St. George’s Day, 1564

[Footnote: 1864.]

All England knows that this year (1864) is the three hundredth since Shakspere was born, probably in this month of April; he was baptized on the twenty-sixth. We do not know whether he was born on the twenty-third, as a tradition may once have said, but two facts would incline us to believe it if we could: he died on the twenty-third of April, as if completing a cycle, and that is St. George’s Day. A little fanciful sentiment may say that it was surely St. George for merry England when Shakspere was born. But even were St. George the best saint in the calendar, which we have little ground to suppose, it suits our subject better to say that the Highest was thinking of his England when he sent Shakspere into it, to be a strength, a wonder, and a gladness to the nations of his earth.

But if we write thus only from the fashion of the day, we are like the fashionable architects who built the prophets’ tombs with vain praises while ignoring what the prophets taught. We hope to show good grounds for rejoicing in the birth of the child whom later years placed highest on the rocky steep of Art, up which so many who combine feeling and thought are always striving.

First, let us look at some of the more powerful influences into which he was born. A child is born into the womb of the time, which enclosed and fed him before his birth. Among the most potent influences on a child’s education, in the true sense, are those that reach him through his parents’ minds, hearts and judgement: what has strongly affected them has a concentrated effect on the child, antenatal and psychological as well as educational and spiritual. Shakspere was born in the sixth year of Queen Elizabeth, the eldest son but third child. His parents must have married by 1557, two years after Cranmer was burned at the stake, one of the two hundred who perished in that time of pain, which firmly established a reformation that, like every change for the better, could not be secured without a trial by fire. Such events everywhere in the country could not fail to impress thinking people, especially as those called to bear witness were not only people of high position. John Shakspere and Mary Arden were in all likelihood of the Protestant party; and though never, as far as we know, in special danger of denunciation, they must have been made earnest, as the age seems to have been. In such times people are compelled to think.

An interesting question arises: was Shakspere indebted in part to his mother for the profound knowledge of the Bible evident in his writings? By now a good many copies of the Scriptures, in one translation or another, must have been scattered over the country. [Footnote: And it seems to us probable that this spread of the Bible did more to rouse the slumbering literary power of England than any influence of foreign literature whatever.] The word was precious and hard to buy, but John Shakspere’s house might have had a copy, and the boy may first have heard the Scripture tales from his mother. One peculiar feature bears out the word profound: he often reproduces the very spirit and aroma of a passage without using its words, and some passages in his writings we could not have understood without some acquaintance with the New Testament. We give a few specimens, from “Macbeth” alone.

Passing over “temple-haunting martlet” (act i. scene 6), which refers to the verse about the sparrow finding a house and the swallow a nest at the Lord’s altars, we come to a passage for which we believe the only explanation is the Scripture to be cited.

On his way to murder Duncan, Macbeth says,—

What is meant by the last two lines? To us they are another form of the saying that nothing covered shall fail to be revealed, and what is spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light and what is whispered in closets proclaimed on the house-tops. We do not mean Macbeth has this passage in mind, only that Shakspere had the feeling of it when he wrote. Macbeth means, “Earth, do not hear me in the dark, which suits the present horror, lest the very stones prate about it in the daylight, which does not suit such things; thus taking ‘the present horror from the time which now suits with it.’”

Again, in the play’s only piece of humour—if that is humour which, to the principal characters’ consciousness, is as terrible as anything in it—the porter ends his fantastic soliloquy as porter of hell-gate with the words, “But this place is too cold for hell: I’ll devil-porter it no further. I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.” What else had the writer in mind but the Sermon on the Mount’s verse that the gate is wide and the way broad that leads to destruction, and many go in at it?

It may be objected that such commonly quoted passages imply no profound acquaintance with Scripture. But no knowledge of the words of the Bible would justify the word profound. What is remarkable is not only that these passages come up in the most exciting moments of composition, but that he gives their spirit such a new form that minds deadened by the sound of the words see the very image and spiritual meaning in them. “The primrose way!” And to what?

We will confine ourselves to one passage more:—

At the end of Revelation 14 we read that the time to reap has come, “for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” We suspect that Shakspere wrote, ripe to shaking.

These are by no means the most evident proofs of his acquaintance with Scripture, which others have treated far more fully. We chose passages that breathe the very spirit of sacred writ without using its words, and there we can only appeal to our readers’ varying degrees of conviction.

But one singular correspondence, in another almost literal quotation from the Gospel, interests us wonderfully. We are told that the “eye of a needle,” in the passage about a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven, means the small side entrance in a city gate. Now in “Richard II,” act v. scene 5, Richard quotes the passage thus:—

So either Shakspere’s imagination suggested the real explanation, or he took pains to learn the simile’s significance. It can hardly be merely fortuitous: at the least he looked for and found a suitable figure to go with eye of a needle—unless he had no particular reason for using the word for a little gate rather than for any entrance, which with him seems unlikely.

We have not proved that Shakspere’s acquaintance with the Scriptures began early; but the Bible must certainly have greatly influenced the highest representative mind of the time, its influence on the nation being unquestionable. Since the Bible was just dawning fully on the country as Shakspere became able to understand it, this seems the place to notice that influence and the passages in his works that 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 special attention to this is no conjecture. His way of writing historical plays is, we suspect, more like the Bible histories than most historians’; the development and consequences of character and conduct are clear to those who read them with open eyes. In childhood he may have had special reason to study history: his mother’s grandfather had been “groom of the chamber to Henry VII.,” and, on sufficient testimony, a more remote ancestor of his father’s had also stood high in that monarch’s favour. So the troublous times before Henry VII.’s usurpation would naturally be talked about in the quiet household, where books and amusements like our boys’ now were scarce or lacking. That past of strife and change was an exciting background for an age living in an exciting history of its own.

Perhaps the chief intellectual characteristic of Elizabeth’s age was activity, which accounts even for much that is objectionable in its literature. It must have been growing throughout the fifteenth century. The wars of the Roses stifled literature, so that it had to be born again at the start of the next century, but they were only like the “eager strife” of the shadow-leaves above the “genuine life” of the grass,—

But when peace fell on the land, the impulse to action that sprang from strife seems to have gone on, as waves go on raving on the shore after the wind has ceased, and found an outlet, among others, in literature, especially dramatic literature. Peace, made more intense by the end of the tormentors’ cries and the martyrs’ groans, made a kind of vacuum, and into it burst the torrent-springs of a thousand souls, their thoughts no longer repressed: history of the past and Utopian speculation about the future; noble theology, capable statesmanship, brilliant and profound science; voyages of discovery, and the swan-like merchantman turned into a fire-drake of war to defend the threatened shores; the first brave speech of a Puritan in Elizabeth’s Parliament, the first murmur of liberty’s voice, soon to thunder through the land; foreign genius naturalized by translation, and a new and transcendent rhythm invented or at least adopted; the song, the epic, the drama.

So much for the general. Following the course of his life, let us recall some chief events that must have impressed his all-open mind in his earlier years.

It would not be going back too far to begin with the Massacre of Paris, when he was eight. It caused such horror in England that some black rays from that deed of darkness may well have fallen on such a child’s mind. In strong contrast is the next event.

When he was eleven, Leicester gave the Queen that magnificent reception at Kenilworth, so well known from its memorials in our literature. It has been suggested, with enough likelihood to justify a conjecture, that Shakspere may have been present at the dramatic shows so gorgeously gathered before her Majesty. If so, one can imagine their influence on the young dramatic genius, at an age when the critical faculty is, happily, far less awake than the receptive and exultant faculties, and a nature chiefly needs excitement to growth, without which the most artistic pruning has nothing to work on.

When he was fifteen, Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch (through the French) was first published. Anyone who has compared one of Shakspere’s Roman plays with the corresponding life in Plutarch will not be surprised that we count this among the events of paramount influence on him. He probably did not know the large folio, with its medallion portraits set first singly and then side by side for comparison, as soon as it appeared; but we cannot tell when he began to read it, and it took such hold of him that he probably began very early. It seems to us one of the most powerful aids to his remarkable perception and discrimination of character. To say that in a very pregnant sense he was Plutarch’s disciple is no derogation from his originality. In the Plutarch plays he picked out every dramatic point and sometimes used the very phrases of North’s nervous, graphic English, as if it honoured his work to embody Plutarch’s words as he first knew them. From him he seems especially to have learned to bring out a character’s points by setting one man against another and remarking where they resembled and differed; and in other plays too he partly arranged his characters so.

Not long after he went to London, at twenty-two, Sir Philip Sidney died at thirty-two, and this must have influenced him: all Europe mourned its model, almost ideal man. England’s mourning, at court and in the city, lasted months, and Dr. Zouch supposes it the first for a private person. Sidney was renowned throughout the civilized world for everything a man could be renowned for, and his literary fame must have shared in the impression his death made on Shakspere. None of his works appeared until after his death, the first within months of it, but his fame as a writer was widely spread in private and could hardly fail to reach one who, though probably without friends of rank yet, kept such keen open ears. Whether or not Shakspere had heard of Sir Philip’s literary greatness, the “Arcadia,” first published four years after his death (1590), in a third edition within eight years—with another in Scotland the next year—must have interested him. It is very unlike the impression most minds have of it from the confident incapacity of last century’s critics. Few books are more fruitful in results and causes of thought, more sparkling with fancy, more evidently the outcome of rich and noble habit. That Shakspere read it is evident from his taking from it the secondary but still important plots of two of his plays.

Anticipating a little: in the same year, 1590, when Shakspere was twenty-six, came the first three books of Spenser’s “Faery Queen.” Of its reception we need say nothing, and of its character only that nowadays the depths of its teaching, heartily prized by Milton, are seldom explored. It would take months to set out the known and imagined sources of knowledge and spiritual food of the man who laid every mental region under such contribution that almost every profession has claimed him as a student of its science—so marvellously did he combine assimilation with reproduction.

To go back a little: in 1587, when he was twenty-three, Mary Queen of Scots was executed. The next year England, with the winds and waters as allies, won her mighty victory over the towering pride of the Spanish Armada. Like birds flying from their cliffs to defend their young, the little navy, many of its vessels able to carry only a few guns, flew out from the coasts; and fighting, fire-ships and tempest left this island,—

still a “blessed plot,” with an accumulated obligation to liberty that can only be paid by helping others be free; when she utterly forgets that, her doom is sealed, as surely as that of the old empires that passed away in self-indulgence and wickedness.

When Shakspere was about thirty-two, Sir Walter Raleigh published his glowing account of Guiana, which at once gave the English mind an earthly paradise or fairy-land. Raleigh seems too full of his own reports for us to suppose he invented or disbelieved them, especially when, expecting execution, he pictures the heavenly country he looks forward to in the fashion of the wonderful West:—

Such were some influences that widened thought and excited productive power in the minds of the time. After this there were fewer in Shakspere’s life, and more would have mattered less to a mind more fully formed and better able to choose its influences. Let us look back at the history of the art he chose for easing his mind of its wealth, which, like gold and silver, has a moth and rust of its own unless sent out for our neighbours’ good.

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 until then given in Norman-French, as Mr. Collier supposes, began to be given in English. Most likely there had been dramatic representations of a sort from the nation’s earliest period—to begin with the lowest form, imitated animal sounds for listeners’ delight, such as the drama of an attacking poodle and a fiercely repellent puss. The art would pass through innumerable gradations of childhood before its first formal embodiment in the so-called miracle-plays, Scripture stories, canonical and apocryphal, dramatized in the rudest fashion. From the height the art had reached two hundred and fifty years later, “how dwarfed a growth of cold and night” they look! But when there was no printing, little preaching, and Latin prayers, we cannot help thinking that, grotesque and ill-imagined as they were, they were of unspeakable value to a people whose spiritual digestion was not hurt by an abnormal quantity of husk and saw-dust in their food. Occasionally we find verses of true poetic feeling, such as these in “The Fall of Man:”—

This implies that the separation between God and man, though it had destroyed the beatific vision, was not yet so complete that the creature was deaf to his Maker’s voice. And the words with which Eve, in shame and remorse, begs her husband to strangle her, odd and quaint as they are, have an almost overpowering pathos:—

To this Adam begins his reply with the verses,—

And this portion of the representation ends with these verses, spoken by Eve:—

These plays are most interesting set against the places where they were sometimes performed. Scaffolds usually stood in market-places or churchyards, but sometimes rose in the great churches, with ecclesiastics’ help. So the rude beginnings of the dramatic art, with the devil as the unfortunate buffoon drawing the people’s most exuberant laughter, stood under the perfection of another art, architecture, which we can now only imitate at our best: below, clumsy contrivance and vulgar jest; above, the solemn heaven of uplifted arches, their mysterious glooms ringing with the multitude’s delight—the play of children enclosed in the heart of prayer aspiring in stone. But it was not all laughter, and the drama is so much nearer than architecture to the ordinary human heart that these grotesque plays, we think, did far more to arouse the people’s inward life and conscience than all the glory into which the monks’ out-working spirit compelled the stubborn stone to bourgeon and blossom.

Although the drama surely grew somehow during the dreary fifteenth century, it reached Elizabethan grandeur not by steady progression but as if a dry, knotty, uncouth but vigorous plant suddenly opened its inward life in a flower of surpassing splendour. When real historical persons in the miracle-plays gave way to unreal allegorical ones, and the “play of morals,” as it was called, nearly drove the miracle-play off the stage, there was no great advance: the gain was more variety, while allegorical moral teaching lacks the vivifying fire of faith that works in even the poorest representation of a history the people heartily believed and loved. Nor do the interludes in the pauses of Henry VIII.’s banquets, the favourite amusement of later royalty, refine on the miracle-plays: they gained facility and wit but lost poetry and pathos and gathered grossness. In the comedies that soon appear there is far more fun than art; and though the historical play had existed for some time, and learning from the inns of court had flowed into the drama, there is no whole of artistic or poetic value before Shakspere. This brings us to another branch of the subject, whose importance has not, we think, been duly acknowledged: the use, if not invention, of blank verse in England, and its application to the drama.

We have in the present day one grand master of blank verse, the Poet Laureate. But where would he be if Milton had not gone before him, or if the verse in which he works like an informing spirit did not exist? He might have invented it himself, but his verse would have been very different from what he will now leave beside that of the master of the epic. So thanks to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He died on the scaffold at thirty and left no poetry of much value in itself, but he refined the language’s poetic usages and, above all, was the first ever to write blank verse in English. He used it to translate the second and fourth books of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” probably not long before his execution in 1547, seventeen years before Shakspere’s birth. The work has passages of excellence and rarely does a line quite fail, but as might be expected it is somewhat stiff and stunted in sound, partly because the lines are divided too much where distinction would have been enough. It would have been strange if he had at once handled freely a rhythm that every boy-poet now thinks he can do anything with, though few ever learn its real scope. His difficulty was increased because the nearest measure was the heroic couplet, so familiar, though scarcely anyone has equalled the variety of its modelling in Chaucer, whom Surrey of course knew. Even in Chaucer, the constant expectation of a rhyme completed at the couplet’s end would tempt one used to heroic verse, on first trying blank verse, to put a rhythmical fall and a kind of close at the end of every line. Still, Surrey’s translation has good verse. Here are lines about Mercury in which the fault is scarcely perceptible.

Justice demands in all comparative criticism that whoever began a mode not be compared with his followers on the absolute merit of the productions alone; he may be inferior in quality, but as inventor he stands on a height the imitators can never reach, though his example may let them climb other and loftier heights. It is doubtful whether Surrey himself invented this verse or followed some poet of Italy or Spain, where blank verse is said to have been used before Surrey wrote English in that measure.

So here are the low beginnings of blank verse. It was nearly a hundred and twenty years before Milton took it up, served well by it and glorifying it; we know of no poem of worth in that measure between. We speak here of the epic form, which, being uttered ore rotundo, necessarily differs considerably from its form in the drama.

Let us glance at the forms of composition used for the drama before blank verse came into favour. The short specimens already given show the miracle-plays’ verse: carefully measured and varied lines, correct and superabundant rhymes, melody and rhythm not lacking. The moral and other rhymed plays that followed, as far as we know them, fell off greatly: largely long, irregular lines with rhythmical progress rather than rhythm, exceedingly hard to read musically, at least for one of our day. Here are a few such verses from the dramatic poem, rather than drama, somewhat improperly called “The Moral Play of God’s Promises,” by John Bale, who died the year before Shakspere was born; it is the first in Dodsley’s collection. They have some poetic merit, though the rhythm is at least difficult. We give two stanzas; in most plays the verses are in rhyming couplets only.

To our ears the older miracle-plays were greatly superior. Yet this apparently popular way of “building the rhyme”—certainly not the lofty rhyme, since so crumbling a foundation could carry no height of superstructure—contains the elements of the most popular rhythm of our day: any number of syllables to the line, from four up to twelve or more, with no more than four accented. A spirited song in this measure, other things not being quite equal, almost certainly becomes more popular than one in any other. Most of Barry Cornwall’s and Mrs. Heman’s songs use it, as do Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Byron’s “Siege of Corinth,” and Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant.” Spenser first used it well, in one of the months of the “Shepherd’s Calendar.” We quote a few lines to show the kind we mean:—

We can trace it slightly in Sir Thomas Wyatt, and we think in others before Spenser, but not in Chaucer. We judge it the essential rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which would harmonize with, if it cannot explain, its still being the most popular measure. Shakspere uses it a little in one play, if not more, though there it shares the irregular character of the older plays he imitates. But we suspect the clowns of authoring some of the rhymes, “speaking more than was set down for them,” evidently no uncommon offence.

Prose was likewise in use for the drama at an early period.

But we must now look at the application of blank verse to the drama, where we owe most to Mr. Collier’s investigations, than whom no one has deserved more gratitude. It is universally acknowledged that “Ferrex and Porrex” was the first drama in blank verse. It was never put on the public stage. It was the joint work of Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and Thomas Norton, both gentlemen of the Inner Temple, whose members played it before the Queen at Whitehall in 1561, three years before Shakspere’s birth. Though the verse is decent and in some respects irreproachable, time spent reading it is, we think, all but lost except to those who must verify their literary profession for themselves—a profession which, like all others, involves a good deal of disagreeable duty. We spare our readers any quotation, since there is no need to show what blank verse of the commonest sort is. But this drama by no means represents Thomas Sackville’s poetic powers. Though we cannot agree with Hallam’s general criticism, for or against Sackville, and though we admire Spenser, we hope, as much as Hallam could have, we venture to say that some of Sackville’s personifications may “fairly be compared with some of the most poetical passages in Spenser,” and more: in this kind Sackville has a strength and simplicity of representation that surpasses Spenser’s in passages where Spenser probably imitated him. We mean the allegorical personages in Sackville’s “Induction to the Mirrour of Magistrates” and in Spenser’s description of the “House of Pride.”

Mr. Collier judges that the first blank-verse play acted on the public stage was Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine,” before 1587, when Shakspere was twenty-three, and that better plays by Marlowe followed. His dramatic art is not much, but in dramatic poetry he far surpassed everyone before him. Passages worth quoting for their poetry are innumerable, though many others lie in a border land between poetry and bombast where we cannot say which they are. A critic can easily win credit for common sense, and spare himself the thinking he so often cannot do, by labelling all such passages bombastical nonsense; but a wise reader sees that poetry and bombast, though not the same, meet so entirely at their extremes that they can mix, if not combine. Goethe need not have been ashamed of one or two scenes in Marlowe’s “Faust,” though they are nothing like his own work. For dramatic purposes Marlowe’s verse is far inferior to Shakspere’s, but it mattered greatly that he came first and helped prepare Shakspere’s tools. That blank verse was ready for Shakspere seems to us providential, even in a system in which we cannot believe in chance. The stage is raised a few feet because it shows a representation; likewise the speech of a drama, which presents ideal not unreal persons (the fool a worthy fool, the villain a worthy villain), must be raised some tones above ordinary life and its commonplace flavour. Shakspere’s drama has no commonplace, which already lifts it above ordinary life, so its speech must be lifted too, from prose to blank verse. Go beyond that and we are unnatural for stage and life alike, as in the kind of composition, familiar in his time, that he mocks in the player’s speech about Priam and Hecuba in “Hamlet”; we could show the very passages of the play-writer Nash that he imitates. Another figure: in the same play he tells the players “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” Everyone has felt that an object looks different seen directly and in a mirror; nature herself is not the same in the mirror held up to her. Everything changes sides, and a familiar homely room gains something strange and poetic in the mirror over the fire. For this reflection on the stage, blank verse is the suitable glass to take the silvering of the genius behind it.

If Shakspere had had to make his tools first, quarry his stone and fell his timber for his house, instead of finding the stone hewn and the timber already in logs and planks beside him, no doubt his house would have been built; but can we suppose it would have proved such “a lordly pleasure-house”? Not even Shakspere could do without his poor little brothers who preceded him and, like the goblins and gnomes of the drama, got everything out of the dark earth’s bowels, ready for the master, whom it would have been a shame to see working in the gloom and dust instead of the open eye of day. Nothing helps the true development of power so much as free action for whatever power is already operative; blank verse gave this room.

Yet when Shakspere first came upon the scene of dramatic labour, he had to serve his private apprenticeship, to which the age’s apprenticeship in the drama had led up. He had to act first. Driven to London and the drama by an irresistible impulse, when he needed a profession to be independent of his father, being himself, though very young, a married man, the impulse would naturally first show itself as the desire to act, for outside relations operate first. We can hardly judge how good an actor he was, for in his own plays he never took the best characters, writing them for his friend Richard Burbage. Possibly writing satisfied the dramatic impulse, though the study he gave to the higher department of the art might have been more than enough to make him unrivalled in presenting his own conceptions. But the dramatic spring, once through the surface, would scoop out a deeper and deeper well for itself, and the actor would soon work on the parts he studied. Finding that he greatly bettered his own parts, others would submit theirs, and at length whole plays for revision, of which there may be several in his collected works. If the feather-end of his pen is just traceable in “Titus Andronicus,” the point of it is much more evident, and to as good purpose as Beaumont or Fletcher could have used his at best, in “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” Before long he would submit one of his own plays; and then his whole dramatic career lay open, for which nature qualified him better than probably any other man. He knew acting practically—the play-house and its capabilities, stage necessities, each of the company’s endowments and qualifications—so that when writing a play he could distribute the parts before they were on paper, and write for each actor with the living form of the ideal person present “in his mind’s eye,” and often to his bodily sight. The actual came in aid of the ideal, as it always does if the ideal is genuine, and the loftiest conceptions proved the truest to visible nature.

This close relation of Shakspere to the actual leads to a general and remarkable fact, which will lead us back to him: all the great writers of Elizabeth’s time were men of affairs, not merely literary men in the present usual sense. Hooker was a hard-working, sheep-keeping, cradle-rocking pastor of a country parish. Bacon had innumerable legal duties before becoming Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor. Raleigh was soldier, sailor, adventurer, courtier, politician and discoverer; we owe his most ambitious literary work, “The History of the World,” hardly to be surpassed in prose for majesty of subject and style, to his imprisonment. At twenty-three Sidney won the highest praise for managing a secret embassy to the Emperor of Germany; he took the deepest, most active interest in his country’s politics, would have sailed with Sir Francis Drake for South American discovery, and might have been king of poor Poland had the queen not been too selfish or wise to spare him. All his literary work came in spare hours. Spenser, the most purely literary of them but Shakspere, was at one time Secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland and later Sheriff of Cork. And the remark is true beyond Elizabeth’s writers and England.

It seems to us among the greatest advantages for a poet to be drawn out of his study, and still more out of the chamber of imagery in his own thoughts, to behold and reflect on the embodiment of Divine thoughts and purposes in men and their affairs around him. Shakspere held no public appointment, but his dramatic position gave him all the advantage of one, and more. He had more than plays to deal with: an actor himself, and in great measure owner of more than one theatre, he ruled a little realm harder to govern than many a kingdom—a company of actors, though perhaps easier for being only men and boys—and supervised the management’s finances. In the relations and necessities of his profession he found not only enough of the actual to keep him real, but almost enough opportunity for his one great study, mankind, quite apart from his social and friendly relations, which were of the widest and deepest.

But Shakspere had not business relations merely: he was a man of business. His life sets in full light a common blunder, in theory on one side and practice on the other. The theory is that genius is an abnormal development of imagination at the cost of practical powers, so that a genius is incapable and incompetent in worldly matters. The most complete refutation is that the greatest genius the world has known succeeded in common affairs. As his genius grew in strength, fervour and executive power, his worldly condition rose too; he became important in his townspeople’s eyes, who would not have honoured him had he not made money, and he bought landed property in his native place with the proceeds of managing his theatres.

The practical blunder is the notion, sometimes held by young people ambitious of literary distinction, that they must accept the poverty to which the world dooms its greatest men, and take it as further proof of their genius. If this means the poet is not to make money his object, it means well: no man should. But if it means that the world is unkind, or that the poet is not to “gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost,” it means ill. Shakspere did not make haste to be rich. He neither blamed, courted nor neglected the world; he was friendly with it. He could not have pinched and scraped, but neither did he waste or neglect his worldly substance, which is God’s gift too. Many immense fortunes have been made in ways, short of dishonesty, to which a man of genius ought to be yet more ashamed than another to stoop; but a man of genius who does honest work will make a fair livelihood by it, which is better for all good results of intellect and heart than a great fortune. Shakspere began by doing what he could. He did not agree to starve until the world recognized his genius, or grumble at its blindness to what could not be seen before it was set forth. He supplied something the world wanted, for it wants many an honest thing: he went on the stage and acted, and so gained power to reveal his genius, which the world, in its measure, was not slow to recognize. Many a young fellow who entered life with the one ambition of being a poet has failed because he did not see that it is better to be a man than a poet, and that his first duty is to earn an honest living by honest work he can do and for which there is a demand, though it may not be the pleasantest. Time would have shown whether he was meant to be a poet; if not, he would have been no beggar; if so, it would have been partly by virtue of the experience of life and truth, won in the struggle for bread, without which a man may be a sweet dreamer but no strong maker, no poet. In a word, here is the Englishman of genius, beginning with nothing and dying not rich but easy and honoured, by doing what no one else could do: writing dramas in which outward grandeur or beauty is only an exponent of inward worth, hiding pearls for the wise within the jewelled play of the variegated bubbles of fancy he blew as he wrought for the innocent delight of his thoughtless brothers and sisters. Wherever the rainbow of his genius stands, at the foot of its arch lies a golden key that opens the secret doors of truth and admits the humble seeker into the presence of Wisdom, who, having cried in the streets in vain, sits at home waiting for him who will come to find her. And Shakspere had cakes and ale, although he was virtuous.

But what do we know about Shakspere’s character? How can we tell the inner life of a man who uttered himself in dramas, where he can never speak in his own person? He may voice his own sentiments through many of his persons, but how are we to know when? At least, as a self-evident negative: a passage on a wide question put into the mouth of a person despised and rebuked by the best characters in the play is not likely to hold the dramatist’s cautiously formed and cherished opinion. That may seem a truism, but one of the passages oftenest quoted with admiration, even printed separately and illuminated, is “The Seven Ages of Man,” full of inhuman contempt for humanity and unbelief in its destiny, in which no age passes over its poor sad stage without a sneer; and Shakspere gives it to the blasé sensualist Jaques in “As You Like it,” whom the good and wise Duke says has been as vile as a man can be, so vile that it would be an added sin in him to rebuke sin; a man who never could see what is good in any man and hates men’s vices because he hates himself, seeing in them only the reflex of his own disgust. Shakspere knew better than to say that all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players. He had been a player himself, but only on the stage; Jaques had been a player where he ought to have been a true man. His whole account of human life is contradicted and exposed, the moment he finishes his wicked burlesque, by the entrance of Orlando, the young master, carrying Adam, the old servant, on his back. The song that follows sings true: “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.” Between the all of Jaques and the most of the song lies the difference between earth and hell.—Of course, from a literary and dramatic point of view, “The Seven Ages” is perfect.

Now one positive statement to balance the other. When a noble character voices not stock sentiments of stage virtue but appreciation of a truth that takes deep thought and experience united with love of truth to discover or verify for oneself—especially a truth most men will fail not only to recognize but to understand, since understanding it depends on prior spiritual perception—we may take the passage as an expression of the writer’s inner soul. He must have seen it before he could say it; and to see such a truth is to love it, or rather love of truth in general must have preceded and enabled the discovery. Such a passage is the Duke’s speech opening the second act of “As You Like it.” Its lesson is that a man’s well-being cannot be secured unless he shares the ills of life, “the penalty of Adam.” It seems strange to us that the excellent editors of the Cambridge edition now being published, a great boon to all students of Shakspere, did not see that the original reading, that of the folios, is right,—

which, with the point of interrogation supplied, gives the true meaning of the whole passage: the penalty of Adam is just what makes the “wood more free from peril than the envious court,” teaching each “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think.”

But Shakspere, though everywhere felt, is nowhere seen in his plays. He is too true an artist to show his face from behind the play of life he fills his stage with. What we find of him we must find by regarding the whole and letting its spiritual essence find its way to brain and heart. The student of Shakspere becomes imbued with the idea of his character; it exhales from his writings. Once we have found a play’s main drift—the grand rounding of the whole—we may interpret individual passages by it; only in relation to the whole can we do them full justice, and in that relation we discover the master’s mind.

We have another source of more direct enlightenment about Shakspere himself—direct, not more certain or extended. One collection of poems, his sonnets, speaks in his own person and of himself. Though they present him in a small relative space, they admirably round and complete, to our eyes, the circle of his individuality. In them and the plays the common saying, one of the truest, that extremes meet, is verified; no man is complete without extremes, or if they do not meet. His individuality, judged by his dramas alone, has been declared nonexistent, while in the sonnets he shows some of the deepest phases of a healthy self-consciousness. We do not enter the unsettled question whether they were addressed to a man or a woman; we have scarcely a doubt ourselves, as the argument we found on our conviction will show. The other question, If a man, what man? interests us little. A few at the end, as they have come down to us, are beyond doubt addressed to a woman, but their difference in tone from the others we think very remarkable. Possibly when they were written—most of them early in his life, as it appears to us, though not published till 1609, when he was forty-five, Meres referring to them in 1598 as known “among his private friends”—he had not known such women as he knew afterwards, and the true devotion of his soul went to a friend of his own sex. Gervinus, whose lectures on Shakspere are more profound and lofty than any other interpreter’s, and which we are glad to see in suitable English under his own superintendence, says somewhere that as Shakspere lived and wrote his ideal of womanhood grew nobler and purer. Certainly the woman to whom the last few sonnets are addressed was neither noble nor pure. In this matter at least we think they record one of his early experiences.

We shall briefly indicate what we find in these sonnets about the man himself, beginning with what is least pleasing and of least value.

We must confess that probably soon after he first came to London, he, then a married man, had an intrigue with a married woman, of which there are indications that he was afterwards deeply ashamed. One little incident seems traceable: he gave her a set of tablets his friend had given him; and the sonnet excusing himself to his friend for it seems to us the only special pleading, and so ungenuine expression, in the whole. This friend, to whom the rest of the sonnets are addressed, made the woman’s acquaintance, and both were false to Shakspere. Even Shakspere could not keep the love of a worthless woman. So much the better for him; but it is a sad story. Yet even in this evil environment we see his nobility and real self. The sonnets in which he mourns his friend’s falsehood, forgives him, and finds excuses so as not to lose his love of him are, to our minds, among the most beautiful and profound. Of these are the 33rd and 34th. In the 35th he goes on to comfort his friend in his grief for his offence, even accusing himself of offence in having made more excuse for his fault than it needed! But to leave this part of his history, which as far as we know stands alone yet cannot truthfully be passed by, any more than the story of David’s crime, though the two compare in nothing beyond the primary fact, let us look at the one reality that, spiritually and apart from literary beauty, makes these poems stand all but alone in literature: the devotion of his friendship, already unavoidably touched on. We say all but alone, because we should better understand these poems from the fact that in our day has appeared the only other poem like them, which casts a light back upon them.

So sings the Poet of our day, in the loftiest of his poems—“In Memoriam”—to the spirit of his vanished friend. In the midst of his song arises the thought of the Poet of all time, who loved his friend too, and would have lost him in a way far worse than death, had his love not been too strong even for that ghastly death which threatened to cut the golden chain between them and part them by the impassable gulf. Tennyson’s friend never wronged him; Shakspere’s love has the added divineness of forgiveness. Such love between men is rare, and so to a mind in itself no way rare it is incredible, being unintelligible. Divine individuality is always rare, though all common things are divine, and faith in its ideal sense is always hard to find. But perhaps this affection between men, as Coleridge indicates in his “Table Talk,” was more common under Elizabeth and James than now. There is a dread of the demonstrative today which may be carried where it is out of place and hinder a devotion that must be real, grand and divine if one man such as Shakspere or Tennyson has felt it. If one has felt it, humanity may claim it, and He who is the Son of man has surely verified the claim. Few of us, we believe, know what to love our neighbour as ourselves means; but when a man here and there over the centuries does, we may take him as the prophet of coming good for his race, his prophecy being himself.

Next to the interest of knowing that a man could love so well comes the association of this fact with his art. He who could look abroad on men and understand them all—who stood, as it were, in the open gates of his palace and welcomed everyone in sight—had in its inner places one chamber where he met his friend and where his whole soul went out to understand his friend’s. The man to whom nothing in humanity was common or unclean; in whom the most remarkable artistic moral is fair-play; who fills our hearts with saintly love for Cordelia and admiration of Sir John Falstaff, the lost gentleman, mournful even at the height of our laughter; who could make an Autolycus and a Macbeth both human, and an Ariel and a Puck neither human—this is the man who loved best. We believe this depth of capacity for loving lay at the root of all his knowledge of men and women and all his dramatic pre-eminence. The heart is more intelligent than the intellect. Well says the poet Matthew Raydon, who has hardly left anything behind him but the lamentation over Sir Philip Sidney in which these lines occur,—

We simply believe that this—not this only, but this more than any other endowment—made Shakspere the artist he was, by giving him all the material of humanity to work upon and keeping him to the true spirit of its use. Love looking forth upon strife understood it all. Love is the true revealer of secrets, because it makes one with the object regarded.

“But,” say some impatient readers, “when shall we have done with Shakspere? There is no end to this writing about him.” It will be a bad day for England when we have done with Shakspere, for that will mean that, along with losing him, we can no longer understand him. Should that time come, Heaven grant the generation that does not understand him at least the grace to keep its pens off him, which will by no means follow from the non-intelligence! The plentiful writing so far must do good in proportion as it directs attention to him and helps understanding of him. While today’s utterances pass away, tomorrow’s children are born and need new utterance for their fresh need from those who have gone before, tasted life and Shakspere, and can help them further by telling what they have found. Had this cry been raised last century, after good Dr. Johnson stopped displaying the facts about his own incapacity that he took for criticisms of Shakspere, where would our aids to understanding the dramatist now be? Reflecting with how much labour we have deepened our knowledge of him and found in him the best—for the best does not lie on the surface for the careless reader—we are convinced that not half has been done that ought to be to help young people at least understand their country’s master mind. Few can give it the attention we have, but much may be done with judicious aid. And a profound knowledge of their greatest writer would do more than almost anything to bind the hearts of coming generations of Englishmen together in a true and unselfish way; for his works are our country in a convex magic mirror.

When a man finds that each time he reads a book not only does some obscurity melt away but deeper depths dawn upon him, he is not likely to think the time has come to stop writing about it. In Shakspere, as in all true artistic work and nature herself, the depths are never utterly revealed; and every new generation needs new aid toward discovering itself and its own thoughts in these forms of the past. Of all who read about Shakspere, few are reached by more than one or two utterances. The speech or writing must go out to find the soil for its kernel of truth. So, aware that perhaps more has been said and written about Shakspere than any other writer, we venture to add a few general remarks.

First we would remind our readers of the marvel of two faculties combined to a high degree in Shakspere, one generally far inferior to the other: reception and production. Great receptive power, brought into play by reading or observation, is rarely combined with originality of thought. Some hungers are quite satisfied by taking in what others have thought, felt and done, and many minds grow on this food; others feed far more on what rises from their own depths: answers they must give to questions that come unsought; theories they cannot help constructing to unite in one whole the facts around them, which at first strive like the atoms of a chaos; impulses of hidden origin that at one time show a height of being far above the thinker’s present condition, at another a gulf of evil he may fall into. In Shakspere the powers of beholding and originating meet like the rejoining halves of a sphere. A man who thinks his own thoughts a great deal will often walk through London streets and see nothing. In the man who only observes, every passing object mirrors itself in its prominent peculiarities but rouses no magician from the inner chamber to charm and chain its image to his purpose. In Shakspere every outer form of humanity and nature spoke to the ever-moving, self-vindicating—we had almost said, and in a sense it would be true, self-generating—humanity within him. The sound of any action outside struck in him just the chord that, set in motion within him, would have produced a similar action. When anything was done, he felt as if he were doing it—perception and origination joined in one consciousness.

To this gift was joined the gift of utterance, or representation. Many a man both receives and generates who somehow cannot represent. Nothing is more disappointing than our first experience of the artistic attempts of a man who has raised our expectations by a social display of familiarity with, and command of, the subjects of conversation. When such a one tried to give these thoughts vital or artistic form, so that they might exist rather than be born and die on his lips, was not a poor, weak, faded simulacrum the result? Shakspere was a great talker who enraptured listeners and was himself so rapt that he could scarcely come to a close; but only alone with his art did he rise to the height of his great argument, and all the talk was like the fallen mortar and stony chips lying about the walls of the great temple of his drama.

Along with this wealth of artistic speech, an artistic virtue of an opposite kind is remarkable: his reticence. How often he might say fine, particularly poetic, things and does not, because it would not suit the character or the time! How many delicate points in his plays we find only after many readings, because he will not put one tone of success into natural utterance to draw attention to the author’s triumph and jar with the all-important reality of his production! Wherever an author obtrudes his self-importance, unreality results, like what we feel in the old moral plays when historical and allegorical personages, such as Julius Caesar and Charity, are on the same stage in the same story. Shakspere never points to any stroke of his own wit or art. We may find it or not: there it is, and no matter if no one sees it!

Much has been disputed about how conscious Shakspere was of his art: whether he worked by a grand yet blind impulse or knew what he wanted and knowingly used the means. We cannot enter on that here, but we recommend anyone interested not to decide before considering a passage in another of his poems, which may throw light on it: the description of a painting in “The Rape of Lucrece,” towards the end. Its very minuteness expresses principles and reveals that in an art not his own he could hold principles of execution and indicate perfection of finish, which must at least come from a general capacity for art and so might operate as consciously in his own province. For our part we think his results are a perfect combination of consciousness and unconsciousness: consciousness where the play’s arrangements, outside the region of inspiration, required the wakeful intellect’s care; unconsciousness where the subject itself bore him aloft on the wings of its own creative delight.

There is another manifestation of his power that will astonish those who consider it. He could go down to the simple and grand realities of human nature, which are all tragic, and so rejoice most in contemplations that find fit outlet in a “Hamlet,” a “Lear,” a “Timon,” or an “Othello”—the tragedies of Doubt, Ingratitude, and Love—yet he can, when he chooses, float on the very surface of human nature, as in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” “The Comedy of Errors,” “The Taming of the Shrew;” or descend half way and remain suspended in the characters and feelings of ordinary nice people, interesting to meet in society but without the development or circumstances that admit the highest and simplest poetic treatment. In these he brings out the ordinary noble or ordinary vicious. Most of his comedies are of this kind: an ideal representation of common social life, steering clear of what in such surroundings would be heroics. See how steadily he keeps the noble-minded youth Orlando in this middle region; and see how the best comes out at last in the wayward, recalcitrant and bizarre, but honest and true natures of Beatrice and Benedick, without untruth to the nature of comedy, though the circumstances border on the tragic. When he wants to give the deeper affairs of the heart, he throws the whole out of the social circle with its multiform restraints. As in “Hamlet” the stage is really Hamlet’s heart, he makes his visible stage slope off into the misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead and Hades open beneath. Hence young people brought up in the country understand the tragedies far sooner than the comedies, which need acquaintance with society and its ways.

The remarks on “Hamlet” lead us to point out how in some plays Shakspere prepares a stage suitable for the whole representation. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the place that gives tone to the whole is a midnight wood in the first flush and youthful delight of summer. In “As You Like it” it is a daylight wood in spring, full of morning freshness, with a cold wind now and then through the half-clothed boughs. In “The Tempest” it is a solitary island, circled by the mysterious sea-horizon, over which who can tell what may come?—a place where the magician may work his will and have all nature at the beck of his superior knowledge.

The only writer who might have rivalled Shakspere in his own walk, had he been born in the same period, is Chaucer, who has the same gift of individualizing the general and idealizing the portrait. The best dramatists of Shakspere’s time, eager to individualize, forget the modifying multiformity of individual humanity. Anxious to present a character, they take a human mould, label it with a peculiarity, and fill in speeches and forms to match. The peculiarity so predominates, and the whole is so much of one colour, that the result is like an allegorical personification, with everything human removed except what belongs to the peculiarity. Shakspere is quite different. He knows no human being was ever like that. His most peculiar characters speak very much like other people, and their peculiarities show with indubitable plainness only over the whole. The one apparent exception is Jaques, in “As You Like it,” but there Shakspere represents a man who chooses to represent himself so: a man in his humour, in his own chosen affectation. Jaques writes his own part, for with him “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women,” himself first, “merely players.” We see him as he chooses to be taken, not first as he is. His real self does come out, since no man can seem altogether other than he is, and the Duke, who sees through him, rebukes him as noted; but it is his affectation that gives his speech and manner their unnatural peculiarity, as he wishes.

So every one of Shakspere’s characters stands on the firm ground of humanity, where weeds as well as flowers, glorious or fantastic, show themselves. His more heroic persons are the most profoundly human. Nor are his villains unhuman, though inhuman enough. Compared with Marlowe’s Jew, Shylock is a terrible man beside a dreary monster, and, as far as logic and the lex talionis go, has the best of the argument. Crime is strong through human nature’s own strength; wickedness has no power of itself but lives by the perverted powers of good. Shakspere’s sympathy with Shylock is so great, even in the hard and unjust doom that overtakes him, that he dismisses him with some of the tender-hearted spectators’ spare sympathies. Nowhere is the justice of genius plainer than in his utter freedom from party-spirit, even toward his own creations. Each character sets itself forth from its own point of view, and the poet’s judgment appears only in the choice and scope of the whole. He never lets his opinion damage an individual’s self-presentation. He knows something can be said for the worst, and that a feeling of justice and right will be strong in a man swayed by perfect selfishness. So the false man cannot be discovered in his speech, not only because the villain talks as like a true man as he can, but because seldom is the villainy clear to the villain’s own mind. We cannot determine whether Bolingbroke or Norfolk spoke the truth in bandying the lie; doubtless each believed the other the villain he called him. Shakspere has no need to play the historian and decide it. He leaves his reader as puzzled as Richard, in full sympathy with his perplexity, as if present at the interrupted combat.

If every writer could write up to his own best, we should have far less to marvel at in Shakspere. His wealth of suggestions, an abundance of the best to choose from, largely lifts him above those who, having felt the inspiration of one good idea, must go on constructing, carpentering, with dreary handicraft, until the exhausted faculty can generate another. Then comes his unerring choice of the best. To see what variety he could produce of the same kind of thought, examine the same business in different plays: instigation to a crime in “Macbeth,” where Macbeth tempts the two murderers to kill Banquo; in “King John,” where the King tempts Hubert to kill Arthur; in “The Tempest,” where Antonio tempts Sebastian to kill Alonzo; in “As You Like it,” where Oliver instigates Charles to kill Orlando; and in “Hamlet,” where Claudius urges Laertes to murder Hamlet.

He shows no anxiety about being original. A man full of his work forgets himself. In his desire to produce a good play he takes any material that offers, even a bad play to make a good one. One of the most remarkable discoveries for the student is the hide-bound poverty of some of the stories, which his life-power turns into forms of strength, richness and grace. He does what the Spirit in “Comus” says the music he heard might do,—

and then death is straightway “clothed upon.” Nowhere is his genius’s refining operation more evident than in purifying these stories. Characters and incidents that would have been honey and nuts to Beaumont and Fletcher he entirely remodels, despite their dramatic appeal. The fair Ophelia is in the old tale a common woman and Hamlet’s mistress; and the policy of the Lady of Belmont, in the old story’s place of the lovely Portia he invented, on which the whole story turns, is as unfit to set forth in our pages as it was for his art. His noble art refuses to work on base matter. He sees at once a tale’s capabilities, but will use it only if he may do with it what he pleases.

If we may help the young student who wants to help himself, we suggest that following Plutarch’s way of comparison, in a measure, is the best guide to understanding the poet. Let him set any two characters side by side and look first for differences, then for resemblances, with the causes of each; or set two plays against each other and compare and contrast them. Take, for instance, Hamlet and Brutus: compare their beginnings and endings, their likenesses of character and differences of conduct, what was required of each and the circumstances demanding action, the helps and hindrances each had in working out life’s problem, how each meets the supernatural or any other question the plays suggest, and end with each play’s main lesson; he will be astonished to find, if he has not already, what a rich mine of intellectual and spiritual wealth lies open to him. Perhaps not the least valuable result is that the young Englishman who wants delivering from any temptation to think himself the centre of the universe will be helped toward honourable humility by looking up to the man who towers, like Saul, head and shoulders above his brethren and, seeing that he is humble, may learn to leave it to the pismire to be angry, the earwig to be conceited, and the spider to insist on his own importance.

To return to the main course: the dramas of Shakspere are so natural that this, their greatest praise, is the ground of one difficulty the young student feels in estimating them. The very simplicity of his art throws him out of any known groove of judgment. Hearing “Look at this, and admire,” he is inclined to answer, “Why, he only says in the simplest way what the thing must have been. It is as plain as daylight.” Yes, to the reader, and because Shakspere wrote it. There were a thousand wrong ways of doing it, and he took the one right way. He has made it plain in art, whatever it was before in nature; most likely its very simplicity in nature was scarcely observed before he saw and represented it. Is it not the glory of art to attain this simplicity? for simplicity is the end of all things—all manners, all morals, all religion. To say the thing could not have been done otherwise is to forget the art in beholding its object, the mirror because you see nature in it. Anyone can see the moon in Lord Rosse’s telescope; but who made the reflector? Let the student try to express anything just as it is, in prose or verse, painting or modelling: only after many attempts does he know how hard this simplicity is to reach. The greater the success, the fewer the signs of labour. Simplicity is art’s perfection.

So natural are all his plays, the great tragedies we now have in mind among them, that it may seem at first sight he built them on no moral plan and had no lesson of his own to teach, since they show no individual intent, depart nowhere from nature, and go straight on like a history. Their directness springs partly from his respecting humanity, not circumstance: he uses circumstance only to set forth humanity and cares nothing for the plot of circumstance so favoured by Ben Jonson and other contemporaries. As for their looking too natural to have any design, we do not believe it is unlike nature to have a design and a result. If the proof of a high aim is what the critics called poetic justice, a kind of justice one would gladly find more of in grocers’ and linen-drapers’ shops but can spare from a poem, then he has not always a high end: the wicked man is not tortured, nor the good man smothered in bank-notes and rose-leaves. Even Macbeth’s outward ruin and death are only a small, unavoidable consequence in the wake of nature’s, even God’s, mighty vengeance: that Macbeth cannot say Amen; can sleep no more; is “cabined cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears;” has a brain that is a charnel-house from which the ghosts of his own murders rise, till he envies the dead the rest his hand sent them to. That immediate and eternal vengeance on crime, and inner reward of well-doing, never fail in nature or in Shakspere, and seem so much a matter of course that they hardly look like design in nature or in the mirror he holds up to her. The secret is that, in the ideal, habit and design are one.

Most authors seem anxious to round off and finish everything in full sight. Most of Shakspere’s tragedies compel our thoughts to follow their persons across the bourn; as Jean Paul says, they need a piece of the next world painted in to complete the picture. This is surely nature, but need not therefore be no design. What could be done with Hamlet but send him where he has some chance of finding his difficulties solved; where he will know his reverence for God, the sole stay left him in the flood of human worthlessness, has not been in vain; that the skies are not “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;” that there are noble women, though his mother was false and Ophelia weak, and noble men, though his uncle and Laertes were villains and his old companions traitors? If Hamlet is not to die, the play must perish under the charge that its hero is left with only a superadded misery, a fresh demand for action—to rule a people who seem to him worthless, when action has become impossible for him—and must live on, forsaken even by death, which will not come though the cup of misery is at the brim.

But a high end may be gained in this world, and the vision into the world beyond so justified, as in King Lear. The passionate, impulsive, unreasoning old king must certainly have given his wicked daughters occasion enough for the charges their avarice urged. He had learned little from his life of kingship; he was a boy with grey hair and no inner experiences. So all the development of manhood and age is crowded into the few weeks left of his life, his own folly and blindness supplying the occasion. Before they are gone he has passed through all the stages of a fever of indignation and wrath, ending in a madness from which love redeems him. He has learned that a king is nothing if the man is nothing; that a king ought to care for those who cannot help themselves; that love does not originate in favours flowing from royal munificence, and yet is the one thing worth living for, which gained, it is time to die. Now that he has life’s experience and is a child in simplicity of heart and judgment, he cannot lose his daughter again; and she too has learned the one thing she needed with her father, a little more excusing tenderness. In the same play it cannot be chance that Gloucester at the start speaks with utmost carelessness and off-hand wit about his natural son Edmund’s parentage, but finds at last that this son is his ruin.

Edgar, the true son, says to Edmund, after righteously dealing him his death-wound,—

To which the dying and convicted villain replies,—

Could anything be put more plainly than the moral lesson in this?

It would be easy to give examples of fine design from the comedies too; for instance in “Much Ado about Nothing,” Beatrice and Benedick, made to fall in love by each being assured of the other’s love, are shown beforehand to have a strong inclination toward each other in their continual good-humoured squabbling; but this does not make them heartily in love until they find each other’s nobility in how they act about the calumniated Hero; and the author takes care they are not married without first knowing of the trick played on them. We think it will be found true that Shakspere never leaves a character the same at the end of a play as at the beginning: better or worse, wiser or more irretrievably foolish. The historical plays illustrate this as well as any.

Of all the terrible plays we are inclined to think “Timon” the most terrible, and to doubt whether justice has been done to its finish and completeness. We also think it was printed (first in the first folio, 1623, seven years after Shakspere’s death) from a copy corrected by the author but not written fair, with consequent mistakes. The same might be true of other plays, but perhaps more evidently of “Timon.” The idea of making the generous spendthrift, whose old idolaters forsook him because the idol had no more to give, into the high-priest of the Temple of Mammon, dispensing the gold he hated and despised so that it might be a curse to the race he had learned to hate and despise too; and the way Shakspere discloses the depths of Timon’s wound by comparing him with one who hates men by profession and humour—are as powerful as anything even in Shakspere.

We are very willing to believe “Julius Caesar” was one of his latest plays, for it is certainly the play in which he represents a hero in the high and true sense. Brutus is the hero: because he will do what he sees to be right regardless of personal feeling or advantage. Nor does his attempt fail from any overweening or blindness in himself. Had he known the various papers thrown in his way were concocted by Cassius, he would not have mistakenly supposed that the Romans longed for freedom and would defend it. As it was, he tried to liberate a people that did not feel its slavery. He failed for others but not for himself; his truth was such that everybody was true to him. Unlike Jaques with his seven acts of burlesque of human life, Brutus says at the last,—

Of course all this is in Plutarch. But it is easy to see with what relish Shakspere takes it up, setting forth all the aids in himself and others that Brutus had toward being a hero, and making the representation as credible as possible.

We must heartily confess that no amount of genius alone makes a man good; genius only shows the right way and drives no one to walk in it. But surely we have some moral scent to tell whether a man cares for good only from an artistic point of view or admires and loves good. No dramatist true to his art can set this admiration and love forth prominently, but it must come out over the whole: his predilections must show in the scope of his artistic life, in the things and subjects he chooses and how he represents them. Notwithstanding Uncle Toby and Maria, who will venture to say that Sterne was noble or virtuous, looking over the whole of what he wrote? In Shakspere there is no suspicion of a cloven foot. Everywhere he is on the side of virtue and truth. Many small arguments with great cumulative force might be given to this effect.

For ourselves, we cannot easily believe that the calmness of his art could be so unvarying unless he exercised it with a good conscience; that he could have kept looking out on the world with the untroubled regard needed to see all things as they are unless there had been peace in his house at home; that he could have known all men as he did and failed to know himself. Any degree of partial or excited genius may coexist with evil ways, but not such calm and universal genius as his works show, except in association with all that is noblest in human nature. It also counts for his rectitude that he never forces it on others’ attention. The strong impression left on us is that, however Shakspere may have strayed in the early part of his life in London, he was for the main part not only an upright and noble man but a repentant man, whose life was influenced by the truths of Christianity.

Much is now said about a memorial to Shakspere. The best and only true memorial is no doubt the one in Milton’s poem on this subject: the living, ever-changing monument of human admiration, expressed in the faces and forms of those absorbed in reading his works. But if an external monument could foster the constant reproduction of the inward monument of love and admiration, it might well be raised; and to that end let us venture to propose one way.

Let a Gothic hall of the fourteenth century be built, such as would be more in Shakspere’s imagination than any architecture of his own time. Let it hold every early edition of his works that can be procured, singly or collectively, a copy of every other edition ever printed, and every book or treatise about him or his works, good, bad or indifferent. Let a special place hold the shameless corruptions of his plays produced as improvements, some of which, to England’s disgrace, still partly occupy the stage in place of what he wrote. Let one department hold every work that directly elucidates his meaning, chiefly those of the dramatic writers who preceded and closely followed him. Let the windows show in stained glass the popular sports of his own time and of the times of his English histories, and a small museum hold all procurable antiquities referred to in his plays, with, if possible, first editions of the best books of his time that he probably read, so that the whole represents his time as far as possible. Let a marble statue in the midst do the best English art can for the vanished man, and let copies, if not the originals, of the portraits be safely shrined for the multitude to see. Let the perpetual care the monument needs be secured by endowment, and let a reading-room fitted for the comfort of all who wish to use these facilities serve the public in a true acquaintance with our greatest artist. Let a simple, moderately sized theatre be attached, for occasional use, for Shakspere’s plays only, free of expense for amateur or other representations of them for charitable purposes. And within a certain cycle of years—if it would be too much to expect enough London play-goers to justify acting all his plays once in the season—let all of them be acted in the best manner the managers of the time can manage.

The very existence of such a theatre would be a noble protest of the highest kind against the sort of play, chiefly translated and adapted from the French, that infests our boards, whose low tone, even where not decidedly immoral, does more harm than any amount of Shakspere’s rough, honest plain-spokenness, as judged by our more fastidious if not always purer manners. Such plays are the real ground of objection to theatre-going. We believe the other objections, which could equally be urged against large assemblies of any sort, rest on less objectionable fact than good people suppose. Such objections are, or ought to be, directed not against the drama but against its avoidable concomitants. The dramatic impulse, like all other impulses of our nature, is from the Maker.

A monument like this would help change blind enthusiasm and dilettante-talk into knowledge, reverence and study; and surely that is the true way to honour the man who appeals to posterity by no mighty deeds of worldly prowess but left food for heart, brain and conscience on which generations will feed till the end of time. It would be the one true and natural way of perpetuating his fame in kind, helping him do more of that for which he was born and for which we humbly wish to honour him, as the years flow farther from when, at fifty-two, he left the world a richer legacy of intellectual labour than any other labourer in literature. It would be a monument to his mind more than his person.

But to honour Shakspere in the best way we must not gaze on a grand memorial of his fame, nor talk largely of his doings, nor even watch his works acted, invaluable as that is to understanding them; by close, silent, patient study we must enter into an understanding with the spirit of the departed poet-sage, and let his own words be the necromantic spell that raises the dead and brings us into communion with the man who knew what was in men more than any other mere man. Well was it for Shakspere that he was humble; else on what a desolate pinnacle of companionless solitude must he have stood! Where was he to find his peers? To most thoughtful minds it is a terrible fancy that there is no greater human being than themselves. Shakspere’s love for men preserved him from the terror of such a truth; he thought less about himself than about them. Had he been a self-student alone, or chiefly, could he ever have written those dramas? We close by repeating that the love of our kind is the one key to the knowledge of humanity and of ourselves. And have we not sacred authority for concluding that he who loves his brother is the more able and likely to love Him who made him and his brother also, and then told them that love is the fulfilling of the law?