"Nature by a maternal gentleness accompanies and guides" the
lower animals, "as if by the hand, to all the actions and
commodities of their life," while, "as for us, she abandons
us to hazard and fortune, and to seek by art the things
necessary to our conservation,"
though he proceeds to insist on the contrary that "nature has
universally embraced all her creatures," man as well as the rest, and to
argue that man is as much a creature of nature as the rest--since even
speech, "if not natural, is necessary"--he never seems to come within
sight of the solution that art, on his own showing, is just nature in a
new phase. But to that point Shakspere proceeds at a stride in the
WINTER'S TALE, one of the latest plays (? 1611), written about the time
when we know him to have been reading or re-reading the essay on the
Cannibals. When Perdita refuses to plant gillyflowers in her garden,
"For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature,"
the old king answers:
"Say there be:
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so o'er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentle scion to the wildest stock
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: This is an art
Which does mend nature--change it rather; but
The art itself is nature."[180]
It is an analysis, a criticism, a philosophic demonstration; and the
subtle poet smilingly lets us see immediately that he had tried the
argument on the fanatics of "nature," fair or other, and knew them
impervious to it. "I'll not put," says Puritan Perdita, after demurely
granting that "so it is"--
"I'll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them."
The mind which could thus easily pierce below the inveterate fallacy of
three thousand years of conventional speech may well be presumed capable
of rounding Montaigne's philosophy wherever it collapses, and of setting
it aside wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never
convict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we
never seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of VENUS AND ADONIS
seems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the
deep-striking intelligence that first stirred him to philosophise.
And yet, supposing this to be so, there is none the less a lasting
community of thought between the two spirits, a lasting debt from the
younger to the elder. Indeed, we cannot say that at all points
Shakspere outwent his guide. It is a curious reflection that they had
probably one foible in common; for we know Montaigne's little weakness
of desiring his family to be thought ancient, of suppressing the fact of
its recent establishment by commerce; and we have evidence which seems
to show that Shakspere sought zealously,[181] despite rebuffs, the
formal constitution of a coat-of-arms for his family. On the other hand,
there is nothing in Shakspere's work--the nature of the case indeed
forbade it--to compare in democratic outspokenness with Montaigne's
essay[182] OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG US. The Frenchman's hardy saying[183]
that "the souls of emperors and cobblers are all cast in one same mould"
could not well be echoed in Elizabethan drama; and indeed we cannot well
be sure that Shakspere would have endorsed it, with his fixed habit of
taking kings and princes and generals and rich ones for his personages.
But then, on the other hand, we cannot be sure that this was anything
more than a part of his deliberate life's work of producing for the
English multitude what that multitude cared to see, and catching London
with that bait of royalty which commonly attracted it. It remains a fine
question whether his extravagant idealisation and justification of Henry
V.--which, though it gives so little pause to some of our English
critics, entitled M. Guizot to call him a mere John Bull in his ideas of
international politics--it remains disputable whether this was exactly
an expression of his own thought. It is notable that he never again
strikes the note of blatant patriotism. And the poets of that time,
further, seem to have had their tongues very much in their cheeks with
regard to their Virgin Queen; so that we cannot be sure that Shakspere,
paying her his fanciful compliment,[184] was any more sincere about it
than Ben Jonson, who would do as much while privately accepting the
grossest scandal concerning her.[185] It is certainly a remarkable fact
that Shakspere abstained from joining in the poetic out-cry over her
death, incurring reproof by his silence.[186]
However all that may have been, we find Shakspere, after his period of
pessimism, viewing life in a spirit which could be expressed in terms of
Montaigne's philosophy. He certainly shaped his latter years in
accordance with the essayist's ideal. We can conceive of no other man in
Shakspere's theatrical group deliberately turning his back, as he did,
on the many-coloured London life when he had means to enjoy it at
leisure, and seeking to possess his own soul in Stratford-on-Avon, in
the circle of a family which had already lived so long without him. But
that retirement, rounding with peace the career of manifold and intense
experience, is a main fact in Shakspere's life, and one of our main
clues to his innermost character. Emerson, never quite delivered from
Puritan prepossessions, avowed his perplexity over the fact "that this
man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject
than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some
furlongs forward into Chaos--that he should not be wise for himself: it
must even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure
(!) and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement." If
this were fundamentally so strange a thing, one might have supposed that
the transcendentalist would therefore "as a stranger give it welcome."
Approaching it on another plane, one finds nothing specially perplexing
in the matter. Shakspere's personality was an uncommon combination; but
was not that what should have been looked for? And where, after all, is
the evidence that he was "not wise for himself"?[187] Did he not make
his fortune where most of his rivals failed? If he was "obscure," how
otherwise could he have been less so? How could the bankrupt tradesman's
son otherwise rise to fame? Should he have sought, at all costs, to
become a lawyer, and rise perchance to the seat of Bacon, and the
opportunity of eking out his stipend by bribes? If it be conceded that
he must needs try literature, and such literature as a man could live
by; and if it be further conceded that his plays, being so marvellous in
their content, were well worth the writing, where enters the "profanity"
of having written them, or of having acted in them, "for the public
amusement"? Even wise men seem to run special risks when they discourse
on Shakspere: Emerson's essay has its own anomaly.
It is indeed fair to say that Shakspere must have drunk a bitter cup in
his life as an actor. It is true that that calling is apt to be more
humiliating than another to a man's self-respect, if his judgment remain
sane and sensitive. We have the expression of it all in the
Sonnets:[188]
"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
_Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear_,
_Made old offences of affections new_."
It is impossible to put into fewer and fuller words the story, many a
year long, of sordid compulsion laid on an artistic nature to turn its
own inner life into matter for the stage. But he who can read Shakspere
might be expected to divine that it needed, among other things, even
some such discipline as that to give his spirit its strange universality
of outlook. And he who could esteem both Shakspere and Montaigne might
have been expected to note how they drew together at that very point of
the final retirement, the dramatic caterer finally winning, out of his
earnings, the peace and self-possession that the essayist had inherited
without toil. He must, one thinks, have repeated to himself Montaigne's
very words[189]: "My design is to pass quietly, and not laboriously,
what remains to me of life; there is nothing for which I am minded to
make a strain: not knowledge, of whatever great price it be." And when
he at length took himself away to the quiet village of his birth, it
could hardly be that he had not in mind those words of the essay[190] on
SOLITUDE:
"We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ... altogether
ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and establish
our true liberty, the principal retreat and solitariness,
wherein we must go alone to ourselves.... We have lived long
enough for others, live we the remainder of all life unto
ourselves.... Shake we off these violent hold-fasts which
elsewhere engage us, and estrange us from ourselves. The
greatest thing of the world is for a man to know how to be
his own. It is high time to shake off society, since we can
bring nothing to it...."
A kindred note is actually struck in the 146th Sonnet,[191] which tells
of revolt at the expenditure of inner life on the outward garniture, and
exhorts the soul to live aright:
"Then soul live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that live to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed; without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then"--
an echo of much of Montaigne's discourse, herein before cited.[192]
In perfect keeping with all this movement towards peace and
contemplation, and in final keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of
Montaigne, is the musing philosophy which lights, as with a wondrous
sunset, the play which one would fain believe the last of all. At the
end, as at the beginning, we find the poet working on a pre-existing
basis, re-making an old play; and at the end, as at the beginning, we
find him picturing, with an incomparable delicacy, new ideal types of
womanhood, who stand out with a fugitive radiance from the surroundings
of mere humanity; but over all alike, in the TEMPEST, there is the
fusing spell of philosophic reverie. Years before, in HAMLET, he had
dramatically caught the force of Montaigne's frequent thought that
daylight life might be taken as a nightmare, and the dream life as the
real. It was the kind of thought to recur to the dramatist above all
men, even were it not pressed upon him by the essayist's reiterations:
"Those which have compared our life unto a dream, have
happily had more reason so to do than they were aware. When
we dream, our soul liveth, worketh, and exerciseth all her
faculties, even and as much as when it waketh.... We wake
sleeping, and sleep waking. In my sleep I see not so clear,
yet can I never find my waking clear enough, or without
dimness.... Why make we not a doubt whether our thinking
and our working be another dreaming, and our waking some
kind of sleeping?"[193]
"Let me think of building castles in Spain, my imagination
will forge me commodities and afford means and delights
wherewith my mind is really tickled and essentially gladded.
How often do we pester our spirits with anger or sadness by
such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical
passions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of
yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there
anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? over
whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the
Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some
ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the
right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to
forego it for a dream."[194]
" ... Our reasons do often anticipate the effect and have
the extension of their jurisdiction so infinite, that they
judge and exercise themselves in inanity, and to a not
being. Besides the flexibility of our invention, to frame
reasons unto all manner of dreams; our imagination is
likewise found easy to receive impressions from falsehood,
by very frivolous appearances."[195]
Again and again does the essayist return to this note of mysticism, so
distinct from the daylight practicality of his normal utterance. And it
was surely with these musings in his mind that the poet makes Prospero
pronounce upon the phantasmagoria that the spirits have performed at his
behest. We know, indeed, that the speech proceeds upon a reminiscence of
four lines in the Earl of Stirling's DARIUS (1604), lines in themselves
very tolerable, alike in cadence and sonority, but destined to be
remembered by reason of the way in which the master, casting them into
his all-transmuting alembic, has remade them in the fine gold of his
subtler measure. The Earl's lines run:
"Let greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt;
Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruised, soon broken;
And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant;
All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token.
Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls,
With furniture superfluously fair;
Those stately courts, those sky-encountering walls,
Evanish all like vapours in the air."
The sonorities of the rhymed verse seem to have vibrated in the poet's
brain amid the memories of the prose which had suggested to him so much;
and the verse and prose alike are raised to an immortal movement in the
great lines of Prospero:
"These our actors,
As I foretold you, are all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a wrack behind. _We are such stuff
As dreams are made on_, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
In the face of that vast philosophy, it seems an irrelevance to reason,
as some do, that in the earlier scene in which Gonzalo expounds his
Utopia of incivilisation, Shakspere so arranges the dialogue as to
express his own ridicule of the conception. The interlocutors, it will
be remembered, are Sebastian and Antonio, two of the villains of the
piece, and Alonso, the wrecked usurper. The kind Gonzalo talks of the
ideal community to distract Alonso's troubled thoughts; Sebastian and
Antonio jeer at him; and Alonso finally cries, "Pr'ythee, no more, thou
dost talk nothing to me." Herr Gervinus is quite sure that this was
meant to state Shakspere's prophetic derision for all communisms and
socialisms and peace congresses, Shakspere being the fore-ordained
oracle of the political gospel of his German commentators, on the
principle of "Gott mit uns." And it may well have been that Shakspere,
looking on the society of his age, had no faith in any Utopia, and that
he humorously put what he felt to be a valid criticism of Montaigne's in
the mouth of a surly rascal--he has done as much elsewhere. But he was
surely the last man to have missed seeing that Montaigne's Utopia was no
more Montaigne's personal political counsel to his age than AS YOU LIKE
IT was his own; and, as regards the main purpose of Montaigne's essay,
which was to show that civilisation was no unmixed gain as contrasted
with some forms of barbarism, the author of CYMBELINE was hardly the man
to repugn it, even if he amused himself by putting forward Caliban[196]
as the real "cannibal," in contrast to Montaigne's. He had given his
impression of certain aspects of civilisation in HAMLET, Measure for
Measure, and KING LEAR. As his closing plays show, however, he had
reached the knowledge that for the general as for the private wrong, the
sane man must cease to cherish indignation. That teaching, which he
could not didactically impose, for such a world as his, on the old
tragedy of revenge which he recoloured with Montaigne's thought, he
found didactically enough set down in the essay on Diversion:[197]
"Revenge is a sweet pleasing passion, of a great and natural
impression: I perceive it well, albeit I have made no trial
of it. To divert of late a young prince from it, I told him
not he was to offer the one side of his cheek to him who had
struck him on the other in regard of charity; nor displayed
I unto him the tragical events poesy bestoweth upon that
passion. There I left him and strove to make him taste the
beauty of a contrary image; the honour, the favour, and the
goodwill he should acquire by gentleness and goodness; I
diverted him to ambition."
And now it is didactically uttered by the wronged magician in the
drama:--
"Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance...."
The principle now pervades the whole of Prospero's society; even the
cursed and cursing Caliban is recognised[198] as a necessary member of
it:--
"We cannot miss him; he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices
That profit us."
It is surely not unwarrantable to pronounce, then, finally, that the
poet who thus watchfully lit his action from the two sides of passion
and sympathy was in the end at one with his "guide, philosopher, and
friend," who in that time of universal strife and separateness could of
his own accord renew the spirit of Socrates, and say:[199] "I esteem all
men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole even as a Frenchman,
subordinating this national tie to the common and universal." Here, too,
was not Montaigne the first of the moderns?
[1] Preface to Eng. trans. of Simrock on _The Plots of
Shakespere's Plays_, 1850.
[2] _Lady Politick Would-be._ All our English writers,
I mean such as are happy in the Italian,
Will deign to steal out of this author [_Pastor Fido_] mainly
Almost as much as from Montaignie;
He has so modern and facile a vein,
Fitting the time, and catching the court ear.
--Act iii. sc. 2.
[3] _London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p. 321.
[4] Article in _Journal des Debats_, 7 November, 1846,
reprinted in _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, ed. 1879, p.
136.
[5] _Montaigne_ (Serie des _Grands Ecrivains Francais_),
1895, p. 105.
[6] _Moliere et Shakspere._
[7] _Shakspere and Classical Antiquity_, Eng. tr. p. 297.
[8] See this point discussed in the _Free Review_ of July,
1895: and compare the lately published essay of Mr. John
Corbin, on _The Elizabethan Hamlet_, (Elkin Matthews, 1895).
[9] _Hamlet_, Act V, scene 2.
[10] Book I, Essay 33.
[11] _Advice_ in Florio.
[12] B. III, Ch. 8. _Of the art of conferring._
[13] B. III, Ch. 12.
[14] Act II, Sc. 1, 144.
[15] Book I, ch. II, _end_.
[16] Book I, ch. 23.
[17] _Ibid._
[18] Some slip of the pen seems to have occurred in this
confused line. The original _Et male consultis pretium est:
prudentia fallax_--is sufficiently close to Shakspere's
phrase.
[19] "O heaven! a beast that wants discourse of reason" (Act
I, Scene 2.)
[20] Act II, Sc. 2.
[21] Act IV, Scene 2.
[22] Act IV, Scene 4.
[23] See Furniss's Variorum edition of _Hamlet, in loc._
[24] B. I, Chap. 19; Edit. Firmin-Didot, vol. i, p. 68.
[25] B. II, Chap. 4; Ed. cited, p. 382.
[26] B. II, Chap. 12; _Ibid_, p. 459.
[27] B. II, Chap. 33.
[28] _Shakespere and Montaigne_, 1884, p. 88.
[29] B. III, Chap. 12.
[30] Act III, Scene 3.
[31] B. I, ch. 22.
[32] Act II, Scene 2.
[33] _Othello_, Act II, Scene 3.
[34] B. I, ch. 40, "That the taste of goods or evils doth
greatly depend on the opinion we have of them."
[35] B. I, ch. 50.
[36] B. I, ch. 22.
[37] B. III, ch. 10.
[38] Act V, Scene 4.
[39] On reverting to Mr. Feis's book I find that in 1884 he
had noted this and others of the above parallels, which I
had not observed when writing on the subject in 1883. In
view of some other parallels and clues drawn by him, our
agreements leave me a little uneasy. He decides, for
instance (p. 93) that Hamlet's phrase "foul as Vulcan's
stithy" is a "sly thrust at Florio" who in his preface calls
himself "Montaigne's Vulcan"; that the Queen's phrase
"thunders in the index" is a reference to "the Index of the
Holy See and its thunders"; and that Hamlet's lines "Why let
the stricken deer go weep" are clearly a satire against
Montaigne, "who fights shy of action." Mr. Feis's book
contains so many propositions of this order that it is
difficult to feel sure that he is ever judicious. Still, I
find myself in agreement with him on some four or five
points of textual coincidence in the two authors.
[40] Act I, Scene 4.
[41] B. II, Chap. 33.
[42] It is further relevant to note that in the essay _Of
Drunkenness_ (ii. 2) Montaigne observes that "drunkenness
amongst others appeareth to me a gross and brutish vice,"
that "the worst estate of man is where he loseth the
knowledge and government of himself," and that "the grossest
and rudest nation that liveth amongst us at this day, is
only that which keepeth it in credit." The reference is to
Germany: but Shakspere in _Othello_ (Act II, Sc. 3) makes
Iago pronounce the English harder drinkers than either the
Danes or the Hollanders; and the lines:
"This heavy-headed revel, east and west,
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations;
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase,
Soil our addition."
might also be reminiscent of Montaigne, though of course
there is nothing peculiar in such a coincidence.
[43] B. III, Chap. 7.
[44] B. III, Chap. 4.
[45] B. III, Chap. 10.
[46] B. III, Chap. 2.
[47] B. III, Chap. 13.
[48] B. I, Chap. 38.
[49] B. III, Chap. 4.
[50] B. I, Chap. 40.
[51] B. II, Chap. 8.
[52] B. II, Chap. 18.
[53] _De Officus_ i, 4: _cf._ 30.
[54] 1534, 1558, 1583, 1600. See also the compilation
entitled _A Treatise of Morall Philosophie_ by W. Baudwin,
4th enlargement by T. Paulfreyman. 1600, pp. 44-46, where
there is a closely parallel passage from Zeno as well as
that of Cicero.
[55] Mr. Feis makes this attribution.
[56] B. II, Chap. 1.
[57] This may fairly be argued, perhaps, even of the
somewhat close parallel, noted by Mr. Feis, between Laertes'
lines (I, 3):
"For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
In thews and bulk, but as this temple waxes
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal,"
and Florio's rendering of an extract from Lucretius in the
_Apology_
"The mind is with the body bred, we do behold.
It jointly grows with it, it waxeth old."
Only the slight coincidence of the use of the (then
familiar) verb "wax" in both passages could suggest
imitation in the case of such a well-worn commonplace.
[58] See some cited at the close of this essay in another
connection.
[59] B. II, Chap. 12.
[60] Act IV, Scene 3.
[61] "_Le monde est un branloire perenne_" (Book III, Essay
2). Florio translates that particular sentence: "The world
runs all on wheels" a bad rendering.
[62] B. III, Chap. 3.
[63] B. II, Chap. 17.
[64] It may fairly be laid down as practically certain, from
what we know of the habit of circulating works in manuscript
at that period, and from what Florio tells us in his
preface, that translations of some of the essays had been
passed about before Florio's folio was printed. [65] _Varia
Historia_, XII, 23.
[66] The story certainly had a wide vogue, being found in
Aristotle, _Eudemian Ethics_, iii, 1, and in Nicolas of
Damascus; while Strabo (vii, ii. Sec. 1) gives it further
currency by contradicting it as regards the Cimbri.
[67] B. II, Chap. 5.
[68] B. II, Chap. 3.
[69] Richard III, I, 4; V, 3.
[70] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, 1893,
p. 80-5.
[71] Actus III, 865-866.
[72] Actus IV, 1526-7.
[73] This in turn is an echo from the Greek. See note in
Doering's edition.
[74] See Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, _in loc._
[75] Yet again, in Marston's _Insatiate Countess_, the
commentators have noticed the same sentiment.
"Death, From whose stern cave none tracks a backward path."
It was in fact a poetic commonplace.
[76] Act 5, Scene 6.
[77] Act v, sc. 1.
[78] I, 22.
[79] 2 _H. IV_, iv. 3
[80] ii, 2
[81] ii, 10.
[82] So far as I remember, the idea of suicide as a
desertion of one's post without the deity's permission is
first found, in English literature, in Sidney, and he would
find it in Montaigne's essay on the _Custom of the Isle of
Cea_ (edit. Firmin-Didot, i. 367).
[83] When this is compared with the shorter speech of
similar drift in the anonymous play of _Edward III._ ("To
die is all as common as to live" etc., Act iv., sc. 4) it
will be seen that the querying form as well as the
elaboration constitutes a special resemblance between the
speech in Shakspere and the passages in Montaigne
[84] _APOLOGY OF RAYMOND SEBONDE._
[85] ii, 6, _Of Exercise or Practice_.
[86] _Apology._
[87] _Ibid._, near end.
[88] _On Isis and Osiris_, c. 26.
[89] Canto v.
[90] Canto xxxii.
[91] It would seem to be from those early monkish legends
that the mediaeval Inferno was built up. The torture of cold
was the northern contribution to the scheme. Compare Warton,
_History of English Poetry_, sec. 49, and Wright's _Saint
Patrick's Purgatory_, 1844, p. 18.
[92] _Paradise Lost_, B. II, 587-603.
[93] Edit. Firmin-Didot. i, 597-598.
[94] _Ibid._ p. 621.
[95] Act iv, sc. 5.
[96] iii, 3.
[97] B. v, cc. 8, 9, 10. _Cf._ vi, 2, 3.
[98] B. v, cc. 22-25.
[99] ii, 32.
[100] The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his _Essays on
Shakspere_ (Eng. tr., p. 15), to show that the _Tempest_ was
written about 1604, seem to me to possess no weight
whatever. He goes so far as to assume that the speech of
Prospero in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the
Earl of Stirling's _Darius_ must have been written
immediately after the publication of that work. The argument
is (1) that Shakspere must have seen _Darius_ when it came
out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or
never.
[101] Act v, sc. 3.
[102] i, 31.
[103] ii, 13.
[104] Act i, sc. 2.
[105] Act iv, sc. 3.
[106] i, 2.
[107] _Hippolytus_, 615 (607).
[108] See the Prologue to _Every Man in His Humour_, first
ed., preserved by Gifford.
[109] The 29th.
[110] See his _Characteristics of English Poets_, 2nd. ed.
p. 222.
[111] The most elaborate and energetic attempt to prove
Shakspere classically learned is that made in the _Critital
Observations on Shakspere_ (1746) of the Rev. John Upton, a
man of great erudition and much random acuteness (shown
particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from
the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as
was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of
to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax
are peculiarly unconvincing.
[112] It may not be out of place here to say a word for
Farmer in passing, as against the strictures of M. Stapfer,
who, after recognising the general pertinence of his
remarks, proceeds to say (_Shakspere and Classical
Antiquity_, Eng. trans, p. 83) that Farmer "fell into the
egregious folly of speaking in a strain of impertinent
conceit: it is as if the little man for little he must
assuredly have been--was eaten up with vanity." This is in
its way as unjust as the abuse of Knight. M. Stapfer has
misunderstood Farmer's tone, which is one of banter against,
not Shakspere, but those critics who blunderingly ascribed
to him a wide and close knowledge of the classics. Towards
Shakspere, Farmer was admiringly appreciative--and in the
preface to the second edition of his essay he wrote:
"Shakspere wanted not the stilts of languages to raise him
above all other men."
[113] Ch. iv, of vol. cited.
[114] _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_, pp.
66-67.
[115] _Hercules Furens_, ad fin. (1324-1329.).
[116] _Hippolytus_, Act. II, 715-718 (723-726.)
[117] _Choephori_, 63-65.
[118] Carm. lxxxviii, _In Gellium_. See the note in
Doering's edition.
[119] _Gerusalemme_, xviii, 8.
[120] _The Insatiate Countess_, published in 1613.
[121] _Hamlet_, Act iv, sc. 3.
[122] _Agamemnon_, 152-153.
[123] ii, 3 (near beginning.)
[124] _Hercules Furens_, Act. V. 1261-2.
[125] Act iv, Sc. 3.
[126] _Hercules Furens_, 1258-61.
[127] _Macbeth_, Act v, Sc. 2.
[128] _Ibid._ Act iv, Sc. 2.
[129] _Ibid._ Act i, sc. 7.
[130] B. ii, ch. 10.
[131] Tschischwitz, _Shakspere-Forschungen_, i. 1868, S. 52.
[132] "Es ist ubrigens nicht zu bedauern dass Shakspere
Brunos Komodie nicht durchweg zum Muster genommen, den sie
enthaelt so masslose Obscoenitaten, dass Shakspere an seinen
staerksten Stellen daneben fast jungfraeulich erscheint" (Work
cited, S. 52).
[133] Work cited, S. 57. I follow Dr. Tschischwitz's
translation, so far as syntax permits.
[134] Act i, Sc. 4.
[135] Work cited, Sc. 59.
[136] See Frith's _Life of Giordano Bruno_, 1889, pp.
121-128.
[137] Act v. Sc. 1.
[138] Cited by Noack, art. _Bruno_, in
_Philosophie-geschichtliches Lexikon_.
[139] Act i, Sc. 2.
[140] Work cited, p. 90.
[141] It would be unjust to omit to acknowledge that Dr.
Furnivall seeks to frame an inductive notion of Shakspere,
even when rejecting good evidence and proceeding on
deductive lines; that in the works of Professor Dowden on
Shakspere there is always an effort towards a judicial
method, though he refuses to take some of the most necessary
steps; and that the work of Mr. Appleton Morgan, President
of the New York Shakspere Society, entitled _Shakspere in
Fact and Criticism_ (New York, 1888), is certainly not open
to the criticism I have passed. Mr. Morgan's essentially
rationalistic attitude is indicated in a sentence of his
preface: "My own idea has been that William Shakspere was a
man of like passions with ourselves, whose moods and veins
were influenced, just as are ours, by his surroundings,
employments, vocations ... and that, great as he was, and
oceanic as was his genius, we can read him all the better
because he was, after all, a man...." In recognising the
good sense of Mr. Morgan's general attitude, I must not be
understood to endorse his rejection of the "metrical tests"
of Mr. Fleay and other English critics. These seem to me to
be about the most important English contribution to the
scientific comprehension of Shakspere. On the other hand, it
may be said that the naturalistic conception of Shakspere as
an organism in an environment was first closely approached
in the present century by French critics, as Guizot and
Chasles (Taine's picture of the Elizabethan theatre, adopted
by Green, having been founded on a study by Chasles); that
the naturalistic comprehension of _Hamlet_, as an incoherent
whole resulting from the putting of new cloth into an old
garment, was first reached by the German Ruemelin (_Shakspere
Studien_); and that the structural anomalies of _Hamlet_ as
an acting play were first clearly put by the German Benedix
(_Die Shakspereomanie_) these two critics thus making amends
for much vain discussion of _Hamlet_ by their countrymen
before and since; while the naturalistic conception of the
man Shakspere is being best developed at present in America.
The admirable work of Messrs. Clarke and Wright and Fleay in
the analysis of the text and the revelation of its
non-Shaksperean elements, seems to make little impression on
English culture; while such a luminous manual as Mr. Barrett
Wendell's _William Shakspere: a Study in Elizabethan
Literature_ (New York, 1894), with its freshness of outlook
and appreciation, points to decided progress in rational
Shakspere-study in the States, though, like the _Shakspere
Primer_ of Professor Dowden, it is not consistently
scientific throughout.
[142] _Life of Shakspere_, 1886, p. 128.
[143] See Mr. Appleton Morgan's _Shakspere's Venus and
Adonis: a Study in Warwickshire Dialect_.
[144] Professor Dowden notes in his _Shakspere Primer_ (p.
12) that before 1600 the prices paid for plays, by Henslowe,
the theatrical lessee, vary from L4 to L8, and not till
later did it rise as high as L20 for a play by a popular
dramatist.
[145] Compare the 78th Sonnet, which ends;--
But thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance.
[146] _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 29, 128.
[147] See it in his _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 120-124. Mr.
Fleay's theory, though perhaps the best "documented" of all,
has received little attention in comparison with Mr.
Tyler's, which has the attraction of fuller detail.
[148] Only in Chaucer (_e.g._, _The Book of the Duchess_) do
we find before his time the successful expression of the
same perception; and Chaucer counted for almost nothing in
Elizabethan letters.
[149] See Fleay's _Life of Shakspere_, pp. 130-1.
[150] Cp. the _Essays_, ii, 17: iii, 2. (Edit. cited, vol.
ii, pp. 40, 231.)
[151] _Essays_, i, 25; _cf._ i, 48. (Edit. cited, vol. i,
pp. 304, 429.)
[152] ii, 4. (Edit. cited, i, 380.)
[153] ii, 10. (Edit. cited, i, 429.)
[154] _Pensees Diverses._ Less satisfying is the further
_pensee_ in the same collection:--"Les quatre grand poetes,
Platon, _Malebranche_, _Shaftesbury_, Montaigne."
[155] Edition cited, i, 622-623.
[156] _Port Royal_, 4ieme edit., ii. 400, _note_.
[157] B. iii, Chap. 13.
[158] "In the midst of our compassion, we feel within I know
not what bitter sweet touch of malign pleasure in seeing
others suffer." (Comp. La Rochefoucauld, _Pensee_ 104.)
[159] B. iii, Chap. 1.
[160] i, Chap. 38.
[161] _L'Angleterre au Seizieme Siecle_, p. 133.
[162] This seems to be the ideal implied in the criticisms
even of Mr. Lowell and Mr. Dowden.
[163] _Hamlet: ein Tendenzdrama Sheakspere's_ [_sic_
throughout book] _gegen die skeptische und cosmopolitische
Weltanschanung des Michael de Montaigne_, von G. F.
Stedefeld, Kreisgerichtsrath, Berlin. 1871.
[164] B. i, Chap. 26.
[165] It is not disputed that the plot existed beforehand in
Whetstone's _Promos and Cassandra_; and there was probably
an intermediate drama.
[166] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 590.
[167] _Oxford Essays_, p. 279. Sterling, from his
Christian-Carlylese point of view, declared of Montaigne
that "All that we find in him of Christianity would be
suitable to apes and dogs rather than to rational and moral
beings" (_London and Westminster Review_, July, 1838, p.
340.)
[168] Sainte-Beuve has noted how in the essay on Prayer he
added many safeguarding clauses in the later editions.
[169] See Mr. Spedding's essay, so entitled, in the
_Cornhill Magazine_, August, 1880.
[170] Art. cited, _end_.
[171] Note cited by Mr. Spedding. Cp. Introd. to _Leopold_
Shakspere p. lxxxvii.
[172] Lear once (iii. 4) says he will pray; but his religion
goes no further.
[173] See the passage cited above in section iii in
connection with _Measure for Measure_.
[174] Act iv, Sc. 2.
[175] Act i, Sc. 2.
[176] B. i, Chap. 20.
[177] B. i, Chap. 30.
[178] Edit. Firmin-Didot, i, 202.
[179] _Ibid._, pp. 477-478.
[180] _Here_, it may be said, there is a trace of the
influence of Bruno's philosophy; and it may well be that
Shakspere did not spontaneously strike out the thought for
himself. But I am not aware that any parallel passage has
been cited.
[181] Fleay's _Life_, pp. 138, &c.
[182] B. i, Chap. 42.
[183] B. ii, Chap. 12. (Edit. cited, i. 501.)
[184] _Midsummer Nights Dream_, Act ii. Sc. 2.
[185] See his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden
[186] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines of the Life of
Shakspere_, 5th ed., p. 175.
[187] I find even Mr. Appleton Morgan creating a needless
difficulty on this head. In his _Shakspere in Fact and
Criticism_, already cited, he writes (p. 316): "I find him
... living and dying so utterly unsuspicious that he had
done anything of which his children might care to hear, that
he never even troubled himself to preserve the manuscript of
or the literary property in a single one of the plays which
had raised him to affluence." As I have already pointed out,
there is no reason to suppose that Shakspere could retain
the ownership of his plays any more than did the other
writers who supplied his theatre. They belonged to the
partnership. Besides, he could not possibly have published
as _his_ the existing mass, so largely made up of other
men's work. His fellow-players did so without scruple after
his death, being simply bent on making money.
[188] Sonnet 110. Compare the next.
[189] B. ii, Chap. 10.
[190] B. i, Chap. 38.
[191] This may be presumed to have been written between 1603
and 1609, the date of the publication of the Sonnets. As Mr.
Minto argues, "the only sonnet of really indisputable date
is the 107th, containing the reference to the death of
Elizabeth" (_Characteristics_, as cited, p. 220). As the
first 126 sonnets make a series, it is reasonable to take
those remaining as of later date.
[192] It more particularly echoes, however, two passages in
the nineteenth essay: "There is no evil in life for him that
hath well conceived, how the privation of life is no evil.
To know how to die, doth free us from all subjection and
constraint." "No man did ever prepare himself to quit the
world more simply and fully ... than I am fully assured I
shall do. The deadest deaths are the best"
[193] ii, 12.
[194] iii, 11.
[195] iii, 4.
[196] In all probability this character existed in the
previous play, the name being originally, as was suggested
last century by Dr. Farmer, a mere variant of "Canibal."
[197] iii, 4.
[198] Act ii, Sc. 2.
[199] iii, 9.