“Macbeth
Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above
Put on their instruments.”
In the end of the 14th chapter of the Revelation we have the words,
“Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap;
for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” We suspect that Shakspere wrote,
ripe _to_ shaking.
The instances to which we have confined ourselves do not by any means
belong to the most evident kind of proof that might be adduced of
Shakspere’s acquaintance with Scripture. The subject, in its ordinary
aspect, has been elsewhere treated with far more fulness than our design
would permit us to indulge in, even if it had not been done already. Our
object has been to bring forward a few passages which seem to us to
breathe the very spirit of individual passages in sacred writ, without
direct use of the words themselves; and, of course, in such a case we
can only appeal to the (no doubt) very various degrees of conviction
which they may rouse in the minds of our readers.
But there is one singular correspondence in another _almost_ literal
quotation from the Gospel, which is to us wonderfully interesting. We
are told that the words “eye of a needle,” in the passage about a rich
man entering the kingdom of heaven, mean the small side entrance in a
city gate. Now, in “Richard II,” act v. scene 5, _Richard_ quotes the
passage thus:--
“It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a needle’s eye;”
showing that either the imagination of Shakspere suggested the real
explanation, or he had taken pains to acquaint himself with the
significance of the simile. We can hardly say that the correspondence
might be _merely_ fortuitous; because, at the least, Shakspere looked
for and found a suitable figure to associate with the words _eye of a
needle_, and so fell upon the real explanation; except, indeed, he had
no particular significance in using the word that meant a _little_ gate,
instead of a word meaning any kind of entrance, which, with him, seems
unlikely.
We have not by any means proven that Shakspere’s acquaintance with the
Scriptures had an early date in his history; but certainly the Bible
must have had a great influence upon him who was the highest
representative mind of the time, its influence on the general
development of the nation being unquestionable. This, therefore, seeing
the Bible itself was just dawning full upon the country while Shakspere
was becoming capable of understanding it, seems the suitable sequence in
which to take notice of that influence, and of some of those passages in
his works which testify to it.
But, besides _the_ Bible, every nation has _a_ Bible, or at least _an_
Old Testament, in its own history; and that Shakspere paid especial
attention to this, is no matter of conjecture. We suspect his mode of
writing historical plays is more after the fashion of the Bible
histories than that of most writers of history. Indeed, the development
and consequences of character and conduct are clear to those that read
his histories with open eyes. Now, in his childhood Shakspere may have
had some special incentive to the study of history springing out of the
fact that his mother’s grandfather had been “groom of the chamber to
Henry VII.,” while there is sufficient testimony that a further removed
ancestor of his father, as well, had stood high in the favour of the
same monarch. Therefore the history of the troublous times of the
preceding century, which were brought to a close by the usurpation of
Henry VII., would naturally be a subject of talk in the quiet household,
where books and amusements such as now occupy our boys, were scarce or
wanting altogether. The proximity of such a past of strife and
commotion, crowded with eventful change, must have formed a background
full of the material of excitement to an age which lived in the midst of
a peculiarly exciting history of its own.
Perhaps the chief intellectual characteristic of the age of Elizabeth
was _activity_; this activity accounting even for much that is
objectionable in its literature. Now this activity must have been
growing in the people throughout the fifteenth century; the wars of the
Roses, although they stifled literature, so that it had, as it were, to
be born again in the beginning of the following century, being, after
all, but as the “eager strife” of the shadow-leaves above the “genuine
life” of the grass,--
“And the mute repose
Of sweetly breathing flowers.”
But when peace had fallen on the land, it would seem as if the impulse
to action springing from strife still operated, as the waves will go on
raving upon the shore after the wind has ceased, and found one outlet,
amongst others, in literature, and peculiarly in dramatic literature.
Peace, rendered yet more intense by the cessation of the cries of the
tormentors, and the groans of the noble army of suffering martyrs, made,
as it were, a kind of vacuum; and into that vacuum burst up the
torrent-springs of a thousand souls--the thoughts that were no longer
repressed--in the history of the past and the Utopian speculation on the
future; in noble theology, capable statesmanship, and science at once
brilliant and profound; in the voyage of discovery, and the change of
the swan-like merchantman into a very fire-drake of war for the defence
of the threatened shores; in the first brave speech of the Puritan in
Elizabeth’s Parliament, the first murmurs of the voice of liberty, soon
to thunder throughout the land; in the naturalizing of foreign genius by
translation, and the invention, or at least adoption, of a new and
transcendent rhythm; in the song, in the epic, in the drama.
So much for the general. Let us now, following the course of his life,
recall, in a few sentences, some of the chief events which must have
impressed the all-open mind of Shakspere in the earlier portion of his
history.
Perhaps it would not be going back too far to begin with the Massacre of
Paris, which took place when he was eight years old. It caused so much
horror in England, that it is not absurd to suppose that some black rays
from the deed of darkness may have fallen on the mind of such a child as
Shakspere.
In strong contrast with the foregoing is the next event to which we
shall refer.
When he was eleven years old, Leicester gave the Queen that magnificent
reception at Kenilworth which is so well known from its memorials in our
literature. It has been suggested as probable, with quite enough of
likelihood to justify a conjecture, that Shakspere may have been present
at the dramatic representations then so gorgeously accumulated before
her Majesty. If such was the fact, it is easy to imagine what an
influence the shows must have had on the mind of the young dramatic
genius, at a time when, happily, the critical faculty is not by any
means so fully awake as are the receptive and exultant faculties, and
when what the nature chiefly needs is excitement to growth, without
which all pruning, the most artistic, is useless, as having nothing to
operate upon.
When he was fifteen years old, Sir Thomas North’s translation of
Plutarch (through the French) was first published. Any reader who has
compared one of Shakspere’s Roman plays with the corresponding life in
Plutarch, will not be surprised that we should mention this as one of
those events which must have been of paramount influence upon Shakspere.
It is not likely that he became acquainted with the large folio with its
medallion portraits first placed singly, and then repeated side by side
for comparison, as soon as it made its appearance, but as we cannot tell
when he began to read it, it seems as well to place it in the order its
publication would assign to it. Besides, it evidently took such a hold
of the man, that it is most probable his acquaintance with it began at a
very early period of his history. Indeed, it seems to us to have been
one of the most powerful aids to the development of that perception and
discrimination of character with which he was gifted to such a
remarkable degree. Nor would it be any derogation from the originality
of his genius to say, that in a very pregnant sense he must have been a
disciple of Plutarch. In those plays founded on Plutarch’s stories he
picked out every dramatic point, and occasionally employed the very
phrases of North’s nervous, graphic, and characteristic English. He
seems to have felt that it was an honour to his work to embody in it the
words of Plutarch himself, as he knew them first. From him he seems
especially to have learned how to bring out the points of a character,
by putting one man over against another, and remarking wherein they
resembled each other and wherein they differed; after which fashion, in
other plays as well as those, he partly arranged his dramatic
characters.
Not long after he went to London, when he was twenty-two, the death of
Sir Philip Sidney at the age of thirty-two, must have had its
unavoidable influence on him, seeing all Europe was in mourning for the
death of its model, almost ideal man. In England the general mourning,
both in the court and the city, which lasted for months, is supposed by
Dr. Zouch to have been the first instance of the kind; that is, for the
death of a private person. Renowned over the civilized world for
everything for which a man could be renowned, his literary fame must
have had a considerable share in the impression his death would make on
such a man as Shakspere. For although none of his works were published
till after his death, the first within a few months of that event, his
fame as a writer was widely spread in private, and report of the same
could hardly fail to reach one who, although he had probably no friends
of rank as yet, kept such keen open ears for all that was going on
around him. But whether or not he had heard of the literary greatness of
Sir Philip before his death, the “Arcadia,” which was first published
four years after his death (1590), and which in eight years had reached
the third edition--with another still in Scotland the following
year--must have been full of interest to Shakspere. This book is very
different indeed from the ordinary impression of it which most minds
have received through the confident incapacity of the critics of last
century. Few books have been published more fruitful in the results and
causes of thought, more sparkling with fancy, more evidently the outcome
of rich and noble habit, than this “Arcadia” of Philip Sidney. That
Shakspere read it, is sufficiently evident from the fact that from it he
has taken the secondary but still important plots in two of his plays.
Although we are anticipating, it is better to mention here another book,
published in the same year, namely, 1590, when Shakspere was
six-and-twenty: the first three books of Spenser’s “Faery Queen.” Of its
reception and character it is needless here to say anything further
than, of the latter, that nowadays the depths of its teaching, heartily
prized as that was by no less a man than Milton, are seldom explored.
But it would be a labour of months to set out the known and imagined
sources of the knowledge and spiritual pabulum of the man who laid every
mental region so under contribution, that he has been claimed by almost
every profession as having been at one time or another a student of its
peculiar science, so marvellously in him was the power of assimilation
combined with that of reproduction.
To go back a little: in 1587, when he was three-and-twenty, Mary Queen
of Scots was executed. In the following year came that mighty victory of
England, and her allies the winds and the waters, over the towering
pride of the Spanish Armada. Out from the coasts, like the birds from
their cliffs to defend their young, flew the little navy, many of the
vessels only able to carry a few guns; and fighting, fire-ships and
tempest left this island,--
“This precious stone set in the silver sea,”
still a “blessed plot,” with an accumulated obligation to liberty which
can only be paid by helping others to be free; and when she utterly
forgets which, her doom is sealed, as surely as that of the old empires
which passed away in their self-indulgence and wickedness.
When Shakspere was about thirty-two, Sir Walter Raleigh published his
glowing account of Guiana, which instantly provided the English mind
with an earthly paradise or fairy-land. Raleigh himself seems to have
been too full of his own reports for us to be able to suppose that he
either invented or disbelieved them; especially when he represents the
heavenly country to which, in expectation of his execution, he is
looking forward, after the fashion of those regions of the wonderful
West:--
“Then the blessed Paths wee’l travel,
Strow’d with Rubies thick as gravel;
Sealings of Diamonds, Saphire floors,
High walls of Coral, and Pearly Bowers.”
Such were some of the influences which widened the region of thought,
and excited the productive power, in the minds of the time. After this
period there were fewer of such in Shakspere’s life; and if there had
been more of them they would have been of less import as to their
operation on a mind more fully formed and more capable of choosing its
own influences. Let us now give a backward glance at the history of the
art which Shakspere chose as the means of easing his own mind of that
wealth which, like the gold and the silver, has a moth and rust of its
own, except it be kept in use by being sent out for the good of our
neighbours.
It was a mighty gain for the language and the people when, in the middle
of the fourteenth century, by permission of the Pope, the miracle-plays,
most probably hitherto represented in Norman-French, as Mr. Collier
supposes, began to be represented in English. Most likely there had been
dramatic representations of a sort from the very earliest period of the
nation’s history; for, to begin with the lowest form, at what time would
there not, for the delight of listeners, have been the imitation of
animal sounds, such as the drama of the conversation between an
attacking poodle and a fiercely repellent puss? Through innumerable
gradations of childhood would the art grow before it attained the first
formal embodiment in such plays as those, so-called, of miracles,
consisting just of Scripture stories, both canonical and apocryphal,
dramatized after the rudest fashion. Regarded from the height which the
art had reached two hundred and fifty years after, “how dwarfed a growth
of cold and night” do these miracle-plays show themselves! But at a time
when there was no printing, little preaching, and Latin prayers, we
cannot help thinking that, grotesque and ill-imagined as they are, they
must have been of unspeakable value for the instruction of a people
whose spiritual digestion was not of a sort to be injured by the
presence of a quite abnormal quantity of husk and saw-dust in their
food. And occasionally we find verses of true poetic feeling, such as
the following, in “The Fall of Man:”--
_Deus._ Adam, that with myn handys I made,
Where art thou now? What hast thou wrought?
_Adam._ A! lord, for synne oure floures do ffade,
I here thi voys, but I se the nought;
implying that the separation between God and man, although it had
destroyed the beatific vision, was not yet so complete as to make the
creature deaf to the voice of his Maker. Nor are the words of Eve, with
which she begs her husband, in her shame and remorse, to strangle her,
odd and quaint as they are, without an almost overpowering pathos:--
“Now stomble we on stalk and ston;
My wyt awey is fro me gon:
Wrythe on to my necke bon
With, hardnesse of thin honde.”