to discover an obscene besmirching of the figure of Ophelia in

that passage of Jonson, Marston, and Chapman's _Eastward Ho!_ (iii. 2)

where there occur some passing allusions to _Hamlet_.

There remain, then, in reality, only one or two passages in

_Bartholomew Fair_, dating from 1614. We have already seen (_ante_, p.

337) that there may possibly be a satirical allusion to the Sonnets

in the introduced puppet-play, _The Touchstone of True Love_. The

Induction contains an unquestionable jibe, both at _The Tempest_ and

_The Winter's Tale_, whose airy poetry the downright Ben was unable to

appreciate.[3] Neither Caliban nor the element of enchantment in _The

Tempest_ appealed to him, and in _The Winters Tale_, as in _Pericles_,

it offended his classic taste and his Aristotelian theories that the

action should extend over a score of years, so that we see infants in

one act reappear in the next as grown-up young women.

But these trifling intolerances and impertinences must not tempt us to

forget that it was Ben Jonson who wrote of Shakespeare those great and

passionate lines:--

"Triumph, my Britain! thou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time!"

[1] "Observe him as his watch observes his clock."--_Sejanus_, i. I.

[2] He says of Jonson in _The Times Displayed in Six Sesfyads_:--

"So His, that Divine Plautus equalled,

Whose Commick vain Menander nere could hit,

Whose tragic sceans shal be with wonder Read

By after ages, for unto his wit

My selfe gave personal ayd, _I_ dictated

To him when as _Sejanus_ fall he writ,

And yet on earth some foolish sots there bee

That dare make Randolph his Rival in degree."

[3] "If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help

it, he says, nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid

in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such-like

drolleries."

XI

_HAMLET: ITS ANTECEDENTS IN FICTION, HISTORY, AND DRAMA_

Many and various emotions crowded upon Shakespeare's mind in the year

1601. In its early months Essex and Southampton were condemned. At

exactly the same time there occurs the crisis in the relations of

Pembroke and Shakespeare with the Dark Lady. Finally, in the early

autumn, Shakespeare suffered a loss which he must have felt deeply. The

Stratford register of burials for 1601 contains this line--

_Septemb._ 8. Mr. _Johannes Shakespeare_.

He lost his father, his earliest friend and guardian, whose honour and

reputation lay so near to his heart. The father probably lived with his

son's family in the handsome New Place, which Shakespeare had bought

four years before. He had doubtless brought up the two girls Susannah

and Judith; he had doubtless sat by the death-bed of the little Hamnet.

Now he was no more. All the years of his youth, spent at his father's

side, revived in Shakespeare's mind, memories flocked in upon him, the

fundamental relation between son and father preoccupied his thoughts,

and he fell to brooding over filial love and filial reverence.

In the same year _Hamlet_ began to take shape in Shakespeare's

imagination.

_Hamlet_ has given the name of Denmark a world-wide renown. Of all

Danish men, there is only one who can be called famous on the largest

scale; only one with whom the thoughts of men are for ever busied in

Europe, America, Australia, aye, even in Asia and Africa, wherever

European culture has made its way; and this one never existed, at any

rate in the form in which he has become known to the world. Denmark

has produced several men of note--Tycho Brahe, Thorvaldsen, and Hans

Christian Andersen--but none of them has attained a hundredth part of

Hamlet's fame. The _Hamlet_ literature is comparable in extent to the

literature of one of the smaller European peoples--the Slovaks, for

instance.

As it is interesting to follow with the eye the process by which a

block of marble slowly assumes human form, so it is interesting to

observe how the _Hamlet_ theme gradually acquires its Shakespearian

character.

The legend first appears in Saxo Grammaticus. Fengo murders his

brave brother Horvendil, and marries his widow Gerutha (Gertrude).

Horvendil's son, Amleth, determines to disarm Fengo's malevolence

by feigning madness. In order to test whether he is really mad, a

beautiful girl is thrown in his way, who is to note whether, in his

passion for her, he still maintains the appearance of madness. But a

foster-brother and friend of Amleth's reveals the plot to him; the

girl, too, has an old affection for him; and nothing is discovered.

Here lie the germs of Ophelia and Horatio.

With regard to Amleth's mad talk, it is explained that, having a

conscientious objection to lying, he so contorted his sayings that,

though he always said what he meant, people could not discover

whether he meant what he said, or himself understood it--an account

of the matter which applies quite as well to the dark sayings of the

Shakespearian Hamlet as to the naïve riddling of the Jutish Amleth.

Polonius, too, is here already indicated--especially the scene in which

he plays eavesdropper to Hamlet's conversation with his mother. One of

the King's friends (_præsumtione quam solertia abundantior_) proposes

that some one shall conceal himself in the Queen's chamber. Amleth runs

his sword through him and throws the dismembered body to the pigs, as

Hamlet in the play drags the body out with him. Then ensues Amleth's

speech of reproach to his mother, of which not a little is retained

even in Shakespeare:--

"Think'st thou, woman, that these hypocritical tears can

cleanse thee of shame, thee, who like a wanton hast cast

thyself into the arms of the vilest of nithings, hast

incestuously embraced thy husband's murderer, and basely

flatterest and fawnest upon the man who has made thy son

fatherless! What manner of creature doest thou resemble? Not

a woman, but a dumb beast who couples at random."

Fengo resolves to send Amleth to meet his death in England, and

despatches him thither with two attendants, to whom Shakespeare, as

we know, has given the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern--the

names of two Danish noblemen whose signatures have been found in close

juxtaposition (with the date 1577) in an album which probably belonged

to a Duke of Würtemberg. They were colleagues in the Council of Regency

during the minority of Christian IV. These attendants (according to

Saxo) had rune-staves with them, on which Amleth altered the runes, as

in the play he re-writes the letters.

One more little touch is, as it were, led up to in Saxo: the exchange

of the swords. Amleth, on his return, finds the King's men assembled

at his own funeral feast. He goes around with a drawn sword, and on

trying its edge against his nails he once or twice cuts himself with

it. Therefore they nail his sword fast into its sheath. When Amleth has

set fire to the hall and rushes into Fengo's chamber to murder him,

he takes the King's sword from its hook and replaces it with his own,

which the King in vain attempts to draw before he dies.

Now that Hamlet, more than any other Dane, has made the name of his

fatherland world-famous, it impresses us strangely to read this

utterance of Saxo's: "Imperishable shall be the memory of the steadfast

youth who armed himself against falsehood with folly, and with it

marvellously cloaked the splendour of heaven-radiant wisdom.... He

left history in doubt as to whether his heroism or his wisdom was the

greater."

The Hamlet of the tragedy, with reference to his mother's too hasty

marriage, says, "Frailty, thy name is woman!" Saxo remarked with

reference to Amleth's widow, who was in too great a hurry to marry

again: "Thus it is with all the promises of women: they are scattered

like chaff before the wind and pass away like waves of the sea. Who

then will trust to a woman's heart, which changes as flowers shed their

leaves, as seasons change, and as new events wipe out the traces of

those that went before?"

In Saxo's eyes, Amleth represented not only wisdom, but bodily

strength. While the Hamlet of Shakespeare expressly emphasises the

fact that he is anything but Herculean ("My father's brother, but no

more like my father than I to Hercules"), Saxo expressly compares his

hero to the Club-Bearer whose name is a synonym for strength: "And the

fame of men shall tell of him that, if it had been given him to live

his life fortunately to the end, his excellent dispositions would have

displayed themselves in deeds greater than those of Hercules, and would

have adorned his brows with the demigod's wreath." It sounds almost as

though Shakespeare's Hamlet entered a protest against these words of

Saxo.

In the year 1559 the legend was reproduced in French in Belleforest's

_Histoires Tragiques_, and seems in this form to have reached England,

where it furnished material for the older _Hamlet_ drama, now lost,

but to which we find frequent allusions. It cannot be proved that this

play was founded upon Pavier's English translation of Belleforest, or

even that Shakespeare had Pavier before him; for the oldest edition

of the translation which has come down to us (reprinted in Collier's

_Shakespeare's Library_, ed. 1875, pt. I. vol. ii. p. 224) dates

from 1608, and contains certain details (such as the eavesdropper's

concealment behind the arras, and Hamlet's exclamation of "A rat!

a rat!" before he kills Polonius) of which there is no trace in

Belleforest, and which may quite as well have been taken from Shakespeare's

tragedy, as borrowed by him from an unknown older edition of the novel.

The earliest known allusion to the old _Hamlet_ drama is the phrase of

Thomas Nash, dating from 1589, quoted above (p. 91). In 1594

the Lord Chamberlain's men (Shakespeare's company), acting together

with the Lord Admiral's men at the Newington Butts theatre under the

management of Henslow and others, performed a _Hamlet_ with reference

to which Henslow notes in his account-book for June 9th: "Rd. at hamlet

... viii s." This play must have been the old one, for Henslow would

otherwise have added the letters _ne_ (new), and the receipts would

have been much greater. His share, as we see, was only eight shillings,

whereas it was sometimes as much as nine pounds.

The chief interest of this older play seems to have centred in a figure

added by the dramatist--the Ghost of the murdered King, which cried

"Hamlet, revenge!" This cry is frequently quoted. It first appears

in 1596 in Thomas Lodge's _Wits Miserie_, where it is said of the

author that he "looks as pale as the visard of ye ghost, which cried

so miserably at ye theator like an oister-wife, _Hamlet, revenge_" It

next occurs in Dekker's _Satiromastix_, 1602, where Tucca says, "My

name's _Hamlet, revenge!_" In 1605 we find it in Thomas Smith's _Voiage

and Entertainement in Rushia_; and it is last found in 1620 in Samuel

Rowland's _Night Raven_, where, however, it seems to be an inaccurate

quotation from the _Hamlet_ we know.

Shakespeare's play was entered in the Stationers' Register on the

26th of July 1602, under the title "A booke called _'the Revenge of

Hamlett Prince_ [of] _Denmarke' as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord

Chamberleyne his servantes._"

That it made an instant success on the stage is almost proved by the

fact that so early as the 7th of July the opposition manager Henslow

pays Chettle twenty shillings for "The Danish Tragedy," evidently a

furbishing up of the old play.

The publication of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, however, did not take

place till 1603. Then appeared the First Quarto, indubitably a

pirated edition, either founded entirely on shorthand notes, or on

shorthand notes eked out by aid of the actors' parts, and completed,

in certain passages, from memory. Although this edition certainly

contains a debased and corrupt text, it is impossible to attribute to

the misunderstandings or oversights of a copyist or stenographer all

its divergences from the carefully-printed quarto of the following

year, which is practically identical with the First Folio text. The

differences are so great as to exclude such a theory. We have evidently

before us Shakespeare's first sketch of the play, although in a very

defective form; and, as far as we can see, this first sketch keeps

considerably closer than the definitive text to the old _Hamlet_ drama,

on which Shakespeare based his play. Here and there, though with

considerable uncertainty, we can even trace scenes from the old play

among Shakespeare's, and touches of its style mingling with his. It is

very significant, also, that there are more rhymes in the First than in

the Second Quarto.

The most remarkable feature in the 1603 edition is a scene between

Horatio and the Queen in which he tells her of the King's frustrated

scheme for having Hamlet murdered in England. The object of this

scene is to absolve the Queen from complicity in the King's crime;

a purpose which can also be traced in other passages of this first

edition, and which seems to be a survival from the older drama. So

far as we can gather, Horatio appears to have played an altogether

more prominent part in the old play; Hamlet's madness appears to have

been wilder; and Polonius probably bore the name of Corambis, which

is prefixed to his speeches in the edition of 1603. Finally, as we

have seen, Shakespeare took the important character of the Ghost, not

indicated in either the legend or the novel, from this earlier _Hamlet_

tragedy. The theory that it is the original of the German tragedy, _Der

bestrafte Brudermord,_ published by Cohn, from a manuscript of 1710, is

unsupported by evidence.

Looking backward through the dramatic literature of England, we find

that the author of the old _Hamlet_ drama in all probability sought

inspiration in his turn in Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_. It appears from

allusions in Jonson's _Cynthia's Revels_ and _Bartholomew Fair_ that

this play must have been written about 1584. It was one of the most

popular plays of its day with the theatre-going public. So late as

1632, Prynne in his _Histriomastix_ speaks of a woman who, on her

death-bed, instead of seeking the consolations of religion, cried out:

"Hieronimo, Hieronimo! O let me see Hieronimo acted!"

The tragedy opens, after the fashion of its models in Seneca, with the

apparition of the murdered man's ghost, and his demand for vengeance.

Thus the Ghost in Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ is lineally descended from

the spirit of Tantalus in Seneca's _Thyestes_, and from the spirit of

Thyestes in Seneca's _Agamemnon_. Hieronimo, who has been driven mad by

sorrow for the loss of his son, speaking to the villain of the piece,

gives half-ironical, half-crazy expression to the anguish that is

torturing him:--

"_Lorenzo_. Why so, Hieronimo? use me.

_Hieronimo_. Who? you my lord?

I reserve your favour for a greater honour:

This is a very toy, my lord, a toy.

_Lor_. All's one, Hieronimo, acquaint me with it.

_Hier_. I' faith, my lord, 'tis an idle thing ...

The murder of a son, or so--

A thing of nothing, my lord!"

These phrases foreshadow Hamlet's speeches to the King. But Hieronimo

is really mad, although he speaks of his madness much as Hamlet does,

or rather denies it point-blank--

"Villain, thou liest, and thou dost naught

But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad.

I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques;

I'll prove it to thee; and were I mad, how could I?"

Here and there, especially in Ben Jonson's additions, we come across

speeches which lie very close to passages in Hamlet. A painter, who

also has lost his son, says to Hieronimo: "Ay, sir, no man did hold a

son so dear;" whereupon he answers--

"What, not as thine? That is a lie,

As massy as the earth: I had a son,

Whose least unvalued hair did weigh

A thousand of thy sons; and he was murdered."

Thus Hamlet cries to Laertes:--

"I lov'd Ophelia: forty thousand brothers

Could not, with all their quantity of love,

Make up my sum."

Hieronimo, like Hamlet, again and again postpones his vengeance:--

"All times fit not for revenge.

Thus, therefore, will I rest me in unrest,

Dissembling quiet in unquietness:

Not seeming that I know their villainies,

That my simplicity may make them think

That ignorantly I will let all slip."

At last he determines to have a play acted, as a means to his revenge.

The play is Kyd's own _Solyman and Perseda_, and in the course of it

the guilty personages, who play the chief parts, are slaughtered, not

in make-believe, but in reality.

Crude and naïve though everything still is in _The Spanish Tragedy_,

which resembles _Titus Andronicus_ in style rather than any other

of Shakespeare's works, it evidently, through the medium of the

earlier _Hamlet_ play, contributed a good deal to the foundations of

Shakespeare's _Hamlet_.

Before going more deeply into the contents of this great work, and

especially before trying to bring it into relation to Shakespeare's

personality, we have yet to see what suggestions or impulses the poet

may have found in contemporary history.