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SHAKESPEARE 



SHAKESPEARE 

Five Lectures 



BY 

GEORGE NYE BOARDMAN 

Professor Emeritus , 
Chicago Theological Seminary 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinbur&rh 



Copyright, 1908, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



LIBRARY ot CONGHfcSS 
Two CoDies Recfiived 

DEC 2\ 1908 

^^ Copyriij-nt Entry 
GLASS O^ XXc. .Vo, 






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Preface 

The following lectures are the result of 
occasional readings of Shakespeare ex- 
tending through sixty years. The author 
is not at all a Shakespearean scholar. He 
has not given attention to discussions of 
the text nor taken much interest in special 
interpretations of peculiar passages. He 
has not even made himself familiar with 
all the minor characters of the different 
plays, but he has taken an almost life-long 
interest in the great passages, and in the 
acute, deft, liquid' expressions scattered 
through the poet's compositions. He has 
also taken an interest in the man himself, 
sought to form an idea of his personality. 
The lectures are a collection and arrange- 
ment of notes and impressions dating from 
various readings on widely separated 
occasions. 



Contents 

I. Memoir : Early Life and Work . . . 11 

II. Memoir: Later Life and Work .... 37 

III. Shakespeare as a Servant of His Generation 63 

IV. Shakespeare as Tragedian 89 

V. Shakespeare — Ripe Manhood . . . . 115 



LECTURE FIRST 



SHAKESPEARE 

I 

Memoir 

EARLY LIFE AND WORK 

SHAKESPEARE was a popular au- 
thor and dramatist in his own day. 
His later reputation, however, is 
not simply the continuation of the judg- 
ment of his contemporaries. How is it 
that at the present time and for genera- 
tions he has been accorded the first place 
in English literature! Of how many is 
this the independent judgment! If we 
could suppose his works to be a discovery 
of the present day, what would be the 
popular opinion concerning him! His 
writings consist so much of unrelated com- 
positions that they are not easily compact- 
ed into a unity. His most brilliant pas- 
sages are so isolated that they are liable 
to be passed unnoticed and in any case are 
not readily retained in memory by associa- 
tion. Then again the topics of which he 
treats are so varied and, to a superficial 
view, so common-place, that, as mere ob- 
11 



12 SHAKESPEARE 

jects of thought, they excite but little in- 
terest. The more striking subjects of 
which he treats, like the stories of Hamlet, 
Macbeth and others, are so slightly histor- 
ical that they do not call for serious in- 
vestigation. Under these circumstances 
each admirer of Shakespeare must find in 
his writings something which pleases him 
personally. While such plays as Lear and 
Tempest make a profound impression as 
a whole, the general impression which they 
make is not their chief value as literary 
productions. Their manifold excellences 
are appreciated only by readers trained to 
notice and gather on the broad fields over 
which they roam the scattered passages 
that have intrinsic merit. 

A fame attained both by incidental 
strokes of genius and prolonged exhibi- 
tions of power may well attract our atten- 
tion. I bring forward first some biograph- 
ical items. 

Marly l,ife 

It has often been said that of Shake- 
speare's life we know almost nothing. And 
this is true, if we mean by life external 
deeds. We often wish we could find in his 
own hand-writing some such assertion as 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 13 

this: ^^When I was a boy I went up to 
Kenilworth to see a display of fire-works, ' ' 
or **Oii sucli a day I bought stock in the 
Globe Theatre," but no trace of a report 
about himself has ever been found. Still 
there are few men of whom we have more 
intimate knowledge. The working of his 
mind in the days of his maturity, if not 
laid open before us, is an object of success- 
ful investigation. Admirers of his genius 
have studied his writings with the utmost 
care, and by noting his words, forms of ex- 
pression and various and changing tenden- 
cies of thought, have been able to bring 
into view very much of his career in the 
last thirty years of his life. His occupa- 
tion, the most prominent portion of which 
was preparing plays to be enacted on the 
stage, disclosed from year to year the sub- 
jects to which he gave attention, and in 
some degree his personal feelings. More- 
over his sonnets, if not an autobiography, 
must at least embrace experiences through 
which he passed in the joys and trials of 
life. 

Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon 
Avon, on the twenty-third of April, 1564. 
He was the oldest of ten children. He at- 
tended such schools as the town afforded, 



14 SHAKESPEARE 

and acquired sucli knowledge as was im- 
parted by them at that day. He was not 
in early life possessed of anything like 
literary culture, though he had some 
knowledge of Latin. There are indications 
that he was early employed in assisting 
his father in his business occupations, who 
is reported to have been a dealer in wool ; 
also to ha_Ye had a meat market. The fa- 
ther was a man in good standing as a citi- 
zen, was for a time a town officer, but later 
was unfortunate in financial affairs and 
became a bankrupt. The family thereby 
fell into straitened circumstances. In Son- 
net 111 Shakespeare bewails the disad- 
vantages under which he labored. Ad- 
dressing a friend he says : 

''O, for my sake do you with fortune chicle 
' ' The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 

"That did not better for my life provide 

"Than public means, which public manners breeds. 

"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 
"And almost thence my nature is subdued 

"To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.'' 

Marriage— I^eaves Stratford 

In December, 1582, when he was eight- 
een years old, he married Ann Hathaway, 
eight years older than himself. This was 
a freak of youthful folly and caused him 
life-long mortification. There are expres- 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 15 

sions in liis plays which show that regret 
and shame chmg to him ever after. In 
May, 1583, his first child, Susanna, was 
born, and in 1585 his wife gave birth to a 
pair of twins, Hamnet and Judith. When 
he was twenty-one years old, then, he had 
a wife and three children to support. His 
father being reduced in fortune, it is not 
known that either the father or the son had 
any remunerative business. The tradition 
is that the son was irregular in his habits 
and associated with bad companions. He 
is reported to have poached upon the pre- 
serves of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, 
a town near Stratford. After being prose- 
cuted for his outlawry he composed a lam- 
poon upon the owner of the property and 
affixed it to the gate of the park. This 
is supposed to have roused the anger of 
the country gentleman and to have made 
it necessary for the wayward youth to 
leave the region. There can be no doubt 
that he, at some time, fell into the meshes 
of the law, — a plight which he has immor- 
talized in the Merry Wives of Windsor, in 
the travesty of a trial before Justice Shal- 
low. 

Whatever may have been the occasion 
of his leaving Stratford, it is certain that 



16 SHAKESPEARE 

he went to London about 1585, and, prob- 
ably, mainly for the purpose of acquiring 
a support for his family. Except on oc- 
casional visits, — regularly, it is believed, 
once a year, and of course for special oc- 
currences, he was separated from his home 
for twenty-eight years, till 1613. 

Employed at Blackfriars Theatre 

On reaching London Shakespeare found 
his way very soon, perhaps at once, to 
Blackfriars theatre. Here he met a towns- 
man, Thomas Green, by whose advice, 
probably, he resorted to that city. Here 
he early found employment, at first, it is 
understood, of a humble kind. He must 
have been ready to accept anything remu- 
nerative, for he was in sore need. He 
seems, moreover, to have turned over a 
new leaf as the result of the discipline he 
had undergone. He must^ have adopted 
habits of thrift for he became a man of 
property within ten years, and ultimately, 
like another sharp financier among liter- 
ary men, Voltaire, a man of wealth and 
free expenditures. But this was from 
small beginnings. The report, without 
much confirmation, is that he began his 
theatrical career with holding horses for 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 17 

those who had come to witness the plays. 
Being a sprightly young man, facile in 
movement, of fair proportions, with dark 
auburn hair and hazel eyes, — so the re- 
port goes, — ^^he was soon called in to help 
in shifting scenes and drawing curtains. 

Appren ticeship 

Of course an intellect like his could not 
remain unrecognized. Huxley said of 
Gladstone, with whom he had very little 
kinship in intellectual tendencies, that if 
he were thrown down alone upon a barren 
Scotch heath, it would be but little time 
before he would be known as the first intel- 
lect in Britain. Shakespeare would in any 
place shine as a star by his own inherent 
brilliancy. It was soon found that he was 
a good prompter while the acting was in 
progress; then he was found to be apt in 
suggesting changes or amendments; — not 
an uncommon thing, as the plays were the 
property of the company. He was undoubt- 
edly soon called in to take a minor part or 
to fill a gap. In all this he was modest, 
set a humble estimate upon his powers, 
considered himself an imitator of those 
who had already acquired fame ; especially 
he looked up to Marlowe as a model and a 



18 SHAKESPEARE 

master. It is generally believed that in 
Marlowe, but for his untimely death, 
Shakespeare might have found a rival in 
the estimate of later generations. 

His apprenticeship was a long one. 
Brandes says there was no definite trace 
of him till 1592, seven years after his ar- 
rival in London. But it is understood 
that he wrote plays wholly his own, 
before that time, — plays that he re- 
touched before they were acted. There is 
no doubt that these seven years were years 
industriously spent in self-education. It 
is believed that he understood Italian, per- 
haps French. He may have acquired a 
knowledge of these languages during this 
period. We know from outside evidence 
that before 1592 he had already made his 
mark upon the inner circle of habitues of 
the theatre. This is evident from an on- 
slaught upon him by Robert Greene. Mabie 
says: Greene, Marlowe and Nash seemed 
to hold the stage when Shakespeare ap- 
peared. Greene, who died in 1592, jealous 
of the fame of this country bumpkin, wrote 
to his friends charging them not to trust 
Shakespeare because of his literary dis- 
honestly, calling him an upstart crow, beau- 
tifying himself with our f eatherSy with his 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 19 

tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, 
an absolute Johannes factotum, thinking 
himself the only shake- scene in the coun- 
try. This attack excited general indig- 
nation. Henry Chettle, who published 
Greene's note, denied its truthfulness, de- 
clared the accused ^Ho be civil, excellent 
in quality, upright, honest, possessed of a 
facetious grace in writing." There was 
ground for saying, not reproachfully, that 
he beautified himself with the feathers of 
others that was the habit of the time and 
the profession. He did not claim as his 
own what did not belong to him, but used 
what had been given out to the public when 
it answered his purpose. He had no pride 
in his originality, but wrote to please his 
audience. He availed himself, as a legiti- 
mate means of attracting attention, to a 
remarkable degree, of legends, traditions, 
happy expressions that fell under his no- 
tice. Pope said of him: 

"For gain, not fame, he winged his roving flight, 
"And grew immortal in his own despite.^' 

Yet what he appropriated he made his 
own by giving it life and popular currency. 
Lowell says: 

'*We call a thing his in the long run 
**Who utters it clearest and best." 



20 SHAKES P E ARE 

We have now followed the poet through 
his youth, which we will say closed when 
he was thirty years of age, in 1594. He 
began sober work late and we will allow 
him a somewhat prolonged youth. Instead 
of following him now through the years of 
his maturity, we will turn back to see what 
his literary work had been up to this point. 
He had been associated with others in re- 
vamping old plays, perhaps had attempted 
independent work while he was acquiring 
his skill as an actor. But we are interested 
now in his unquestioned work. First we 
notice his pre-dramatic productions. 

The Passionate Pilgrim and A Lover ^s 
Complaint have their merits but are over- 
shadowed by other works. The three 
poems Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lu- 
crece and the sonnets have more than five 
thousand lines, as much in amount as five 
books of VirgiPs Aeneid. The Venus and 
Adonis he dedicated to Southampton, as 
the first heir of his invention. It was pub- 
lished in 1593, when the poet was twenty- 
nine years old. The Eape of Lucrece came 
out in the following year. These poems 
may have been written, probably were, at 
a somewhat earlier date. It is to be pre- 
sumed that they lay before him, open for 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 21 

correction and enlargement, for months, 
perhaps years. They bear the marks of 
youth but as fully illustrate the exuber- 
ance of the author's fancy as his later pro- 
ductions. 

Shakespeare was, we may probably say 
as a boy, intoxicated by that old myth that 
represents the primal tragedy of human- 
ity. Feminine admiration adoration of 
independent, generous, brave masculinity 
is one of the elementary facts of human 
nature. Not long since a woman account- 
ing for the sad career of a gifted young 
man said: "First it must be remembered 
that all femininity was at his feet.'' 
Shakespeare in his latest play makes Mi- 
randa on emerging from her seclusion 
exclaim : * ^ How goodly mankind is. ' ' Our 
author began life overwhelmingly im- 
pressed with this trait in the human fam- 
ily. The Venus and Adonis portrays the 
ardent devotion of a sensitive and impres- 
sible nature to a beautiful courageous per- 
sonality glorying in its abounding 
strength. And it leads on to the fore- 
doomed result, the well known outcome of 
nature, the crushing of hope and ambition 
by a death which results from brutal vio- 
lence. The efflorescence of humanity trod- 



22 SHAKESPEARE 

den into the dust by the cruel on-goings of 
nature has ever been a theme at once fas- 
cinating and depressing to the thinking 
world. On this the youthful poet wrote 
con amore. The Eape of Lucrece is a poet- 
ical rendering of the old Eoman story. 

I include, as I have stated, the sonnets 
in the list of youthful and pre-dramatic 
poems. It is true that they were published 
when the author was forty-five years of 
age, but I think they had long been in 
existence and express sentiments connect- 
ed with his initial experiences in London 
life. He had no hand in their publication, 
so far as is known. They were given to 
the press by their possessor, probably for 
selfish reasons, perhaps with hostile in- 
tent. They have been long and carefully 
studied by Samuel Butler and he gives 
them an early date. In presenting the 
early life of the poet, then, they have a 
place, and whatever is to be said of them 
may come here. They are a memoir of 
thought rather than action, but are indis- 
pensable to a full view of the man. 

They number one hundred fifty-four. 
Together they contain about one-half the 
amount of one of the longer dramas. But 
because of their enigmatical character and, 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 23 

at times, expression of personal feeling, 
whether of the author or not, they have 
wakened much curiosity and painstaking 
study. They were first published in 1609 
by Thomas Thorpe, dedicated to W. H., 
who is designated as their only begetter. 
Whether this means that he procured 
them, or called them into existence as 
the person addressed, is uncertain. 
They begin with an address to a young 
man of great beauty, urging him to 
marry, that his marked excellences may 
be carried down to the coming generations. 
Seventeen sonnets are devoted to advice 
of this kind, repeated and enforced in 
every form and with utmost emphasis. 
More than a hundred sonnets follow ad- 
dressed apparently to the same person in 
which charges of wrong and confessions of 
wrong, alienations and reconciliations are 
recorded: that is, alluded to, obscurely in- 
dicated, in poetical terms that need 
shrewd interpretation. 

After these follow sonnets addressed to 
or relating to a dark lady, with whom he 
had tribulations that manifest at once the 
poet's weakness and sense of duty. It will 
aid us to a correct view of the sonnets and 
all Shakepeare's works, to notice, by the 



24 SHAKESPEARE 

way, a state of society in the Elizabethan 
age and in subsequent reigns, not openly 
tolerated in our day. It would be assumed 
that a man in Shakespeare 's circumstances 
would have a mistress and live a life of 
pleasure. The Court of King James was 
lax in morals, gallants of that and succeed- 
ing royal administrations would have been 
ashamed not to have on their hands in- 
trigues and amours that would keep up 
court scandal. It would be difficult to 
maintain a high-toned morality when the 
nobility of a kingdom was enlarged by the 
illegitimate children of the king. We are 
not to be surprised therefore that Shake- 
speare had alliances that brought him 
trouble. When we remember the man, that 
of all men he most clearly understood hu- 
manity in its beauties and deformities, re- 
member that the human race develops it- 
self in social relations and that its most 
commendable qualities are affection, kind- 
ly associations for help and mutual sup- 
port, admiration and love culminating in 
marriage and family life, we can compre- 
hend the range of his thoughts. From 
this starting point his comedies and trage- 
dies grew and took form. By reason of his 
personal endowments friendships were in- 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 25 

evitable. He had Ms boon companions, 
his genial associates, his feminine admira- 
tions. I think, he felt that coming from the 
country he was raw in manners and must 
imitate city ways and form city associa- 
tions, I give this as my opinion simply 
derived from appearances. He is acknow- 
ledged to have made some of the dram- 
atists models for a time. I think he looked 
with a youthful awe upon those who had 
seen courtly life. He sought to he intimate 
with W. H. a handsome boy or youth, to 
cultivate a friendship that has been com- 
pared to that of David and Jonathan. He 
flattered this young man, desired to be 
with him, asserted his devotion to him 
over and over, till, at this distance he 
seems to have been absurdly obsequi- 
ous in his attempts at familiarity. 
Again Shakespeare lacked iron in the 
blood. He fell under the notice of a dark 
lady who fascinated him. She was not 
handsome, indeed to a critical eye coarse 
in feature, but he could not resist her ba- 
silisk eye, and was bewitched by the music 
which she could draw from instruments 
at her command. Between these two per- 
sons he had a sorry experience. W. H. 
was frivolous and roguish, the woman 



26 SHAKESPEARE 

heartless and treacherous. The boy be- 
guiled the poet's mistress, she was false to 
her vows, but was soon scorned by her 
new lover and became again the enchanter 
of the poet. He was racked with shame 
and remorse but for a time, at least, un- 
able to resist his temptress. All these ex- 
periences he wrote down in the sonnets, 
with tedious repetition, with many clumsy 
expressions, yet with many lines of 
exquisite beauty and inspiring poetic 
imagery. These sonnets he must have 
sent to W. H. in intervals of friendly 
confidence, as letters intended to retain his 
allegiance and foster continued familiar- 
ity. In the course of time W. H. published 
them and opened to the world the secret 
workings of the poet's heart. 

Shakespeare was forty-five when the 
sonnets were published, but I think they 
were the product of his earlier days and 
tnat he had long outgrown the follies they 
commemorate. His later plays indicate a 
manliness and self-control that win the 
respect, and, under the circumstances, the 
admiration of his readers. 

The sonnets remain an enigma. The view 
I have presented seems to me the best that 
has fallen under my observation, and co- 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 27 

incides with my impressions as I have 
read them. 

As a specimen of other views I notice 
that of Park Goodwin. He thought they 
were written from time to time on tablets 
and thrown into a drawer and after a time 
published without any regard for order. 
Godwin studied them with great care, 
wrote them out in prose as he understood 
them, and put them in the order in which 
they were written, as he believed. 

He began with one introductory, fol- 
lowed with nine independent ones; in the 
next sixteen he found a plea for poetic 
art; a description of a young love-time 
followed in the next thirty- s even ; the epi- 
sode of the dark lady occupies thirty- 
seven; the closing fifty set forth the au- 
thor's communion with the higher muse. 

Godwin's prolonged study and great 
critical ability entitle his theory to consid- 
eration, but it seems to me too ideal. Of 
all men Shakespeare was the most difficult 
to adjust to a theory. 

It may be worth while to say, that not 
attempting an exhaustive classification of 
them I have set some, as specimens, 
under descriptive designations, — terms and 
numbers as follows, — Hard circumstances 



28 SHAKESPEARE 

of early life, 1; Homesick, 5; Rivals, 6; 
Melancholy, 1; Self-confidence, (writings 
eternal), 4; Depressed but hopeful, 4; En« 
thralled, 2 ; Life worthless, 1 ; Despair, 2 ; 
Lovesick, 6; Confession 2; True love, 3; 
Virtue slandered, 1 ; Betrayed and robbed, 
6. 

It is painful to pass in review these 
items of the poet's early life, but they 
were the schooling for his later labors. 
Without them we should not have had 
Lear and Hamlet. What he experienced 
in his own personal trials he saw besetting 
humanity at large. The slow but fine 
grinding of the mills of the gods continued 
so long as his appointed work compelled 
him to identify himself with his fellow 
creatures. 

There are some plays clustering about 
the period between 1591 and 1594 which 
may come under consideration with the 
pre-dramatic poems. At this time the poet 
was practicing his art for the sake of the 
practice. Professor Baker, of Harvard 
University, calls it the period of experi- 
mentation in plotting. 

In the period of discipline are to be 
placed the following plays: Love's Labor's 
Lost; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 29 

Titus Adronicus and the Comedy of Er- 
rors; also, in an early form at least, 
Eomeo and Juliet. 

How shall we estimate the man at this 
stage of his career! Professor Baker 
says of his productions, they were prom- 
ising but not extraordinary, that Love's 
Labor's Lost was weak in technique, i. e. 
in structure as a whole, and that Shake- 
speare's phrases and sentiments show that 
his mind was saturated with the writings 
of John Lyly, a popular dramatist of the 
day. Similar criticisms are made by this 
author of the other plays of the period. 
His disparaging estimate of the early 
plays would be modified by most of the 
admirers of the poet. Goldwin Smith finds 
in Love's Labor's Lost expressions char- 
acteristic of the poet's mind. His disap- 
proval of inflicting pain upon animals is 
thus set forth : 

''As I for praise alone now seek to spill 
The poor deer 's blood, that my heart means no ill. * ' 

And in praise of woman we find in the 
same play this : 

*'From woman's eyes this doctrine I derive, 
''They are the ground, the books, the academes 
"From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire." 



30 SHAKESPEARE 

Romeo and Juliet is considered to belong 
to this period of experimentation. But, if 
so, it also opens the period of maturity. 
Brandos considered it Shakespeare ^s 
first independent tragedy; — a love poem, 
the apotheosis of passion, immeasurably 
above anything else of the kind. There is 
no doubt that he improved from year to 
year in marshalling his material, and in 
adjusting the parts of a play in due pro- 
portions, but this play is considered evi- 
dence that he had already, in a good de- 
gree, acquired a mastery of his art. 

We will give it special attention to as- 
certain what Shakespeare was at thirty. 

It is impossible to fix any date when he 
ceased writing narrative poems and began 
to write dramas. The two kinds of 
composition undoubtedly overlapped. He 
would surely try his hand at work for 
the stage before taking the respon- 
sibility of furnishing finished plays. 
"We may, however, take Romeo and Juliet 
as his first composition characteristic of 
his work for the theatre in a business-like 
way. It is believed to have been written 
in 1591, revised and enlarged in 1594. The 
author was then thirty years of age. So 
far as it discloses his personal feelings it 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 31 

shows us the man at his transition from 
youth to manhood. 

The play is based upon an Italian story 
which had already been made available 
for the stage. A quarrel between two 
prominent families of Verona, the Mon- 
tagus and the Capulets, agitated the town. 
Adherents of the houses and family friends 
took part in the quarrel and the peo- 
ple were divided into hostile parties. 
Street brawls frequently disturbed the 
peace of the city. Notwithstanding these 
bitter differences Eomeo, a handsome 
young man, fell desperately in love with 
Juliet, the two being of different parties. 
Juliet returned his love, and her affection 
and devotion are the dominant element of 
the play. The wakening of her spirit to a 
longing for response from a kindred spirit, 
the thirst for recognition, her satisfaction 
in the lover who sought her as a bride, are 
portrayed with a wealth of statement and 
subtleness of description unsurpassed, not 
to be surpassed in language. The garden 
scene, in which Eomeo, having scaled a 
supposedly impassible barrier, has found 
access to the Capulet mansion, and the dia- 
logue with Juliet at the window above are 
famous the world over. Two lovers talk- 



32 SHAKESPEARE 

ing two hundred lines of poetry across a 
space that separates an aristocratic sleep- 
ing room from the ground, in language 
that can never grow old, is a picture to 
be left to Shakespeare. 

Our aim here is not to describe the play 
but to get a view of the author. That 
**true love does not run smooth'' is graph- 
ically delineated, but the deaths of the 
lovers are more romantic than like 
events in later tragedies. The violent 
deaths in partisan quarrels, (of which 
there are three), are more chivalric, less 
repulsive than those in Lear and Othello. 
The poet manifests the same tendency to 
premonition and to foreboding that be- 
came noticeable in after years, and the 
same sense of dependence upon an over- 
ruling power, Eomeo, approaching the 
Capulet festivity, where he was to see 
Juliet, of whom he had never heard, al- 
ready in love with Eosaline, as he sup- 
posed, but not an accepted lover, says: 

"For my mind misgives, 
' * Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars 
*' Shall bitterly begin his fearful fate 
''With this night's revels; and expire the term - • 

"Of a despised life, closed in my breast, . > 

**By some vile forfeit of untimely death; 
''But he that hath the steerage of my course 
"Direct my sail." 



EARLY LIFE AND WORK 33 

Other passages expressive of the same 
sentiment occur in the play. The poet ex- 
hibits also the same wealth of charnel- 
house imaginings that is found elsewhere 
in his writings. Juliet destined by her 
parents to be the wife of Paris, rejects this 
arrangement and prefers the following al- 
ternative : 

''Bid me lurk 
''Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears; 
"Or shut me nightly in a charnel house, 
" O 'er-covered quite with dead men's rattling bones; 
"With reeky shanks; and yellow chapless skulls; 
"Things that to hear them told have made me tremble, 
"And I will do it without fear or doubt, 
"To live an unstained wife to my sweet love.'' 

The opposition that Juliet had had to 
encounter is manifest from her father's 
speech. He was determined that his 
daughter should marry Paris on the com- 
ing Thursday. She thanked him for his 
care for her but refused to fulfil the ap- 
pointment he had made. He says to her 

"How now! how now, Chop-logic! what is this? 
"Proud, and I thank you, and I thank you not; 
"And yet not proud; Mistress minion, you, 
"Thank me no thanking, nor proud me no prouds, 
"But settle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next, 
"To go with Paris to St. Peters Church 
"Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither." 



34 SHAKESPEARE 

The poet, though following an old story 
exhibits his power of invention in this 
play. He introduces two characters of 
prominence not elsewhere connected with 
the narrative. Juliet's nurse contributes 
much to the diversion of the audience, and 
Mercutio is almost as much an original as 
Falstaff. A gay and careless young aris- 
tocrat, he can talk without stopping) to 
think, and plays with the same equanim- 
ity with airy nothings and the fatal wound 
stealthily inflicted on him by an enemy. 

We shall find in the end that the wearied 
Shakespeare of fifty was the buoyant 
Shakespeare of thirty. We follow farther, 
and to the end, his life and work in an- 
other lecture. 



LECTURE SECOND 



II 

Memoir. 

LATER LIFE AND WORK 

IN following Shakespeare to his matur- 
ity, we have not reached the highest 
development of his manhood. At 
thirty years of age one is expected 
to be already engaged in the serious 
work of life. What account can we 
give of his succeeding years'? Twen- 
ty-two years are still before him, how 
is he to fill them! Unfortunately but 
few items have come down to us which 
have reference to his business and social 
occupations. Such as we have are con- 
nected with his closing years and may be 
noticed later. There is, however, a vast 
amount of literary labor spread out before 
us which discloses the subject of his 
thoughts and to some extent the drift of 
his mental development. His work is defi- 
nitely known. In mature life he was a dram- 
atist and he was nothing else. The theatre, 
however, opens to observation the entire 
range of human experience. His work of 
the period now under review consists of 

37 



38 SHAKESPEARE 

thirty-seven dramas. Some of them were 
written before the year to which Eomeo 
and Juliet is assigned, 1594, but they were 
retouched and may all be considered as be- 
longing to this second period, after his 
advance from the position of poet to that 
of poet and dramatist. These plays fall 
into groups, and belong with some definite- 
ness to different periods of his life. Of 
those that centre about the year 1594 the 
most noted are the plays already men- 
tioned as belonging to the period of ex- 
perimentation, to which may be added Mid- 
Summer Night's Dream. These exhibit 
the playful young man. Their author is 
trying to see what he can do. He was not 
sure that he should succeed in taking a 
place by the side of Marlowe and Nash. 
He was like the young author who sends 
an article to the newspaper under a 
pseudonym, to see if he shall have a 
reader. Shakespeare was indeed already 
an author of repute, but he was attempting 
the playwright. These plays are not fan- 
tastic, the author had a solid basis to work 
upon, but in two of them the playful acces- 
sories give them their character, and they 
all excite interest by their incidents and 
extravagances rather than as works 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 39 

of art. One of them, Love's La- 
bor's Lost, excites an additional interest 
by bringing forward the question: What 
was the author's relation to Euphuism? 
Euphuism was an affected, pompous, pe- 
dantic style of speech cultivated in the 
days of Queen Elizabeth. It was consid- 
ered a mark of high standing in society. 
The term was derived from a work of the 
dramatist John Lyly, entitled Euphues, 
or the Anatomy of Wit. The book was 
written in the Euphuistic style. This 
method of speech is supposed to have en- 
larged somewhat the range of the Eng- 
lish language. Shakespeare uses a super- 
abundance of words, some of which were 
never in general use. Hence it is asked, 
was he a Euphuist? Eidiculous as this 
method of speech now seems, it was popu- 
lar for a time. Queen Elizabeth was an 
adept in it. In Love's Labor's Lost one 
character, Don Armado, a fantastical 
Spaniard, set off by his page. Moth, blurts 
out his sounding words intended to over- 
awe the audience. As an illustration we 
may take these words addressed to the 
King: ** Great deputy, the welkin's vice- 
gerent and sole dominator of Navarre, my 
soul's earth's god, and body's fostering 



40 SHAKESPEARE 

patron.'' What the introduction of this 
character indicates has been a matter of 
debate. Moulton thinks Shakespeare was 
at heart a Euphuist. Dowden says against 
pedantic learning, he directed the light 
artillery of his wit. Another author thinks 
the part of Don Armado is a pitiless satire 
on Euphuism. It is certain that Shake- 
speare took pleasure in a broad vocabu- 
lary, but no one will accuse him of bom- 
bast. 

It will give us some facility in appre- 
hending the life of the author to speak 
of his plays in groups. One of the groups 
most distinctly marked is The Chronicle 
plays. They follow immediately upon 
those already noticed, to some extent 
mingled with them. Baker succintly states 
the facts concerning these plays : ' * Ten of 
Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays are 
chronicle histories in the strict sense of 
the word. Three more are drawn from 
English legendary history. Three others 
are founded on the history of two other 
nations. That is, roughly speaking, one- 
quarter of Shakespeare 's work is chronicle 
play, and nearly one-half of it has its 
source in the histories. ' ' The ten founded 
on veritable English history are, the three 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 41 

parts of Henry VI, Richard III, Richard 
II, King John, two parts of Henry IV, 
Henry V and Henry VIII. These are men- 
tioned in the order of their composition. 
The first of these is assigned to 1592, the 
last but one, that is Henry V, to 1598. 
Henry VIII belongs to a later time, and is 
a composite production, much of it from 
the hand of John Fletcher. This play was 
not written with the same aim as the other 
nine relating to England. 

There was a period of about fifteen 
years when popular audiences were de- 
lighted with English story. Queen Eliza- 
beth, coming to the throne in 1558 was be- 
set by manifold dangers and most trying 
duties. By 1585 the government had be- 
come master of the situation. In 1587 the 
intrigues over Mary, Queen of Scots, sub- 
sided with her death, in 1588 the Spanish 
Armada was annihilated, and the country 
entered on a period of national pride as 
well as prosperity. Dramatists found 
their account in glorifying England before 
the people. Professor Baker says: ^^ In- 
deed I think it may be said that between 
1588 and 1598 the Chronicle play was the 
most popular kind of play in England. 
The pages of Henslow's diary certainly 



42 SHAKESPEARE 

show that all the leading dramatists, at 
one time or another within that decade, 
tried their hands on this kind of work — 
Greene, Peele, Marlow, Dekker, Jonson, 

Shakespeare." He adds, ^'It (the 

Chronicle play) was trained in the freest 
of all schools, that of the only national 
drama England then had, — the miracle 
plays and the moralities.'^ The people, 
however, soon desired more amusing ex- 
hibitions, and there was little of the strict- 
ly historic brought upon the stage after 
1600. Shakespeare's work in this depart- 
ment brought out some of his finest liter- 
ary passages and gave free play to his 
powers of invention. The account of Car- 
dinal Beaufort's death is the most appall- 
ing picture to be found in Shakespeare. 
There are passages of deepest pathos in 
King John, and stirring exhibitions of 
moral and mental struggle in Richard III. 
In Henry IV we have comic exhibitions of 
soldier life and that unique character, the 
bibulous, lying braggart and wit, Falstaff. 
These plays, of little value in furnish- 
ing accurate information in minute af- 
fairs, are in outline truthful and instruc- 
tive. They also constitute a grand gallery 
of portraiture. In their more serious and 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 43 

passion-stirring portions they prepared 
the mind of the author for his great trage- 
dies. The two plays based on Eoman his- 
tory, Julins Caesar and Anthony and Cleo- 
patra, tragedies of great power and abid- 
ing value, were not intended to be promi- 
nently historical narratives. 

The decade devoted prominently to the 
Chronicle plays, from 1590-1600, was an 
important one in Shakespeare's life. At 
its opening he had been five years in Lon- 
don. His Stratford life and education had 
not opened to him broad views of the 
world. London lifted him from provin- 
cialism, Blackfriars made him acquainted, 
to some extent, with social life and with 
the nobility of England. Before the 
decade closed he had become a good 
actor and had with his theatrical company 
visited many of the country towns of Eng- 
land. He had seen the places of historic 
interest and had doubtless visited the 
scenes of contest where the fate of his 
country had been decided. In accord with 
the habit of the times he had studied 
English history. His taste and imagina- 
tion led him to reproduce the past. Only 
one of his plays, The Merry Wives of 
Windsor, represents scenes of his own day. 



44 SHAKESPEARE 

He became interested in the events and 
actors that gave character to his native 
land. He brought scene after scene from 
the olden time before his contemporaries. 
He began his historic representations 
with events connected directly or indirect- 
ly with the War of the Eoses, — a period 
extending through thirty-five or forty 
years and closing about eight years before 
the poet's birth. While he aimed at por- 
traying character rather than teaching 
political wisdom, he impressed upon his 
hearers the horrors of civil war, the deso- 
lating and impoverishing effects of an in- 
ternal strife that sweeps away the leaders 
of the people and robs the soil of its labor- 
ers. From the civil wars he reached back- 
ward a hundred and fifty years and 
brought before the eyes of his generation 
the intrigues, cruelties, murders that ac- 
companied the old-time graspings after 
power. He portrayed the heroic and glori- 
ous achievements of the wars with France, 
as well as the final defeats and disasters 
that followed. He stretched his vision 
eastward also and garnished his pages with 
the aspirations of those who sought to 
rescue the lands trodden by ^ ^ the feet nail- 
ed for our advantage to the bitter cross.'' 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 45 

Views like these enlarged the dramatist's 
thoughts, confirmed in him principles of 
truth and righteousness as well as incul- 
cated upon him those sound sentiments of 
law and order that he carried through life. 

We may properly connect with these 
chronicle plays that of Julius Cgesar, writ- 
ten only two years after Henry V. The 
majesty of Britain may have led him to 
think of the majesty of Eome. He was in 
advance of his age in apprehending the 
character of Caesar. He was fascinated 
by the foremost man of all this world. It 
was consonant with his spirit to mark the 
portents of nature witnessed in the streets 
of Eome ere the mighty Julius fell. He 
judged of Anthony and Cicero more acute- 
ly than many later historians. It was in 
accordance with his conservative principles 
tliat he should show favor to Brutus, but 
he was not blind to the motives of the con- 
spirators. On the whole, this passage 
of Roman history seems to me to have been 
an open book to Shakespeare, and that he 
read it not only with profit to himself but 
to the world. 

We get a good glimpse of the author's 
mental progress by a look at the Mer- 
chant of Venice, written in the midst 



46 SHAKESPEARE 

of the chronicle plays. There is an 
atmosphere around it that is sugges- 
tive. It is ascribed to 1596. At this time 
the author was at the height of his hopes 
and prospects. It seems to me the most 
easy and nonchalant of his productions. 
It has no special purpose, no moral bear- 
ing. It is the overflowing of a mind that 
is more than full. It is true, it contains 
the famous passage asserting the human- 
ity of the Jew. ^^Hath not a Jew eyes! 
hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, 
senses, affections, passions f It would 
seem as if the poet was about to rebuke 
the bitter, savage prejudice against the 
Hebrew race, but no such result follows. 
The patines of bright gold and the celes- 
tial harmonies are declared to be per- 
ceived through the quickening influences of 
love, but these add nothing to the substance 
of the play. The author is throwing off a 
masterly production for the stage — the 
stage and nothing else. The last act, 
where the moral aim should be em- 
phasized, if there were one, is simply a 
means of closing up a story in a way to 
gratify curiosity. But if we look at the 
author we see him in his strength. He 
carries forward four or more stories in 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 47 

harmonious development, in clear narra- 
tive yet with co-operative blending; he 
brings upon the stage the gentleman, 
wealthy, generous, serene under supposed 
losses, still a firm friend to an attached ad- 
herent; he brings before us the grasping, 
revengeful Jew, and he portrays a court 
in which justice is administered with sharp 
practice. All these things he manages with 
the ease of a master. The play seems to 
me to manifest the author's calm, modest 
enjoyment of power and position as fa- 
vorably as any of his productions. 

Historic plays must after a time be- 
come monotonous. The people desired to 
be amused. Shakespeare's motto must 
have included, if it did not consist of 
the phrase *Ho please." He was con- 
nected with a company and must seek their 
advantage as well as his own. He had 
shares in the Globe theatre, begun in 1593, 
and he must make the stock valuable. He 
set himself therefore to work of another 
kind. He invoked the playful muse of ear- 
lier days. With the wit of Comedy of 
Errors he combined the elegance and wis- 
dom of an advanced culture. We have at 
the opening of the seventeenth century a 
group, less defined than the chronicle 



48 SHAKESPEARE 

group, of plays known as High Comedy. 
In the years following 1599 he produced 
the three most popular plays of this kind : 
Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, 
and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare had now 
come to know the relations of his art to 
the English people. He understood the 
tastes and desires of his fellow-citizens, 
and felt himself possessed of the power to 
gratify them. Baker says : he had learned 
that they liked a good story. He had 
learned to carry the story through, to pro- 
portion the parts, to interlard agreeable 
sentiments and amusing incidents, and to 
dismiss his audience with a fitting denou- 
ment. Baker's expression is: he had ac- 
quired mastery of the plot and of tech- 
nique. 

Admirers of Shakespeare often prefer 
reading here and there in these comedies to 
the study of the great tragedies. They af- 
ford more amusement and cause less pain. 
They abound in gaiety and frolicsome wit, 
the daring banter of spruce young men 
and the sharp repartee of girls in their 
teens. To give continuity and an air of 
fact to the story there are evolutions of 
love that excite interest, waken curiosity, 
play upon the hearer's fears, threaten 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 49 

catastrophe, but finally reach a happy so- 
lution. There is one character, however, 
in ^'As You Like It," the melancholy 
Jaques, who gives a kind of pre-intimation 
of the sad and tragic thoughts soon to be 
evolved in later productions. He indulges 
in a melancholy which he says is his own, 
not like any other, compounded of many 
simples, that enwraps him in a humorous 
sadness. He stands out in effective con- 
trast with the frivolity and buffoonery of 
some of the other characters. I shall refer 
to these plays at another time. 

The decade between 1600 and 1610 was 
for Shakespeare a trying one and gives us 
our most penetrating view of his life. 
Within that period he wrote his great 
tragedies. For some reason he turned his 
thoughts to most gloomy and harrowing 
topics, year after year. He had found that 
his power lay in treating them, but that 
made them none the less themes to agitate 
the spirit. And his ability to treat them with 
great effect was in the fact that he could 
be agitated by them. There was a kinship 
between his soul and tragic themes. Those 
who have studied the man and his work at 
this time think they find marks of excru- 
ciating experiences. I do not pretend to 



50 SHAKESPEARE 

see anything concealed from common view, 
but I can see that the poet must have 
passed the time under deep shadow. We 
are to bear in mind that he was able, be- 
yond most men, to put himself in the 
place of another. He could reproduce and 
make his own the feelings of a Macbeth or a 
Desdemona and put them in a living form. 
That was his genius. That is what is 
meant when it is said, ^^He understood 
human nature. ' ' His greatness was in his 
capacity for sympathy. Though the great 
tragedies appeared within a period of 
about eight years, he must have been 
brooding over them for fully ten years. 
We can imagine how Hamlet clung to his 
mind night and day, till he almost thought 
he was Hamlet himself. It was a long- 
continued work to write one of these trage- 
dies, the author must have returned day 
after day for months to the dreaded theme. 
We can imagine living all summer now 
Hamlet, now Polonius, now the uncle, then 
Ophelia and the guilty Queen. What a bed 
of torture must home-retreat have been! 
He had but recently been reproducing 
Julius Caesar, what a depressing contrast 
must his Hamlet have been! To go from 
the original facile princeps to the timid, 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 51 

doubting irresolute laggard, drooping 
under too heavy a burden must have been 
a lesson on human weakness. Yet Shake- 
speare knew that he was himself more a 
Hamlet than a Caesar. The poet was a 
kind of medium through which the weak 
and wicked, the perplexed and conscience- 
smitten made themselves known to the 
world. 

This capacity of losing himself in an- 
other was the source of his power. Up to 
the production of Hamlet he had been a 
dramatist among dramatists, one of a com- 
pany of peers of like if not equal standing. 
Suddenly he developed a power that prob- 
ably astonished himself. His resources un- 
rolled themselves with a freedom and 
reach that surprised everybody. He now 
left all rivalry in the rear. This and a few 
kindred plays are not only specimens but 
landmarks in literary productions. De- 
voted admirers of the poet have spent 
years in attempts to comprehend and dis- 
play their contents, — contents open and 
hidden — but no exposition can do them jus- 
tice. They address us through soul-com- 
munications too subtle for words. It seems 
to me that in Hamlet Shakespeare, for the 
first time, actuated by the exuberance of 



52 SHAKESPEARE 

his powers, was pushed on to over-produc- 
tion and encumbered his play with unnec- 
essary material. 

Measure for Measure, ascribed to 1603, 
reveals a settled conviction of the poet's 
mind. It comes between Hamlet and the 
trilogy of great tragedies usually associ- 
ated with it. It has been described as 
pessimistic, and certainly it does not ex- 
hibit any great hopefulness as an experi- 
ment in the exercise of power committed 
to new hands. But I think there are un- 
derlying sentiments that disclose increas- 
ing tendencies in the author's mind more 
distinctly than any positive assertions. 
The moral of the play takes two di- 
rections — one in favor of geniality, the 
other against Pharasaic righteousness. 
One sentiment approaches the doctrine 
that love is the fulfilling of the law. The 
dramatist would show that kindness se- 
cures the ends of justice as surely as pre- 
cision in enforcing the statute. He makes 
the strict unswerving ruler as liable to 
temptation as the one more genial in the in- 
terpretation of his duties. It is thought by 
some to be an assault upon Puritanism 
when he makes the man in power, who re- 
nounces any choice but to enforce the law, 



LATER JLIFE AND WORK 53 

corrupt and cruel when himself proved 
guilty. 

The play holds a substantial place 
among the author's productions, though 
the denouement brings into service some 
subterfuges that are not pleasing to mod- 
ern taste nor consonant with the most re- 
fined morals. 

The three tragedies that are associated 
with Hamlet, that is Macbeth, Othello and 
Lear, are ascribed to the years 1604 and 
1605. They required, in a still more in- 
tensified form, the feeling which imparted 
to Hamlet its ever living pathos. It is 
not necessary to follow the author through 
each play, for no new mental element could 
be added where the utmost energy con- 
ceivable had already been put to service. 

In the man Macbeth we have a display of 
ambition set on fire by supernatural 
agencies, further influenced by a most un- 
scrupulous creature, his wife. In the play 
Othello we have what Macaulay said was, 
perhaps, the greatest of literary composi- 
tions. We have a man without moral train- 
ing, driven to fury by the satanic wiles of a 
cunning enemy, choking to death a delicate 
innocent woman, his wife. 



54 SHAKESPEARE 

Lear is one long agony. We have a rev- 
elry of crime in its basest and meanest 
forms set off by virtues simply sufficient 
to make a contrast. 

How Shakespeare could have survived 
two years of personating in living sympa- 
thy, lago and Desdemona, Lear and Glos- 
ter, Goneril and Regan, Duncan and Ban- 
quo with their murderers repels attempt at 
explanation. 

The tragedies specially known as such 
were not Shakespeare 's final work. If they 
disclose to some extent the state of the 
author's mind, there followed others simi- 
larly indicative, — indicative of some de- 
gree of mental relief. If Hamlet's strug- 
gles and increasing gloom, if the note of 
woe rumbling through Lear and Othello 
tell us of a depressed Shakespeare, there 
are plays written after 1608 which assure 
us that his buoyancy of spirit was some- 
what restored, that his vivacity of imag- 
ination knew no abatement. 

He was now forty-four years of age, was 
in the fulness of his strength. Some ambi- 
tions he had renounced, some wounds time 
had healed. He rallied his energies anew 
and turned them to less painful themes. 
The theatre with which he was connected 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 55 

still made demands upon his pen. He pre- 
pared for the stage f onr plays wholly his 
own and some others, notably Henry VIII, 
with the co-operation of others. He 
emerged, however, gradually from somber 
themes. The first production of this period 
seems to have been Coriolanus. He puts 
into the mouth of the proud old Eoman of 
uncertain date, the bitterest denunciation 
of the common people and portrays him as 
giving way, under severe provocation, to 
the most unworthy passions. But the play 
has powerful passages and is not repulsive 
as presented to an audience. It has been 
often brought upon the stage. 

Cymbeline is ascribed to 1610. Though 
there is blood-shedding in the enactment, 
it is after the feelings of hearer or reader 
have been dulled, while Shakespeare's fa- 
vorite sentiment, that blood will tell, has 
been impressed upon him. Two royal 
youths, unconscious of their own descent 
and concealed in a wild rural retreat from 
infancy, manifest their high birth by deeds 
of valor and by their noble bearing. Not- 
withstanding the fiercest accusations 
against woman and against man, in the end 
virtually withdrawn, the graceful style, 
happy descriptions and genial sentiments 



56 SHAKESPEARE 

make the play a favorite witli cultivated 
readers. 

Winter's Tale is ascribed to 1611. It 
resembles Cymbeline in some of its inci- 
dents, but is a distinct, independent pro- 
duction. It excited some ridicule among 
the author's contemporaries by its blun- 
ders in geography, but as a drama ex- 
hibits his power of happy combination. 
His mellowed sentiment is described in the 
following comment of an editor: ^'Shake- 
speare has, in this play, finely depicted the 
evils that accrue by the hasty entertain- 
ment of that deadly enemy to social and 
friendly intercourse, jealousy, nor has he 
been less careful to show the utility of a 
patient forbearance in the conduct of Po- 
lixenes and Hermione." 

But the Tempest is the consummate 
flower of Shakespeare's plays. He no- 
where shows his true self, — the self that 
nature made, — at better advantage. He 
drops all brooding over the evils of society, 
does not allow himself to be irritated by 
wrongs that he cannot amend, and takes 
his place with his fellow-men, accepting 
things as they are. With a full sense of 
freedom he gives unconstrained play to 
the powers that distinguish him from 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 57 

others, — other poets even. He gathers up 
the reports of surprising and grotesque 
experiences through which voyagers to 
newly discovered countries had passed, he 
summons spirits from the air to wheel 
about him and do his bidding, he calls up 
from the earth monsters to perform for 
him servile labors, and with the ease of a 
magician through these works his will. He 
weaves a story that grows and spreads and 
sweeps in the doings of men and women, 
fosters love, suppresses wrong and sets 
us down in a world of his own making. 
For power of description, for originality 
of conception, for free range in the super- 
natural, for mastery over the delicate and 
the monstrous alike, this play seems to 
me nowhere equalled. 

With the Tempest his work for the 
world was finished. This play was writ- 
ten, it is supposed, in 1613. The poet was 
only forty-nine years old, and it would 
seem that he might have produced still 
more of dramatic compositions, such as 
he had before thrown off with marvellous 
rapidity. His last work showed that his 
visions did not flit less palpably before 
him than in former times, but it is not 
known that he e;igaged in any later liter- 



58 SHAKESPEARE 

ary labors. The Globe Theatre was burnt 
in the year the Tempest was written. He 
has not told us whether or not he had 
manuscripts burnt in it. He does not seem 
to have collected his works to prepare them 
for publication. It was left for John 
Heminge and Henry Condell, self-moved, 
so far as we know, to gather and publish 
them, seven years after his death. This 
has been, by some enthusiast, said to be the 
greatest service to the world ever rendered 
by any two men. We wonder how the poet 
spent his three remaining years. He must 
have been conscious of possessing extra- 
ordinary powers ; but did he think his re- 
sponsibility for them had been discharged? 
and did he fall back into easy ways, call 
himself, as in his younger days. Will 
Shakespeare or simply Will? or did he 
fret himself over his lawsuits and mourn 
over the degeneracy of the times? We 
wish he had told us. He had many things 
to remember from his childhood school 
days at Stratford to his return from Lon- 
don to his old home, the prince of dram- 
atists. I am inclined to think he did not 
much recall the past but settled into an 
easy indifference, felt as all great men 
do, that he had not done much, and that the 



LATER LIFE AND WORK 59 

world would go on without him as it had 
gone with him. In any case I feel sure that 
the closing years of his life were serene 
and happy. If he was appointed by the 
Divine Ruler to portray in immortal 
verse the weaknesses of our nature, the 
tragic elements that underlie human de- 
velopment, his destiny allowed him a 
peaceful evening of life, the cheer and sup- 
port of friends down to the hour of his 
departure. From a happy and fortunate 
wedding celebration in his own house he 
passed after a few weeks to the repose of 
the grave. He sleeps beneath the parish 
church of his own Stratford upon the 
Avon. 



LECTURE THIRD 



III. 

SHAKESPEARE AS A SERVANT OF HIS 
GENERATION 

ONE of our hymns begins with these 
lines : 
''A charge to keep I have, 
''A calling to fulfill.'' 

Dr. Horace Bushnell once announced as 
the subject of his sermon: ^* Every man's 
life a plan of God.'' The apostle Paul 
said: *^For none of us liveth to himself." 
As all men are alike before God this di- 
vine appointment may be extended to 
every one. A child may be by divine ap- 
pointment a guide to its parents or an 
instructor of its teacher. Services like 
these are private or confined within a lim- 
ited range. It is the privilege of some 
to promote the general good, to be so 
widely useful as to fall into vital rela- 
tions to vast numbers, perhaps entire com- 
munities. We cannot conceive of a higher 
achievement than to deserve the gratitude 
of all men. The universality with which 
Shakespeare is recognized as a benefactor 
gives him a place well-nigh unique. 
Whether we consider him the product of 
the age in which he lived, or the selected 

63 



64 SHAKESPEARE 

agent of the world's Providential Euler, 
that he stands out before the race as a 
conspicuous object of observation admits 
of no doubt. And it is to be noted that his 
message appeals to the common sense of 
mankind. He does not lecture as a pro- 
fessor of science or philosophy but as a 
man who knows human susceptibilities and 
human needs. Other men become con- 
spicuous as he, but their teachings are not 
of so general applicability. Aristotle or 
Aquinas, Kant or Calvin may by many be 
regarded with deeper reverence than 
Shakespeare, but neither of them is wel- 
comed equally by the humble reader and 
the profound thinker as he is. 

It will aid us to a just view of the poet 
as a servant of his generation to notice 
first what he was not — 

He was not a philosopher. 

It was easy for him to seize upon gen- 
eral truths, fundamental truths, but he did 
not give his time to expounding them. He 
seems to have had very little taste for 
work of that kind. His mind occupied it- 
self with concrete things, did not linger 
over abstractions. It has been said to be 
the function of philosophy to transform 
scattered thoughts into comprehensive 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 65 

ideas ; — to bring items of knowledge under 
unity of expression. Shakespeare com- 
pressed thought but it was by instinct not 
study. Few men have uttered so many 
phrases that have been caught up and re- 
peated, but their value was in the vivid 
glow of his intuitions not in the expression 
of profound meditation. He has his glory 
but it is not that of the philosophers. 
His does not eclipse their 's, their 's does 
not eclipse his. Neither party envies the 
other. Each has equally enthusiastic ad- 
mirers. ^' There is one glory of the sun, 
and another glory of the moon, and another 
glory of the stars: for one star differeth 
from another star in glory." 

He was not a theologian, though he lived 
in an eminently theological age. No one 
can read Hamlet without being convinced 
that Shakespeare was a man of deep re- 
ligious emotions, yet their influence upon 
his character is nowhere made obvious. 
Widely different opinions have been enter- 
tained as to his views of the most promi- 
nent topics in theology. His expressions 
concerning God do not indicate habits of 
worship. Yet he must have been familiar 
with the theological questions rife in his 
time. Eecounting the varied accomplish- 



66 SHAKESPEARE 

ments of his favorite character, Henry 
Fifth, he says : 

''Hear him but reason in divinity, 

''And all-admiring with an inward wish 

"You would desire the king were made a prelate." 

It was only twenty-seven years after his 
death that the Westminster Assembly, the 
most profoundly theological gathering 
among English-speaking people, began its 
sessions. The thinking of England must 
have been saturated for two generations 
with the doctrines which it discussed, but 
Shakespeare gives no intimation of a per- 
sonal interest in those topics that revolu- 
tionized the nation. He was fond of forms 
and traditional practices, he seems to have 
had a liking for priests, but aside from the 
outward show, the church seems to have 
taken no hold of him. 

He was not a reformer. 

He does not seem to have been interested 
in the amelioration of civil life. Begin- 
ning in his day was a movement among the 
people in opposition to tyranny, which has 
continued with increasing force to our 
time. The terms progressive, radical, phi- 
lanthropist, socialist are familiar to us. 
Efforts were made, by the Puritans espe- 
cially, to secure a recognition of the rights 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 67 

of the common people, but for a time with 
little success. After much endurance the 
deceived, the persecuted sought refuge in 
foreign countries. Shakespeare refers to 
them only with ridicule. Brewster and 
Eobinson were his contemporaries, but 
they and their friends had no share in his 
sympathies. He had no pre-vision of the 
future politics of England, of the career 
of Cromwell, seventeen years old when 
he died, of the execution of Charles I, to 
occur a third of a century after he was 
gone. He manifested no affiliation with 
Hampden and Pyne, none with that class 
of men to which Howard, Wilberf orce, Lin- 
coln belong. He stands out in unfavorable 
contrast with Milton, eight years his con- 
temporary, only second to him as a poet, 
who espoused with great ardor the cause of 
human rights. 

He was not a statesman. 

This epithet designates, perhaps, the 
proudest position open to human attain- 
ment in secular life. To comprehend the 
significance of the state, the grades of so- 
cial life, the legislation that will secure 
to all their rights, the policy that will best 
foster virtuous and suppress vicious citi- 
zenship, requires broad reach of thought, 



68 SHAKESPEARE 

patient reflection and sagacious judgment. 
Shakespeare lived when questions of state 
policy were widely and ardently discussed. 
The Puritan movement was bringing 
within its range such profound themes as 
the amount of reverence due to tradition, 
inherited authority and the rights of the 
people. Topics like these must have fallen 
under his notice and have been discussed 
within his hearing. There is no evidence 
that he was interested in them, he has left 
no opinion on record concerning them. He 
lived by the side of Bacon, the policy of 
Burleigh was of interest to all who were 
anxious for Protestant success, but no one 
knows what measures of state he ap- 
proved. He was twenty-three years old 
when Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded, 
twenty-four when the Spanish Armada was 
destroyed, but there is no trace of anxiety 
or hope in reference to these events. Still 
there is abundant evidence that he ad- 
mired England, its soil, its climate, its in- 
sular situation. There are expressions in 
the plays that probably indicate his pleas- 
ure in the defeat of its foes. The applica- 
tion of such passages is conjectural, and in 
any case relates to past achievements not 
to desired future attainments. 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 69 

We turn from the negative to the posi- 
tive. Having noticed what the poet was not, 
we ask what he was. The best answer I 
can give is, he was, as a man, the fullest 
general response to the times. The most 
sensitive sonl in England, his mind the 
most delicate photographic plate then in 
the world, he showed England what she 
was. He was the nation's man, not a party 
man. He did much to anglicise England. 
Its burly strength needed to be curbed and 
trained, the rough surface needed polish- 
ing, the cheer of merry England needed re- 
finement, self-conceit needed to be repress- 
ed. He was an epitome, or a compendium 
of England. He did not develop in sec- 
tions, in parts, as an orator, as a states- 
man nor as a reformer, but as a whole man 
and that whole as ah Englishman or Eng- 
land's man. What England has become 
by slow development he became in the life- 
time of one man. He and England were 
alike, he was no better and no worse than 
the nation as a whole, both needed develop- 
ment, he led the way; both needed to at- 
tain to self-knowledge, he attained it in 
part, the state is still attaining it. The 
amazing thing is the amount of culture he 



70 SHAKESPEARE 

aided England to attain in the unfolding 
of its powers. 

The world's history is sometimes called 
a web woven in the loom of time. A web 
consists of warp and woof. The warp may 
be considered the forth-pntting of nature, 
the items of experience which we meet of 
necessity not of choice. The woof is that 
which is wrought into the web by human 
endeavor; it is that which enwraps the 
separate lines of the warp and fills its in- 
terstices. It completes a tissue which 
comes to have length and breadth. The 
woof is sometimes called the filling. This 
is the best term here. As a co-worker with 
nature Shakespeare's greatness consisted 
in the immense amount of filling which he 
had at hand. It was this and not the warp 
which gave him his reputation. Mabie, in 
his life of the poet, says: ^^In power of 
pure invention, of creating plots, situa- 
tions and episodes, Shakespeare was in- 
ferior to many of his contemporaries ; and 
if invention and originality were syno- 
nyms, as they are often taken to be, his 
rank would be below that of Jonson, 
Fletcher, Manton or Middleton.'' It is 
when commonplace events are thrown be- 
fore him, or the deeds of great men, or 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 71 

the items of mythical story, or the fan- 
tastical performance of beings of a nature 
diverse from our&j that the wealth of his 
intellect appears. His command of the ma- 
terial which he gathers to weave into the 
coarse rough fibre of the warp is the 
wonder of the world. 

It would be impossible to recount the 
services which Shakespeare rendered to 
the people of England, co-operating with 
others indeed, but himself chief in the 
work, in elevating character and diffusing 
intelligence. The English were in his day, 
in times previous, in times following, fond 
of rough sports, found their pastime in 
roistering, violent amusements, in bear- 
baiting and other kindred hilarities. 
Among Bunyan's confessions of cursing 
and indulgence of appetite is his fondness 
for bell-ringing and dancing. He had in 
mind the coarse rustic dance upon the 
public common. 

Shakespeare gratified while he mollified 
this taste by some of his earlier plays. 
The Comedy of Errors affords food for in- 
extinguishable laughter. Taming the 
Shrew diverts one by its humorous ab- 
surdities. It does not teach lovers to 
quench their quarrels with kindness. That 



72 SHAKESPEARE 

was a family resort too advanced for the 
reign of Elizabeth, but it narrates a vic- 
tory over female waywardness quite in 
advance of the discipline from stocks and 
bridles ready at hand, near the pump in 
the market place, for the scolding women 
of an incipient civilization. 

Again the poet could cater to the love 
of ease. We delight to throw off care, for- 
get our troubles, lounge in luxurious re- 
treats. Our contemporaries have their 
Lotus clubs, their cottages by the lakes 
with their fishing boats at the wharf, their 
hunting camps in the mountain forest, 
Christian families escape the summer 
heats of cites by resorting to their castles 
of indolence in the country. Shakespeare 
has adapted himself to this taste. 

In Midsummer Night's Dream, he has 
surpassed in imagination the realities of 
the most fastidious. He has prepared a 
scene of sportive frivolity for all time. 
Fairies and gnomes, the bewildered and the 
bewitched, deceivers and deceived together, 
enact their fantastic parts to amuse an au- 
dience by ever fresh surprises of absurd- 
ity. To this play belongs the honor of ac- 
quiring a permanent reputation through 
nonsense. 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 73 

Shakespeare became the public and pop- 
ular teacher of England, if we might take 
the word in the primitive sense, its school- 
master. This position he shared with 
others, but he was pre-eminent. In his day- 
there were no newspapers, no schemes for 
popular education, no public libraries 
opened to the children, there was but scant 
communication between different sections 
of the country. The Elizabethan drama 
had been preceded by certain popular 
plays, known as miracle plays, passion 
plays, and such like names, by which the 
people had been entertained and somewhat 
instructed. The aim in these performances 
was to impress upon the people certain re- 
ligious and moral principles. The facts 
of Christianity were illustrated, as in the 
present age, periodically, at Ober-Ammer- 
gau. It has been said that in this school 
Shakespeare was instructed. But while 
he could only have received suggestions 
from such performances he did much in re- 
turn to instruct the people. His plays 
were enacted in the provinces as well as in 
the city, and he told his countrymen of 
the contests that had desolated England in 
civil strife. 



74 SHAKESPEARE 

He taught them to destest civil war and 
indeed all internal contentions. He gave 
glimpses of the history of Greece and 
Eome, but specially opened before the citi- 
zens of England the national traits, the 
peculiarities of different classes, the in- 
trigues of popular leaders, the ambitions, 
defeats and successes of those in power. 
He displayed before the nobility the occu- 
pations, superstitions and amusements of 
rural life, and before the populace the 
pride, corruption and disappointments of 
court ambitions. To read even at this day 
the names his dramas bear is to get a 
glimpse, — broad and luminous glimpse, — 
of old England in its early history. The 
instruction which he gives is indeed in- 
definite as to details, but it is graphic, and 
truthful in its outlines. 

He was the instructor of all English- 
speaking people in the use of their Ian- 
language. It has often been said: **If you 
would master English, study Shakespeare 
and the Bible." Up to his day, and long 
after his day, the counties of England had 
each its dialect and peculiar pronunciation. 
Though we; have need of a glossary at 
times in reading our author his words are 
mostly the words understood and used in 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 75 

Britain, America, India and Australia. 
The Bible in King James' translation, 
made ^ve years before the poet's death, 
has been the most potent influence in 
moulding and preserving the English 
tongue. After it the master of sentences is 
Shakespeare. He unfolded the marvellous 
wealth of our speech. He displayed its ca- 
pacity to portray the grand majestic 
scenes of life, to express the most subtle 
emotions, to catch and hold the most deli- 
cate shades of thought, to give wings to 
the meditations of the student. He must 
have studied words, have practiced com- 
bining and creating them, yet he was never 
overmastered by them. 

His power as an author was not attained 
through schools. Hq was self-made, no 
man's disciple. He hung long over the 
pages of others, considered them adepts 
where he was weak, imitated them, but this 
he did to enlarge and strengthen himself. 
It was the discipline of his early author- 
ship, culture only. He called no man 
master. As he attained maturity and be- 
came conscious of his own capacity, the 
outreach of his literary work was amazing. 
His range of subjects was like his range 
of words. His vocabulary contains fifteen 



76 SHAKESPEARE 

thousand words, that of Milton eight thou- 
sand. His forms of expression are mani- 
fold, his aptness of phrase at times seems 
superhuman. 

The felicities of his style can only be as- 
cribed to genius, they elude analysis and 
are too subtle for description. Still there 
are some qualities that may be readily ap- 
prehended and should not be passed over. 
He always faces his subject squarely, bold- 
ly, composedly. Whether he lays hewn 
stone to build a granite structure or blows 
feathers into the air, he is equally busi- 
ness-like in the operation. He sees no diffi- 
culties to shrink from, no heights to climb. 
He moves right forward on a dead level 
and reaches the goal without trying his 
breath. When he has reached the goal his 
work is done. He never interprets him- 
self, the reader must do the interpreting. 
He is not a member of any Shakespeare 
club, his sayings are open to the world, his 
readers are welcome to anything they can 
get from them. Yet his writings are self- 
illuminating. His thoughts flow from a 
brain that is aglow, and are suffused with 
the light amid which they germinate. They 
proceed from a mind teeming with living 
forms of its own creation and partake of 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 77 

the spirit that reigns within. While he has 
left some enigmas to be solved, his scenes 
and paragraphs, taken in their entirety, 
are clear and many of them impressively 
significant. 

There is a proverb that the style is the 
man and it has much of truth, but it 
can not be said of Shakespeare, he is much 
more than his style. It is eminently true, 
however, that his style is like its author. 
It has the free, spontaneous, supple move- 
ment that belongs to the man. It does not 
show the careful polish that we find in 
Horace, yet it deftly meets the demands 
required of style as a form of expression. 
It is not a mosaic made of classic words 
chosen with perfect skill, like the style of 
Milton, yet it uniformly embodies thought 
as accurately as his. It does not always 
glide as smoothly as the lines of Pope, who 
has been said to have tuned the English 
language, but it has lines and phrases that 
cling to the memory, echo from the tongue 
and are repeated as coined thought, more 
numerous than any other author has pro- 
duced. Shakespeare does not seem to have 
selected words from a mass as we find 
them in a dictionary, but they selected 
themselves, that is, from the hidden treas- 



78 SHAKESPEARE 

ury of speech in the author's mind the 
word akin to the thought sprang from its 
concealment and took its place in the poet 's 
verse. 

The rythm of the author's lines, with- 
out being artificial, is musical and charac- 
teristic of the man. In plays of which he 
is partially author his work has been de- 
tected and distinguished from that of 
others by the melody of the composition. 
His songs have attracted special attention 
by their sweet flow of liquid words. The 
dirge over the seemingly lifeless Cymbel- 
ine is an illustration: 

'Tear no more the heat o' the sun, 
''Nor the furious winter's rages; 
''Thou thy worldly task hast done, 
"Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages; 
"Golden lads and girls all must, 
"As Chimney-sweepers, come to dust." 

The fundamentals of good rhetoric, per- 
spicuity, energy and elegance pervade the 
author's writings as co-constituents of the 
substance. The latter two everywhere 
come into view. Such figures as meta- 
phor, simile, emphatic repetition, cursory 
allusion came thronging at his bidding and 
made his text a thing of life. Prof. Strong 
quotes fourteen lines descriptive of Young 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 79 

Harry and says : ^ ^ Here are nine different 
similes, succeeding each other with such 
matchless freshness and beauty that they 
fairly dazzle us. ' ' It should be added that 
the poet is not satisfied with dazzling the 
reader or hearer, he aims to move the emo- 
tions and convince the intellect. With him 
style is not the man but the servant of the 
man. 

Shakespeare entertained and inculcated 
sound views of social life. This is a car- 
dinal point in estimating him. It is im- 
portant to entertain right views of the 
initial combination of individuals into a 
community. Here we can judge of him 
only by inference. We might say he has 
not treated of this subject at all, and we 
might say he has treated of nothing else. 
We have noticed that he did not devote 
himself to any special method of serving 
his generation, but he did give his thoughts 
to a life-long study of humanity at large. 
Did he seek the good of humanity'? or, 
more definitely, the good of the community 
as the primal form of humanity entering 
on its mission? The poet fascinated by 
cultivated social life was still loyal to hu- 
manity as it develops itself primarily. The 
early Christians had all things in common, 



80 SHAKESPEARE 

or established a commonalty. This does 
not sufficiently bring into service individual 
powers and peculiar gifts. Accordingly, 
common interests have been divided into 
sections, and we have governments, 
schools, denominations, clubs and corpora- 
tions. But these, neither singly nor com- 
bined, embody all the social interests of 
humanity, yet all rest upon a humanity 
that is at once many and one. No greater 
service to civilization can be performed 
than to make this primitive combining 
force of the race promotive of a pure 
morality. It is an outgrowth of nature, 
not a jDroduct of will, yet may be modified 
by well-directed effort. 

What estimate did Shakespeare enter- 
tain of this substratum of human society, 
this fundamental community! He has 
given, as has been remarked, no treatise on 
the subject, but the opinions he embraced 
are clear enough. He held that the family 
is the intial force that brings individuals 
into unity and harmony. He would have 
abhorred Plato's Eepublic, a scheme that 
feeds the mass at a common table where 
children do not know their parents, nor 
parents their children. He would have de- 
tested organizations like the Oneida Com- 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 81 

munity and all those associations whose 
key-word is free, realized in free posses- 
sions, free love, and freedom from obliga- 
tion. He found in admiration, attachment, 
affection among the young, between those 
of opposite sex, the starting point for set- 
ting, in Scripture phrase, ^'the solitary in 
families/' In almost all his plays are 
characters avowedly in love; as Lorenzo 
in love with Jessica, Viola in love with the 
Duke, William in love with Audrey. In the 
bantering of lovers the poet had great de- 
light. Some of his most characteristic 
passages are to be found in their timid, in- 
direct approaches and affected misunder- 
standings or pretended indifference. The 
simulated war between Benedick and 
Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing will 
afford amusement to readers as long as 
human nature is true to itself. Broadly 
separated by utter disregard, pelting each 
other with jokes and sarcasms, casting 
glances over the shoulder as they utter 
their flings, they gradually approach each 
other and finally reveal the fact that under 
half -contemptuous slights they have all the 
time been desperately in love. A specimen 
of this chaffing is to be found in As You 
Like It. Eosalind says to Orlando: 



82 SHAKESPEARE 

i i There are none of my uncle ^s marks upon 
you: lie taught me how to know a man in 
love. ' ' ^ ' What were his marks ? ' ' asks Or- 
lando. She replies : ^ ^ A lean cheek, which 
you have not ; a blue eye, and sunken, which 
you have not; an unquestionable spirit, 
(i. e. averse to conversation) which you 
have not; a beard neglected, which you 
have not. Then your hose should be un- 
gartered, your bonnet unhanded, your 
sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and 
everything about you demonstrating a 
careless desolation." 

All these love-passages in Shakespeare 
are only incidental, he is not satisfied with 
anything but honorable marriage. The 
happiness of lovers is consummated by 
wedlock. 

True peace and repose in life are attain- 
ed in the home and the family. Shake- 
speare labors long, plans artfully to gather 
the interest of his audience around the ful- 
filment of a vow that seemed in danger 
of being broken. He loves to see unfaith- 
fulness defeated, endangered rights es- 
tablished. His love of justice is conspicu- 
ous, his desire to see the weak protected we 
recognize as inborn, he had an instinctive 
tive aversion to anything base or wanton. 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 83 

It has been remarked by acute and 
broad-minded critics like Coleridge, that 
Shakespeare nowhere favors or even ex- 
cuses wrong. He is never betrayed into a 
tolerance of folly, or cunning, or the art- 
ful over-reaching of others. He would 
have abhorred the claim that one may drive 
a bargain with the ignorant or unwary. 
He nowhere encourages crime by passing 
it over as the way of the world. He al- 
ways frowns upon social disorder or any 
thing that mars the proprieties to be main- 
tained in everyday life. I have no doubt 
that his own indiscretions prompted him 
to enforce such sentiments instead of se- 
ducing him into excuses for wrong-doing. 

Such a position is the more remarkable 
from the fact, that he lived in an age when 
irregularities were expected in certain of 
the social classes, that he was on friendly 
terms with many not over- strict in their 
habits, and was himself less scrupulous in 
practice than in theory — if we may trust 
by-way inferences. 

It is to be remarked that Shakespeare's 
view of the race, perhaps better here, of 
his nation, as a social unit, was an ideal 
one. The nation he addressed was not 
visible but was the spirit of the mass, the 



84 SHAKESPEARE 

substantial reality. He wrote and wrote., 
he talked and talked to the world not aim- 
lessly^ not hopelessly, but had an inner 
sense that there was value in it, that it 
was worth making better. He did not 
work on material that was mere empti- 
ness, material which he had to hold up 
with one hand while he smote it to the 
ground with the other, but at bottom he 
was a serious-minded man and dealt with 
realities. He was neither a pessimist nor 
an optimist, but simply accepted realities. 
He did not, as a few do, look upon hu- 
manity when acting out itself, as perfect, 
an expression of God's glory. He did not 
embrace the democratic idea that the judg- 
ment of the mass will be found to be right, 
but he did believe it to be true enough to 
endure and to have the basis of improve- 
ment. He was willing to work for its good. 
On the other hand, he did not see perfec- 
tion anywhere. He had no heroes. Car- 
lyle could not have welcomed him as a 
fellow hero-worshipper. He does indeed 
make a kind of pet of Prince Hal, Fal- 
staif's companion, but this was poetical. 
He did not make Henry V an object of rev- 
erence. It has been a matter of surprise 
that he has uttered no praise of the men 



A SERVANT OF HIS GENERATION 85 

of genius with whom he was associated. 
They took notice of him, some of them be- 
stowed flattering laudations upon him, but 
he is not known to have returned the favor. 
I suspect that, while he saw much to love 
and admire in humanity taken at its ulti- 
mate worth, he saw nothing great in it, 
nothing before which he could bow down in 
reverence. 

Shakespeare of course served his gen- 
eration in many ways, too many to be 
enumerated. Such a mind coming in con- 
tact with other leading, influential minds 
must have diffused sentiments and convic- 
tions that reached to the more intelligent 
population of London, even of England. 
The sweet, gentle, peace-loving bard must 
have been held in friendly esteem by many 
of his contemporaries. 

These offices which it fell to him to ful- 
fill made him a substantial and enduring 
power in the nation. To have gratified a 
people fond of sports while softening their 
manners, to have initiated them into their 
national traditions, to have awakened a 
spirit of patriotism, to have made their 
language a permanent power and an em- 
bodiment of thoughts that are an eter- 
nal possession, to have impressed upon 



86 SHAKESPEARE 

the people that the glory of a na- 
tion is in social order and civic right- 
eousness, was to perform a work the 
length and breadth of which no man 
can measure. It requires a fit time when 
the nation is in a forming state and ab- 
sorbs into its life the impressions made 
upon it; it requires a man whom God has 
foreordained to the service, whose will is 
overruled by divine decree. 



LECTURE FOURTH 



IV. 

SHAKESPEARE AS TRAGEDIAN 

SHAKESPEARE is known by Ms 
tragedies rather than by his poems 
or comedies. They are not the most 
pleasing of his writings but are indisput- 
ably the most powerful. I have not in 
mind any very strict definition of the term 
tragedy, but mean by it a drama that is- 
sues in a sad and remediless catastrophe. 
The result reached is due to nature rather 
than mischance. It indicates a universal 
rather than a particular weakness, and 
{Shakespeare has been spoken of often as 
an interpreter of humanity because he has 
brought to view its fundamental as well 
as individual traits. 

We will notice first some of the circum- 
stances which turned his thoughts to tragic 
themes, and . then his treatment of such 
topics. 

With all his vivacity he tended naturally 
to that which is somber and melancholy. 
In his earlier career he may be spoken 
of as the interpreter, perhaps better, the 
delinea;tor of human life, but there fol- 
lowed a period in which he became the in- 

89 



90 SHAKESPEARE 

terpreter of humanity itself. He adhered 
still to narrative, to actions attributed to 
men and women, but he dwelt on what 
might he, what on occasions is, rather than 
on the ordinary occurrences of human 
experience. What is human nature at bot- 
tom! seems to have been the question over 
which his mind was brooding. Here he 
took a depressing view of man's being and 
nature. He had always been sensitive to 
thoughts of decay and death. Turning 
back to clay was a repulsive picture to his 
mind, but lingered in his imagination 
against his will. Before middle life sen- 
timents like these were rather floating sug- 
gestions, however, than controlling ideas. 
But as early as 1602, when he wrote 
Hamlet, somber if not melancholy ideas 
bore sway in his soul. Brandes, a Danish 
critic, an appreciative and admiring stu- 
dent of the poet, says of the play Measure 
for Measure: that it is pessimistic, and 
adds: ^^Shakespeare's melancholy in- 
creases, he broods over the problem of hu- 
man existence, the prevalence of evil, the 
power of wickedness.'' His surroundings 
were depressing and aggravated the droop- 
ing of his spirits. The royal court was cor- 
rupt, the private life of those high in 



AS TRAGEDIAN 91 

authority disgraceful. Men of mark, justly 
or unjustly, suffered before the law. Ea- 
leigh was sent to the Tower in 1603, Es- 
sex beheaded in 1601. Under such cir- 
cumstances and in such a state of mind the 
dramatist went on to fulfil his engagements 
with the theatre and wrote his great trage- 
dies. In these he gave his views of man 
when he most unrestrainedly acts out him- 
self. 

His gentlemen, like Prospero, Bassanio, 
the Duke in As You Like It, are respected, 
honored, but not men of force. Especially 
noticeable is it that he has brought upon 
the stage no women of the highest charac- 
ter; some of them are smart, witty, re- 
sourceful, others are amiable, mild, at- 
tractive, still others are daring, defiant, 
reckless, but there is no Shunamite, no De- 
borah, no Mother in Israel, no oracle to 
stand beside the wise women of the Ger- 
man tribes. 

These general facts and the tendencies 
of mind developed in the tragedies can to 
some extent be accounted for by the per- 
sonal experiences manifested in a close 
study of his life. 

While he did much for woman, he suf- 
fered much from her. Henry Ward 



92 SHAKESPEARE 

Beecher once said, on the question whether 
Shakespeare should be tolerated for popu- 
lar reading, women owe more to him than 
to any other person for the advanced 
standing they hold in modern times. This 
may be questioned, but he certainly has 
thrown a fascination about the female 
character. This is due, in part, to his own 
personal susceptibility. He seems to have 
been very responsive to a woman ^s eyes. 
They are the creators of love. We only 
know life's value by encountering their 
piercing glance. 

' • For where is any author in the world, 
''Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?" 

But one extreme leads to another. 
Shakespeare, in his youthful enthusiasm, 
based the power and value of woman on 
this frail foundation, viz: the gleam and 
glow of her face radiant with the Prome- 
thean fire of her eyes. But he came to put 
another estimate on this power to fascinate 
the judgment and subdue the will. He felt 
in later experiences the degradations in- 
flicted on one enslaved by feminine 
tyranny. After a time the victim of the 
charmer writhes in his helplessness, and 
delight is displaced by remorse. Close pen- 



AS TRAGEDIAN 93 

etratmg students find in the poet's writ- 
ings evidence that his admiration was at 
times turned into bitterness. A dark lady 
figures largely in the sonnets and an almost 
demoniac power is attributed to her. In 
sonnet 132 we find these lines : 

''Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me, 
''Knowing thy heart torments me with disdain, 
"Have put on black and loving mourners be 
"Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain." 

In sonnet 141 we have this pitiful confes- 
sion; 

"In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes 
"For they in thee a thousand errors note, 
"But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise 
"Who in despite of view is pleased to dote." 

It is not known how far these sonnets 
are biographical; it is to be hoped not to 
a great extent. I am sure they are not 
wholly so, and express sentiments that he 
outgrew, but they express what he consid- 
ered possible, what he had seen, doubtless 
what he had in part felt, and give us thus a 
trustworthy clue to his estimate of human 
nature. 

In more definable ways he acquired a 
knowledge of the tragic in life. Perhaps 
he did not suffer defeats and disappoint- 
ments beyond those of ordinary men, but 



94 SHAKESPE AIR E 

he was sensitive to an extreme degree, had 
an imagination to body forth possible evils, 
and labored mider some personal weak- 
nesses. We learn what he was and what 
view he took of life, by a careful reading 
of the tragedies, and specially by reading 
the sonnets, which disclose more pathet- 
ically than the dramas the tortures to 
which the soul is liable. 

It is supposed that the complaint which 
he puts into the mouth of Hamlet is really 
his own, surely it is not what a prince and 
an heir to a throne would utter concern- 
ing himself, and must have risen from the 
poet's observation if not from his experi- 
ence. It has a modern ring. 

''For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 

' ' The oppressor 's wrong, the proud man 's contumely, 

''The insolence of office, and the spurns 

' ' That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 

"When he himself might his quietus make 

"With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear 

"To grunt and sweat under a weary life; 

"But that the dread of something after death — 

"The undiscovered country from whose bourne 

"No traveller returns, — puzzles the will 

"And makes us rather bear the ills we have 

"Than fly to others that we know not of?" 

Some of Shakespeare's troubles are 
known to us. His son, Hamnet died in 
1596, just as his prospect of founding a 



AS TRAGEDIAN 95 

family and estate was at its height. He 
had of course been wounded by the sneers 
and jeers of older dramatists who looked 
upon him as an upstart, though he made 
no response. As he rose in reputation he 
had rivals who annoyed him though he 
fell into no open contentions as Jonson did. 
His feelings in this regard are supposed to 
be expressed in some of the sonnets. 'Ad- 
dressing a friend he says : 

"When I alone did call upon thy aid 
''My verse alone had all thy gentle grace; 
''But now my gracious numbers are decayed 
"And my sick muse doth give another place.'- 

Again : 

"Knowing a better spirit doth use your name 
"And in the praise thereof spends all his might 
"To make me tongue-ty'd, speaking of your fame. 



a 



There are other sonnets pointedly allud- 
ing to some one trying to supplant him in 
his friend ^s estimation. Who the rival was 
is a question on which Shakespearians are 
not agreed. One treatise of considerable 
length was written to show that it was 
Chapman. He was the translator of 
Homer, and this work was at the time and 
is still highly esteemed, but there is no cer- 
tainty that he was the person in the au- 



96 SHAKESPEARE 

thor 's mind. There are two articles in the 
May and June numbers of Blackwood's 
Magazine of 1901, which are at least en- 
tertaining. The author, evidently an en- 
thusiastic student of the sonnets, who 
reads a good deal between the lines, thinks 
he shows that the rival was Samuel Daniel. 
Sonnet 78, the first of a series in which 
the author pours out his grief to the 
friend who has apparently forsaken him, 
begins thus: 

'^So oft have I invoked thee for my muse 
*^And found such fair assistance in my verse 
^'As every alien pen hath got my use 
"And under thee their praise disperse." 

Whose was the alien pen! Drop D from 
Daniel, transpose the remaining letters 
and you have alien. The Essayist does 
a good deal of work of this kind in his 
article, — all with a certain degree of plau- 
sibility. He says, that when Spenser died 
in 1598 Shakespeare desired the office of 
poet laureate which then became vacant, 
but Daniel received the appointment. 
And his defeat was made the more bitter 
by the fact that Pembroke, whom he count- 
ed his friend, recommended Daniel. Thei 
Essayist supposed that Pembroke was, th^ 



AS TRAGEDIAN 97 

person addressed in the sonnets. What- 
ever may be true in this particular matter, 
there can be no doubt that the poet's sup- 
port from the nobility fell away at this 
time. Essex was beheaded, Southampton 
was banished, Pembroke (though there is 
some doubt as to his relations to Shake- 
speare) is believed by many to have been 
heartless towards an old friend and even 
treacherous. 

Shakespeare was vexed also that other, 
and, as he thought, inferior, theatrical com- 
panies were preferred to his own. This is 
evident from the instruction to the players 
introduced into one of the scenes of Ham- 
let, — a rather awkward device by which he 
could tell a London audience what he 
thought of them. He also had lawsuits on 
his hands of which the results are not 
known. Jonson seems to have ridiculed 
some of his expressions and inaccuracies 
of statement. Jonson was however his 
staunch and generous friend, a fact the 
more noteworthy since he had much the 
advantage in learning. We see here enough 
to show us that he knew something of the 
stings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
something of the pangs of despised love, 
something of the law's delay. 



98 SHAKESPEARE 

Some of his admirers have thought they 
penetrated to a deeper depth than this. 
Those who have delved with loving zeal in 
search of the real Shakespeare, who have 
read between the lines and beneath the 
lines, who have caught glimpses of the 
heart in its inmost action, think they have 
found evidence of experiences more seri- 
ous than such trials as befall ordinary 
humanity. They think that the agitation 
of his soul over his own lapses, and a pro- 
found brooding over the great problems of 
life brought down this rare spirit to the 
depths of agony. 

The abject confessions of the sonnets, 
their contrition, their self-condemnation 
are thought to indicate a personal experi- 
ence of fearful despondency. It is believed 
that his feelings at times went quite be- 
yond misanthropy to a disgust of the 
world, a hatred of it, a denunciation of it 
that amounts almost to cursing. These 
words of Lear are considered too elab- 
orate, too intellectual, for an old, broken, 
distracted sufferer: _ 

''You sulphurous and tbought-executing fires 
''Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, 
"Singe my white head! and thou all-shaking thunder 
"Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world.'' 



AS TRAGEDIAN 99 

The following from Timon of Athens is 
a more direct assertion of the same senti- 
ment; 

^'All is oblique; 
'' There ^s nothing level in our cursed natures, 
*'But direct villiany. Therefore be abhorred 
''All feasts, societies and throngs of men. 
''His semblable, yes, himself, Timon disdains, 
"Destruction fang mankind." 

It seems as if these utterances went be- 
yond the demands of the plays themselves, 
but no one can tell just where Lear and 
Timon end and Shakespeare begins. It is 
certain, however, that in thought, if not in 
personality, Shakespeare pervades it all. 
Professor Walter Ealeigh of Oxford says : 
*In the tragedies he faces the mystery and 
cruelty of human life. ' ' A profound sense 
of fate underlies all his tragedies.' ^We 
cannot even guess at the experiences which 
may have left their mark on the darkest 
of his writings. ' ' ' It is admitted that his 
later plays exhibit a more calm and equa- 
ble state of mind than that manifested in 
the years extending from the production 
of Hamlet to that of Anthony and Cleo- 
patra. Ealeigh says : ^ ^ We know that only 
a man of extraordinary strength and se- 
renity of temper could have emerged from 
such experiences." 



100 SHAKESPEARE 

We come now to notice some of the tragic 
representations of humanity which the 
poet actually put before the world. 

The fate of Shylock seems to me tragic, 
though not actually irremediable of itself, 
only in the current sentiment of the day. 
That he should be crushed because of his 
race was no less woeful than the death 
of Lear or Macbeth. That he should be 
given over to pitiless abuse and insult 
without sympathy from a fellow-creature 
beyond those suffering with him, seems 
to me depressing humanity to the level 
of the brutes. That this cruelty to the 
descendants of Abraham should be jus- 
tified on the ground of their descent seems 
to me a sentiment unworthy of Shake- 
speare, yet it was the popular view on 
which he brings the tragedy before the 
world. Doubtless public opinion justified 
it and, as to the persecutors, the dramatist 
read humanity aright. 

The doom of Eomeo and Juliet is tragic. 
But the result is not so horrifying, not so 
depressing, as in some other dramas. The 
tender interest in the affectionate child 
and enamoured youth kindles a deep de- 
sire for their success and happiness, moves 
one to tears over their defeat, but the issue 



AS TRAGEDIAN 101 

seems ordered by nature, perhaps a benefi- 
cent nature. There is no element of world- 
ly success entering into the character of 
either of the lovers, failure is natural to 
them. Their death reconciles the hostile 
families, the Montagus and the Capulets, 
but their prolonged life would have af- 
forded increased cause of contention. It 
was better to carry their loves to another 
world and to be remembered tenderly in 
this, than to live under restraint and to 
meet by stealth without home or a sense of 
safety. 

Still the world will always mourn over 
them. It seems fated that the world will 
not treat kindly such tender affection. We 
could wish that the currents of life would 
carry the innocent and unthinking ones 
across unruffled seas to the final haven of 
blessedness, but that is not the sentence 
of the Supreme Judge — ^^In the sweat of 
thy face shalt thou eat bread." We ad- 
mire Eomeo 's strength and endurance, but 
Shakespeare has not attributed to either 
of the lovers the wisdom that secures suc- 
cess in this world. 

Hamlet seems to me like a diversified 
landscape on canvas. It represents the 
general life of man by an intensified in- 



1 ^ 



102 SHAKESPEARE 

stance. It is like the wearing out of a fam- 
ily line by continual attrition. In any com- 
munity the leading names change rapidly. 
If scattered members of a household retain 
the name, it is with new surroundings, not 
often is a family mansion held firmly un- 
der the same auspices from generation to 
generation. Hamlet, as a drama, seems 
to me to represent a long, painful grind 
by which a household is worn down to non- 
existence. When Hamlet dies there is noth- 
ing left. Nothing extraordinary happens 
to the family, as portrayed on the stage, 
except dense accumulation, — the events 
might occur anywhere. There is, of course, 
an intensifying of purpose and action, — 
that is necessary in compressing protract- 
ed experiences into a brief show, — but the 
occurrences might all have been private 
and concealed. Murders, disappointments, 
thwarted love, ghostly frights are happen- 
ing continually. The only extraordinary 
element is Hamlet himself — the man of 
high position, high endowment, under over- 
whelming duties. With infinite resolutions 
and dallyings, amid countless besetments 
and temptations, attracted and repelled by 
feminine charms and feminine weaknesses, 
suffering tortures under disgraces and too 



AS TRAGEDIAN 103 

weak to strike the decisive blow, he drags 
out a dismal existence, in which like a de- 
caying family he slowly turns to dust. The 
tragic issue is reached before he falls a 
victim to the poisoned dagger. The man 
has vanished before he dies, he falls an 
object of pity not respect. 

In this drama Shakespeare seems to me 
to have interpreted humanity with a most 
wonderful penetration into its nature. 

There is one episode in the play which 
I cannot pass by. The soliloquy of Ham- 
let's uncle, the murderer, seems to me its 
most pathetic passage. It reveals, I think, 
a brooding of the poet's mind over a deep 
problem of human destiny. The guilty 
man confesses that his offence is rank, a 
brother's murder. He queries, how he 
shall rid himself of the condemnation that 
follows guilt. Will repentance make him 
an innocent man! Will it secure even 
pardon from a righteous judge? But in 
any case can the guilty repent! Is he not 
at the last precisely what he was when he 
committed the crime! Eepentance is a 
change of the soul's tendency; does the 
guilty man abhor himself or does he only 
dread consequences! Can a man cease 
loving what he loves by nature! Is a sin- 



104 SHAKESPEARE 

ner doomed to be himself! Can he cease 
to be what he is I The soliloquist a;id the 
dramatist left the question unsettled. 

Macbeth is a comment on the text that 
one sinner destroys much good. Though 
he has accomplices, a wife not less guilty 
than himself, and assassins ready to do 
anything they are paid for, he is the cen- 
tral force that sets the machinery in mo- 
tion. Suddenly a kingdom is in an up- 
roar, a king murdered with disregard of 
the sacred laws of hospitality, his attend- 
ants accused of the murder, portents fill 
the air, a vague terror seizes upon the 
people, an old man says: 

^ ' Threescore and ten I can remember well, 
''Within the volume of which time I have seen 
''Hours dreadful, and things strange; but this sore 

night 
"Hath trifled former knowings." 

The citizens flee for safety, officers of 
the government are puzzled, distracted, 
uncertainty reign everywhere.^ After a, 
time it is known that Macbeth committed 
the murder and has usurped royal au- 
thority. Shakespeare has brought before 
the world a man trusted, honored, faithful 
to his king, successful in the discharge of 
important duties, by nature so possessed of 



AS TRAGEDIAN 105 

^ ^ the milk of human kindness ' ' that his wife 
feared he would flinch when violent action 
was demanded. This man he has brought 
forward as the bloodiest of murderers. An 
old companion and friend says over him 
^Hhis butcher." Ambition within, not 
known to others, not acknowledged by him- 
self, has eaten out all the better qualities 
of soul and left him the incarnate greed 
for power. Breaking away from restraint 
he murders right and left, pretending in- 
nocence all the time, he is dazed by ghostly 
visitations and overwhelmed by the con- 
sciousness of defeat. Lady Macbeth 
equally guilty with her husband and more 
eager for power can hide away from her 
associates, can conceal her woe in her wak- 
ing hours, but in sleep-walking is crushed 
between the upper and nether mill- stone, 
alternately urging her husband to kill the 
king and washing the blood from her own 
hands. 

Unusual space is given in this play to 
witches, ghosts and goddesses, and they 
have a decisive influence upon its outcome. 
I suppose the dramatist considered them 
fair and just personifications of irrepres- 
sible suggestions and fears that spring up 
in the soul. In modern philosophy they 



106 SHAKESPEARE 

would be said to be revelations from the 
sub-consciousness. In none of the author 's^ 
plays does Nemesis more promptly work 
out her mission. Macbeth is slain in battle, 
his wife dies by her own hand. Shake- 
speare has seen fit to bring murderers on 
the stage with Macbeth, whether to ex- 
hibit humanity at its vilest, or to cast 
reproach upon corrupt government is un- 
certain. Macbeth asks them if they are 
ready to do thorough work, one of them 
replies : 

''I am one, my liege, 

''Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world 
''Have so incensed, that I am reckless what 
"I do, to spite the world." 

The most intense wickedness portrayed 
by Shakespeare is found in Othello. What 
promised to be an apotheosis of marriage 
became a woeful wreck. A Moorish sol- 
dier who had passed through fearful 
dangers and hair-breadth escapes, has by 
his enormous strength, skill and power of 
endurance won a commanding position, 
has opened to himself households of cul- 
ture and become a centre of interest to 
wondering listeners. A young woman, the 
daughter of a senator, is fascinated by his 
heroic deeds. She loses herself in admira- 



AS TRAGEDIAN 107 

tion of the brave adventurer. Against the 
will of friends and the sneers of the young 
fops at the sooty complexion of the Moor, 
she turns from others and makes him the 
object of her adoration. As was natural 
the stalwart man of arms is entranced by 
the young woman who had been nurtured 
in the lap of ease, indulged in every luxury 
and was a stranger to anything rough 
or unseemly. Without stopping to weigh 
consequences they are acknowledged lovers 
and soon married. It would seem that this 
romantic union would be without a jar. 
One was generous in his superabundant 
strength and glad to gratify every desire 
of his bride, — the other happy to entrust 
everything to the generosity and tender- 
ness of her husband. What could mar the 
satisfaction they should have in each other 
for a lifetime! But the soldier unused to 
society is easily imposed upon, easily made 
the victim of cunning wiles. An enemy 
convinces him, with flimsy evidence, of the 
infidelity of his wife. In his fury, racked 
at once by love and a sense of wounded 
honor, too much enraged to sift evidence 
or listen to protestations he strangles his 
wife and ends a life of innocence and con- 
fiding trust. 



108 SHAKESPEARE 

What crime could be more horrible than 
this ! Shakespeare has nowhere shown his 
resources more markedly than in mitigat- 
ing the indignation of reader or hearer 
over this awful deed. 

The Moor^s enemy, lago, determined on 
revenge because his commander gave an- 
other the office he desired, set himself de- 
liberately to ruin husband and wife. He 
was cunning, he was plausible, he won the 
epithet honest, he simulated not only 
friendship but a sensitive regard for the 
welfare and honor of the Moor and so 
perfectly entrapped him that he made him 
a helpless victim. The murderer seems 
comparatively innocent before the cunning 
fiend, still he has no thought of excusing 
himself and dies by his own hand. 

Lear is a drama without a hero. The 
place of the hero might be said to be taken 
by the doctrine of total depravity. Some 
have considered that the author's style 
reaches its highest point in this play. It 
has also been remarked that his power of 
combination, the ability to keep in hand 
a multitude of items and make them con- 
verge towards one point has here its best 
illustration. He brings forward an old 
story from pre-Christian England that had 



AS TRAGEDIAN 109 

been told in various forms and represented 
at times npon the stage. This he adopts, 
enlarges and adapts to his own purposes. 
The personages in the play are the king, 
in his second childhood, who has given 
over his power to his daughter, — three 
daughters, of whom one is disinherited 
because she would not flatter her father 
with a lie ; two daughters who are ready to 
say anything to get their inheritance ; their 
husbands; Kent, an old courtier who en- 
dures wanton abuses but remains true and 
dies in the service of the King; Gloster who 
confesses his past life is not wholly jus- 
tifiable; his legitimate son, resourceful, 
versatile and true; his bastard son, who 
renounces all allegiance to kindred, to jus- 
tice, to law and proclaims that nature is 
his goddess. Other characters need not 
be mentioned. The daughters in power 
give themselves over to every indulgence, 
disregard all contracts for maintaining the 
dignity of the old king, turn him out of 
doors and leave him to the pity of the dis- 
inherited daughter. The old king wanders 
about insane, is jeered by court clowns and 
fools, takes shelter in a cabin in a pelting 
storm and dies watching over the dying 
daughter that remained loyal. Gloster 



no SHAKESPEARE 

loses both his eyes through his bastard 
son, who becomes intimate with the ruling 
powers. When all restraints are thrown 
ofP the daughters endowed with a kingdom, 
one of the sons-in-law and their retainers 
revel in unlimited excesses. Finally they 
fall to quarreling among themselves and 
like a coil of serpents bite and devour 
each other. Their brawls end in murder 
and suicide. One cannot but repeat the 
exclamation of the most righteous judge: 
^*0 ye generation of vipers, how can ye 
escape the damnation of hell!" 

Such scenes our author considers to be 
among the possibilities of humanity. 

These tragedies are a most powerful ex- 
pression of the terrific outcome of nature's 
forces doing their worst. They do not 
seem so much descriptions of individuals 
as of embodied energies. They remind us 
of the convulsions in nature when masses 
collide with Titanic force. They seem like 
riven ledges that grind upon each other 
and crush granite or marble blocks to pow- 
der. Yet they do not pass beyond the pos- 
sibilies of human nature. They stand be- 
fore the world the supreme assertion of 
what lies within man and may be realized 
in action. 



AS TRAGEDIAN 111 

In the survey of these tragedies it is 
worth while briefly to notice the place 
which Shakespeare occupies in history. 
He has been called a child of the renais- 
sance. Europe had for two centuries at 
the time of his death been throwing off the 
burden of Medievalism, — scholasticism and 
feudalism, — and cherishing the classic cul- 
ture of the older nations. For a century 
a reformation in religion had been in pro- 
gress. For half a century Puritanism had 
been making itself felt in England. Shake- 
speare was not in sympathy with Puritan- 
ism, felt only incidentally the influence of 
the Eeformation. But his works may be 
considered the culmination, the utmost ef- 
florescence of the renaissance. The cher- 
ished thoughts and poetic art of Italy and 
France refined and purified entered into 
his works. We have in him the best of the 
renaissance. New and different forces en- 
tered into the later products of English 
literature. 

What shall we say of these mighty 
dramas ! No one can estimate their price- 
less worth as literature to be studied and 
absorbed. One element of their worth, 
however, seems to me their demonstration 
of the defects of the renaissance. It seems 



112 SHAKESPEARE 

to me that the mission of Shakespeare in 
serving his race was to show that culture, 
art, beauty cannot redeem the world. In 
whatever form presented, radiant with 
their own virtues, modeled after ancient 
civilization, cherished by the side of Chris- 
tianity but not transformed by it, they are 
inadequate to the salvation of mankind. 
Shakespeare did nothing better for the 
world than to show that the time for Puri- 
tanism had come. 



LECTURE FIFTH 



SHAKESPEARE— RIPE MANHOOD 

EVERY person who reaches mature 
age contracts habits. These taken 
in the fullest sense are the man 
himself. He is known as the combination 
of certain methods of conduct. He is the 
embodiment of certain holdings, for this 
is what habit means, and that which one 
holds, — holds at command and for service, 
— is that by which he impresses his fellow- 
men. These holdings may be natural en- 
dowments brought into service or they 
may be acquired forms of activity. Not 
only is habit second nature, but nature 
passes into habit and combines with ac- 
quirements that become spontaneously ef- 
fective through practice. 

Our topic now is, Shakespeare as the 
man of habits, — the man as known to the 
world through those characteristics that 
acted out themselves. We ask then. 

How did he appear to his contempo- 
raries? how did he impress them! His en- 
dowments, we may safely say, were much 
to his advantage. He was graceful in form 
and manners, winning in his address, com- 

115 



116 SHAKESPEARE 

panionable among his fellows, able and 
ready to enter into the amusements of such 
company as he might be in. He abhorred 
quarreling, was inclined to forgive wrong 
rather than resent it. He was a master of 
ridicule and pungent wit, but these were 
brought into service against public wrongs 
and popular defects. He has left no trace 
of malice or desire of revenge. The ad- 
jectives gentle and sweet have come down 
to us from his companions as descriptive 
of his character, though there have been 
some charges, perhaps some indications, of 
jealousy and wounded ambition. With his 
delicate and refined nature he was very 
susceptible to influences from without. He 
had exquisite delight in music. Nature ad- 
dressed him in manifold ways. The purple 
of the morning, the blaze of sunlight, the 
alternation of light and shadow, birds, the 
young of animals, flowers and trees 
brought to him their daily messages of 
cheer. His love of nature was inborn and 
developed by its own inherent energy, 
greatly fostered, however, by his early 
habits. He was not educated to the appre- 
ciation of rural scenes by plotted lawns 
and landscape gardening, but by the fields 
over which he roamed, by the woodlands 



RIPE MANHOOD 117 

where he watched the birds, the habitants 
of hollow trees and the shy burrowers of 
the ground. He became familiar with the 
ways of the wild world by his own obser- 
vations. His poetry pnts in words what 
he saw with his own eyes. Until he was 
twenty years of age he must have lived in 
intimate converse, not with books that de- 
scribed the habits of the pigeon and the 
ground-hog, but with the animals them- 
selves in their chosen haunts. In the Venus 
and Adonis he begins the description of the 
hunted hare thus : 

'*And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, 
''Mark the blind wretch, to overshoot his troubles 

* ' How he outruns the wind, and with what care "* 

''He cranks and crosses, with a thousand doubles; 

' ' The many musits through which he goes 

' ' Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. ' ' 

The poet's minute observation of par- 
ticulars is illustrated by the dialogue of 
Duncan with Banquo, wholly unconscious 
of the fate awaiting them. 

Duncan says: 

' ' This castle hath a pleasant seat ; the air 
"Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 
"Unto our gentle senses.'' 



118 SHAKESPEARE 

Banquo responds : 

"This guest of summer, 

"The temple-haunting martlet does approve. 

"By this loved maisonery, that the heaven's breath 

"Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze, buttress, 

"Nor coigne of vantage, but this bird hath made 

"His pendent bed, and procreant cradle; where they 

' ' Most breed and haunt, I have observed, the air 

"Is delicate." 

Sir Josliua Eeynolds remarks of this 
passage: '^Tliis short dialogue between 
Duncan and Banquo has always appeared 
to me a striking instance of what in paint- 
ing is termed repose.'^ 

He was equally susceptible to social in- 
fluences and must have enjoyed the sodal- 
ity of boon companions. The creator of 
Falstaff had certainly witnessed revelry 
and carousing. Brandos remarks that the 
hilarities in which he had part opened the 
way for some of the scenes in Henry V 
and Henry IV. ^^He drew the character 
of young English aristocrats under the 
names Mercutio, Benedek, Gratiano, Lo- 
renzo, etc. These he had met and con- 
versed with at such taverns as The Mitre, 
Boar's Head, The Mermaid.'' Such re- 
sorts were much patronized at that day. 
Brandos says : * ^ There were never so many 
kinds of drink in England as in 1600." I 



RIPE MANHOOD 119 

do not believe, however, that Shakespeare 
was a gross inebriate. He was too dainty 
for that. There are notable passages in 
his works in which he deprecates the nse 
of strong drinks. ^ ' O thon invisible spirit 
of wine, if thou hadst no name to be known 
by, let us call thee devil.'' ^^0, that men 
should put an enemy in their mouths, to 
steal away their brains, that we should 
with joy, revel, pleasure and applause 
transform ourselves into beasts.'' In As 
You Like It he makes Adam, boasting of 
his ability to do service in his advanced 
years, say: 

"For in my youth I never did apply 
''Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood." 

Still it must be confessed that the signa- 
ture to his will betrays a hand too shaky 
for a man of fifty-two years. 

Shakespeare was attracted by beauty in 
all its forms and accordingly was very sus- 
ceptible to feminine charms. He married, 
as has already been stated, when he was 
eighteen. This was a youthful lack of con- 
sideration for which he never forgave him- 
self. But his penitence was not of the kind 
not to be repented of. The giddy indiscre- 
tion did not eliminate his senstitiveness to 



120 S H A K|E S P E A R E 

later fascinations. Early in Ms appearance 
upon the stage he attracted the attention of 
some of the aristocratic theatre-goers, and, 
Brandes supposes, was invited to their 
houses where he met ladies of higher cul- 
tivation than he had before known. 
This acute critic and ardent admirer of 
his works says, that after this time he 
brought upon the stage women of a dif- 
ferent type from those coarse and shrew- 
ish personages whom he had presented to 
the public. Ealeigh, the acutest of Shake- 
sperians, would deny any affinity of the 
dramatist with his coarse characters, says 
he was always at home with ladies of high 
birth, that he inherited this quality from 
his mother, who was of distinguished an- 
cestry. Aside from stage representations 
and acquaintances in families that he vis- 
ited he formed personal friendships with 
women whose captivating qualities excited 
his interest. 

After speaking of the poet's sensibilities 
it is natural to speak of his intellect, but 
here we come to a pause. One does not 
know where to begin. His mind had such 
a roundness and smoothness that it is dif- 
ficult to lay hold of it. It has no protuber- 
ances. We presume he might have been a 



RIPE MANHOOD 121 

good mathematician, lie certainly could 
count money, but there is nothing in his 
writings to suggest logarithms or conic 
sections. It is certain that he might have 
been an adept in the natural sciences, for 
he had a quick observant eye, but nothing 
indicates that the laboratory or the dis- 
secting room would have attracted him 
early in the morning or retained him late 
at night. His ready use of terms familiar 
to the legal profession show that he might 
have attained eminence at the bar, but he 
destested the law's delay and the devices 
that turn awry the course of justice. He 
certainly might have been a great linguist 
for he surpasses all the word-mongers in 
his command of language, but he conform- 
ed to the rules of grammar only as was 
natural to him, and he had no pride in 
being a purist in his English. Scholast- 
ically he has no place in the arts of analy- 
sis and constructiveness, but in the work 
to which he gave himself, in reducing to 
its elements the matter in hand, and in ar- 
raying it in the fittest forms, he had no 
rival. 

Without attempting to give a descrip- 
tion of such a mind except in the most gen- 
eral way, I think we may say it was char- 



122 SHAKESPEARE 

acterized by perception and intnition. He 
knew just what lie saw with the inner eye 
and the outer eye. Such a man must have 
resorted to reminiscence as a pastime and 
a confirmation of opinion, but I do not be- 
lieve he enlarged his stock of knowledge 
or doctrine by reflection. Such a book as 
Coleridge's Aids to Reflection would not 
have been specially congenial to him. He 
had his eyes open and saw all that was to 
be seen. He apprehended the inner work- 
ings of the soul and understood humanity 
to the bottom. We might say, he was the 
great reader and his book was creation. 
His own language is: 

''This our life * * * 
''Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, 
"Sermons in stones and good in every thing." 

On subtle metaphysical questions, such 
as the bondage of the will and freedom of 
the will, he would have sympathized with 
old Samuel Johnson, ^^We know we are 
free and there is the end of it.'' 

Shakespeare's eminence in creative im- 
agination requires that this faculty should 
be somewhat more carefully noticed. 

Of all our faculties this is the one most 
difficult to define. For all ages and na- 



RIPE MANHOOD 123 

tions, as heathen superstitions testify, it 
is one of man's endowments. Yet imagi- 
nations can hardly be compared one with 
another. No one would think of arranging 
them in classes. There is, however, a cer- 
tain quality belonging to the true poet's 
imagination which may be recognized as 
characteristic. It works mostly upon a 
low level and deals in practical atfairs. 
There are imaginations that scale ceru- 
lean heights, range in lofty regions where 
common minds are not at home. It may be 
that true poets indulge in such flights, but 
they are not poets of the highest order, 
nor is their best work connected with fan- 
tastic, trackless movements. The true poet 
is a maker, a creator. He deals with plain 
things, if not themselves real he makes 
them real. He materializes the items that 
belong to his own ideal world; if I may 
coin a word, he matterizes the things he 
calls into existence for his own use. True 
poets cling close to nature; if they create 
a new world it borders on the old world 
and is explained by it. Keats and Shelley 
were undoubtedly true poets, but are really 
known only to a few kindred spirits. On 
the other hand Burns is appreciated by all 
who read him; the reader needs no inter- 



124 SHAKESPEARE 

preter. Wordsworth carries well-under- 
stood earthly energies into an intellectual 
world. Browning never leaves this world, 
though he often writes as if he had dis- 
covered new dimensions in it. 

Of all men Shakespeare worked most 
easily and naturally through the imagina- 
tion. He could transform an idea into an 
earthly agent or create an earthly agent 
to carry out an idea; an Ariel or an lago 
was equally within the range of his power 
and is made equally subject to our appre- 
hension. There is never any straining, any 
struggle to outreach or overtop nature. 
All he does is done here and now; for all 
that he proposes to do the means and the 
power are at hand. His ghosts stalk be- 
fore us in visible form, and vanish not be- 
cause of their nature but because they are 
no longer needed. His witches have a fire 
and cauldron to boil their broth, his fairies 
have a king and queen to keep them in 
order. Sycorax, Ariel, Caliban do their work 
as naturally as if produced by nature 's pro- 
cesses. His caricatures of humanity. Snug, 
Bottom, Flute, Snout, Quince and Starve- 
ling all work together to carry out an ap- 
pointed part of a drama. The capacity of 
realizing the products of the imagination 



RIPE MANHOOD 125 

gives this poet Ms highest power. When 
we consider that the characters which he 
presented as the product of his invention 
seemed to flow as freely as water from a 
fountain, and that they were selections 
from a world teeming with thoughts that 
live, our poet seems almost a master not of 
the actual only but of the possible also. 

Shakespeare set a high value on an hon- 
orable position in the world. He might be 
said to have been an ambitious man, but 
this would not cover the entire case. He 
had aspirations for a high and dignified 
position in society. He was not satisfied 
with the station to which he was born, nor 
with that which he was obliged to accept 
in order to earn a living. His talents and 
genial personal qualities attracted the at- 
tention of some who were born to wealth 
and high station, and he could not but wish 
he were of them. It was a source of morti- 
fication that he was obliged to do hard 
work in a theatre and appear in city and 
country as a stage-actor, do humble work, 
as the modern phrase is, to make a little 
money. I think this idea of his character 
may be fairly inferred from the sonnets. 

His native pride is shown in that he held 
the populace in a certain degree of con- 



126 SHAKESPEARE 

tempt. There is evidence that he deplored 
their sufferings, pitied them in their sor- 
rows, but he exhibits little appreciation of 
their substantial worth, none of the con- 
fidence of many modern politicians in the 
soundness of their mature and settled judg- 
ment. He despised the literary taste of 
the groundlings, however much he might 
have sought their applause in his the- 
atrical exhibitions. He was disgusted with 
their sweaty nightcaps and detested the 
** common cry of curs" as it was heard in 
the bowlings of the mob. In Troilus and 
Cressida he turns aside from the course of 
the drama to express his estimate of de- 
greeSy by which he means distinctions be- 
tween high and low in society. He makes 
Ulysses say: 

^^The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre 
''Observe degree, priority and place, 
''Insistence, course, proportion, season, form, 
"Office and custom, all in line of order, 
"And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol, 
"In noble eminence enthroned and sphered 
"Amidst the other * * * 

"But when the planets 
"In evil mixture, to disorder wander, 
"Wliat plagues, and what portents? what mutiny? 
"What ragings of the sea? Shaking of earth? 
"Commotion in the winds? Frights, changes, horrors 
"Divert and crack, rend and deracinate 
"The unity and married calm of States 



RIPE MANHOOD 127 

''Quite from their fixtures. O where degree is staked 

''Which is the ladder of all high designs, 

"The enterprise is sick." 

"Take but degree away, untune the string 

"And hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets 

"In mere appugnancy. 

"Then everything includes itself in power, 

"Power into will, will into appetite; 

"And appetite an universal wolf, 

"So doubly seconded with will and power, 

' ' Must make perforce an universal prey 

"And last eat up itself." 

The psychologic summing up of this 
drift toward chaos is worthy of notice; — 
law absorbed by power, power absorbed by 
will, will reduced to appetite. 

Shakespeare determined to lift himself 
out of his low estate, be known as a gentle- 
man possessed of lands, having a substan- 
tial home and a family bearing a badge of 
rank. At his prompting, no doubt, his 
father secured a coat of arms acknowl- 
edged by the public authorities. He main- 
tained his home at Stratford all the time 
of his residence in London, supported his 
family, and must have assisted his father, 
supposed to have been in needy circum- 
stances. He purchased lands in the vi- 
cinity, became owner of the best house in 
the town, and thus accumulated a fine es- 
tate to which he retired in his later years. 



128 SHAKESPEARE 

He was, however, defeated in his main 
purpose. His son, Hamnet, died in 1596, 
when the poet was at the height of his 
prosperity, and he, in the increasing sober- 
ness of age, with his more extended experi- 
ence, saw that the supposedly fortunate 
classes had their trials also, had their pe- 
culiar dangers, were liable to sad defeats 
and deep disgraces. 

I have often desired to sit down with 
Shakespeare, when he was off duty, to hear 
him talk of common things and tell how he 
felt about the little affairs going on in 
everyday life. I have wished that he might 
have had his Boswell, to tell us how the 
great man drank a glass of beer or blurted 
out an honest opinion about an absurdity. 
But the great poet is always enveloped in 
mist, it is only by inference that we get at 
the man. Still in his work are passages 
which he wrote because he could not help it, 
and some that he wrote con amore. These 
serve as windows to give a sight of the 
writer. 

As has been noticed, he fell at times into 
a gloomy brooding over the ultimate des- 
tiny of humanity. Yet such-like themes 
had a kind of fascination for him. Who 
has not read the scene of the grave-diggers 



RIPE MANHOOD 129 

spell-bound yet hastening to get through 
it! The minute descriptions of the body 
passing into dissolution which we meet in 
Claudio's speech and certain lamentations 
in the sonnets show that somber themes at 
times haunted his mind. Still more pow- 
erful was his fear of that which follows 
death. That gives the would-be suicide 
pause. 

^'The weariest and most loathed wordly life, 
^'That age, ach, penury, and imprisonment 
*'Can lay on nature, is a paradise 
''To what we fear of death.'' 

These are poetic expressions but they 
occur too often to permit the supposition 
that he was not subject to depressing sen- 
timents. There seems evidence that in his 
later years he rose in some degree above 
them, yet he never attained to the hopeful 
outlook of Doddridge: 

"Fain would we leave this weary road 
''And sleep in death to rest with God." 

Akin to this drift of mind was his habit 
of drawing dark scenes accompanied by 
presentiments and forebodings of evil. 
Hamlet, before his duel with Laertes, 
says: 

' ' But thou wouldst not think, how ill all 's here about my 
heart. ' ' 



130 SHAKESPEARE 

Premonitions in Macbeth are thus de- 
scribed : 

''The night has been unruly; where we lay, 

''Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, 

"Lamentings heard in th' air; strange dreams of death, 

"And prophesying, with accents terrible, 

"Of dire combustion, with confused events, 

"New hatch 'd to th^ woeful time. The obscure bird 

" Clamor 'd the live-long night; some say, the earth 



We would like to know what were Shake- 
speare 's sentiments in the milder ranges 
of experience. But we shall find few dis- 
closures here. After he was twenty-one 
he lived for twenty-eight years in London 
and there is no evidence that he made do- 
mestic life prominent the little time he was 
in Stratford. We do not know what kind 
of a lodging-house he had in the city; but 
it does not seem to have fostered any ad- 
miration of home life. We look in vain 
for anything to correspond with Burns' 
^* Cotter's Saturday Night," or the strains 
of grief found in his address to *^Mary in 
Heaven." His love of order, social quiet, 
is manifest in various passages, eminently 
in his praise of degree already noticed, and 
again in the words of the wronged Beli- 



RIPE MANHOOD 131 

sarius. Tempted to acts of vengeance he 
submits to his lot: 

''And yet reverence, 
''(That angel of the world) doth make distinction 
"Of place 'tween high and low." 

He was a man of wide observation and 
saw that righteousness was the real basis 
of security. 

"What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? 
"Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; 
"And he but naked, though locked up in steel, 
"Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted." 

His observation reaching to high and 
low, to nobility and peasantry, led him, as 
he mused by the fireside, to thoughts like 
those of the Preacher : 

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." 

Macbeth comments thus on the death of 
his wife, the instigator and partner of his 
crimes : 

"She should have died hereafter; 

' ' There would have been a time for such a word. 

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 

"Creep in this pretty pace from day to day, 

' ' To the last syllable of recorded time ; 

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 

"The way to dusty death." 

Isabel in Measure for Measure suffering 
under the rule of a usurper, says : 

"O, but man, proud man! 
"Brest in a little brief authority; 



132 SHAKESPEARE 

''Most ignorant of what lie's most assured, 
''His glassy essence, — like an angry ape, 
"Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven 
"As makes the angels weep." 

The poet, bemoaning the degeneracy of 
the times when the young care for nothing 
but dress, makes the King of France com- 
mend his father for saying : 

"Let me not live 

"After my flame lacks oil, to be the sniff 

"Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses 

"All but new things disdain; whose judgments are 

"Mere fathers of their garments." 

If life is appointed us in this fickle world 
the poet questions whether the peasant's 
life is not on the whole the most desirable. 
He makes King Henry VI, another 
preacher of vanity of vanities, say : 

"O God! Methinks, it were a happy life, 

"To be no better than a homely swain; 

' ' To sit upon a hill as I do now, 

' ' To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, 

"Thereby to see the minutes how they run. 

"And to conclude, — ^the Shepherds homely curds, 

"His cold thin drink out of a leather bottle, 

"His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade, 

"All which secure and sweetly he enjoys, 

"Is far beyond a prince's delicates, 

"His viands sparkling in a golden cup, 

"His body couched in a curious bed, 

"When care mistrust and treason wait on him." 

It is not to be maintained, of course, that 
the poet embraced all these sentiments in 



RIPE MANHOOD 133 

practical life, but they ocurred to him, they 
flitted across his mind in so many guises, 
and reappeared on so many occasions, that 
they must be accepted as indicating, to 
some extent, the current of his leisure 
thoughts. 

Wit and humor are often spoken of to- 
gether, but this is because they are often 
associated in actual life, not because 
they are akin. They play into each other, 
one opens the way for the other, yet they 
are different in essence. Wit is intellec- 
tual, humor emotional. Both abound in 
Shakespeare, but in attempting to discover 
the personal feelings of the poet, his spon- 
taneous emotions, we consider his humor 
rather than his wit. The latter glitters in 
all his plays, flashes and subsides, while 
humor abides, fosters itself and works like 
leaven. We ask now, not how the poet's 
humor amused an audience, its service in 
dramatic displays is to be noticed by the 
critic of the dramas, here we desire to ask, 
how did he divert himself! How did this 
man, subject to deep depressions, some- 
times falling into ways which he disap- 
proved, throw oif his somberness, his mel- 
ancholy reminiscences and restore his spir- 
its to their native buoyancy? How did he, 



134 SHAKESPEARE 

severed from family ties, much a solitary, 
devise for himself pastimes? We know 
that he had favorite tavern resorts, and 
met boon companions in gay festivities. I 
suspect also that he witnessed hilarities 
that were more rude than the pleasing con- 
versation of gentlemen sipping their wine. 
Men who were his compeers, were in- 
volved in brawls ; Marlowe was killed in a 
quarrel at the age of twenty-nine ; Jonson, 
famous for wit encounters, fought a duel 
and was imprisoned. Shakespeare had 
seen drunken men claiming to be sober, he 
heard the drivel of men who had lost their 
senses and had undoubtedly laughed at 
the antics of revellers till the tears ran 
down his cheeks. Falstaff^s swagger was 
not evolved from the inner consciousness 
of a man in his study. That wag, ridicul- 
ing the pretended honor of a poltroon, 
says: ^^Why, thou unconfinable baseness, 
it is as much as I can do, to keep the terms 
of my honor precise. I, I, I myself some- 
times, leaving the fear of heaven on the 
left hand, and hiding mine honor in my ne- 
cessity, am fain to shuffle, to hedge, and 
to lurch.'' Some of our author's pictures 
are redeemed only by their supreme lu- 
dicrousness. 



RIPE MANHOOD 135 

It might be expected that so sensitive 
a man would at times be annoyed, and with 
all his natural gentleness give way to im- 
patience. Perhaps we have no direct proof 
of this, but he is believed to have had sev- 
eral lawsuits on his hands when he died, 
and he puts into the mouth of Hotspur, for 
whom he had a kind of liking, these words 
which seem to me to have something of a 
home-born smack: 

* * I '11 give thrice so much land 
''To any well-deserving friend; 
''But in the way of bargain, mark ye me, 
"I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair." 

Hotspur, impatient with Glendower, 
says of him: 

"I tell you what; — 
"He held me, but last night; at least nine hours, 
"In reckoning up the several devils' names, 
"That were his lackeys; 

"But marked him not a word. Oh he as tedious 
"As a tired horse, a railing wife; 
"Worse than a smoky house; — I had rather live 
"With cheese and garlic, in a windmill, far, *^ 

' ' Than feel on eates, and have him talk to me, 
"In any summer house in Christendom." 

Shakespeare shows his soundhearted- 
ness and thorough manliness, as much as 
anywhere, in his affection for England. 
He entertained a kind of Hebrew devotion 



136 SHAKESPEARE 

to liis native soil. There is something 
touching in the Jew's remembrance of the 
land given to Abraham. That spirit was 
infused from above. It is recorded in Le- 
viticus, that when God promises to remem- 
ber his covenant with the patriarchs, he 
adds: **And I will remember the land.'' 
This kindred sentiment of the poet is ex- 
pressed several times. I cite a few lines 
from the majestic words of the dying 
Gaunt mourning over the degeneracy of 
the times. 

''This land of such clear souls, this dear, dear land, 
"Dear for her reputation through the world. 
"Is now leased out (I die pronouncing it), 
"Like to a tenement, or a pelting farm; 
"England bound in by the triumphant sea, 
"Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege 
"Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, 
"With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds; 
"That England that was wont to conquer others, 
"Hath made a shameful conquest of itself; 
"O, would the scandal vanish with my life, 
' * How happy then were my ensuing death ! ^ ' 

The poet does not seem to have given 
much time to a contemplation of Deity. Of 
the divine attributes he gave the greatest 
emphasis to mercy. He believed that all 
men had need of it. There is no doubt that 
he coincided with the assertion of Isabella : 
that all souls were forfeit once. He had no 



RIPE MANHOOD 137 

thought of being himself saved by works. 
He claimed to be indifferent honest, but re- 
morsefully confessed to debasing sins. Of 
mercy he says, comparing it to the highest 
earthly power : 

"But mercy is above this scepter 'd sway, 

"It is enthroned in the hearts of kings. 

"It is an attribute of God Himself 

"And earthly power doth then show likest God's 

"When mercy seasons justice.'* 

I suspect our author's sympathies were 
with seasoned justice rather than pure jus- 
tice. His fellowship was with those that 
called for mercy rather than those who 
were self-sufficient. We can hardly deny 
that this is akin to humanity. The prodigal 
son wakens more interest than the elder 
son to whom the father said: '*all I have is 
thine.'' And we have high authority for 
saying: **Joy shall be in heaven over one 
sinner that repenteth, more than over 
ninety and nine just persons, which need no 
repentance. ' ' 

Shakespeare probably prolonged his re- 
spites in Stratford in his later years, and 
was there permanently after 1613. It is 
supposed that he wrote his great tragedies 
there. In 1611 he sold his shares in the 
Globe Theatre, two years later he wrote 



138 S H A K|E S P E"A R E 

his last play, The Tempest. It is supposed 
that he took leave of dramatic composition 
at that time in the words of Prospero, as 
he formally renounced his magic art. 

"But this rough magic 
"1 here abjure, and when I have required 
''Some heavenly music (which even now I do) 
''To work mine end upon their senses, that 
"This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, 
"Bury it certain fathoms in the earth. 
"And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, 
"I'll drown my book." 

After this date he lived a retired country 
gentleman, in his native town, in the home 
he had fitted up for himself. His style of 
living was generous. His expenses were 
considered large by his fellow-pitizens. 
How agreeable the circumstances of his re- 
tirement were is not definitely known. It 
has been inferred from the form of his will 
that his wife was not treated with great 
consideration. She was, however, abund- 
antly provided for by her legal claims upon 
his estate. His family was inclined to 
Puritanism, a scheme distasteful to him. 
It seems certain, however, that he was hon- 
ored and cherished in his own family. His 
daughter, Susannah, honorably married, is 
believed to have been a woman of force 



RIPE MANHOOD 139 

and character, having inherited something 
of her father ^s business shrewdness. A 
mind like his, a man with his history, could 
not have been without resources for diver- 
sion and meditation in a secluded life. His 
closing years of uninterrupted stay at 
Stratford could not have been without 
their enjoyment. On February 10, 1616, 
his daughter Judith was married. There 
is a tradition that Ben Jonson and Michael 
Drayton were his guests on that occasion 
and that a too free festivity brought on a 
disease that proved fatal. There is not 
much credit given to this tradition, but he 
did not long survive the event. He signed 
his will on the twenty-fifth day of the fol- 
lowing month, March, ^and died on the 
twenty-third of April. He was buried in 
the church near at hand, and the bust, said 
by his daughter to be a good likeness, soon 
after placed over the grave, is still to be 
seen. 

Of the personal religious views of 
Shakespeare nothing is definitely known. 
Intimations of various kinds may be gath- 
ered from his writings, but these were 
thrown in mainly for poetical effect. In 
his last drama, expressive of the restful 
calm of his later life, he says : alluding to 



140 SHAKESPEARE 

the fairy displays that had appeared and 
vanished : 

^*We are such stuff 

'*As dreams are made of, and our little life 

''Is rounded with a sleep." 

Did he mean that the Almighty brings 
ns into existence to play out our seeming 
life and then sink back into nothingness? 
or was this utterance the culmination of 
his own poetic play I I suppose the ques- 
tion can never be answered, but I think the 
current sentiment of his writings implies 
that: 

''Life is real! Life is earnest! 
"And the grave is not its goal." 



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