The humble but hard-working journeyman of letters who was charged with
the honourable duty of reporting the transactions at the last meeting of
the Newest Shakespeare Society on the auspicious occasion of its first
anniversary, April 1st, has received sundry more or less voluminous
communications from various gentlemen whose papers were then read or
announced, pointing out with more or less acrimonious commentary the
matters on which it seems to them severally that they have cause to
complain of imperfection or inaccuracy in his conscientious and
painstaking report. Anxious above all things to secure for himself such
credit as may be due to the modest merit of scrupulous fidelity, he
desires to lay before the public so much of the corrections conveyed in
their respective letters of reclamation as may be necessary to complete
or to rectify the first draught of their propositions as conveyed in his
former summary. On the present occasion, however, he must confine
himself to forwarding the rectifications supplied by two of the members
who took a leading part in the debate of April 1st.
The necessarily condensed report of Mr. A.'s paper on _A Midsummer
Night's Dream_ may make the reasoning put forward by that gentleman
liable to the misconception of a hasty reader. The omission of various
qualifying phrases has left his argument without such explanation, his
statements without such reservation, as he had been careful to supply. He
did not say in so many words that he had been disposed to assign this
drama to the author of _The Revenger's Tragedy_ simply on the score of
the affinity discernible between the subjects of the two plays. He is
not prone to self-confidence or to indulgence in paradox. What he did
say was undeniable by any but those who trusted only to their ear, and
refused to correct the conclusions thus arrived at by the help of other
organs which God had given them--their fingers, for example, and their
toes; by means of which a critic of trained and competent scholarship
might with the utmost confidence count up as far as twenty, to the great
profit of all students who were willing to accept his guidance and be
bound by his decision on matters of art and poetry. Only the most
purblind could fail to observe, what only the most perverse could
hesitate to admit, that there was at first sight an obvious connection
between the poison-flower--"purple from love's wound"--squeezed by Oberon
into the eyes of the sleeping Titania and the poison rubbed by Vindice
upon the skull of the murdered Gloriana. No student of Ulrici's
invaluable work would think this a far-fetched reference. That eminent
critic had verified the meaning and detected the allusion underlying many
a passage of Shakespeare in which the connection of moral idea was more
difficult to establish than this. In the fifth act of either play there
was a masque or dramatic show of a sanguinary kind; in the one case the
bloodshed was turned to merry-making, in the other the merry-making was
turned to bloodshed. Oberon's phrase, "till I torment thee for this
injury," might easily be mistaken for a quotation from the part of
Vindice. This explanation, he trusted, would suffice to exonerate his
original view from any charge of haste or rashness; especially as he had
now completely given it up, and adopted one (if possible) more
impregnably based on internal and external evidence.
Mr. C. was not unnaturally surprised and indignant to find his position
as to Romeo and Lord Burghley barely indicated, and the notice given of
the arguments by which it was supported so docked and curtailed as to
convey a most inadequate conception of their force. Among the chief
points of his argument were these: that the forsaken Rosaline was
evidently intended for the late Queen Mary, during whose reign Cecil had
notoriously conformed to the observances of her creed, though ready on
the accession of Elizabeth to throw it overboard at a day's notice; (it
was not to be overlooked that the friar on first hearing the announcement
of this change of faith is made earnestly to remonstrate, prefacing his
reproaches with an invocation of two sacred names--an invocation peculiar
to Catholics;) that the resemblance between old Capulet and Henry VIII.
is obvious to the most careless reader; his oath of "God's bread!"
immediately followed by the avowal "it makes me mad" is an unmistakable
allusion to the passions excited by the eucharistic controversy; his
violence towards Juliet at the end of the third act at once suggests the
alienation of her father's heart from the daughter of Anne Boleyn; the
self-congratulation on her own "stainless" condition as a virgin
expressed by Juliet in soliloquy (Act iii. Sc. 2) while in the act of
awaiting her bridegroom conveys a furtive stroke of satire at the similar
vaunt of Elizabeth when likewise meditating marriage and preparing to
receive a suitor from the hostile house of Valois. It must be
unnecessary to point out the resemblance or rather the identity between
the character and fortune of Paris and the character and fortune of
Essex, whose fate had been foreseen and whose end prefigured by the poet
with almost prophetic sagacity. To the far-reaching eye of Shakespeare
it must have seemed natural and inevitable that Paris (Essex) should fall
by the hand of Romeo (Burghley) immediately before the monument of the
Capulets where their common mistress was interred alive--immediately,
that is, before the termination of the Tudor dynasty in the person of
Elizabeth, who towards the close of her reign may fitly have been
regarded as one already buried with her fathers, though yet living in a
state of suspended animation under the influence of a deadly narcotic
potion administered by the friends of Romeo--by the partisans, that is,
of the Cecilian policy. The Nurse was not less evidently designed to
represent the Established Church. Allusions to the marriage of the
clergy are profusely scattered through her speeches. Her deceased
husband was probably meant for Sir Thomas More--"a merry man" to the last
moment of his existence--who might well be supposed by a slight poetic
license to have foreseen in the infancy of Elizabeth her future
backsliding and fall from the straight path "when she came to age." The
passing expression of tenderness with which the Nurse refers to his
memory--"God be with his soul!"--implies at once the respect in which the
name of the martyr Chancellor was still generally held, and the lingering
remains of Catholic tradition which still made a prayer for the dead rise
naturally to Anglican lips. On the other hand, the strife between
Anglicans and Puritans, the struggle of episcopalian with Calvinistic
reformers, was quite as plainly typified in the quarrel between the Nurse
and Mercutio, in which the Martin Marprelate controversy was first
unmistakably represented on the stage. The "saucy merchant, that was so
full of his ropery," with his ridicule of the "stale" practice of Lenten
fasting and abstinence, his contempt for "a Lenten pie," and his
preference for a flesh diet as "very good meat in Lent," is clearly a
disciple of Calvin; and the impotence of the Nurse, however scandalised
at the nakedness of his ribald profanity, to protect herself against it
by appeal to reason or tradition, is dwelt upon with an emphasis
sufficient to indicate the secret tendency of the poet's own sympathies
and convictions. In Romeo's attempt at conciliation, and his poor excuse
for Mercutio (which yet the Nurse, an emblem of the temporising and
accommodating pliancy of episcopalian Protestantism, shows herself only
too ready to accept as valid) as "one that God hath made, for himself to
mar,"--the allusion here is evidently to the democratic and revolutionary
tendencies of the doctrine of Knox and Calvin, with its ultimate
developments of individualism and private judgment--we recognise the note
of Burghley's lifelong policy and its endeavour to fuse the Protestant or
Puritan party with the state Church of the Tudors as by law established.
The distaste of Elizabeth's bishops for such advances, their flutter of
apprehension at the daring and their burst of indignation at the
insolence of the Calvinists, are significantly expressed in terms which
seem to hint at a possible return for help and protection to the shelter
of the older faith and the support of its partisans. "An 'a speak
anything against me, I'll take him down an 'a were lustier than he is,
and twenty such Jacks;" (the allusion here is again obvious, to the
baptismal name of John Calvin and John Knox, if not also to the popular
byword of Jack Presbyter;) "and if I cannot," (here the sense of
insecurity and dependence on foreign help or secular power becomes
transparent) "I'll find those that shall." She disclaims communion with
the Protestant Churches of the continent, with Amsterdam or Geneva: "I am
none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates." Peter, who
carries her fan ("to hide her face: for her fan's the fairer face"; we
may take this to be a symbol of the form of episcopal consecration still
retained in the Anglican Church as a cover for its separation from
Catholicism), is undoubtedly meant for Whitgift, Archbishop of
Canterbury; the name Peter, as applied to a menial who will stand by and
suffer every knave to use the Church at his pleasure, but is ready to
draw as soon as another man if only he may be sure of having the secular
arm of the law on his side, implies a bitter sarcasm on the intruding
official of state then established by law as occupant of a see divorced
from its connection with that of the apostle. The sense of instability
natural to an institution which is compelled to rely for support on
ministers who are themselves dependent on the state whose pay they draw
for power to strike a blow in self-defence could hardly be better
expressed than by the solemn and piteous, almost agonised asseveration;
"Now, afore God, I am so vexed, that every part about me quivers." To
Shakespeare, it cannot be doubted, the impending dissolution or
dislocation of the Anglican system in "every part" by civil war and
religious discord must even then have been but too ominously evident.
If further confirmation could be needed of the underlying significance of
allusion traceable throughout this play, it might amply be supplied by
fresh reference to the first scene in which the Nurse makes her
appearance on the stage, and is checked by Lady Capulet in the full tide
of affectionate regret for her lost husband. We can well imagine Anne
Boleyn cutting short the regrets of some indiscreet courtier for Sir
Thomas More in the very words of the text;
Enough of this; I pray thee, hold thy peace.
The "parlous knock" which left so big a lump upon the brow of the infant
Juliet is evidently an allusion to the declaration of Elizabeth's
illegitimacy while yet in her cradle. The seal of bastardy set upon the
baby brow of
Anne Boleyn's daughter may well be said to have "broken" it.
The counsel of the Nurse to Juliet in Act iii. Scene 5 to forsake Romeo
for Paris indicates the bias of the hierarchy in favour of Essex--"a
lovely gentleman"--rather than of the ultra-Protestant policy of
Burghley, who doubtless in the eyes of courtiers and churchmen was "a
dish-clout to him."
These were a few of the points, set down at random, which he had been
enabled to verify within the limits of a single play. They would suffice
to give an idea of the process by which, when applied in detail to every
one of Shakespeare's plays, he trusted to establish the secret history
and import of each, not less than the general sequence and significance
of all. Further instalments of this work would probably be issued in the
forthcoming or future Transactions of the Newest Shakespeare Society; and
it was confidently expected that the final monument of his research when
thoroughly completed and illustrated by copious appendices, would prove
as worthy as any work of mere English scholarship could hope to be of a
place beside the inestimable commentaries of Gervinus, Ulrici, and the
Polypseudocriticopantodapomorosophisticometricoglossematographicomaniacal
Company for the Confusion of Shakespeare and Diffusion of Verbiage
(Unlimited).