Book i

. Satires 3 and 9); but both these pleasant caricatures are executed with vigour and life.

Ben Jonson has in this play woven together three different actions, one only of which has a symbolic meaning outside the frame of the picture. In the first place, he presents Ovid's struggle for leave to follow his poetic vocation, his suspected love-affair with Augustus's daughter, Julia, and his banishment from the court when Augustus discovers the intrigue between the young poet and his child. In the second place, he introduces us into the house of the rich bourgeois Albius, who has been ill-advised enough to marry one of the emancipated great ladies of the period, Chloe by name, and who, by her help, obtains admission to court society. Chloe's house is a meeting-place for all the love-poets of the period, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Cornelius Gallus, and the ladies who favour them; and Jonson has succeeded very fairly in suggesting the free tone of conversation prevalent in those circles, which was doubtless reproduced in many circles of London life during the Renaissance. Finally, we have a representation--Jonson's chief object in writing the play--of the conspiracy of the bad and envious poets against Horace, which culminates in a formal impeachment. The Emperor himself, and the famous poets of his court, form a sort of tribunal before which the case is tried. Horace is acquitted on every count, and the accusers are sentenced to a punishment entirely in the spirit of the Aristophanic comedy--so foreign to Shakespeare--Crispinus being forced to take a pill of hellebore, which makes him vomit up all the affected or merely novel words he has used, which appear to Ben Jonson ridiculous. Some of them--for example the first two, "retrograde" and "reciprocal"--have nevertheless survived in modern English. In spite of its allegorical character, the episode is not deficient in an almost too pungent realism.

The most Roman of all these scenes are doubtless those in which the gallantry between the young men and the ladies, and the snobbery which forces its way into Augustus's court, are freely represented. Less Roman, by reason of their too palpable tendency, are the scenes in which Augustus appears in the circle of his court poets. No serious attempt is made to portray the Emperor's character, and the speeches placed in the mouths of the poets are very clearly designed simply for the glorification of poetry in general, and Ben Jonson in particular.

The sins of which his enemies were always accusing him were "self-love, arrogancy, impudence, and railing," together with "filching by translation." As he explains in the defensive dialogue which he appended to his play, it was his purpose--

"To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master-spirits, did not want Detractors then, or practisers against them."

He makes foolish persons find injurious allusions to themselves, and even insults to the Emperor, in entirely innocent poems of Horace's, and shows how the Emperor orders them to be whipped as backbiters. Horace's literary relation to the Greeks, be it noted, was not unlike that of Ben Jonson himself to the Latin writers.

A special interest attaches for us to the passage in the fifth act, where, immediately before Virgil's entrance, the different poets, at the suggestion of the Emperor, express their judgment of his genius, and where Horace, after warmly protesting against the common belief that one poet is necessarily envious of another, joins in the general eulogy of his great rival. There is this remarkable circumstance about the encomiums on Virgil, here placed in the mouths of Gallus, Tibullus, and Horace, that while some of them are appropriate enough to the real Virgil (else all verisimilitude would have been sacrificed), others seem unmistakably to point away from Virgil towards one or other famous contemporary of Jonson's own. Look for a moment at these speeches (v. I):--

"_Tibullus_. That which he hath writ Is with such judgment labour'd, and distill'd Through all the needful uses of our lives, That could a man remember but his lines, He should not touch at any serious point, But he might breathe his spirit out of him. _Augustus_. You mean, he might repeat part of his works As fit for any conference he can use? _Tibullus_. True, royal Cæsar. _Horace_. His learning savours not the school-like gloss That most consists in echoing words and terms, And soonest wins a man an empty name; Nor any long or far-fetch'd circumstance Wrapp'd in the curious generalties of arts, But a direct and analytic sum Of all the worth and first effects of arts. And for his poesy, 'tis so ramm'd with life, That it shall gather strength of life, with being, And live hereafter more admired than now."

Can we conceive that Ben Jonson had not Shakespeare in his eye as he wrote these speeches, which apply better to him than to any one else? It is true that a Shakespeare scholar of such authority as the late C. M. Ingleby, the compiler of _Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse_, has declared against this theory, together with Nicholson and Furnivall. But none of them has brought forward any conclusive argument to prevent us from following Ben Jonson's admirer, Gifford, and his impartial critic, John Addington Symonds, in accepting these speeches as allusions to Shakespeare. It is useless to be for ever citing the passage in _The Return from Parnassus_, as to the "purge" Shakespeare has given Ben Jonson, in proof that there was an open feud between them, when, in fact, there is no evidence whatever of any hostility on Shakespeare's part; and the very stress laid on the assertion that Horace, as a poet, is innocent of envy towards a famous and popular colleague, makes it unreasonable to take the eulogies as applying solely to the real Virgil, whom they fit so imperfectly. Of course it by no means follows that we are to conceive every word of these eulogies as unreservedly applied to Shakespeare; the speeches seem to have been purposely left somewhat vague, so that they might at once point to the ancient poet and suggest the modern. But out of the mists of the characterisation certain definite contours stand forth; and the physiognomy which they form, the picture of the great teacher in all earthly affairs, rich, not in book-learning, but in the wisdom of life, whose poetry is so vital that it will live through the ages with an ever-intenser life--this portrait we know and recognise as that of the genius with the great, calm eyes under the lofty brow.

Ben Jonson's _Sejanus_, which dates from 1603, only two years after _The Poetaster_, is a historical tragedy of the time of Tiberius, in which the poet, without any reference to contemporary personalities, sets forth to depict the life and customs of the imperial court. It is as an archæologist and moralist, however, that he depicts them, and his method is thus very different from Shakespeare's. He not only displays a close acquaintance with the life of the period, but penetrates through the outward forms to its spirit. He is animated, indeed, by a purely moral indignation against the turbulent and corrupt protagonist of his tragedy, but his wrath does not prevent him from giving a careful delineation of the figure of Sejanus in relation to its surroundings, by means of thoughtfully-designed and even imaginative individual scenes. Jonson does not, like Shakespeare, display from within the character of this unscrupulous and audacious man, but he shows the circumstances which have produced it, and its modes of action.

The difference between Jonson's and Shakespeare's method is not that Jonson pedantically avoids the anachronisms which swarm in _Julius Cæsar_. In both plays, for instance, watches are spoken of.[1] But Ben, on occasion, can paint a scene of Roman life with as much accuracy as we find in a picture by Alma Tadema or a novel by Flaubert. For example, when he depicts an act of worship and sacrifice in the Sacellum or private chapel of Sejanus's house (v. 4), every detail of the ceremonial is correct. After the Herald (Præco) has uttered the formula, "Be all profane far hence," and horn and flute players have performed their liturgical music, the priest (Flamen) exhorts all to appear with "pure hands, pure vestments, and pure minds;" his acolytes intone the complementary responses; and while the trumpets are again sounded, he takes honey from the altar with his finger, tastes it, and gives it to the others to taste; goes through the same process with the milk in an earthen vessel; and then sprinkles milk over the altar, "kindleth his gums," and goes with the censer round the altar, upon which he ultimately places it, dropping "branches of poppy" upon the smouldering incense. In justification of these traits, Jonson gives no fewer than thirteen footnotes, in which passages are cited from a very wide range of Latin authors. Kalisch has counted the notes appended to this play, and finds 291 in all. The ceremonial is here employed to introduce a scene in which "great Mother Fortune," to whom the libation is made, averts her face from Sejanus, and thereby portends his fall; whereupon, in an access of fury, he overturns her statue and altar.

Another scene, constructed with quite as much learning, and far more able and remarkable, is that which opens the second Act. Livia's physician, Eudemus, has been suborned by Sejanus to procure him a meeting with the princess, and, moreover, to concoct a potent poison for her husband. In the act of assisting his mistress to rouge her cheek, and recommending her an effective "dentrifice" and a "prepared pomatum to smooth the skin," he answers her casual questions as to who is to present the poisoned cup to Drusus and induce him to drink it. Here, again, Ben Jonson's mastery of detail displays itself. Eudemus's remark, for example, that the "ceruse" on Livia's cheeks has faded in the sun, is supported by a reference to an epigram of Martial, from which it appears that this cosmetic was injured by heat. But here all these details are merged in the potent general impression produced by the dispassionate and business-like calmness with which the impending murder is arranged in the intervals of a disquisition upon those devices of the toilet which are to enchain the contriver of the crime.

Ben Jonson possesses the undaunted insight and the vigorous pessimism which render it possible to represent Roman depravity and wild-beast-like ferocity under the first Emperors without extenuation and without declamation. He cannot, indeed, dispense with a sort of chorus of honourable Romans, but they express themselves, as a rule, pithily and without prolixity; and he has enough sense of art and of history never to let his ruffians and courtesans repent.

Now and then he even attains to a Shakespearian level. The scene in which Sejanus approaches Eudemus first with jesting talk, and then, with wily insinuations, worms himself into his acquaintance and makes him his creature, while Eudemus, with crafty servility, shows that he can take a half-spoken hint, and, without for a moment committing himself, offers his services as pander and assassin--this passage is in no way inferior to the scene in Shakespeare's _King John_ in which the King suggests to Hubert the murder of Arthur.

The most remarkable scene, however, is that (v. 10) in which the Senate is assembled in the Temple of Apollo to hear messages from Tiberius in his retreat at Capri. The first letter confers upon Sejanus "the tribunitial dignity and power," with expressions of esteem, and the Senate loudly acclaims the favourite. Then the second letter is read. It is expressed in a strangely contorted style, begins with some general remarks on public policy, hypocritical in tone, then turns, like the first, to Sejanus, and, to the astonishment of all, dwells with emphasis upon his low origin and the rare honours to which he has been preferred. Already the hearers are alarmed; but the impression is obliterated by new sentences of flattery. Then unfavourable opinions and judgments regarding the favourite are cited and dwelt upon with a certain complacency; then they are refuted with some vehemence; finally, they are brought forward again, and this time in a manner unmistakably hostile to Sejanus. Immediately the senators who have swarmed around him withdraw from his neighbourhood, leaving him in the centre of an empty space; and the reading continues until Laco enters with the guards who are to arrest the hitherto all-powerful favourite and lead him away. We can find no parallel to this reading of the letter and the vacillations it produces among the cringing senators, save in Antony's speech over the body of Cæsar and the consequent revulsion in the attitude and temper of the Roman mob. Shakespeare's

## scene is more vividly projected, and shines with the poet's humour;

Jonson's scene is elaborated with grim energy, and worked out with the moralist's bitterness. But in the dramatic movement of the moralist's scene, no less than of the poet's, antique Rome lives again.

Jonson's _Catiline_, written some time later, appeared in 1611, and was dedicated to Pembroke. Although executed on the same principles, it is on the whole inferior to _Sejanus_; but it is better fitted for comparison with _Julius Cæsar_ in so far as its action belongs to the same period, and Cæsar himself appears in it. The second act of the tragedy is in its way a masterpiece. As soon as Jonson enters upon the political action proper, he transcribes endless speeches from Cicero, and becomes intolerably tedious; but so long as he keeps to the representation of manners, and seeks, as in his comedies, to paint a quite unemotional picture of the period, he shows himself at his best.

This second act takes place at the house of Fulvia, the lady who, according to Sallust, betrayed to Cicero the conspirators' secret. The whole picture produces an entirely convincing effect. She first repels with unfeeling coldness an intrusive friend and protector, Catiline's fellow-conspirator, Curius; but when he at last turns away in anger, telling her that she will repent her conduct when she finds herself excluded from participation in an immense booty which will fall to the share of others, she calls him back, full of curiosity and interest, becomes suddenly friendly, and even caressing, and wrings from him his secret, instantly recognising, however, that Cicero will pay for it without stint, and that this money is considerably safer than the sum which might fall to her share in a general revolution. Her visit to Cicero, with his craftily friendly interrogatory, first of her, and then of her lover Curius, whom he summons and converts into one of his spies, deserves the highest praise. These scenes contain the concentrated essence of Sallust's _Catiline_ and of Cicero's Orations and Letters. The Cicero of this play rises high above the Cicero to whom Shakespeare has assigned a few speeches. Cæsar, on the other hand, comes off no better at Ben Jonson's hands than at Shakespeare's. The poet was obviously determined to show a certain independence of judgment in the way in which he has treated Sallust's representation both of Cæsar and of Cicero. Sallust, whom Jonson nevertheless follows in the main, is hostile to Cicero and defends Cæsar. The worthy Ben, on the other hand, was, as a man of letters, a sworn admirer of Cicero, while in Cæsar he sees only a cold, crafty personage, who sought to make use of Catiline for his own ends, and therefore joined forces with him, but repudiated him when things went wrong, and was so influential that Cicero dared not attack him when he rooted out the conspiracy. Thus the great Caius Julius did not touch Jonson's manly heart any more than Shakespeare's. He appears throughout in an extremely unsympathetic light, and no speech, no word of his, portends his coming greatness.

Of this greatness Jonson had probably no deep realisation. It is surprising enough to note that the scholars and poets of the Renaissance, in so far as they took sides in the old strife between Cæsar and Pompey, were all on Pompey's side. Even in the seventeenth century, in France, under a despotism more absolute than Cæsar's, the men who were familiar with antique history, and who, for the rest, vied with each other in loyalty and king-worship, were unanimously opposed to Cæsar. Strange as it may seem, it is not until our century, with its hostility to despotism and its continuous advance in the direction of democracy, that Cæsar's genius has been fully appreciated, and the benefits his life conferred on humanity have been thoroughly understood.

The personal relation between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare is not to this day quite clearly ascertained. It was for long regarded as distinctly hostile, no one doubting that Jonson, during his great rival's lifetime, cherished an obstinate jealousy towards him. More recently, Jonson's admirers have argued with warmth that cruel injustice has been done him in this respect. So far as we can now judge, it appears that Jonson honestly recognised and admired Shakespeare's great qualities, but at the same time felt a displeasure he never could quite conquer at seeing him so much more popular as a dramatist, and--as was only natural--regarded his own tendencies in art as truer and better justified.

In the preface to _Sejanus_ (edition of 1605) Jonson uses an expression which, as the piece was acted by Shakespeare's company, and Shakespeare himself appeared in it, was long interpreted as referring to him. Jonson writes:--

"Lastly, I would inform you that this book, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage, wherein a second pen had good share; in place of which, I have rather chosen to put weaker, and, no doubt, less pleasing, of mine own, than to defraud so happy a genius of his right by my loathed usurpation."

The words "so happy a genius," in particular, together with the other circumstances, have directed the thoughts of commentators to Shakespeare. Mr. Brinsley Nicholson, however (in the _Academy_, Nov. 14th, 1874), has shown it to be far more probable that the person alluded to is not Shakespeare, but a very inferior poet, Samuel Sheppard. The marked politeness of Jonson's expressions may be due to his having inflicted on his collaborator a considerable disappointment, almost an insult, by omitting his portion of the work, and at the same time excluding his name from the title-page. It seems, at any rate, that Samuel Sheppard felt wounded by this proceeding, since, more than forty years later, he claimed for himself the honour of having collaborated in _Sejanus_, in a verse which is ostensibly a panegyric on Jonson.[2] Symonds, so late as 1888, nevertheless maintains in his _Ben Jonson_ that the preface most probably refers to Shakespeare; but he does not refute or even mention Nicholson's carefully-marshalled argument.

It is not, however, of great importance to decide whether a compliment in one of Jonson's prefaces is or is not addressed to Shakespeare, since we have ample evidence in the warm eulogy and mild criticism in his _Discoveries_, and in the enthusiastic poem prefixed to the First Folio, that the crusty Ben (who, moreover, is said to have been Shakespeare's boon companion on his last convivial evening) regarded him with the warmest feelings, at least towards the close of his life and after his death.

This does not exclude the probability that Jonson's radically different literary ideals may have led him to make incidental and sometimes rather tart allusions to what appeared to him weak or mistaken in Shakespeare's work.

There is no foundation for the theory which has sometimes been advanced, that the passage in _The Poetaster_ ridiculing Crispinus's coat of arms is an allusion to Shakespeare. It is beyond all doubt that the figure of Crispinus was exclusively intended for Marston; he himself, at any rate, did not for a moment doubt it. For the rest, Jonson's ascertained or conjectured side-glances at Shakespeare are these:--

In the prologue to _Every Man in his Humour_, which can scarcely have been spoken when the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's company, not only is realistic art proclaimed the true art, in opposition to the romanticism which prevailed on the Shakespearian stage, but a quite definite attack is made on those who

"With three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars."

And this is followed by a really biting criticism of the works of other playwrights, concluding--

"There's hope left then, You, that have so graced monsters, may like men."

The possible jibe at _Twelfth Night_ in _Every Man out of his Humour_ (iii. I) has already been mentioned (_ante_, p. 272). That, too, must be of late insertion, and is at worst extremely innocent.

Much has been made of the passage in _Volpone_ (iii. 2) where Lady Politick Would-be, speaking of Guarini's _Pastor Fido_, says:--

"All our English writers Will deign to steal out of this author, mainly: Almost as much as from Montagnié."

This has been interpreted as an accusation of plagiarism, some pointing it at the well-known passage in _The Tempest_, where Shakespeare has annexed some lines, from Montaigne's Essays; others at _Hamlet_, which has throughout many points of contact with the French philosopher. But _The Tempest_ was undoubtedly written long after _Volpone_, and the relation of _Hamlet_ to Montaigne is such as to render it scarcely conceivable that an accusation of plagiarism could be founded upon it. Here again Jonson seems to have been groundlessly suspected of malice.

Jacob Feis (_Shakespeare and Montaigne_, p. 183) would fain see in Nano's song about the hermaphrodite Androgyno a shameless attack upon Shakespeare, simply because the names Pythagoras and Euphorbus appear in it (_Volpone_, i. I), as they do in the well-known passage in Meres; but this accusation is entirely fantastic. Equally unreasonable is it of Feis to discover an obscene besmirching of the figure of Ophelia in that passage of Jonson, Marston, and Chapman's _Eastward Ho!_ (iii. 2) where there occur some passing allusions to _Hamlet_.

There remain, then, in reality, only one or two passages in _Bartholomew Fair_, dating from 1614. We have already seen (_ante_, p. 337) that there may possibly be a satirical allusion to the Sonnets in the introduced puppet-play, _The Touchstone of True Love_. The Induction contains an unquestionable jibe, both at _The Tempest_ and _The Winter's Tale_, whose airy poetry the downright Ben was unable to appreciate.[3] Neither Caliban nor the element of enchantment in _The Tempest_ appealed to him, and in _The Winters Tale_, as in _Pericles_, it offended his classic taste and his Aristotelian theories that the

## action should extend over a score of years, so that we see infants in

one act reappear in the next as grown-up young women.

But these trifling intolerances and impertinences must not tempt us to forget that it was Ben Jonson who wrote of Shakespeare those great and passionate lines:--

"Triumph, my Britain! thou hast one to show To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time!"

[1] "Observe him as his watch observes his clock."--_Sejanus_, i. I.

[2] He says of Jonson in _The Times Displayed in Six Sesfyads_:--

"So His, that Divine Plautus equalled, Whose Commick vain Menander nere could hit, Whose tragic sceans shal be with wonder Read By after ages, for unto his wit My selfe gave personal ayd, _I_ dictated To him when as _Sejanus_ fall he writ, And yet on earth some foolish sots there bee That dare make Randolph his Rival in degree."

[3] "If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries."

XI

_HAMLET: ITS ANTECEDENTS IN FICTION, HISTORY, AND DRAMA_

Many and various emotions crowded upon Shakespeare's mind in the year 1601. In its early months Essex and Southampton were condemned. At exactly the same time there occurs the crisis in the relations of Pembroke and Shakespeare with the Dark Lady. Finally, in the early autumn, Shakespeare suffered a loss which he must have felt deeply. The Stratford register of burials for 1601 contains this line--

_Septemb._ 8. Mr. _Johannes Shakespeare_.

He lost his father, his earliest friend and guardian, whose honour and reputation lay so near to his heart. The father probably lived with his son's family in the handsome New Place, which Shakespeare had bought four years before. He had doubtless brought up the two girls Susannah and Judith; he had doubtless sat by the death-bed of the little Hamnet. Now he was no more. All the years of his youth, spent at his father's side, revived in Shakespeare's mind, memories flocked in upon him, the fundamental relation between son and father preoccupied his thoughts, and he fell to brooding over filial love and filial reverence.

In the same year _Hamlet_ began to take shape in Shakespeare's imagination.

_Hamlet_ has given the name of Denmark a world-wide renown. Of all Danish men, there is only one who can be called famous on the largest scale; only one with whom the thoughts of men are for ever busied in Europe, America, Australia, aye, even in Asia and Africa, wherever European culture has made its way; and this one never existed, at any rate in the form in which he has become known to the world. Denmark has produced several men of note--Tycho Brahe, Thorvaldsen, and Hans Christian Andersen--but none of them has attained a hundredth part of Hamlet's fame. The _Hamlet_ literature is comparable in extent to the literature of one of the smaller European peoples--the Slovaks, for instance.

As it is interesting to follow with the eye the process by which a block of marble slowly assumes human form, so it is interesting to observe how the _Hamlet_ theme gradually acquires its Shakespearian character.

The legend first appears in Saxo Grammaticus. Fengo murders his brave brother Horvendil, and marries his widow Gerutha (Gertrude). Horvendil's son, Amleth, determines to disarm Fengo's malevolence by feigning madness. In order to test whether he is really mad, a beautiful girl is thrown in his way, who is to note whether, in his passion for her, he still maintains the appearance of madness. But a foster-brother and friend of Amleth's reveals the plot to him; the girl, too, has an old affection for him; and nothing is discovered. Here lie the germs of Ophelia and Horatio.

With regard to Amleth's mad talk, it is explained that, having a conscientious objection to lying, he so contorted his sayings that, though he always said what he meant, people could not discover whether he meant what he said, or himself understood it--an account of the matter which applies quite as well to the dark sayings of the Shakespearian Hamlet as to the naïve riddling of the Jutish Amleth.

Polonius, too, is here already indicated--especially the scene in which he plays eavesdropper to Hamlet's conversation with his mother. One of the King's friends (_præsumtione quam solertia abundantior_) proposes that some one shall conceal himself in the Queen's chamber. Amleth runs his sword through him and throws the dismembered body to the pigs, as Hamlet in the play drags the body out with him. Then ensues Amleth's speech of reproach to his mother, of which not a little is retained even in Shakespeare:--

"Think'st thou, woman, that these hypocritical tears can cleanse thee of shame, thee, who like a wanton hast cast thyself into the arms of the vilest of nithings, hast incestuously embraced thy husband's murderer, and basely flatterest and fawnest upon the man who has made thy son fatherless! What manner of creature doest thou resemble? Not a woman, but a dumb beast who couples at random."

Fengo resolves to send Amleth to meet his death in England, and despatches him thither with two attendants, to whom Shakespeare, as we know, has given the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern--the names of two Danish noblemen whose signatures have been found in close juxtaposition (with the date 1577) in an album which probably belonged to a Duke of Würtemberg. They were colleagues in the Council of Regency during the minority of Christian IV. These attendants (according to Saxo) had rune-staves with them, on which Amleth altered the runes, as in the play he re-writes the letters.

One more little touch is, as it were, led up to in Saxo: the exchange of the swords. Amleth, on his return, finds the King's men assembled at his own funeral feast. He goes around with a drawn sword, and on trying its edge against his nails he once or twice cuts himself with it. Therefore they nail his sword fast into its sheath. When Amleth has set fire to the hall and rushes into Fengo's chamber to murder him, he takes the King's sword from its hook and replaces it with his own, which the King in vain attempts to draw before he dies.

Now that Hamlet, more than any other Dane, has made the name of his fatherland world-famous, it impresses us strangely to read this utterance of Saxo's: "Imperishable shall be the memory of the steadfast youth who armed himself against falsehood with folly, and with it marvellously cloaked the splendour of heaven-radiant wisdom.... He left history in doubt as to whether his heroism or his wisdom was the greater."

The Hamlet of the tragedy, with reference to his mother's too hasty marriage, says, "Frailty, thy name is woman!" Saxo remarked with reference to Amleth's widow, who was in too great a hurry to marry again: "Thus it is with all the promises of women: they are scattered like chaff before the wind and pass away like waves of the sea. Who then will trust to a woman's heart, which changes as flowers shed their leaves, as seasons change, and as new events wipe out the traces of those that went before?"

In Saxo's eyes, Amleth represented not only wisdom, but bodily strength. While the Hamlet of Shakespeare expressly emphasises the fact that he is anything but Herculean ("My father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules"), Saxo expressly compares his hero to the Club-Bearer whose name is a synonym for strength: "And the fame of men shall tell of him that, if it had been given him to live his life fortunately to the end, his excellent dispositions would have displayed themselves in deeds greater than those of Hercules, and would have adorned his brows with the demigod's wreath." It sounds almost as though Shakespeare's Hamlet entered a protest against these words of Saxo.

In the year 1559 the legend was reproduced in French in Belleforest's _Histoires Tragiques_, and seems in this form to have reached England, where it furnished material for the older _Hamlet_ drama, now lost, but to which we find frequent allusions. It cannot be proved that this play was founded upon Pavier's English translation of Belleforest, or even that Shakespeare had Pavier before him; for the oldest edition of the translation which has come down to us (reprinted in Collier's _Shakespeare's Library_, ed. 1875, pt. I. vol. ii. p. 224) dates from 1608, and contains certain details (such as the eavesdropper's concealment behind the arras, and Hamlet's exclamation of "A rat! a rat!" before he kills Polonius) of which there is no trace in Belleforest, and which may quite as well have been taken from Shakespeare's tragedy, as borrowed by him from an unknown older edition of the novel.

The earliest known allusion to the old _Hamlet_ drama is the phrase of Thomas Nash, dating from 1589, quoted above (p. 91). In 1594 the Lord Chamberlain's men (Shakespeare's company), acting together with the Lord Admiral's men at the Newington Butts theatre under the management of Henslow and others, performed a _Hamlet_ with reference to which Henslow notes in his account-book for June 9th: "Rd. at hamlet ... viii s." This play must have been the old one, for Henslow would otherwise have added the letters _ne_ (new), and the receipts would have been much greater. His share, as we see, was only eight shillings, whereas it was sometimes as much as nine pounds.

The chief interest of this older play seems to have centred in a figure added by the dramatist--the Ghost of the murdered King, which cried "Hamlet, revenge!" This cry is frequently quoted. It first appears in 1596 in Thomas Lodge's _Wits Miserie_, where it is said of the author that he "looks as pale as the visard of ye ghost, which cried so miserably at ye theator like an oister-wife, _Hamlet, revenge_" It next occurs in Dekker's _Satiromastix_, 1602, where Tucca says, "My name's _Hamlet, revenge!_" In 1605 we find it in Thomas Smith's _Voiage and Entertainement in Rushia_; and it is last found in 1620 in Samuel Rowland's _Night Raven_, where, however, it seems to be an inaccurate quotation from the _Hamlet_ we know.

Shakespeare's play was entered in the Stationers' Register on the 26th of July 1602, under the title "A booke called _'the Revenge of Hamlett Prince_ [of] _Denmarke' as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servantes._"

That it made an instant success on the stage is almost proved by the fact that so early as the 7th of July the opposition manager Henslow pays Chettle twenty shillings for "The Danish Tragedy," evidently a furbishing up of the old play.

The publication of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, however, did not take place till 1603. Then appeared the First Quarto, indubitably a pirated edition, either founded entirely on shorthand notes, or on shorthand notes eked out by aid of the actors' parts, and completed, in certain passages, from memory. Although this edition certainly contains a debased and corrupt text, it is impossible to attribute to the misunderstandings or oversights of a copyist or stenographer all its divergences from the carefully-printed quarto of the following year, which is practically identical with the First Folio text. The differences are so great as to exclude such a theory. We have evidently before us Shakespeare's first sketch of the play, although in a very defective form; and, as far as we can see, this first sketch keeps considerably closer than the definitive text to the old _Hamlet_ drama, on which Shakespeare based his play. Here and there, though with considerable uncertainty, we can even trace scenes from the old play among Shakespeare's, and touches of its style mingling with his. It is very significant, also, that there are more rhymes in the First than in the Second Quarto.

The most remarkable feature in the 1603 edition is a scene between Horatio and the Queen in which he tells her of the King's frustrated scheme for having Hamlet murdered in England. The object of this

## scene is to absolve the Queen from complicity in the King's crime;

a purpose which can also be traced in other passages of this first edition, and which seems to be a survival from the older drama. So far as we can gather, Horatio appears to have played an altogether more prominent part in the old play; Hamlet's madness appears to have been wilder; and Polonius probably bore the name of Corambis, which is prefixed to his speeches in the edition of 1603. Finally, as we have seen, Shakespeare took the important character of the Ghost, not indicated in either the legend or the novel, from this earlier _Hamlet_ tragedy. The theory that it is the original of the German tragedy, _Der bestrafte Brudermord,_ published by Cohn, from a manuscript of 1710, is unsupported by evidence.

Looking backward through the dramatic literature of England, we find that the author of the old _Hamlet_ drama in all probability sought inspiration in his turn in Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_. It appears from allusions in Jonson's _Cynthia's Revels_ and _Bartholomew Fair_ that this play must have been written about 1584. It was one of the most popular plays of its day with the theatre-going public. So late as 1632, Prynne in his _Histriomastix_ speaks of a woman who, on her death-bed, instead of seeking the consolations of religion, cried out: "Hieronimo, Hieronimo! O let me see Hieronimo acted!"

The tragedy opens, after the fashion of its models in Seneca, with the apparition of the murdered man's ghost, and his demand for vengeance. Thus the Ghost in Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ is lineally descended from the spirit of Tantalus in Seneca's _Thyestes_, and from the spirit of Thyestes in Seneca's _Agamemnon_. Hieronimo, who has been driven mad by sorrow for the loss of his son, speaking to the villain of the piece, gives half-ironical, half-crazy expression to the anguish that is torturing him:--

"_Lorenzo_. Why so, Hieronimo? use me. _Hieronimo_. Who? you my lord? I reserve your favour for a greater honour: This is a very toy, my lord, a toy. _Lor_. All's one, Hieronimo, acquaint me with it. _Hier_. I' faith, my lord, 'tis an idle thing ... The murder of a son, or so-- A thing of nothing, my lord!"

These phrases foreshadow Hamlet's speeches to the King. But Hieronimo is really mad, although he speaks of his madness much as Hamlet does, or rather denies it point-blank--

"Villain, thou liest, and thou dost naught But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad. I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques; I'll prove it to thee; and were I mad, how could I?"

Here and there, especially in Ben Jonson's additions, we come across speeches which lie very close to passages in Hamlet. A painter, who also has lost his son, says to Hieronimo: "Ay, sir, no man did hold a son so dear;" whereupon he answers--

"What, not as thine? That is a lie, As massy as the earth: I had a son, Whose least unvalued hair did weigh A thousand of thy sons; and he was murdered."

Thus Hamlet cries to Laertes:--

"I lov'd Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."

Hieronimo, like Hamlet, again and again postpones his vengeance:--

"All times fit not for revenge. Thus, therefore, will I rest me in unrest, Dissembling quiet in unquietness: Not seeming that I know their villainies, That my simplicity may make them think That ignorantly I will let all slip."

At last he determines to have a play acted, as a means to his revenge. The play is Kyd's own _Solyman and Perseda_, and in the course of it the guilty personages, who play the chief parts, are slaughtered, not in make-believe, but in reality.

Crude and naïve though everything still is in _The Spanish Tragedy_, which resembles _Titus Andronicus_ in style rather than any other of Shakespeare's works, it evidently, through the medium of the earlier _Hamlet_ play, contributed a good deal to the foundations of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_.

Before going more deeply into the contents of this great work, and especially before trying to bring it into relation to Shakespeare's personality, we have yet to see what suggestions or impulses the poet may have found in contemporary history.

We have already remarked upon the impression which the Essex family tragedy must have made upon Shakespeare in his early youth, before he had even left Stratford. All England was talking of the scandal: how the Earl of Leicester, who was commonly suspected of having had Lord Essex poisoned, immediately after his death had married his widow, Lady Lettice, whose lover no one doubted that he had been during her husband's lifetime. There is much in the character of King Claudius to suggest that Shakespeare has here taken Leicester as his model. The two have in common ambition, sensuality, an ingratiating conciliatory manner, astute dissimulation, and complete unscrupulousness. On the other hand, it is quite unreasonable to suppose, with Hermann Conrad,[1] that Shakespeare had Essex in his eye in drawing Hamlet himself.

Almost as near to Shakespeare's own day as the Essex-Leicester catastrophe had been the similar events in the Royal Family of Scotland. Mary Stuart's second husband, Lord Darnley, who bore the title of King of Scotland, had been murdered in 1567 by her lover, the daring and unscrupulous Bothwell, whom the Queen almost immediately afterwards married. Her contemporaries had no doubt whatever of Mary's complicity in the assassination, and her son James saw in his mother and his stepfather his father's murderers. The leaders of the Scottish rebellion displayed before the captive Queen a banner bearing a representation of Darnley's corpse, with her son kneeling beside it and calling to Heaven for vengeance. Darnley, like the murdered King in _Hamlet_, was an unusually handsome, Bothwell an unusually repulsive man.

James was brought up by his mother's enemies, and during her lifetime, and after her death, was perpetually wavering between her adherents, who had defended her legal rights, and her adversaries, who had driven her from the country and placed James himself upon the throne. He made one or two efforts, indeed, to soften Elizabeth's feelings towards his mother, but refrained from all attempt to avenge her death. His character was irresolute. He was learned and--what Hamlet is very far from being--a superstitious pedant; but, like Hamlet, he was a lover of the arts and sciences, and was especially interested in the art of

## acting. Between 1599 and 1601 he entertained in Scotland a portion of

the company to which Shakespeare belonged; but it is uncertain whether Shakespeare himself ever visited Scotland. There is little doubt, on the other hand, that when, after Elizabeth's death in 1603, James made his entrance into London, Shakespeare, richly habited in a uniform of red cloth, walked in his train along with Burbage and a few others of the leading players. Their company was henceforth known as "His Majesty's Servants."

Although there is in all this no lack of parallels to Hamlet's circumstances, it is, of course, as ridiculous to take James as to take Essex for the actual model of Hamlet. Nothing could at that time have been stupider or more tactless than to remind the heir-presumptive to the throne, or the new King, of the deplorable circumstances of his early history. This does not exclude the supposition, however, that contemporary history supplied Shakespeare with certain outward elements, which, in the moment of conception, contributed to the picture bodied forth by the creative energy of his genius.

From this point of view, too, we must regard the piles of material which well-meaning students bring to light, in the artless belief that they have discovered the very stones of which Shakespeare constructed his dramatic edifice. People do not distinguish between the possibility that the poet may have unconsciously received a suggestion here and there for details of his work, and the theory that he deliberately intended an imaginative reproduction of definite historic events. No work of imagination assuredly, and least of all such a work as _Hamlet_, comes into existence in the way these theorists assume. It springs from within, has its origin in an overmastering sensation in the poet's soul, and then, in the process of growth, assimilates certain impressions from without.

[1] _Preuss. Jahrbücher_, February 1895.

XII

_"HAMLET"--MONTAIGNE AND GIORDANO BRUNO--ANTECEDENTS IN ETHNOGRAPHY_

Along with motives from novel, drama, and history, impressions of a philosophical and quasi-scientific order went to the making of _Hamlet_: Of all Shakespeare's plays, this is the profoundest and most contemplative; a philosophic atmosphere breathes around it. Naturally enough, then, criticism has set about inquiring to what influences we may ascribe these broodings over life and death and the mysteries of existence.

Several students, such as Tschischwitz and König, have tried to make out that Giordano Bruno exercised a preponderating influence upon Shakespeare.[1] Passages suggesting a cycle in nature, such as Hamlet's satirical outburst to the King about the dead Polonius (iv. 3), have directed their thoughts to the Italian philosopher. In some cases they have found or imagined a definite identity between sayings of Hamlet's and of Bruno's--for instance, on determinism. Bruno has a passage in which he emphasises the necessity by which everything is brought about: "Whatever may be my pre-ordained eventide, when the change shall take place, I await the day, I, who dwell in the night; but they await the night who dwell in the daylight. All that is, is either here or there, near or far off, now or after, soon or late." In the same spirit Hamlet says (v. 2): "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." Bruno says: "Nothing is absolutely imperfect or evil; it only seems so in relation to something else, and what is bad for one is good for another." In _Hamlet_ (ii. 2), "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

When once attention had been directed to Giordano Bruno, not only his philosophical and more popular writings, but even his plays were ransacked in search of passages that might have influenced Shakespeare. Certain parallels and points of resemblance were indeed discovered, very slight and trivial in themselves, but which theorists would not believe to be fortuitous, since it was known that Giordano Bruno had passed some time in England in Shakespeare's day, and had frequented the society of the most distinguished men. As soon as the matter was closely investigated, however, the probability of any direct influence vanished almost to nothing.

Giordano Bruno remained on English ground from 1583 to 1585. Coming from France, where he had instructed Henri III. in the Lullian art, a mechanical, mnemotechnic method for the solution of all possible scientific problems, he brought with him a letter of recommendation to Mauvissière, the French Ambassador, in whose house he was received as a friend of the family during the whole of his stay in London. He made the acquaintance of many leading men of the time, such as Walsingham, Leicester, Burghley, Sir Philip Sidney and his literary circle, but soon went on to Oxford in order to lecture there and disseminate the doctrines which lay nearest his heart. These were the Copernican system in opposition to the Ptolemaic, which still held the field at Oxford, and the theory that the same principle of life is diffused through everything--atoms and organisms, plants, animals, human beings, and the universe at large. He quarrelled with the Oxford scholars, and held them up to ridicule and contempt in his dialogue _La Cena de le Ceneri_, published soon after, in which he speaks in the most disparaging terms of the coarseness of English manners. The dirtiness of the London streets, for example, and the habit of letting one goblet go round the table, from which every one drank, aroused his dislike and scorn scarcely less than the rejection of Copernicus by the pedants of the University.

At the very earliest, Shakespeare cannot have come to London until the year of Bruno's departure from England, and can therefore scarcely have met him. The philosopher exercised no influence upon the spiritual life of the day in England. Not even Sir Philip Sidney was attracted by his doctrine, and his name does not once occur in Greville's Life of Sidney, although Greville had seen much of Bruno. Brunnhofer, who has studied the question, points out, as showing how little trace Bruno left behind him in England, that there is not in the Bodleian a single contemporary manuscript or document of any kind which throws the least light upon Bruno's stay in London or Oxford.[2] It has been maintained, nevertheless, that Shakespeare must have read his philosophic writings in Italian. It is, of course, possible; but there is nothing in _Hamlet_ to prove it--nothing that cannot be fully accounted for without assuming that he had the slightest acquaintance with them.

The only expression in Shakespeare which, probably by accident, has an entirely pantheistic ring is "The prophetic soul of the wide world" in Sonnet cvii.; the only passages containing an idea, not certainly identical, but comparable with Bruno's doctrine of the metamorphosis of natural forms are the cyclical Sonnets lix., cvi., cxxiii. If Giordano Bruno really had anything to do with these passages, it must be because Shakespeare had heard some talk about the great Italian's doctrine, which may just at that time have been recalled to the recollection of his English acquaintances by his death at the stake in Rome, on February 17, 1600. If Shakespeare had studied his writings, he would, among other things, have obtained some glimmering of the Copernican system, of which he knows nothing. On the other hand, it is quite conceivable that he may have picked up in conversation an approximate and incomplete conception of Bruno's philosophy, and that this conception may have given birth to the above-mentioned philosophical reveries. All the passages in _Hamlet_ which have been attributed to the influence of Bruno really stand in much closer relation to writers under whose literary and philosophical influence we know beyond a doubt that Shakespeare fell.

There is preserved in the British Museum a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, folio, London, 1603, with Shakespeare's name written on the fly-leaf. The signature is, I believe, a forgery; but that Shakespeare had read Montaigne is clear beyond all doubt.

There are many evidences of the influence exerted by Montaigne's Essays on English readers of that date. It was only natural that the book should vividly impress the greatest men of the age; for there were not at that time many such books as Montaigne's--none, perhaps, containing so living a revelation, not merely of an author, but of a human being, natural, many-sided, full of ability, rich in contradictions.

Outside of _Hamlet_, we trace Montaigne quite clearly in one passage in Shakespeare, who must have had the Essays lying on his table while he was writing _The Tempest_. Gonzalo says (ii. I)--

"I' the commonwealth I would by contrarie Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil: No occupation, all men idle, all; And women too."

We find this speech almost word for word in Montaigne (