Book VIII

. chap. viii.). Imogen's head is laid towards the east, and the brothers sing over her the beautiful duet which their father had taught them at the burial of their mother. Its rhythm contains the germ of all that later became Shelley's poetry.

The first verse runs:

"Fear no more the heat of 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-sweeper, come to dust."[2]

The concluding verses, in which the voices are heard first in solo and then in duets, form a wonderful harmony of metric and poetic art.

This idyl, in which he found and expressed his reawakened love for the heart of Nature, has been worked out by Shakespeare with especial tenderness. He by no means intended to represent a flight from scorn of mankind as a thing desirable in itself, but merely to depict solitude as a refuge for the weary, and existence in the country as a happiness for those who have done with life.

As a drama, _Cymbeline_ contains more of the nature of intrigue than any earlier play. There is no little skill displayed in the way Pisanio misleads Cloten by showing him Posthumus's letter, and where Imogen takes the headless Cloten, attired in Posthumus's clothes, for her murdered husband. The mythological dream vision seems to have been interpolated for use at court festivities. The explanatory tablet left by Jupiter, and the king's joyful outburst in the last scene, "Am I a mother to the birth of three?" prove that even at his fullest and ripest Shakespeare was never securely possessed of an unfailing good taste, but such trifling errors of judgment are more than counterbalanced by the overflowing richness of the fairylike poetry of this drama

[1] Scarcely any poet has been more followed in modern times than Shakespeare. We have already drawn attention to the by no means accidental resemblances in Voltaire, Goethe, and Schiller, and we have further instances. Schiller's _D. Jungfrau von Orleans_ is markedly indebted to the first part of _Henry VI_. The scene between the maid and the Duke of Burgundy (ii. 10) is fashioned after the corresponding

## scene in Shakespeare (iii. 3), and that between the maid and her father

in Schiller (iv. II) answers to Shakespeare's (v. 4). The apothecary in Oehlenschläger's _Aladdin_ is borrowed from the apothecary in _Romeo and Juliet_. In Björnstjerne Björnson's _Maria Stuart_ (ii. 2) Ruthven rises from a sick bed to totter into the conspirators with Knox, and take the more eager share in the plot to murder Rizzio, as the sick Ligarius makes his way to Brutus (_Julius Cæsar_, ii. I) to join the conspiracy to murder Cæsar.

[2] It is somewhat remarkable that Guiderius and Arviragus should know anything about chimney-sweepers.

XIX

_WINTER'S TALE--AN EPIC TURN--CHILDLIKE FORMS--THE PLAY AS A MUSICAL STUDY--SHAKESPEARE'S ÆSTHETIC CONFESSION OF FAITH_

We are now about to see Shakespeare enthralled and reinspired by the glamour of fairy tale and romance.

The _Winter s Tale_ was first printed in the Folio of 1623, but, as we have already mentioned, an entry in Dr. Simon Forman's diary informs us that he saw it played at the Globe Theatre on the 15th of May 1611. A notice in the official diary of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, goes to prove that at that date the play was quite new. "For the king's players. An olde playe called Winter's Tale, formerly allowed of by Sir George Bucke, and likewyse by mee on Mr. Hemmings his word that nothing profane was added or reformed, though the allowed book was missinge; and therefore I returned itt without fee this 19th of August 1623." The Sir George Bucke mentioned here did not receive his official appointment as censor until August 1610. Therefore it was probably one of the first performances of the _Winters Tale_ at which Forman was present in the spring of 1611.

We have already drawn attention to Ben Jonson's little fling at the play in the introduction to his _Bartholomew's Fair_ in 1614.

The play was founded on a romance of Robert Greene's, published in 1588 under the title of "Pandosto, the Triumph of Time," and was re-named half-a-century later "The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia." So popular was it, that it was printed again and again. We know of at least seventeen editions, and in all likelihood there were more.

Shakespeare had adapted Lodge's _Rosalynde_ in his earlier pastoral play, _As You Like It_, very soon after its publication in 1590. It is significant that this other tale, with its peculiar blending of the pathetic and idyllic, should only now, though it must have long been familiar to him, strike him as suitable for dramatic treatment. Karl Elze's theory that Shakespeare had adapted the story in some earlier work, which Greene had in his mind when he wrote his famous and violent accusation of plagiarism, cannot be considered as more than a random conjecture. Greene's attack was sufficiently accounted for by that remodelling and adaptation of older works which was practised by the young poet from the very first, and it clearly aimed at _Henry VI_.

Shakespeare, who could not, of course, use Greene's title, called his play _A Winters Tale_; a title which would convey an impression, at that time, of a serious and touching or exciting story, and he plainly strove for a dream-like and fantastic effect in his work. Mamillius says, when he begins his little story (Act ii. sc. I), "A sad tale's best for winter," and in three different places the romantic impossibility of the plot is impressed upon the audience. In the description of the discovery of Perdita we are warned that "this news, which is called true, is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion" (Act v. sc. 2).

The geographical extravagances are those of the romance; it was Greene who surrounded Bohemia with the sea and transferred the Oracle of Delphi to the Island of Delphos. But Shakespeare contributed the anachronisms; it was he who made the oracle exist contemporaneously with Russia as an empire, who made Hermione a daughter of a Russian Emperor and caused her statue to be executed by Giulio Romano. The religion of the play is decidedly vague, the very characters themselves seem to forget at times what they are, one moment figuring as Christians, and the next worshipping Jupiter and Proserpina. In the same play in which a pilgrimage is made to Delphi to obtain an oracle, a shepherd lad says there is "but one puritan amongst them, and he sings songs to hornpipes" (Act iv. sc. 2). All this is unintentional, no doubt, but it greatly adds to the general fairy tale effect.

We do not know why Shakespeare transposed the localities. In Greene's book the tragedy of the play occurs in Bohemia, and the idyllic part in Sicily; in the drama the situations are reversed. It might be that Bohemia seemed to him a more suitable country for the exposure of an infant than the better known and more thickly populated island of the Mediterranean.

All the main features of the play are drawn from Greene, first and foremost the king's unreasonable jealousy because his wife, at his own urgent request, invites Polixenes to prolong his stay and speaks to him in friendly fashion. Among the grounds of jealousy enumerated by Greene was the naïve and dramatically unsuitable one that Bellaria, in her desire to please and obey her husband by showing every attention to his guest, frequently entered his bed-chamber to ascertain if anything was needed there.[1] Greene's queen really dies when she is cast off by the king in his jealous madness, but this tragic episode, which would have deprived him of his reconciliation scene, was not adopted by Shakespeare. He did, however, include and amplify the death of Mamillius, their little son, who pines away from sorrow for the king's harsh treatment of his mother. Mamillius is one of the gems of the play; a finer sketch of a gifted, large-hearted child could not be. We can but feel that Shakespeare, in drawing this picture of the young boy and his early death, must once again have had his own little son in his mind, and that it was of him he was thinking when he makes Polixenes say of his young prince (Act i. sc. 2):

"If at home, sir, He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter; Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy; My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all: He makes a July's day short as December; And with his varying childness, cures in me Thoughts that would thick my blood." _Leontes_. So stands this squire Offic'd with me."

The father's tone towards little Mamillius is at first a jesting one.

"Mamillius, art thou my boy?" _Mamillius_. Ay, my good lord. _Leontes_. Why, that's my bawcock. What, hast smutch'd thy nose? They say it is a copy out of mine."

Later, when jealousy grows upon him, he cries:

"Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear'st! my collop!--Can thy dam?--may'st be?"

The children of the French poets of the middle and end of that century were never childlike. They would have made a little prince destined to a sad and early death talk solemnly and maturely, like little Joas in Racine's _Athelie_; but Shakespeare had no hesitation in letting his princeling talk like a real child. He says to the lady-in-waiting who offers to play with him:

"No, I'll none of you. _lst Lady_. Why, my sweet lord? _Mamillius_. You'll kiss me hard, and speak to me as if I were a baby still."

He announces that he likes another lady better because her eyebrows are black and fine; and he knows that eyebrows are most becoming when they are shaped like a half-moon, and look as though drawn with a pen.

"_2nd Lady_. Who taught you this? _Mamillius_. I learn'd it out of women's faces. Pray, now. What colour are your eyebrows? _lst Lady_. Blue, my lord. _Mam_. Nay, that's a mock; I have seen a lady's nose That has been blue, but not her eyebrows."

The tale he is about to tell is cut short by the entrance of the furious king.

During the trial scene, which forms a parallel to that in _Henry VIII_., tidings are brought of the prince's death (Act iii. sc. I):

"----whose honourable thoughts (Thoughts too high for one so tender) cleft the heart That could conceive a gross and foolish fire Blemished his gracious dam."

In Greene's tale the death of the child causes that of his mother, but in the play, where it follows immediately upon the king's defiant rejection of the oracle, it effects a sudden revulsion of feeling in him as a punishment direct from Heaven. Shakespeare allowed Hermione to be merely reported dead because his mood at this time required that the play should end happily. That Mamilius seems to pass entirely out of every one's memory is only another proof of a fact we have already touched upon, namely, Shakespeare's negligent style of work in these last years of his working life. The poet, however, is careful to keep Hermione well in mind; she is brought before us in the vision Antigonus sees shortly before his death, and she is preserved during sixteen years of solitude that she may be restored to us at the last. It is, indeed, chiefly by her personality that the two markedly distinct parts of this wasp-waisted play are held together.

Although, as in Pericles, there is more of an epic than a dramatic character about the work, it possesses a certain unity of tone and feeling. As a painting may contain two comparatively unconnected groups which are yet united by a general harmony of line and colouring, so, in this apparently disconnected plot, there is an all-pervading poetic harmony which we may call the tone or spirit of the play. Shakespeare was careful from the first that its melancholy should not grow to such an incurable gloom as to prevent our enjoyment of the charming scenes between Florizel and Perdita at the sheep-shearing festival, or the thievish tricks of the rascal Autolycus. The poet sought to make each chord of feeling struck during the play melt away in the gentle strain of reconciliation at the close. If Hermione had returned to the king at once, which would have been the most natural course of events, the play would have ended with the third act. She therefore disappears, finally returning to life and the embrace of the weeping Leontes in the semblance of a statue.

Looked upon from a purely abstract point of view, as though it were a musical composition, the play might be considered in the light of a soul's history. Beginning with powerful emotions, suspense and dread; with terrible mistakes entailing deserved and undeserved suffering, it leads to a despair which in turn gradually yields to forgetfulness and levity; but not lastingly. Once alone with its helpless grief and hopeless repentance, the heart still finds in its innermost sanctuary the memory which, death-doomed and petrified, has yet been faithfully guarded and cherished unscathed until, ransomed by tears, it consents to live once more. The play has its meaning and moral just as a symphony may have, neither more nor less. It would be absurd to seek for a psychological reason for Hermione's prolonged concealment. She reappears at the end because her presence is required, as the final chord is needed in music or the completing arabesque in a drawing.

Among Shakespeare's additions in the first part of the play we find the characters of the noble and resolute Paulina and her weakly good-natured husband. Paulina, who has been overlooked by both Mrs. Jameson and Heine in their descriptions of Shakespeare's feminine characters, is one of the most admirable and original figures he has put upon the stage. She has more courage than ten men, and possesses that natural eloquence and power of pathos which determined honesty and sound common sense can bestow upon a woman. She would go through fire and water for the queen whom she loves and trusts. She is untouched by sentimentality; there is as little of the erotic as there is of repugnance in her attitude towards her husband. Her treatment of the king's jealous frenzy reminds us of Emilia in _Othello_, but the resemblance ends there. In Paulina there is a vein of that rare metal which we only find in excellent women of this not essentially feminine type. We meet it again in the nineteenth century in the character of Christiana Oehlenschläger as we see it in Hauch's beautiful commemorative poem.

The rustic fête in the second part of the play, with the conversations between Florizel and Perdita, is entirely Shakespeare's work; above all is the diverting figure of Autolycus his own peculiar property.

In Greene's tale the king falls violently in love with his daughter when she is restored to him a grown woman, and he kills himself in despair when she is wedded to her lover. Shakespeare rejected this stupid and ugly feature; his ending is all pure harmony.

Here, as in _Cymbeline_, we see the poet compelled by the nature of his theme to dwell upon the disastrous effects of jealousy. This is the third time he treats of such suspicions driving to madness. Othello was the first great example, then Posthumus, and now Leontes.

The case of Leontes is so far unique that no one has suggested causes of jealousy, nor slandered Hermione to him. His own coarse and foolish imaginings alone are to blame. This variation of the vice was evidently intended to darken the background against which womanly high-mindedness and blamelessness were to shine forth.

Mrs. Jameson has charmingly said that Hermione combines such rare virtues as "dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness." As queen, wife, and mother, there is a majestic lovableness about her, a grand and gracious simplicity, a natural self-control, the proverb, "Still waters run deep," being eminently applicable to her. Her gentle dignity contrasts well with Paulina's enthusiastic intrepidity, and her noble reticence with Paulina's free outspokenness. Her attitude and language during the trial scene are superb, far outshining Queen Katherine's on a similar occasion. Her nature, the ideal Englishwoman's nature, all meekness and submissiveness, rises in dignified protest. She is brief in her self-defence; life has no value for her since she has lost her husband's love, since her little son has been removed from her as though she were plague-stricken, and her new-born daughter "from her breast, the innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, haled out to murder." Her only desire is to vindicate her honour, yet the first words of this cruelly accused and shamefully treated woman are full of pity for the remorse which Leontes will some day suffer. Her language is that of innocent fortitude. When about to be taken to prison she says:

"There's some ill planet reigns: I must be patient till the heavens look With an aspect more favourable. Good my lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities: but I have That honourable grief lodged here which burns Worse than tears drown."

She bids her women not weep until she has deserved imprisonment; then indeed their tears will have cause to flow.

In the second half of the _Winters Tale_ we are surrounded by a fresh and charming country, and shown a picture of rustic happiness and well-being. No one was less influenced by the sentimental vagaries of the fantastic pastorals of the day than Shakespeare. He had drawn in Corin and Phebe, in _As You Like It_, an extremely natural, and therefore not particularly poetical, shepherd and shepherdess; and the herdsmen in the _Winters Tale_ are no beautiful languishing souls. They do not write sonnets and madrigals, but drink ale and eat pies and dance. The hostess serves her guests with a face that is "o' fire with labour and the thing she took to quench it." The clowns' heads are full of the prices of wool; they have no thought for roses and nightingales, and their simplicity is rather comical than touching. They are more than overmatched by the light-fingered Autolycus, who educates them by means of ballads, and eases them of their purses at the same time. He is a Jack-of-all-trades, has travelled the country with a monkey, been a process-server, bailiff, and servant to Prince Florizel; he has gone about with a puppet-show playing the Prodigal Son; finally, he marries a tinker's wife and settles down as a confirmed rogue. He is the clown of the piece--roguish, genial, witty, and always master of the situation. In spite of the fact that Shakespeare seized every opportunity to flout the lower classes, that he always gave a satirical and repellent picture of them as a mass, yet their natural wit, good sense, and kind-heartedness are always portrayed in his clowns with a sympathetic touch. Before his time, the buffoon was never an inherent part of the play; he came on and danced his jig without any connection with the plot, and was, in fact, merely intended to amuse the uneducated portion of the audience and make them laugh. Shakespeare was the first to incorporate him into the plot, and to endow him, not merely with the jester's wit, but with the higher faculties and feelings of the Fool in _Lear_, or the gay humour of the vagabond pedlar, Autolycus.

The clown in the _Winter's Tale_ is the drollest and sharpest of knaves, and is employed to unravel the knot in the story. He it is who transports the old shepherd and his son from Bohemia to the court of King Leontes in Sicily.

The ludicrous features of rustic society, however, are quite overpowered by the kind-heartedness which stamps every word coming from the lips of these worthy country folk, and prepares us for the appearance of Perdita in their midst.

She has been adopted out of compassion, and, with her gold, proves a source of prosperity to her adoptive parents. Thus she grows up without feeling the pressure of poverty or servitude. She wins the prince's heart by the beauty of her youth, and when we first see her she is attired in all her splendour as queen of a rural festival. Modest and charming as she is, she shows the courage of a true princess in face of the difficulties and hardships she must encounter for the sake of her love.

She is one of Shakespeare's cherished children, and he has endowed her with his favourite trait--a distaste for anything artificial or unnatural. Not even to improve the flowers in her garden will she employ the art of special means of cultivation. She will not have the rich blooms of "carnations and streaked gillyflowers" there; they do not thrive and she will not plant them. When Polixenes asks why she disdains them, she replies (Act iv. sc. 3):

"For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature."

To which Polixenes makes the profound response:

"Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so over that art Which you say adds to nature is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race; this is an art Which does mend nature,--change it rather; but The art itself is nature." With great creating nature."

These are the most profound and subtle words that could well be spoken on the subject of the relations between nature and culture; the clearest repudiation of that gospel of naturalism against which the figure of Caliban and the ridicule cast upon Gonzalo's Utopia in _The Tempest_ are protests. Perdita herself is one of those chosen flowers which are the product of that true culture which preserves and ennobles nature.

They are also words of genuine wisdom on the relative positions of nature and art. Shakespeare's art was that of nature itself, and in this short speech we possess his æsthetic confession of faith.

His ideal was a poetry which strayed neither in matter nor manner from what Hamlet calls "the modesty of nature." Although he did not wholly succeed in escaping its infection, Shakespeare invariably pursued the artificial taste of the times with gibes. From the days when he made merry at the expense of Euphuisms in _Love's Labours Lost_ and Falstaff, until now, when he puts such affectedly poetical language in the mouths of his courtiers in the _Winter s Tale_, he has always ridiculed it vigorously.

In the first scene of the play Camillo says in praise of Mamillius:

"They that went on crutches before he was born desire still their life to see him a man.

Whereupon Archidamus sarcastically inquires:

"Would they else be content to die?"

and Camillo is forced to laughingly confess:

"Yes, if there were no other excuse why they should desire to live."

Still more absurd is the style in which the Third Gentleman describes, in the last scene of the play, the meeting between the king and his long-lost daughter and the aspect of the spectators. He says of Paulina:

She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled.[2]

This comical diction reaches a climax in the following expressions:

"One of the prettiest touches of all, and that _which angled for mine eyes, caught water though not the fish_, was when at the relation of the queen's death, with the manner how she came to't, bravely confessed and lamented by the king, how attentiveness wounded his daughter; till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an 'Alas,' I would fain say, _bleed tears_, for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed colour; some swooned, all sorrowed: if all the world could have seen't _the woe had been universal_."

That Shakespeare's æsthetic sense did not sanction such expressions as these of the Third Gentleman scarcely needs stating. Perdita's language is that of nature itself. So great is her dislike of artificiality, that she will not even plant gardener's flowers in her garden, saying:

"No more than were I painted I would wish This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore Desire to breed by me."

Nowhere is Shakespeare's knowledge of nature more charmingly displayed than in her speeches. It is not only the poetic expression that is so wonderful in Perdita's distribution of flowers; it is the intimacy shown with their habits. She says (Act iv. sc. 3):

"Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun And with him rises weeping."

How well she knows that in England the daffodils bloom as early as February and March, while the swallow does not come till April:

"----O Proserpina, For the flowers now that, frighted, thou lett'st fall From Dis's waggon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phœbus in his strength--a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one! Oh, these I lack To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o'er and o'er! _Florizel_. What, like a corse? _Perdita_. No, like a bank for love to lie and play on: Not like a corse; or if, not to be buried, 'But quick and in mine arms." ...

Florizel's answer describes her with a lover's eloquence:

"What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it ever: when you sing I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms, Pray so, and, for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too."...

Her charm is equalled by her pride and resolution. When the king threatens to have her "beauty scratched with briars" if she dares retain her hold upon his son, although she believes all is lost, she says:

"I was not much afraid; for once or twice I was about to speak and tell him plainly, The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike." ...

The delineation of the love between Florizel and Perdita is marked by certain features not to be found in Shakespeare's youthful works, but which reappear with Ferdinand and Miranda in _The Tempest_. There is a certain remoteness from the world about it, a tenderness for those who are still yearning and hoping for happiness and a renunciation of any expectation as far as himself is concerned. He stands outside and beyond it all now. In the old days the poet stood on a level, as it were, with the love he was portraying; now he looks upon it from above with a fatherly eye.

As in _Cymbeline_, the court is here placed in contrast with idyllic life, and shown as the abode of cruelty, stupidity, and vice. Even the better of the two kings, Polixenes, is rough and harsh, and Leontes, whom we are not to look upon as criminal, but only as misled by his miserable suspicions, offers a true picture of the princely attitude and princely behaviour of the time of the Renaissance, during the sixteenth century in Italy and about a century later in England. It was with good reason that Belarius said in _Cymbeline_ (Act iii. sc. 3):

"And we will fear no poison, which attends In place of greater state."

We see that the thoughts of the king immediately turn to poison when he believes that his wife has deceived him, and we also see that the courtier in whom he confides has all the means ready to hand (Act i. sc. 2):

"And thou ... ... might'st bespice a cup, To give mine enemy a lasting wink; Which draught to me were cordial. _Camillo_. Sir, my lord, I could do this, and that with no rash potion, But with a lingering dram that should not work Maliciously like poison."

When, to escape committing this crime, Camillo takes flight with Polixenes, and the king has to be content with wreaking his vengeance on the hapless Hermione and her infant, he returns again and again to the thought of having them burned:

"Say that she were gone, Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest Might come to me again."'

Then the command with regard to the child:

"Hence with it, and, together with the dam, Commit them to the fire!" (Act ii/sc. 3).'

Paulina shall share their fate for daring to oppose him:

"I'll ha' thee burnt!"

When she is gone, he repeats his order for the burning of the infant:

"Take it hence And see it instantly consumed with fire.... ... If thou refuse, And wilt encounter with my wrath, say so; The bastard brains with these my proper hands Shall I dash out. Go, take it to the fire!"

We can see that Shakespeare had no intention of allowing the drama to become mawkish by giving too free scope to the humours of a pastoral play.

The resemblance between the sufferings of the infant Perdita, put ashore on the coast of Bohemia during a tempest, and those of the infant Marina, born during a storm at sea, is accentuated by lines which markedly recall a well-known passage in _Pericles._ In the _Winter's Tale_ we have (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Thou'rt like to have A lullaby too rough: I never saw The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour!"[3]

The impression designedly produced upon the audience, that all this is not serious earnest, enables Shakespeare to approach more nearly to tragic dissonance than would otherwise be permissible in a work of this kind. The atmosphere of fairy tale, so skilfully breathed here and there throughout the play, carries with it a certain playfulness of expression which gives a touch of raillery to incidents which would otherwise be horrible. Playfulness it is, and we once more obtain a glimpse of this quality which has so long deserted Shakespeare. It would be difficult to find a more roguish bit of drollery than the old shepherd's monologue on finding the child (Act iii. sc. 3):

"A pretty one; a very pretty one: sure, some 'scape: though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the 'scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work: they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here."

The same tone is preserved in the young shepherd's account of how he saw Antigonus torn to pieces by a bear. Impossible to feel horror-stricken or solemn over this:

"And then for the land-service, to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone; how he cried to me for help, and said his name was Antigonus, a nobleman. But to make an end of the ship, to see how the sea flap-dragoned it; but first how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them; and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than sea or weather."

It does not seem very likely that the unfortunate man's chief anxiety while the bear was tearing him to pieces would be to inform the shepherd of his name and rank. He forgot to add his age, although, through a slip on Shakespeare's part, the old shepherd knows without being told that Antigonus was aged.

Shakespeare did not concentrate his whole strength on this play either. He took no great pains to reduce his scattered materials to order, and, as if in defiance of those classically cultivated people who demanded unity of time and place, he allowed sixteen years to elapse between two acts, leaving us on the voyage between Sicily and Bohemia, between reality and wonderland. In other words, he has freely improvised on his instrument upon a given poetic theme; he has painted purely decoratively, content with a general harmony of colour and unity of tone, without giving much thought to any ultimate meaning.

[1] _The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia_. Shakespeare's Library. T. P. Collins. Vol. i. p. 7.

[2] Julius Lange positively asserts that these expressions are not to be taken as an intentional jest on the part of Shakespeare, but are to be regarded as part of his style ("said in sober earnest," to quote his own words), and he makes them the pretext of an attack upon the "then, as now, idolised Shakespeare--in whose works, after all, we find more high-sounding and highly-coloured words than any meaning or real understanding of life." (_Tilskueren_, 1895, p. 699.)

[3] In _Pericles_:

"For thou'rt the rudliest welcome to this world That e'er was prince's child."

XX

_THE TEMPEST--WRITTEN FOR THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH'S WEDDING_

It is a different matter with that rich, fantastic wonder-poem, _The Tempest_, on which Shakespeare concentrated for the last time all the powers of his mind. Everything here is ordered and concise, and so inspired with thought that we seem to be standing face to face with the poet's idea. In spite of all its boldness of imagination, the dramatic order and condensation are such that the whole complies with the severest rules of Aristotle, the action of the entire play occupying in reality only three hours.

Owing to a notice by the Master of the Revels concerning a performance of the play at Whitehall in 1611, the date 1610-11 was long accepted as the year of its production. This memorandum is, however, a forgery, and the sole bit of reliable information we possess of _The Tempest_, before its appearance in the Folio edition of 1613, is a notice in Vertue's Manuscripts of a performance at court in February 1613, as one of the festivities celebrating the Princess Elizabeth's wedding. We can prove that this was its first performance and that it was written expressly for the occasion.

The Princess Elizabeth had been educated at Combe Abbey, far from the impure atmosphere of the court, under the care of Lord and Lady Harrington, an honourable and right-minded couple. When returned to her parents at the age of fifteen, she was distinguished by a charm and dignity beyond her years, and soon became the special favourite of her brother Henry, then seventeen years of age. Claimants for her hand were not long in appearing. The Prince of Piedmont was among the first, but the Pope would not consent to a marriage between a Catholic potentate and a Protestant princess. The next wooer was no less a person than Gustavus Adolphus, and his suit was rejected because James refused to bestow his daughter upon the enemy of his friend and brother-in-law, Christian IV. of Denmark. As early as December 1611 negotiations were entered upon on behalf of Prince Frederick V., who had just succeeded his father as Elector of the Palatinate. There was much to be said in favour of an alliance with a son of the man who had stood at the head of the Protestant League in Germany, and in May 1612 a preliminary contract of betrothal was signed. In the August of the same year an ambassador from the young Elector came to England. Meanwhile the first suitor, strongly supported by the Queen's Catholic sympathies, had reappeared. The King of Spain had also made some overtures, but they had fallen through on account of their implying the conversion of the Princess to the Catholic faith. It was the Elector Frederick, therefore, who was finally victorious in the contest, and matters were soon so far settled that he could set out on his journey to England. He was very popular there by reason of his Protestantism, and he arrived at Gravesend amid general rejoicing. He sailed up to Whitehall on the 22nd of October, and was enthusiastically greeted by the crowd. King James received him warmly, and presented him with a ring worth eighteen hundred pounds. He was ardently supported by the young Prince of Wales, who announced his intention of following his sister on her wedding-tour to Germany, where it was his secret purpose to look for a bride for himself, regardless of political intrigue.

The Elector Palatine was a remarkably handsome and prepossessing young man. Born on the 16th of August 1596, he was at this time just sixteen years of age, and nothing in his conduct suggested the unmanly and contemptible character he displayed eight years later, when he, as King of Bohemia, lost the battle of Prague through a drunken revel. The contemporary English accounts of him abound with his praise. He made an excellent impression everywhere, and we read, of his dignified and princely behaviour in a letter from John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, dated 22nd October 1612: "He hath a train of very sober and well-fashioned gentlemen, his whole number is not above 170, servants and all, being limited by the King not to exceed." The condition of the exchequer would not permit of any unnecessary extravagance, and in less than a month after the wedding the whole retinue appointed to attend on the Prince during his stay in England was dismissed--a slight which the young Princess took very much to heart.

The much beloved Prince Henry was far from well at the time of his future brother-in-law's arrival in London. He had injured himself by violent bodily exercise during the unusually hot summer, and had ruined his digestion by eating great quantities of fruit. We now know that the illness by which he was attacked was typhus fever, and it appears that not many days after he was convalescent he incurred a severe relapse by playing tennis in the cold open air with no more clothing on the upper part of his body than a shirt.

High-minded, enlightened, and honourable as he was, Prince Henry was the idol and hope of the English nation. Queen Anne had taken the Prince, while he was yet a boy, to visit Raleigh at the Tower, soon after the illustrious prisoner had been forced to abandon those hopes of the Admiralship of the Danish fleet which he had based on the visit of Christian the Fourth, to England. Prince Henry had been intimate with Raleigh since 1610, and is reported to have said, "No man but my father would have kept such a bird in a cage!" He had, with great difficulty, obtained from the King a promise that Raleigh should be released at Christmas 1612--a promise which was never kept.

On the morning of the 6th of November the Prince's condition was declared hopeless. The Queen sent to the Tower for a bottle of Raleigh's famous cordial, which she believed to have once saved her own life, and in which Raleigh himself placed the greatest faith. He despatched it with a message that it would save the Prince's life, unless he were dying of poison. It only availed to ease his death struggles, however, and, barely nineteen years of age, he died before the day was out.

Never before in the history of England had such hopes been fixed and such affection lavished on an heir-apparent, and we can realise how great would be the grief of the entire nation for his loss. According to the manner of the times, it was generally supposed that he had been poisoned. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, says that grave doubts were entertained, but adds that no traces of poison were found when the body was opened on the second day. The editor of these letters however (author of the _Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea_), remarks: "There is nothing conclusive in this; for, in the first place, there were poisons which left no trace of their presence; and, in the next, if the effects of poisoning had been visible, the physicians would have been afraid to say so. More than one writer has ventured to assert that the atrocious crime was perpetrated with the connivance of the king, whose notorious jealousy of the popular young prince at this period, and foolish fondness for his brother Charles, induced a wretch well known to have been guilty of similar practices--the King's favourite, Viscount Rochester--to cause the prince to be secretly put out of the way. It was hoped by all who objected to the marriage of the Princess to the German Elector that Prince Henry's death would stand in the way of the wedding, for it could hardly be celebrated at a time of such deep mourning. The Elector, however, had come over to England on purpose to be married, and it was not possible to delay the ceremony long. The final marriage contract was signed by the King on the 17th of November, and the formal betrothal took place on the 27th of the same month. The wedding was postponed, but only until February. Sir Thomas Lake writes on the 6th of January that mourning is given up, and the wedding festivities are arranged.

The bride of seventeen was solemnly united to the bridegroom of sixteen to the general gratification of the court, on the 14th of February, in the presence of many spectators. On the 18th of the same month John Chamberlain writes to Mrs. Carleton: "The bridegroom and bride were both in a suit of cloth of silver, richly embroidered with silver, her train carried up by thirteen young ladies, or lord's daughters at least, besides five or six more that could not come near it. These were all in the same livery with the bride, though not so rich. The bride was married in her hair, that hung down long, with an exceeding rich coronet on her head, which the King valued at a million of crowns."

The bridegroom, with the King and Prince Charles, took part in a tournament of the wedding, and earned great applause in the evening by a display of his splendid horsemanship (_Court and Times of James the First_). In Wilson's _Contemporary History_ (p. 64) we read of the bride: "Her vestments were white, the emblem of Innocency, her hair dishevel'd, hanging down her back at length, an ornament of Virginity; a crown of pure gold upon her head, the cognizance of Majesty, being all beset with precious gems, shining liking a constellation, her train supported by twelve young ladies in white garments, so adorned with jewels that her passage looked like a milky way."

Among the various plays chosen for performance at court during these wedding festivities was _The Tempest_, and we shall see that it was written expressly for the occasion.

It is hardly necessary to confute Hunter's theory, argued at great length, that the play dates from 1596. One fact alone will sufficiently prove its absurdity, namely, that use is made in the play of a passage from Florio's translation of Montaigne, which was not published until 1603. Nor is there any foundation for Karl Elze's opinion (also lengthily set forth) that _The Tempest_ was written by 1604. The metre shows that it belongs to Shakespeare's latest period. It has a proportion of 33 in the 100 of eleven-syllabled lines, whereas _Antony and Cleopatra_, written long after 1604, has but 25, and _As You Like It_, of the year 1600, only 12 in the 100.

We have another fragment of internal evidence against the play having been written before 1610. In May 1609 Sir George Somer's fleet was scattered by a storm in mid-ocean while on its way to Virginia. The admiral's ship, driven out of its course, was blown by the gale unto the Bermudas. After all hope had been abandoned, the vessel was saved by being stranded between two rocks in just such a bay as that to which Ariel guides the king's ship in _The Tempest_. A little book was written on the subject of this shipwreck, and the adventures connected with it, by Sylvester Jourdan, and was published in 1610 under the title, "Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called, The Isle of Devils." The storm and the peril of the admiral's ship are described; the vessel had sprung a leak, and the sailors were falling asleep at the pumps out of sheer exhaustion when she grounded. They found the island (hitherto regarded as enchanted) uninhabited, the air mild, and the soil remarkably fertile.

Shakespeare borrowed several details from this book, the name of Bermoothes, mentioned by Ariel in the first act, for instance; and his only reason for not following the narrative in detail was his desire to lay the scene in an island of the Mediterranean.

The play, then, was written for the royal wedding in 1613. This date was first surmised by Tieck, and later declared probable by Johan Meissner, being finally confirmed by Richard Garnett in the _Universal Review_ of 1889. The latter maintains and proves that _The Tempest_ was written for a private audience on the occasion of a wedding; that the nature of the audience and the identity of the wedding are determined by unmistakable references to the personality of the bridegroom, to the early death of Prince Henry, and to the qualities which King James prided himself on possessing, and for which he loved to be praised. Over and above all this, there is internal evidence for the year 1613, and none for any other date.

The play is much shorter than the generality of Shakespeare's dramas, there being only 2000 lines in _The Tempest_ against the average 3000. It was not permitted to take up too much of the King's time nor of that of his guests; moreover, the play had to be written and learned and put on the stage all within the course of, at most, a few months. Thus there was every inducement to make it short.

Not being written for performance in an ordinary theatre, it was desirable to have as few changes of scene as possible, and in this respect _The Tempest_ is unique among Shakespeare's plays. After the opening scene on the deck of the ship, no change of scenery whatever is necessary, although the action transpires on different parts of the island. The occasion of the play made it equally desirable to avoid change of costume, and of this there is actually none, except where Prospero attires himself in ducal robes at the close of the play, and even this he effects on the stage with the assistance of Ariel. We have already referred to the compression of the play, which, instead of extending, as is usual with Shakespeare, over a long period, or even (as in _Pericles_ and _The Winter's Tale_) over a whole lifetime, merely occupies three hours, not much longer than was required for the performance of the play.

In spite of its brevity, two masques, of the kind generally represented before royalty on such occasions, are introduced into the play.

The pantomime and ballet, with its transformations, are much more elaborate than would have been necessary if the scene was only there for its own sake. "Enter several strange Shapes, bringing in a banquet; they dance about it with gentle actions of salutation; and inviting the king, &c., to eat, they depart. Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy; claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes." King James had, as we know, a fancy for all manner of stage machinery, and Inigo Jones contrived quantities of it for use at court festivities.

Still more suggestive is the great wedding masque, which, with its mythological figures, Juno, Ceres, and Iris, occupies nearly the whole of the fourth act. If it were not that _The Tempest_ was written for a bridal performance, this masque would be condemned, so extraneous is it to the plot, as a later interpolation, and as such, indeed, it was considered by Karl Elze. Without it, however, the fourth act dwindles to nothing, and the ballet is obviously required to give it its proper length. Moreover, masque and play are inseparably connected by the famous lines, "and like the baseless fabric of this vision," &c. It has been attributed, without sufficient reason, to Beaumont; but even supposing him to have composed it, it must have been planned by the author of the play and written to his order, and it affords unmistakable proof that _The Tempest_ was composed as an occasional play for the diversion of princes and courtiers. The audience must have been in possession of circumstances justifying the introduction of the masque, and those circumstances could not be anything but a wedding. We may now assert with absolute certainty that _The Tempest_ was performed on the occasion of the Princess Elizabeth's wedding. They would not revive an old play, originally written for the stage, for such a purpose, still less would they use one which had been composed for a previous wedding. Shakespeare would never allow anything unsuitable to be performed; moreover, at no former marriage would such a play have been appropriate. The fact that it was one of the king's musicians who composed the music for Ariel's songs, "Full fathom five" in the first act, and "Where the bee sucks" in the last, renders it still more probable that this of the court was its first performance. Everything indicates a royal wedding.

We find many flattering allusions in this play to King James, who could not possibly be neglected on such an occasion as that of his daughter's bridal. When Prospero, explaining his position to his daughter (Act i. sc. 2), tells how he was foremost among all the dukes for dignity and knowledge of the liberal arts, his special study, and how, absorbed in secret studies, he grew a stranger to his state, his speech conveys that interpretation of James's position and character which he himself favoured, and implies, at the same time, that the possession of these qualities was the cause of his unpopularity. Possibly there was a touch of well-concealed irony in all this. Garnett, indeed, finds an intentional dramatic satire in the crustiness and self-sufficiency of the character, proving that even the development of the highest human qualities is attended by drawbacks. But this is carrying the parallel between the characteristics of Prospero and James too far. Garnett can truly say, however, that just such a prince as Prospero, wise, humane, peace-loving, pursuing distant aims which none but he could realise or fathom; independent of counsellors and more than a match for his enemies in sagacity, holding himself in reserve until the decisive moment and then taking effective action, a devoted student of every lawful science but a sworn foe to the black art, did James imagine himself to be, and as such did he love to be represented.

We have seen with what mingled feelings the King and court would prepare for the Princess's wedding. The grief for Prince Henry's death was still so fresh that all rejoicing must be overshadowed by it. A noisy joyous play would have been out of place, while, upon the other hand, it would not do to destroy all festive feeling by directly recalling the loss the royal family and the nation had so lately sustained. Shakespeare performed this difficult task with admirable tact and good feeling. He alluded to the death of the Prince, but in such a manner that grief was lost in joy. Until the last act of the play the youthful Prince Ferdinand is believed by his father and the courtiers to be dead, and frequent expression is given to their sorrow over their supposed loss. The Prince is not the son of Prospero, but of Alonso, and the sonless Duke finds a son in Ferdinand, as James found one in the Elector Palatine.

The fact that these guarded allusions to Prince Henry's death are found throughout the play prove that it must have been written after the 6th of November, and, since it was evidently performed before the wedding, which was celebrated on the 14th of February, we may see how little time was needed by Shakespeare in which to produce a work actually brimming over with genius, and how far he was from being enfeebled or exhausted when, in this play, he bade farewell for ever to his art and his position in London.

The entire drama is permeated by the atmosphere of that age of discovery and struggling colonists. It has been admirably shown by Watkins Lloyd that all the topics and problems it deals with correspond to the colonisation of Virginia--the marvels brought to light by the discovery of new countries and new races; by the wonderful falsehoods, and still more wonderful truths, of travellers concerning natural phenomena and the superstitions arising from them. Sea perils and shipwreck, the power that lies in such calamities to provoke remorse for crimes committed; the quarrels and mutinies of colonists, the struggles of their leaders to preserve their authority; theories on the civilisation and government of new countries, the reappearance of old world vices on a new soil, the contrast between the reasoning powers of man and those of the savage; and lastly, all the demands made upon the

## activity, promptitude, and energy of the conquerors.

The date of the first Virginian settlement was May 1607, and it then consisted of 107 colonists. The Virginia Company was not founded until 1609 and very little was known about it before 1610. Not before 1612 could they write home, "Our colony is now seven hundred strong." These circumstances all seem to point to 1612-13 as the period during which _The Tempest_ was produced.

XXI

_SOURCES OF THE TEMPEST_

We possess no knowledge of any one particular source from which _The Tempest_ might have been drawn, but it seems probable that Shakespeare constructed his drama upon some already existing foundation. A childishly old-fashioned play by Jacob Ayrer, _Comedia von der schönen Sidea_, seems to have been founded upon a variant of the story used by Shakespeare.[1] Ayrer died in 1605, and his work, therefore, cannot have owed anything to that of the great dramatist. The similarity between the two plays is confined to the relations between Prospero and Alonso, and Ferdinand and Miranda. In the German play we have a banished sovereign, his daughter, and a captive prince, who is compelled to atone for his audacity in making love to the daughter by carrying and cutting firewood. He promises his beloved she shall be queen, and attempting to draw his sword upon his father-in-law, is rendered powerless by magic. There is no real resemblance between the dramas. It is, of course, possible that Dowland, or some other English actor, might have introduced the _Sidea_ from Germany, but Shakespeare did not know German, and in any case the play was too poor a one to interest him. Moreover, since we know that Ayrer did occasionally copy English works, we may safely conclude that both dramatists were indebted to some earlier English source. There is nothing specially original about the above incidents. In Greene's _Friar Bacon_, four men make fruitless efforts to draw swords held in their scabbards by magic, and _The Tempest_ would naturally possess traits in common with other plays representing sorcery upon the stage. In Marlowe's drama, _Dr. Faustus_, for instance, the hero punishes his would-be murderers by making them wallow in filth (_Faustus_, Act iv. sc. 2), just as Prospero drives Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano into the marsh and leaves them there up to their chins in mire (_Tempest_, Act iv.).

It is a most arbitrary and unreasonable supposition of Meissner's that Shakespeare borrowed his wedding masque from the one performed at Prince Henry's christening, in which also Juno, Ceres, and Iris appear. Shakespeare was never so lacking in inventive power that he needed to unearth a description of an old play which had been acted before King James at Stirling Castle some nineteen years previously. We know that the masque itself was not yet in print.

It was an early and correct observation that various minor details of _The Tempest_ were taken from different books of travel. Shakespeare found the name of Setebos, and, possibly, the first idea of Caliban himself, in an account of Magellan's voyage to the south pole in Eden's _Historye of Travaile in East and West Indies_ (1577). From Raleigh's _Discovery of the large, rich, and bewtiful Empire of Guiana_ (1596) he took the fable of the men whose heads stood upon their breasts. Raleigh writes that, though this may be an invention, he is inclined to believe it true, because every child in the provinces of Arromai and Canuri maintains that their mouths were in the middle of their breasts.[2] (See Gonzalo's speech in _The Tempest_, Act iii. sc. 2.)

It was Hunter who first suggested that Shakespeare might have taken some hints from Ariosto. It is possible that he had in mind some stanzas from the 43rd canto of _Orlando Furioso_. The 15th and 14th contain a faint foreshadowing, as it were, of Prospero and Miranda, and the 187th stanza alludes to the power of witchcraft to raise storms and calm seas again. The _Orlando_ had been translated into English by Harrington, but, as we have already observed, Shakespeare was fully qualified to read it in the original. Too much, however, has already been made of these trivial, nay, utterly insignificant coincidences.[3]

It is far more remarkable that the famous and beautiful passage (Act iv.) proclaiming the transitoriness of all earthly things--a passage which seems to be a mournful epitome of the philosophy of Shakespeare's last years of productiveness--may be an easy adaptation of an inferior and quite unknown poet of his day. When the spirit play conjured up by Prospero has vanished he says:

"These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air, And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

In Count Stirling's tragedy of _Darius_, published in London, 1604, the following verses occur:

"Let Greatness of her glassy scepters vaunt, Not scepters, no, but reeds, soon bruis'd, soon broken; And let this worldly pomp our wits enchant, All fades, and scarcely leaves behind a token. Those golden palaces, those gorgeous halls, With furniture superfluously fair, Those stately courts, those sky-encount'ring walls, Evanish all like vapours in the air."

History could scarcely afford a more striking proof that in art the style is all, subject and meaning being of comparatively small importance. Stirling's verses are by no means bad, nor even poor, and their decidedly pleasing rhymes express, in very similar words, exactly the same idea we find in Shakespeare's lines, and were, moreover, their precursors. Nevertheless, both they and the name of their author would be utterly forgotten long since if Shakespeare had not, by a marvellous touch or two, transformed them into a few lines of blank verse which will hold their own in the memory of man as long as the English language lasts.

As Meissner[4] pointed out, Shakespeare was indebted to Frampton's translation of Marco Polo (1579) for one or two suggestive hints. For example, we read in Frampton of the desert of Lob in Asia: "You shall heare in the ayre, the sound of _Tabers and other instruments_, to putte the travellers in feare, and to make them lose their way, and to depart their company and loose themselves: and by that meanes many doe die, being deceived so, by evill spirits, that make these soundes, and also doe call diverse of the travellers _by their names_." Compare this with Caliban's words in _The Tempest_ (Act iii. sc. 2):

"The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a _thousand twangling instruments_ Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices."

And Trinculo's subsequent jesting remark, which evidently refers to the accompaniment of a clown's morris dance: "I would I could see this _tabourer_; he lays it on." Compare also Alonso's lament (Act iii. sc. 3):

"Oh, it is monstrous, monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced _The name of Prospero_: it did bass my trespass."

Shakespeare may have found the first suggestions of Caliban and Ariel in Greene's _Friar Bacon_. In the ninth scene of this play, two necromancers, Bungay and Vandermast, dispute as to which possess the greater power, the pyromantic (fire) spirits or the geomantic (earth) spirits. The fire spirits, says Bungay, are mere transparent shadows that float past us like heralds, while the spirits of earth are strong enough to burst rocks asunder. Vandermast maintains that earth spirits are dull, as befits their place of abode. They are coarse and earthly, less intelligent than other spirits, and thus it is they are at the service of jugglers, witches, and common sorcerers. But the fine spirits are mighty and swift, their power is far-reaching.

A more direct suggestion of Ariel's charming ways was probably found by Shakespeare at the close of the already mentioned _Faithful Shepherdess_, written by his young friend Fletcher. In it the satyr offers his services to the beautiful Corin in terms which recall Ariel's speech to Prospero (Act i. sc. 2):

"All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curled clouds, to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality."

Fletcher's satyr makes the same offer:

"Tell me, sweetest, What new service now is meetest For a satyr? Shall I stray In the middle air, and stay The sailing rack, or nimbly take Hold by the moon, and gently make Suit to the pale queen of night For a beam to give thee light? Shall I dive into the sea, And bring thee coral, making way Through the rising waves that fall In snowy fleeces?" &c.

But a much more striking example of Shakespeare's taste and talent for adaptation is presented by Prospero's farewell speech to the elves (Act v. sc. I), "Ye elves of hills, brooks," &c. Warburton was the first to draw attention to the fact that this speech, in which Shakespeare bids farewell to his art, and tells, through the medium of Prospero's marvellous eloquence, of all that he has accomplished, was founded upon the great incantation in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ (vii. 197-219), where, after the conquest of the golden fleece, Medea, at Jason's request, invokes the spirits of night to obtain the prolongation of his old father's life. A comparison of the text plainly proves Shakespeare's indebtedness to Golding's translation of the Latin work:

"Ye Ayres and Windes: _ye Elites of Hillies, of Brooks, of Woods alone_, _Of standing Lakes_, and of the Night approche ye everyone _Through helpe of whom_ (the crooked bankes much wondring at the thing) _I haue compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring_. By charmes I make the calme seas rough, and make the rough seas playne, _And cover all the Skie with clouds and chase them thence againe._ _By charmes I raise and lay the windes_ and burst the Viper's iaw, _And from the bowels of the earth both stones and trees do draw._ _Whole woods and Forrests I remoouve: I make the Mountains shake_, And euen the earth it selfe to grone and fearefully to quake. _I call up dead men from their graues_, and thee, O lightsome Moone, I darken oft, though beaten brass abate thy perill soone. _Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire, and darkes the Sun at Noone._ . . . . . . . . . . Among the earth-bred brothers you a mortall warre did set And brought asleepe the Dragon fell whose eyes were neuer shet."

The corresponding lines in _The Tempest_ run:

"_Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves_; And ye that on the sands with printless foot _Do chase the ebbing Neptune_, and do fly him When he comes back; you . . . . . . . . _by whose aid_-- Weak masters though ye be--_I have bedimm'd_ _The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds_, And twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault Set roaring war: to the dread-rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt: _the strong-bas'd promontory_ _Have I made shake;_ and by the spurs _pluck'd up_ _The pine and cedar: graves at my command_ _Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd and let 'em forth_ By my so potent art."

The words employed in addressing the elves are actually the same. Medea's power to raise and calm the waves becomes the elfin chase of and flight from the advancing and retreating billows. Both Medea and Prospero proclaim their power to overcloud the sky and darken the sun, to raise winds and shatter trees, tearing them up by the roots. They can make the very mountains tremble, and can compel the grave to give up its dead.

The names Prospero and Stephano may be found in Ben Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_ (1595). Prospero was also the name of a riding-master well known in the London of Shakepeare's day.

Malone has suggested that the name "Caliban" was derived from "cannibal." Although the creature displays no tendency towards cannibalism, it is possible that Shakespeare had this term for a man-eater in his mind when he invented the name; it is even probable, seeing that the passage in Montaigne from which he drew Gonzalo's Utopia is contained in a chapter headed "Les Cannibales." Furness, who has inaugurated such an admirable edition of Shakespeare, considers this surmise an improbable one. He and Th. Elze incline to the belief that the name was derived from Calibia, a town in the neighbourhood of Tunis, but the connection is scarcely more obvious. Shakespeare found the name Ariel in Isaiah xxix. 1, the name of a city in which David dwelt, and he doubtless appropriated it on account of its similarity in sound to both English and Latin words for air.

We now seem to have exhausted all the available literary sources of _The Tempest_, and we need only add that Dryden and Davenant, in their abominable adaptation of the play (published in London 1670), made free use of Calderon's already mentioned "En esta vida todo es vertad y todo es mentira," and thus provided the Miranda, who has never seen a young man, with a counterpart in Hippolyto, who has never seen the face of woman.

[1] Jacob Ayrer: _Opera Theatricum_. Nurnburg, 1618. L. Tieck: _Deutsches Theater_, i. p. 323. Albert Cohn: _Shakespeare in Germany_, ii. pp. 1-75.

[2]

"Or that there were such men Whose heads stood in their breasts? which now we find, Each putter-out of five for one will bring us Good warrant of."

[3] We read of the old man:

"Nella nostra cittade era un uom saggio Di tutte l'arti oltre ogni creder dotto."

Of his arrangements for his daughter, due to the bad character of his wife, we are told:

"Fuor del commercio popolo la invola, Ed ove piu solingo il luogo vede, Questo amplo e bel palagio e ricco tanto Fece fare a demonj per incanto."

Of the storm, which, by the way, is not raised by the said old man, but by hermit, we are merely told:

"E facea alcuno effetto soprumano . . . . . . . Fermare il vento ad un segno di croce E far tranquillo il mar quando è più atroce."

[4] Johan Meissner: _Untersuchungen über Shakespeare's Sturm_.

XXII

_THE TEMPEST AS A PLAY--SHAKESPEARE AND PROSPERO--FAREWELL TO ART_

Although, taken from the point of view of a play, _The Tempest_ is lacking in dramatic interest, the entire work is so marvellously rich in poetry and so inspired by imagination, that it forms a whole little world in itself, and holds the reader captive by that power which sheer perfection possesses to enthrall.

If the ordinary being desires to obtain a salutary impression of his own insignificance and an ennobling one of the sublimity of true genius, he need only study this last of Shakespeare's masterpieces. In the majority of cases the result will be prostrate admiration.

Shakespeare gave freer rein to his imagination in this play than he had allowed himself since the days of the _Midsummer Nights Dream_ and the _First Part of Henry IV_. He felt able, indeed compelled to do this; and, in spite of the restraint imposed upon him by the occasion for which it was written, he devoted his whole individuality to the task with greater force than he had done for years. The play contains far more of the nature of a confession than was usual at this period. Never, with the exception of _Hamlet_ and _Timon_, had Shakespeare been so personal.

It may be said that, in a manner, _The Tempest_ was a continuation of his gloomy period; once again he treated of black ingratitude and cunning and violence practised upon a good man.

Prospero, Duke of Milan, absorbed in scientific study, and finding his real dukedom in his library, imprudently intrusted the direction of his little state to his brother Antonio. The latter, betraying his trust, won over to his side all the officers of state appointed by Prospero, entered into an alliance with the Duke's enemy, Alonso, King of Naples, and reduced the hitherto free state of Milan to a condition of vassalage. Then, with the assistance of Alonso and his brother Sebastian, Antonio attacked and dethroned Prospero. The Duke, with his little three-year-old daughter, was carried out some leagues to sea, placed in a rotten old hull, and abandoned. A Neapolitan noble, Gonzalo, compassionately supplied them with provisions, clothes, and, above all, the precious books upon which Prospero's supernatural powers depended. The boat was driven ashore upon an island whose one inhabitant, the aboriginal Caliban, was reduced to subjection by means of the control exercised over the spirit world by the banished man. Here, then, Prospero dwelt in peace and solitude, devoting himself to the culture of his mind, the enjoyment of nature, and the careful education of his daughter Miranda, who received such a training as seldom falls to the lot of a princess.

Twelve years have passed, and Miranda is just fifteen when the play begins. Prospero is aware that his star has reached its zenith and that his old enemies are in his power. The King of Naples has married his daughter, Claribel, to the King of Tunis, and the wedding has been celebrated, oddly enough, at the home of the bridegroom; but then it was probably the first time in history that a Christian King of Naples had bestowed his daughter upon a Mohammedan. Alonso, with all his train, including his brother and the usurper of Milan, is on his homeward voyage when Prospero raises the storm which drives them on his island. After being sufficiently bewildered and humiliated, they are finally forgiven, and the King's son, purified by the trials through which he has passed, is as Prospero has all along intended that he should be, united to Miranda.

It was evidently Shakespeare's intention in _The Tempest_ to give a picture of mankind as he now saw it, and we are shown something quite new in him, a typical representation of the different phases of humanity.

In Caliban we have the primitive man, the aboriginal, the animal which has just evolved into the first rough stages of the human being. In Prospero we are given the highest development of Nature, the man of the future, the superhuman man of spirit.

We have seen that Shakespeare roughly planned such a character some years back, in the faintly outlined sketch of Cerimon in _Pericles_ (_ante_ p. 591). Prospero is the fulfilment of the promise contained in Cerimon's principal speech, a man, namely, who can compel to his uses all the beneficent powers dwelling in metals, stones, and plants. He is a creature of princely mould, who has subdued outward Nature, has brought his own turbulent inner self under perfect control, and has overpowered the bitterness caused by the wrongs he has suffered in the harmony emanating from his own richly spiritual life.

Prospero, like all Shakespeare's heroes and heroines of this last decade--Pericles, Imogen, and Hermione no less than Lear and Timon--suffers grievous wrong. He is even more sinned against than Timon, has suffered more and lost more through ingratitude. He has not squandered his substance like the misanthrope, but, absorbed in occupations of a higher nature, he has neglected his worldly interests and fallen a victim to his own careless trustfulness.

The injustice offered to Imogen and Hermione was not so detestable in its origin as that suffered by Prospero; the wrong done them sprang from misguided love, and was therefore easier to condone. The crime against the Duke was actuated by such low motives as envy and covetousness.

Tried by suffering, Prospero proves its strengthening qualities. Far from succumbing to the blow, it is not until it has fallen that he displays his true, far-reaching, and terrible power, and becomes the great irresistible magician which Shakespeare himself had so long been. His power is not understood by his daughter, who is but a child, but it is felt by his enemies. He plays with them as he pleases, compels them to repent their past treatment of him, and then pardons them with a calmness of superiority to which Timon could never have attained, but which is far from being that all-obliterating tenderness with which Imogen and Hermione forgive remorseful sinners.

There is less of charity towards the offenders in Prospero's absolution than that element of contempt which has so long and so exclusively filled Shakespeare's soul. His forgiveness, the oblivion of a scornful indifference, is not so much that of the strong man who knows his power to crush if need be, as that of the wisdom which is no longer affected by outward circumstance.

Richard Garnett aptly observes, in his critical introduction to the play in the "Irving Edition," that Prospero finds it easy to forgive because, in his secret soul, he sets very little value on the dukedom he has lost, and is, therefore, roused to very little indignation by the treachery which deprived him of it. His daughter's happiness is the sole thing which greatly interests him now, and he carries his indifference to worldly matters so far that, without any outward compulsion, he breaks his magic wand and casts his books into the sea. Resuming his place among the ranks of ordinary men, he retains nothing but his inalienable treasure of experience and reflection. I quote the following passage from Garnett on account of its remarkable correspondence with the general conception of Shakespeare's development set forth in this book.

"That this Quixotic height of magnanimity should not surprise, that it should seem quite in keeping with the character, proves how deeply this character has been drawn from Shakepeare's own nature. Prospero is not Shakespeare, but the play is in a certain measure autobiographical.... It shows us more than anything else what the discipline of life had made of Shakespeare at fifty--a fruit too fully matured to be suffered to hang much longer on the tree. Conscious superiority untinged by arrogance, genial scorn for the mean and base, mercifulness into which contempt entered very largely, serenity excluding passionate affection while admitting tenderness, intellect overtopping morality but in no way blighting or perverting it--such are the mental features of him in whose development the man of the world kept pace with the poet, and who now shone as the consummate perfection of both."

In other words, it is Shakespeare's own nature which overflows into Prospero, and thus the magician represents not merely the noble-minded great man, but the genius, imaginatively delineated, not, as in _Hamlet_, psychologically analysed. Audibly and visibly does Prospero's genius manifest itself, visible and audible also the inward and outward opposition he combats.

The two figures in which this spiritual power and this resistance are embodied are the most admirable productions of an artist's powers in this or any other age. Ariel is a supernatural, Caliban a bestially natural being, and both have been endowed with a human soul. They were not seen, but created.

Prospero is the master-mind, the man of the future, as shown by his control over the forces of Nature. He passes as a magician, and Shakespeare found his prototype, as far as external accessories were concerned, in a scholar of mark and man of high principles, Dr. Dee, who died in 1607. This Dr. Dee believed himself possessed of powers to conjure up spirits, good and bad, and on this account enjoyed a great reputation in his day. A man owning but a small share of the scientific knowledge of our times would inevitably have been regarded as a powerful magician at that date. In the creation of Prospero, therefore, Shakespeare unconsciously anticipated the results of time. He not merely gave him a magic wand, but created a poetical embodiment of the forces of Nature as his attendant spirit. In accordance with the method described in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ he gave life to Ariel:

"The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends the bringer of that joy."

Ariel is just such a harbinger of joy; from the moment he appears we are content and assured of pleasurable impressions. In the whole record of poetry he is the one good spirit who arrests and affects us as a living being. He is a non-christian angel, a sprite, an elf, the messenger of Prospero's thought, the fulfiller of his will through the elementary spirits subject to the great magician's power. He is the emblem of Shakespeare's own genius, that "affable, familiar ghost" (as Shakespeare expresses it in his 86th sonnet) which Chapman boasted of possessing. His longing for freedom after prolonged servitude has a peculiar and touching significance as a symbol of the yearning of the poet's own genius for rest.

Ariel possesses that power of omnipresence and all those constantly varying forms which are the special gift of imagination. He skims along the foam, flies on the keen north wind, and burrows in the frozen earth. Now he is a fire spirit spreading terror as he flashes in cloven flame, encircling the mast and playing about the rigging of the vessel, or as one great bolt hurls himself to strike with all the power and speed of lightning. Now again, he is a mermaid, seen in fitful glimpses, and chanting alluring songs. He sounds the magic music of the air, he mimics the monotonous splashing of the waves, or barks like a dog and crows like a cock. In every essence of his nature as well as name he is a spirit of the air, a mirage, a hallucination of light and sound. He is a bird, a harpy, and finds his way through the darkness of night to fetch dew from the enchanted Bermudas. Faithful and zealous servant of the good, he terrifies, bewilders, and befools the wicked. He is compounded of charm and delicacy, and is as swift and bright as lightning.

He was formerly in the service of the witch Sycorax, but, incurring her displeasure, was imprisoned by her in the rift of a cloven pine. There he was held in suffering many years, until delivered at last by Prospero's supernatural powers. He serves the magician in return for his release, but never ceases to long for his promised freedom. Although a creature of the air, he is capable of compassion, and can understand a sentiment of devotion which he does not actually feel. His subject condition is painful to him, and he looks forward with joy to the hour of liberty. Spirit of fire and air as he is, his essence exhales itself in music and mischievous pranks.

Caliban, on the other hand, is of the earth earthy, a kind of land-fish, a being formed of heavy and gross materials, who was raised by Prospero from the condition of an animal to that of a human being, without, however, being really civilised. Prospero made much of the creature at first, caressed him and gave him to drink of water mixed with the juice of berries; taught him the art of speech and how to name the greater and the lesser light, and lodged him in his cell. But from the moment Caliban's savage instinct prompted him to attempt the violation of Miranda, Prospero treated him as a slave and made him serve as such. Strangely enough, however, Shakespeare has made him no prosaically raw being, untouched by the poetry of the enchanted island. The vulgar new-comers, Trinculo and Stephano, speak in prose, but Caliban's utterances are always rhythmic; indeed, many of the most exquisitely melodious lines in the play fall from the lips of this poor animal. They sound like an echo from the time he lived within the magic circle and was the constant companion of Prospero and Miranda.

But since, from being their fellow, he has been degraded to their slave, all gratitude for former benefits has disappeared from his mind; and he now employs the language they have taught him in cursing the master who has robbed him, the original inhabitant, of his birthright. His is the hatred of the savage for his civilised conquerors.

We have seen that the abhorrence Shakespeare felt for the vices of the court and fashionable life inclined him during these later years to dream of some natural life far from all civilisation (_Cymbeline_). But his instinct was too sure and his judgment too sound to allow of his ever believing, with the Utopists of his day, that the natural primitive state of man was one of innocence and nobility of soul in the golden age of prehistoric times. Caliban is a protest against this very theory, and Shakespeare distinctly ridicules all such fanaticism in the lines copied from Montaigne, and placed in Gonzalo's mouth, concerning the organisation of an ideal commonwealth; without commerce, law, or letters, without riches or poverty, without corn, oil, or wine, and without work of any kind, but a happy idleness for all.

Caliban represents the primitive, the prehistoric man; yet, such as he is, a poetically inclined philosopher of our day has discovered in him the features of the eternal plebeian. It is instructive to witness with how few reservations Renan was enabled to modernise the type, and shown how, tidied up and washed and interpreted as the dull fickle democracy, Caliban was as capable as the old aristocratic-religious despotism of sounding a conservative note, of protecting the arts and graciously patronising the sciences, &c.

Shakespeare's Caliban was the offspring of Sycorax and begotten by the Devil himself. With such a pedigree he could hardly be expected to rise to any height of angelic goodness and purity. He is, in reality, more of an elemental power than a human being; and therefore rouses neither indignation nor contempt in the mind of the audience, but genuine amusement. Invented, and drawn with masterly humour, he represents the savage natives found by the English in America, upon whom they bestowed the blessings of civilisation in the form of strong drink. There is not only wit but profound significance in the scene (Act ii. sc. 2) in which Caliban, who at first takes Trinculo and Stephano for two spirits sent by Prospero to torment him, allows himself to be persuaded that Trinculo is the Man in the Moon, shown to him by Miranda on beautiful moonlight nights, and forthwith worships him as his god, because he alone possesses the bottle with the heavenly liquor which has been put to the creature's lips, and given him his first taste of the wonderful intoxication produced by fire-water.

Midway between these symbols of the highest culture and of Nature in its crudest form Shakespeare has placed a young girl, as noble in body and soul as her father, and yet so purely and simply a child of Nature that she unhesitatingly follows her instincts, including that of love. She is the counterpart of the masculine ideal in Prospero, being all that is admirable in woman; hence her name, Miranda. To preserve her absolutely unspotted and fresh, Shakespeare has made her almost as young as his Juliet; and to still further accentuate the impression of maidenly immaculateness, she has grown up without seeing a single youth of the other sex, a trait which was used and abused by the Spaniards later in the same century. Hence the wondering admiration of the first meeting between Ferdinand and Miranda:

"What! is't a spirit? Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir, It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit."

When her father denies this she says:

"I might call him A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble."

And Ferdinand:

"My prime request, Which I do last pronounce, is, O you wonder! If you be maid or no?"

It is Prospero, whose greatness shows no less in his power over human beings than over the forces of Nature, who has brought these two together, and who, although assuming displeasure at their mutual attraction, causes all which concerns them to follow the exact course his will has marked out.

He sees into the soul of mankind with as sure an eye as Shakespeare himself, and plays the part of Providence to his surroundings as incontestably as did the poet to the beings of his own creation.

When Prospero shows the young people to his guests, they are playing chess, and there would seem to be a touch of symbol in the fact that they are playing, not only because they wish to do so, but because they must. There is, moreover, something almost personal in the way Prospero trains and admonishes the loving couple. Garnett is inclined to infer from the repeated exhortations to Ferdinand to restrain the impulse of his blood until the wedding-hour has struck, that the play was acted some days before the royal wedding ceremony. But if these warnings were intended for the Elector in his capacity of bridegroom, they were a piece of tasteless impertinence. No, it is far more likely that, as before suggested, they contain a melancholy confession, a purely personal reminiscence. Shakespeare cannot be accused of any excessive severity in such questions of morals. We saw in _Measure for Measure_ that he considered the connection between the two lovers, for which they are to be so severely punished, was to the full as good as marriage, although entered upon without ceremonies. It was no mere formalism which spoke here, but bitter experience. Now that he was already, in thought, on his way back to Stratford, and was living in anticipation of what awaited him there, Shakespeare was reminded of how he and Anne Hathaway forestalled their ceremonial union, and he spoke of the punishment following on such actions as a curse, which he knew:

"Barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both" (Act iv. sc. I).

As already observed, Shakespeare appropriated from some source or another the incident of the youthful suitor being obliged to submit to the trial of carrying and piling wood. It almost seems that his motive in including such an incident was to show that it is man's great and noble privilege to serve out of love. To Caliban all service is slavery; throughout the whole play he roars for freedom, and never so loudly as when he is drunk. For Ariel, too, all bondage, even that of a higher being, is mere torment. Man alone finds pleasure in the servitude of love. Thus Ferdinand bears uncomplainingly, and even gladly, for Miranda's sake, the burden laid upon him (Act iii. sc. I):

"I am in my condition A prince, Miranda, I do think, a king. . . . . . . . . The very instant that I saw you, did My heart fly to your service; there resides To make me slave to it."

She shares this feeling:

"I am your wife if you will marry me! If not, I'll die your maid; to be your fellow You may deny me; but I'll be your servant Whether you will or no."

It is a feeling of the same nature which impels Prospero to return to Milan to fulfil his duty towards the state whose government he has so long neglected.

There are certain analogies between _The Tempest_ and the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In both we are shown a fantastic world in which heavenly powers make sport of earthly fools. Caliban discovering a god in the drunken Trinculo reminds us of Titania's amorous worship of Bottom. Both are wedding-plays, and yet what a difference! _The Midsummer Night's Dream_ was one of Shakespeare's earliest independent poetical works, written at the age of twenty-six, and his first great success. _The Tempest_ was written as a farewell to art and the artist's life, just before the completion of his forty-ninth year, and everything in the play bespeaks the touch of autumn.

The scenery is autumnal throughout, and the time is that of the autumn equinox with its storms and shipwrecks. With noticeable care all the plants named, even those occurring merely in similes, are such flowers and fruit, &c., as appear in the fall of the year in a northern landscape. The climate is harsh and northerly in spite of the southern situation of the island and the southern names. Even the utterances of the goddesses, the blessing of Ceres, for example, show that the season is late September--thus answering to Shakespeare's time of life and frame of mind.

No means of intensifying this impression are neglected. The utter sadness of Prospero's famous words describing the trackless disappearance of all earthly things harmonises with the time of year and with his underlying thought--"We are such stuff as dreams are made on:" a deep sleep, from which we awaken to life, and again, deep sleep hereafter. What a personal note it is in the last scene of the play where Prospero says:

"And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave."

How we feel that Stratford was the poet's Milan, just as Ariel's longing for freedom was the yearning of the poet's genius for rest. He has had enough of the burden of work, enough of the toilsome necromancy of imagination, enough of art, enough of the life of the town. A deep sense of the vanity of all things has laid its hold upon him, he believes in no future and expects no results from the work of a lifetime.

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors . . . . . . . . . . were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air."

Like Prospero, he had sacrificed his position to his art, and, like him, he had dwelt upon an enchanted island in the ocean of life. He had been its lord and master, with dominion over spirits, with the spirit of the air as his servant, and the spirit of the earth as his slave. At his will graves had opened, and by his magic art the heroes of the past had lived again. The words with which Prospero opens the fifth act come, despite all gloomy thoughts of death and wearied hopes of rest, straight from Shakespeare's own lips:

"Now does my project gather to a head; My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time Goes upright with his carriage."

All will soon be accomplished and Ariel's hour of deliverance is nigh. The parting of the master from his genius is not without a touch of melancholy:

"My dainty Ariel! _I shall miss thee_, But yet thou shalt have freedom."

Prospero has determined in his heart to renounce all his magical powers:

"To the elements Be free, and fare thee well!"

He has taken leave of all his elves by name, and now utters words whose personal application has never been approached by any character hitherto set upon the stage by Shakespeare:

"But this rough service I here abjure, and, when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, . . . . . I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book."

Solemn music is heard, and Shakespeare has bidden farewell to his art.

Collaboration in _Henry VIII_. and the production and staging of _The Tempest_ were the last manifestations of his dramatic activity. In all probability he only waited for the close of the court festivities before carrying out his plan of leaving London and returning to Stratford; and Ben Jonson's foolish thrust at _those who beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries_, would not find him in town. When we drew attention to his efforts to increase his capital, and his purchase of houses and land at Stratford, we showed that, even at that early period, he hoped eventually to quit the metropolis, to give up the theatre and literature and to spend the last years of his life in the country. Even supposing him to have delayed his departure until after the performance of _The Tempest_, an event which happened only four months later would have supplied the final inducement to leave. In the month of June 13 a fire broke out, as we know, at the Globe Theatre during a performance of _Henry VIII._, and the whole building was burned to the ground. Thus the scene of his activity for so many long years disappeared, as it were, in smoke, leaving no trace behind. He was probably part owner of the stage properties and costumes, which were all consumed. In any case, the flames devoured all the manuscripts of his plays then in the possession of the theatre, a priceless treasure--for him surely a painful, and for us an irreparable, loss.

XXIII

_THE RIDE TO STRATFORD_

That must have been a momentous day in Shakespeare's life on which, after giving up his house in London, he mounted his horse and rode back to Stratford-on-Avon to take up his abode there for good.

He would recall that day in 1585 when, twenty-eight years younger, with his life lying before him veiled in the mists of expectation and uncertainty, he set out from Stratford to London to try his fortunes in the great city. Then his heart beat high, and he must have felt towards his horse much as the Dauphin did in _Henry V_. (Act iii. sc. 7) when he said, "When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it, the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes."

Life lay behind him now. His hopes had been fulfilled in many ways; he was famous, he had raised himself a degree in the social scale, above all he was rich, but for all that he was not happy.

The great town, in which he had spent the better part of a lifetime, had not so succeeded in attaching him to it that he would feel any pain in leaving it. There was neither man nor woman there so dear to him as to make society preferable to solitude, and the crowded life of London to the seclusion of the country and an existence passed in the midst of family and Nature.

He had toiled enough, his working days were over, and now, at last, the cloud should be lifted from his name which had so long been cast upon it by his profession. It was nine years since he had actually appeared upon the stage, since he had made over his parts to others, and now he had ceased to take any pleasure in his pen. None of those were left for whom he had cared to write plays and put them upon the stage; the new generation and present frequenters of the theatre were strangers to him. There was no one in London who would heed his leaving it, no friends to induce him to stay, no farewell banquet to be given in his honour.

He would remember his first arrival in London, and how, according to the custom of all poor travellers, he sold his horse at Smithfield. He could, if he wished, keep many horses now, but no power could renew the joyous mood of twenty-one. Then the wind had played with the long curls hanging below his hat, now he was elderly and bald.

The journey from London to Stratford took three days. He would, put up at the inns at which he was accustomed to stay on his yearly journey to and fro, and where he was always greeted as a welcome guest, and given a bed with snow-white sheets, for which travellers on foot were charged an extra penny, but which he, as rider, enjoyed gratis. The hostess at Oxford, pretty Mistress Davenant, would give him a specially cordial greeting. The two were old and good friends. Little William, born in 1606, and now seven years old, possessed a certain, perhaps accidental, resemblance of feature to the guest.

As Shakespeare rode on, Stratford, so well known and yet, as settled home, so new, would (as Hamlet says) rise "before his mind's eye." A life of daily companionship with his wife was to begin afresh after a break of twenty-eight years. She was now fifty-seven, and consequently much older, in proportion, than her husband of forty-nine than when they were lovers and newly married, the one under and the other somewhat over twenty. There could be no intellectual bond between them after so long a separation, and their married life was but an empty form.

Of their two daughters, Susanna, the elder, was now thirty, and had been married for six years to Dr. John Hall, a respected physician at Stratford. Judith, the younger daughter, was twenty-eight and unmarried.

The Halls, with their little five-year-old daughter, lived in a picturesque house in Old Stratford, at that time surrounded by woods. Mrs. Shakespeare and Judith lived at New Place, and the spirit prevailing in both establishments was not the spirit of Shakespeare.

Not only the town of Stratford, but his own home and family were desperately pious and puritanical. That power which had been most inimical to him in London, which had dishonoured his profession, and with which he had been at war during all the years of his dramatic

## activity; that very power against which he had striven, sometimes by

open attack, more often by cautious insinuation, had triumphed in his native town behind his back and taken complete possession of his only home.

The closing of the theatre, which did not occur in London until the Puritans had completely gained the upper hand many years later, had already been anticipated in Stratford. The performance of those plays at which Shakespeare in his youth had made acquaintance with the men, his future brother professionals, with whom he sought refuge in London, was strictly forbidden. So long ago as 1602 the town council had carried a resolution that no performance of play or interlude should be permitted in the Guildhall, that long, low building with its eight small-paned windows. It was the only place in Stratford suitable for such a purpose, and was connected with many of Shakespeare's memories. Directly above the long narrow hall, on the first floor, was the school which he had attended daily as a child. Into the hall itself he had awesomely penetrated the day the glories of a theatre were first displayed before his childish eyes. And now eleven years had passed since that wise Council had decreed that any alderman or citizen giving his consent to the representation of plays in this building should be fined ten shillings for every infringement of the prohibition. This not proving a sufficient deterrent, the fine was raised in 1612 from ten shillings to the extravagant sum of £10, equivalent to about £50 in our day. Fifty pounds for allowing a play to be performed in the only hall in the town suitable for the purpose! This was rank fanaticism!

Moreover, it was a fanaticism which had found its way into his own home. That strong tendency to Puritanism which was so marked among his descendants until the race died out, had already developed in his family. His wife was extremely religious, as is often the case with women whose youthful conduct has not been too circumspect. When she captured her boy husband of eighteen, her blood was as warm as his, but now she was vastly his superior in matters of religion. Neither could he look for any real intellectual companionship from his daughters. Susanna was pious, her husband still more so. Judith was as ignorant as a child. Thus he must pay the penalty of his long absence from home and his utter neglect of the education of his girls.

It was to no happy harmony of thought and feeling, therefore, that the poet could look forward as he rode away from his dramatic fairyland to the simplicities of domestic life. The only attractions existing for him there were his position as a gentleman, the satisfaction of no longer being obliged to act and write for money, and the pleasure of living on and roaming about his own property. The very fact that he did go back to Stratford with the little there was to attract him there proves how slight a hold London had taken upon him, and with what a feeling of loneliness, and (now that the bitterness was past) with what indifference, he bade farewell to the metropolis, its inhabitants and its pleasures.

It was the quietude of Stratford which attracted him, its leisure, the emptiness of its dirty streets, its remoteness, from the busy world. What he really longed for was Nature, the Nature with which he had lived in such intimate companionship in his early youth, which he had missed so terribly while writing _As You Like It_ and its fellow-plays, and from which he had so long been separated.

Far more than human beings was it the gardens which he had bought and planted there which drew him back to his native town--the gardens and trees on which he looked from his windows at New Place.

XXIV

_STRATFORD-UPON-AVON_

He was home again. Home once more, where he knew every road and path, every house and field, every tree and bush. The silence of the empty streets struck him afresh as his footsteps echoed down them, and the river Avon shone bright and still between the willows bending down to the water's edge. He had shot many a deer in the neighbourhood of that stream, and it was by its banks that Jaques, in _As You Like It_, had sat as he watched the wounded stag that sighed as though its leathern coat would burst, while the big round tears coursed down its innocent nose. The fine arched bridge was erected in the time of Henry VIII. by the same Sir Hugh Clopton who had built New Place, the house which Shakespeare had bought, and been obliged to restore before his family could live in it.

Close by the river stood the avenue leading to the beautiful Gothic church of the Holy Trinity, with its slender spire and handsome windows. Within were the graves and monuments of the neighbouring gentry, and there, so much sooner than he could possibly have dreamed, was Shakespeare himself to lie.

Passing through Church Street, he would come upon the Guild Chapel, a fine square building, from whose tower rang the weekly bells calling to Sunday-morning service. He remembered those bells from of old, and now they would be constantly sounding in his ears, for New Place lay just across the road. Soon they would be tolling his own funeral knell. Directly adjoining the chapel stood the timbered building which represented both Guildhall and school. Once it had seemed large and spacious; how small and mean it looked now! It was more satisfactory to glance on to the corner where his large garden and green lawns stood, and his eye would rest affectionately upon the mulberry-tree his own hands had planted. Ten steps from his door lay the tavern, quaint and low, and how familiar! Not the first time would it be that he had sat at that table, the largest, it was said, that had ever been cut in England from a single piece of wood. He would at least find something to drink there, and a game of draughts or dice. With a sigh he realised that this tavern was likely to prove his chief refuge from his loneliness.

Every spot was rich in memories. Five minutes' walk would bring him to Henley Street, where he had played as a child, and where stood the old house in which he was born. He would enter; there was the kitchen, which had been the living room as well in his parents' time; near the entry was the woman's storeroom, and above, the sleeping-room in which he was born. How little he dreamed that this spot was to become a place of pilgrimage for the whole Anglo-Saxon race--nay, for the whole civilised world.

He would take the road to Shottery, along which he had walked times out of number in his youth--for had not he and Anne Hathaway kept their trysts there? Right and left rose the high hedges separating the fields. Trees, standing singly or in groups, were scattered about the country, and the road, lined with elms, beeches, and willows, wound its way through the undulating country lying between Stratford and Shottery. Half-an-hour's walk would bring him to Anne Hathaway's cottage, with the moss-grown roof. He would enter, and look once more upon the wooden bench in the chimney-corner on which he and she had sat in their ardent youth. How long ago it all seemed! There was the old fifteenth-century bed in which Anne's parents had slept, with her, as a child, at their feet. The mattress was nothing but a straw palliasse, but the bedstead was beautifully carved with figures in the old style. When, a year or two later, he bequeathed to his wife "the second best bed," did he remember that this bed was already hers, I wonder?

Another day he would make his way as far as Warwick and its castle. The town was not unlike that of Stratford; it had the same timbered houses, but here the two great towers of the castle rose and predominated over the beautiful scenery. How vividly the past would rise up before him as he stood on the bridge and gazed up at the castle. He would remember his own youthful dreams concerning it, and the forms he had conjured up from their graves to people it afresh. There was the Earl of Warwick, who enumerated all the proofs of Gloucester's violent death in _Henry VI._ and that other Earl in the _Second Part of Henry IV_, (Act iii. sc. I) into whose mouth he had put words whose truth he was now proving:

"There is a history in all men's lives Figuring the nature of the times deceased."

Charlcote House he would see too. He had stood as a culprit before its master once, and had suffered the bitterest humiliation of his life, one so deep that it had driven him away from home, and had thus been the means of leading him to success and prosperity in London.

How strange it was to be here again where every one knew and greeted him. In London he had been swallowed up in the crowd. How familiar, too, the homely provincial version of his name, with the abbreviated first syllable. In town that first syllable was always long, a pronunciation, which left no doubt as to the etymology of the name.[1] It was on account of these differing pronunciations that he had, while in London, changed the spelling of his name. He had always written it _Shakspere_, but in town it had from the first (the dedication of _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_) been printed _Shakespeare_: a spelling always followed by the various publishers of the quarto editions of his dramas, only one adopting the orthography _Shakspeare_.[2]

Every one knew him, and he must exchange a word with all--with the ploughman in the field, the farmer's wife in her poultry-yard, the mason on the scaffolding, the fish-dealer at his stall, the cobbler in his workshop, and the butcher in the slaughter-house. How well he could talk to each, for no human occupation, however humble, was unfamiliar to him. He had a thorough acquaintance from of old with the butcher's trade. It had formed a part of his father's business, and his early tragedies contain many a proof of his familiarity with it. The Second and Third Parts of _Henry_ VI. are full of similes drawn from it.[3].

There was hardly any trade, calling, or position in life which he did not understand as if he had been born to it. Doubtless the simple folk of his native town respected him as much for his sound judgment and universal knowledge as for his wealth and property. It would be too much to expect that they should recognise anything more and greater in him.

Many years ago, at the outset of his career as a dramatist, he had made a defeated king praise a country life for its simplicity and freedom from care (_Third Part of Henry VI._, ii. 5):

"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, How many make the hour full complete; How many hours bring about the day; How many days will finish up the year; How many years a mortal man may live. When this is known, then to divide the times: So many hours must I tend my flock; So many hours must I take my rest; So many hours must I contemplate; So many hours must I sport myself; So many days my ewes have been with young; So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean; So many years ere I shall shear the fleece: So minutes, hours, days, months and years, Passed over to the end they were created, Would bring white hairs and a quiet grave."

In just such a regular monotony were Shakespeare's own days now to pass.

[1] In 1875 Charles Mackay made an attempt, in the _Athenaum_, to prove a Celtic origin for the name, deriving it from _seac_ = dry, and _speir_--shanks, thus dry or long shanks. If we take into consideration the numerous other names and nicknames of the day which began with Shake--Shake-buckler, Shake-launce, Shake-shaft, &c., this explanation does not seem very probable. Another argument in favour of its Anglo-Saxon origin and simple meaning, _Spearshaker_, is the contemporaneous existence of the Italian surname Crollalanza.

[2] It may be mentioned that there were no less than fifty-five different ways of writing the name at that time. It is well known that such spellings were quite arbitrary. In Shakespeare's wedding contract, for example, we have the version _Shagspere_.

[3]

"And as the butcher takes away the calf, And binds the wretch and beats it when it strays, Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house" (II. iii. I)

"Who finds the heifer dead and bleeding fresh, And sees fast by a butcher with an axe, But will suspect 'twas he that made the slaughter" (II. iii. 2).

"_Holland_. And Dick the butcher. "_Bevis_. Then is sin struck down like an ox and iniquity's throat cut like a calf." (II. iv. 2).

"_Cade_. They fell before thee like sheep and oxen, and thou behavedst thyself as if thou hadst been in thine own slaughter-house." (II. iv. 3).

"So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece, And next his throat unto the butcher's knife." (III. v. 6).

In _As You Like It_ (ii. 2) Rosalind says, using a simile drawn from the same trade: "This way will I take upon me to wash your liver clean as a sound sheep's heart, that there shall be not one spot of love in it."

See Alfred C. Calmon, who in _Fact and Fiction about Shakespeare_ has been very successful in pointing out the numerous reminiscences of Stratford to be found in Shakespeare's plays.

XXV

_THE LAST YEARS OF SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE_

Did Shakespeare find that peace and contentment at Stratford which he sought? From one thing and another we are almost forced to conclude he did not. His own family seem to have looked upon him in the light of a returned artist-bohemian, of a man whose past career and present religious principles were anything but a credit to them. Elze and others believe, indeed, that, like Byron's descendants at a later date, Shakespeare's family considered him a stain upon their reputation. This surmise may be correct, but there is no very great foundation for it.

It has long been inferred, from the fact that he made her his heiress, that Susanna was Shakespeare's favourite daughter. She was probably the individual to whom he felt most drawn in Stratford; but we must not conclude too much from a testamentary disposition. It was plainly the poet's intention to entail his property, and his original desire was that his little son Hamnet, as bearer and continuer of the name, should succeed to everything. Upon the death of the son, the elder daughter would naturally take his place.

It is not conceivable that Susanna could have any real understanding of, or sympathy with, her father. Her very epitaph places her in direct contrast with him in matters of religion, distinctly maintaining that though she was gifted above her sex, which she owed partly to her father, she was also wise with regard to her soul's salvation, and that was entirely due to Him whose happiness she was now sharing. Shakespeare had none of the credit for that.[1] Her natural inclination to bigoted piety was confirmed and augmented by the influence of her husband, whose sectarian zeal and narrow-minded hatred of Catholicism are plainly shown in such of his journals and books as have been preserved. We can fancy how Shakespeare's depth and delicacy of feeling must have suffered under all this. It is even possible that Susanna and her husband may have burned, on the score of what they considered his irreligious principles, any papers that Shakespeare left behind, as Byron's family destroyed his memoirs. This would explain their total disappearance, which, after all, is no more strange than the utter absence of any manuscripts belonging to Beaumont or Fletcher, or any other dramatic writer of the period.

The younger daughter, Judith, could not even write her own name, and signed her mark with a quaint little flourish when she was married. It is clearly impossible, therefore, that she could have taken any interest in her father's manuscripts. In the seventeenth century it was no very liberal education that a poet's daughter received; even Milton's eldest daughter, at a much later period, was unable to write. Susanna could just inscribe her own name, but that seems to have been the limit of her literary accomplishments. Her utter indifference to all such matters would sufficiently account for the destruction of her father's papers, and this surmise is confirmed by a remarkable statement made in his preface by Dr. John Cooke, the editor of her husband's papers. Whilst serving as army surgeon during the Civil War, he was stationed at Stratford to defend the bridge over the Avon. One of his men, lately an assistant of Dr. Hall's, told him that the books and manuscripts left by the doctor were still in existence, and offered to accompany him to the widow's house in search of them. Cooke examined the books, and Mrs. Hall informed him that she had others which had belonged to her husband's partner, and had cost a considerable sum. He replied that if the books pleased him he would be willing to pay the original price. She then produced them, and they proved to be the very book from which we are quoting, and some others' all ready for printing. Cooke, who knew Dr. Hall's handwriting, told her that at least one of these books was her husband's, and showed her the writing. She denied it, and finding that his persistence was giving offence, he paid the sum she named and carried off the books.

This extract proves that Susanna neither knew her husband's handwriting nor recognised his own books. So entirely lacking was she in any interest in intellectual matters, that she, a rich woman, set no greater value on her husband's works than to sell them for a trifle on the first opportunity that offered.

We can draw a tolerably reliable inference from this anecdote of the interest she was likely to take in any written or printed papers left by her father. In all probability she did not even take the trouble to burn them, but either threw them away or sold them as waste paper.

If we reflect that Susanna, born in better circumstances and better educated than her mother, must have been decidedly her superior, we can see how little Shakespeare's wife, now well stricken in years, could have understood or appreciated her husband. She undoubtedly preferred sermons to plays, and both her heart and house were always open to itinerant Puritan preachers. Of this we possess reliable information.

Shakespeare returned to London during the winter of 1614. Letters have been preserved from his cousin Thomas Greene, the town-clerk, proving that he was in the capital on the 16th of November and the 23rd of December. This visit of his is interesting in two ways, for we know that Shakespeare, capable man of business as he was, was defending the rights of his fellow-citizens against the country gentry; and we also know the use his family made of his absence.

The town records of Stratford show that Shakespeare's family was entertaining a travelling Puritan preacher just at this time, for, according to custom, the town presented this man with a quart of sack and a quart of claret, and we read in the municipal accounts: "_Item, for one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine geven to a preacher at the New Place, xxd._"

It is a significant fact that his family should be entertaining a member of the sect Shakespeare held to be peculiarly inimical to himself whilst he, the master of the house, was absent on business.

Probably his family never saw one of his plays performed, nor even read such of them as were printed in the pirated editions.

Anne Hathaway's cottage, which stands unchanged, though the roof is gradually falling in, was visited by the present writer in 1895. An old woman lived in it, the last of the Hathaways. She was sitting on a chair opposite the _courtship bench_, on which, according to tradition, the lovers used to sit. In the family Bible, lying open before her, she pointed with pride to a long list of names inscribed by the Hathaways during hundreds of years, and forming a kind of genealogical tree. The room was filled with all manner of pictures of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, with relics of the poet, and of famous actors and critics of his plays. The old woman, who lived among and by these comparatively valueless treasures, explained the meaning and story of each thing, but to the cautiously ventured inquiry whether she had ever read anything by this same Shakespeare who surrounded her on every side, and on whose memory she was actually living, she returned the somewhat astonished reply, "Read anything of him! No, I read my Bible." If this female Hathaway has never read anything of Shakespeare, was Anne, who must have been far behind this last scion of her race in general and certainly Shakespearian culture, likely ever to have done so?

Seeing that his own family had no great opinion of him, we can hardly be surprised that, in spite of his wealth and his oft-mentioned kindliness of disposition, he was hardly appreciated by the upper ten of Stratford's 1500 citizens. Although he was one of its richest inhabitants, he was never appointed to one of the public offices of the town during the years of his residence there.

There were few with whom he could associate in the little town. The most frequently alluded to of his Stratford acquaintances was a certain John Combe (steward of Ambrose, Earl of Warwick), a man of low repute as tax-collector and worse as money-lender and usurer. That he figured as a philanthropist in his will does not prove very much, but he must have been better than his reputation, or he would surely never have been one of Shakespeare's companions. Tradition tells that the poet and Combe not only spent much time together in their own houses, but were also in the habit of passing their evenings in the tavern (now called the Falcon) which lay just across the road. Here, then, the mighty genius, stranded in a little country town, sat at the same great table which stands there to-day, tossing dice and emptying his glass in company with a country bumpkin of doubtful reputation.

Tradition further adds that it was one of Shakespeare's few amusements to compose ironical epitaphs for his acquaintances, and he is said to have written an exceedingly contemptuous one upon John Combe in his character of usurer and extortioner. This epitaph, however, which has survived to us in various forms, is proved to have been printed, with its many variations, as early as 1608. It was probably only assigned to Shakespeare in the same manner that all the Danish witticisms of the following century were attributed to Wessel. John Combe died in 1614, leaving Shakespeare a legacy of five pounds. If he was the best of Shakespeare's Stratford associates, we can figure to ourselves the rest.

His chief companionship must have been that of Nature.

Wiser and more profound than any other in Voltaire's _Candide_ is its closing utterance, "_Il faut cultiver notre jardin_" Candide and his friends, at the end of the story, come across a Turk who, absolutely indifferent to all that is occurring in Constantinople, is entirely absorbed in the cultivation of his garden. The only communication he holds with the capital is to send thither for sale the fruit that he grows. This Turk's philosophy of life makes a great impression upon Voltaire's hero, who has known and experienced the dangers and difficulties of nearly every human lot, and his constant refrain throughout the last pages of the book is, "_Je sais qu'il faut cultiver notre jardin_" "You are right," answers another character; "let us work and give up brooding; only work makes life bearable." When Pangloss undertakes, for the last time, to prove how wonderfully everything is linked together in this best of all possible worlds, Candide adds the final apostrophe, "Well said! but we must cultivate our gardens."

This was the thought which was now singing its meagre, sad little melody in Shakespeare's soul.

His two gardens stretched from New Place down to the Avon; the larger had one fault--it only communicated by a narrow lane with the bit of ground that lay directly round the house, two small properties on the Chapel Lane side intervening between house and garden. The smaller garden was probably given up to flowers, the larger to the cultivation of fruit. Warwickshire is especially noted for its apples.

Thus Shakespeare could now improve the quality of his own fruit by that process of grafting which Polixenes had so lately taught Perdita in the _Winter's Tale_. He could now, as did the gardener long ago in _Richard II_, bid his assistants bind up the dangling apricots and prop the bending branches.

He had planted the famous mulberry-tree with his own hand, and it stood until the Rev. Francis Gastrell, who owned New Place in 1756, cut it down in a fit of exasperation with the crowds who requested admission to see it. Any one who has visited Stratford knows of the endless pieces of furniture and little boxes which were made from its wood. Garrick, who revived Shakespeare upon the stage, sat under it in 1744; and when, in 1769, he was presented with the freedom of the city, the casket in which the charter was enclosed was made from a portion of the tree. In the same year, when, on the occasion of Shakespeare's Jubilee, he sang his song, _Shakespeare's Mulberry-Tree_, he held in his hand a goblet made from its wood.

A serious attempt was made in Shakespeare's time to introduce the breeding of silkworms at Stratford, and the planting of the mulberry-tree may have had some connection with this experiment.

Not even the ruins of New Place are in existence to-day, but only the site where the house once stood, and the old well in the yard, which is so overgrown with ivy that the windlass looks like a handle of greenery. The foundation-stones of the boundary wall are covered with earth and grass, and form a sort of embankment towards the road. The gardens, however, are much as they were in Shakespeare's day; the larger is spacious and beautiful. Wandering there of an autumn afternoon, when the leaves are beginning to turn faintly golden, a strange feeling comes over one--a feeling belonging to the place, from which it is very difficult to tear oneself away.

One seems to see him walking with grave stateliness there, clad in scarlet, with the broad white collar falling over the sleeveless black tunic. We see the hand which has written so many ill-understood and insufficiently appreciated masterpieces binding up branches or lopping off stray tendrils, while the sunlight sparkles on the plain gold signet ring with its initials, W.S., which is still in our possession.

The numerous portraits and the famous death-masque discovered in Germany are all forgeries. The only genuine likenesses are the bad engraving by Droeshout prefixed to the first Folio and the poorly executed coloured bust by the Dutchman Gerhard Johnson on the monument in the Church of the Holy Trinity, which was probably done from a death-masque. It may be added that a painting was discovered at Stratford eight years ago, which purports to be the original of Droeshout's engraving, and the genuineness of which is still a matter of dispute.[2]

It holds us captive, this head with the healthy, full, red lips, the slight brownish moustache, the fine, high, poet's brow, with the reddish hair growing naturally and becomingly at the sides. The expression is speaking; Shakespeare must surely have looked like this. Even if the painting should prove a forgery, an imitation of Droeshout's work instead of its original, it will still retain an artistic and psychological value possessed by none of the other portraits. As he looks out at us from the canvas, we seem to see him as he was in those last years at Stratford, chatting with the townsfolk and "cultivating his garden."[3]

[1] "Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse."

[2] In the Halliwell-Phillips collection of Shakespearian rarities, stored at the Safe Deposit, Chancery Lane, there was a copy of the print which, according to the catalogue of the collection, is in its original proof condition, before it was altered by "an inferior hand." As traces of what is called the "inferior hand" are to be found in the painting, it would seem that the latter was copied from the print. (See John Corbin: _Two Undescribed Portraits of Shakespeare. Harpers New Monthly Magazine_.)

[3] R. E. Hunter: _Shakespeare and Stratford_. 1864. Halliwell-Phillips _A Brief Guide to the Gardens_. 1863. G.L. Lee: _Shakespeare's Home And Rural Life_. 1874. W. H. H.: _Stratford-Upon-Avon. Historic Stratford_. 1893. _The Home and Haunts of Shakespeare_, With An Introduction by H. H. Furness. 1892. Karl Elze: _Shakespeare_, Chap. viii.

XXVI

_SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH_

On the 9th of July 1614 a terrible calamity fell upon the little town in which Shakespeare dwelt, and a great fire destroyed no less than fifty-four houses, besides various barns and stables. In spite of a prohibitive law, the houses of most of the poorer citizens were thatched with straw, which proved, of course, highly inflammable. Doubtless Shakespeare, whose house was spared, contributed generously towards the alleviation of the general distress.

In March 1612, Shakespeare, jointly with Will Johnson, a wine merchant, John Jackson, and his friend and editor John Heminge, bought a house at Blackfriars in London. The deed of purchase which is still in existence in the British Museum, bears Shakespeare's authentic signature written above the first of the appended seals. His name above and in the body of the document has a different spelling. This property must have necessitated a certain amount of attention, and probably occasioned more than one journey up to town. The already mentioned sojourn there at the close of the year 1614 was not one of these, however. Shakespeare's object then was the fulfilment of a commission intrusted to him by his fellow-townsfolk.

For more than a century past, the great families had been enclosing all the land they could seize, and their parks and preserves began to usurp the old common lands and hunting-grounds, their object being to crush the mediæval custom of the whole community's joint interest in agriculture and cattle-rearing. A steady withdrawal of land from agricultural purposes went on, and the peasant classes were growing gradually poorer as the large landowners arbitrarily raised the prices of meat and wool. Under these circumstances the country people naturally did their best to prevent the enclosure of land.

In 1614 Shakespeare's native town was agitated by a proposal to enclose and parcel out the common land of Old Stratford and Welcombe. That Shakespeare was averse to this plan and determined to oppose it we learn from an utterance of his preserved in the memoranda of his cousin, Thomas Greene, which have been published by Halliwell-Phillips. According to these, Shakespeare said to his cousin that _he was not able to bear the enclosing of Welcombe_. We also learn that he concluded an agreement on the 28th of October, on behalf of his cousin and himself, with a certain William Replingham of Great Harborough, an ardent supporter of the enclosure project. Replingham thereby pledged himself to indemnify the persons concerned for any loss or injury entailed upon them by the enclosure. Shakespeare was also induced to plead the cause of his fellow-townsmen in London, the Stratford town council sending Thomas Greene thither to beg him to use all his influence for the benefit of the town, which had already suffered grievous loss through the fire. That Greene fulfilled his commission is proved by his letter to the council of the 17th of November 1614, in which he says he received reassuring intelligence from Shakespeare, and that both the poet and his son-in-law, Dr. Hall, believe that the dreaded plan will never be carried into execution.[1].

They were right. In 1618, in answer to a petition from the corporation, Government decreed that no enclosure was to be made, and gave orders that any fences already erected for that purpose were to be pulled down.

The year 1615 seems to have passed quietly enough in that country solitude and peace which Shakespeare had so long desired.

He must have been taken seriously ill in January 1616, for above the actual date of his will, _March 25th_, stands that of _January_, as though he had begun to draw it up, and then, feeling better, had postponed his intention of making a will.

The last event of any importance in Shakespeare's life took place on the 10th of February 1616; on that day his daughter Judith was married. She was no longer quite young, being thirty-one, and it was no very brilliant match she made. The bridegroom, Thomas Quiney, was a tavern-keeper and vintner in Stratford, and a son of the Richard Quiney who applied eighteen years before to his "loving countryman," William Shakespeare, for a loan of £30. Thomas Quiney was four years younger than his bride, therefore the maxim of _Twelfth Night_, "Let still the woman take an elder than herself," was as little heeded in his daughter's case as it had been in Shakespeare's own. A vintner in a town the size of Stratford is not likely to have been either a very wealthy man or one of such education that Shakespeare would take any pleasure in his society.

The last wedding festivity in which Shakespeare had taken part was the ideally royal marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda. What a contrast was this of Judith and her vintner! It was prose after poetry.

Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton are supposed to have come down for the wedding, but of this we have no certain information; The supposition rests entirely on the following brief statement, written at least fifty years afterwards by the rector of Stratford, John Ward. "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted." He does not say that this merry meeting was held at the time of the wedding, but the probabilities are that it was. Drayton was a Warwickshire man, and possessed intimate friends in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Ben Jonson may have been invited in return for his having asked Shakespeare to stand as godfather to one of his children. There are good grounds for the surmise that in any case the wine was supplied by the son-in-law, and that the silver-gilt bowl bequeathed to Judith was used upon this occasion.

It was childish of the cleric to connect this little drinking party with Shakespeare's illness. The tradition of Shakespeare's liking for a good glass was rife in Stratford as late as the eighteenth century. Numerous pictures of the crab-apple tree preserve the legend that Shakespeare started off for Bidford one youthful day for the sake of the lively topers he had heard dwelt there, and the tale runs that he drank so hard he had to lie down under the _crab-tree_ on his way home, and sleep for several hours. The story repeated by Ward probably originated in these reports. All we know for certain is that some days after the wedding Shakespeare was taken ill.

Several circumstances tend to prove that the poet was attacked by typhus fever. Stratford, with its low, damp situation and its filthy roads, was a regular typhus trap in those days. Halliwell-Phillips has published a list of enactments and penalties promulgated by the magistrates with a view to the clearing of the streets. They extend into the latter half of the eighteenth century, and that there are none for the years in question is accounted for by the fact that the documents for 1605-1646 are missing. Even so late as the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, Garrick, who was fêted by the town on this occasion, described it as "the most dirty, unseemly, ill-pav'd, wretched-looking town in all Britain." Chapel Lane, towards which Shakespeare's house fronted, was one of the unhealthiest streets in the town. It hardly possessed a house, being but a medley of sheds and stables with an open drain running down the middle of the street. It was small wonder that the place was constantly visited by pestilential epidemics, and little was known in those days of any laws of hygiene, and as little of any treatment for typhus. Shakespeare's son-in-law, who was probably his doctor, knew of no remedy for it, as his journals prove.

Shakespeare drew up his will on the 25th of March. As we have already said, it is still in existence, and is reproduced in facsimile in the twenty-fourth volume of the German Shakespeare Year-book.

The fact that it was dictated, and the extreme shakiness of the signature at the foot of the three lengthily detailed folio pages, prove that Shakespeare was very ill when his will was made.

His daughter Susanna is the principal heiress. Judith receives £150 ready money and £150 more after the lapse of three years, under certain conditions. These are the principal bequests. Joan Hart, his sister, is remembered in various ways. She is to receive five pounds in ready money and all his clothes. Her three sons are separately mentioned, although Shakespeare cannot remember the baptismal name of the second, and are to have five pounds each. To his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, he leaves his silver plate. Ten pounds is to go to the poor of Stratford, and his sword to Thomas Combe. Various good burghers of the town, including Hamlet Sadler, after whom Shakespeare's son was named, are left twenty-six shillings and eightpence each, wherewith to buy a ring in memory of the deceased. A line inserted later bequeaths a similar sum for a similar purpose to the three actors with whom Shakespeare was most intimately associated in his late company, and whom he calls "my comrades"--John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell. As is well known, it is to the first and last of these three that we owe the first Folio edition, containing nineteen of Shakespeare's plays which would otherwise have been lost to us.

A peculiar psychological interest attaches to the following features of the will.

In the first place, the much discussed and remarkable fact that in making his last will Shakespeare apparently entirely forgot his wife. Not until it was completed and read aloud to him did he remember that she, who would receive, of course, the legal widow's share, should at least be named; and then, between the last lines, he has inserted: "_Item, Igyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture._" The poverty of the gift is the more obvious when we recall how Shakespeare's father-in-law remembered his wife in his will.

It is also significant, more especially as it was contrary to the custom of the times, that not a single member of Mrs. Shakespeare's family was mentioned in the will. The name Hathaway does not occur, although it is frequently mentioned in the wills of Shakespeare's descendants; in that of Thomas Nash, for instance, and of Susanna's daughter Elizabeth, who became Lady Barnard by her second marriage. The inference is plain, that Shakespeare was on very unfriendly terms with his wife's family.

The next peculiarity is that Shakespeare never refers to his position as a dramatic writer, nor makes any allusion to books, manuscripts, or papers of any kind, as forming part of his property. This absence of all concern for his poetical reputation is in complete accord with the sovereign contempt for posthumous fame which we have already observed in him.

Finally, it is not without significance that there was neither poet nor author mentioned among those to whom Shakespeare left money for the purchase of that ordinary token of friendship, a ring to be worn as a memento. It would seem as though he felt himself under no obligation to any of his fellow-authors, and had nothing to thank them for. This neglect is quite in harmony with the contempt he always displayed for his brother craftsmen when he had occasion to represent them upon the stage. He may have been willing enough to drink in company with Ben Jonson, the honest and envious friend of so many years' standing, but he had no more depth of affection for him than for any other of the dramatists and lyric poets among whom his lot had been cast. As Byron says of Childe Harold--he was one among them, not of them.

He lingered on for four weeks, and then he died.

He had probably completed his fifty-second year the day before, thus dying at the same age as Molière and Napoleon. He had lived long enough to finish his work, and the mighty turbulent river of his life came to an end among the sands, in the daily drop, drop, drop.[2]

A monument was erected by his family in Stratford church before the year 1623. Below the bust is an inscription, probably of Dr. Hall's composition. The first two lines liken him, in badly constructed Latin, to a Nestor for judgment, a Socrates for genius, and a Virgil for art.[3]

We could imagine a more appropriate epitaph.

[1] The passage runs: "My cosen Shakespeare comyng yesterday to town, I went to See him, how he did. He told me that they assured him they ment to inclose no further than to Gospell Bush, and so upp straight (leavyng out part of the dyngles to the ffield) to the gate in Clopton hedg, and take in Salisburyes peece; and that they mean in Aprill to survey the land, and then to give satisfaccion, and not before; and he and Mr. Hall say they think ther will be nothyng done at all.

Also C. M. Ingleby: _Shakespeare and the Welcombe Enclosures_, 1883.

[2] It is not altogether correct to say that Shakespeare died on the same day as Cervantes. True, they both died on the 23rd of April 1616, but the Gregorian calendar was then in use in Spain, while England was still reckoning by the Julian; there is an actual difference of ten days therefore.

[3]

"Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem arte Maronem, Terra tegit, populus moeret, Olympus habet."

XXVII

_CONCLUSION_

Even a long human life is so brief and fugitive that it seems little short of a miracle that it can leave traces behind which endure through centuries. The millions die and sink into oblivion and their deeds die with them. A few thousands so far conquer death as to leave their names to be a burden to the memories of school-children, but convey little else to posterity. But some few master-minds remain, and among them Shakespeare ranks with Leonardo and Michael Angelo. He was hardly laid in his grave than he rose from it again. Of all the great names of this earth, none is more certain of immortality than that of Shakespeare.

An English poet of this century has written:

"Revolving years have flitted on, Corroding Time has done its worst, Pilgrim and worshipper have gone From Avon's shrine to shrines of dust; But Shakespeare lives unrivall'd still And unapproached by mortal mind, The giant of Parnassus' hill, The pride, the monarch of mankind."

The monarch of mankind! they are proud words those, but they do not altogether over-estimate the truth. He is by no means the only king in the intellectual world, but his power is unlimited by time or space. From the moment; his life's history ceases his far greater history begins. We find its first records in Great Britain, and consequently in North America; then it spread among the German-speaking peoples and the whole Teutonic race, on through the Scandinavian countries to the Finns and the Sclavonic races. We find his influence in France, Spain, and Italy; and now, in the nineteenth century, it may be traced over the whole civilised world.

His writings are translated into every tongue and all the languages of the earth do him honour.

Not only have his works influenced the minds of readers in every country, but they have moulded the spiritual lives of thinkers, writers and poets; no mortal man, from the time of the Renaissance to our own day, has caused such upheavals and revivals in the literatures of different nations. Intellectual revolutions have emanated from his outspoken boldness and his eternal youth, and have been quelled again by his sanity, his moderation, and his eternal wisdom.

It would be far easier to enumerate the great men who have known him and owed him nothing than to reckon up the names of those who are far more indebted to him than they can say. All the real intellectual life of England since his day has been stamped by his genius, all her creative spirits have imbibed their life's nourishment from his works. Modern German intellectual life is based, through Lessing, upon him. Goethe and Schiller are unimaginable without him. His influence is felt in France through Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Vigny. Ludovic Vitet and Alfred de Musset were from the very first inspired by him. Not only the drama in Russia and Poland felt his influence, but the inmost spiritual life of the Sclavonic story-tellers and brooders is fashioned after the pattern of his imperishable creations. From the moment of the regeneration of poetry in the North he was reverenced by Ewald, Oehlenschläger, Bredahl, and Hauch, and he is not without his influence upon Björnson and Ibsen.

This book was not written with the intention of describing Shakespeare's triumphant progress through the world, nor of telling the tale of his world-wide dominion. Its purpose was to declare and prove that Shakespeare is not thirty-six plays and a few poems jumbled together and read _pêle-mêle,_ but a man who felt and thought, rejoiced and suffered, brooded, dreamed, and created.

Far too long has it been the custom to say, "We know nothing about Shakespeare;" or, "An octavo page would contain all our knowledge of him." Even Swinburne has written of the intangibility of his personality in his works. Such assertions have been carried so far that a wretched group of _dilettanti_ has been bold enough, in Europe and America, to deny William Shakespeare the right to his own life-work, to give to another the honour due to his genius, and to bespatter him and his invulnerable name with an insane abuse which has re-echoed through every land.

It is to refute this idea of Shakespeare's impersonality, and to indignantly repel an ignorant and arrogant attack upon one of the greatest benefactors of the human race, that the present attempt has been made.

It is the author's opinion that, given the possession of forty-five important works by any man, it is entirely our own fault if we know nothing whatever about him. The poet has incorporated his whole individuality in these writings, and there, if we can read aright, we shall find him.

The William Shakespeare who was born at Stratford-on-Avon in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who lived and wrote in London in her reign and that of James, who ascended into heaven in his comedies and descended into hell in his tragedies, and died at the age of fifty-two in his native town, rises a wonderful personality in grand and distinct outlines, with all the vivid colouring of life from the pages of his books, before the eyes of all who read them with an open, receptive mind, with sanity of judgment and simple susceptibility to the power of genius.

THE END

INDEX

AARON the Moor in 'Titus Andronicus' Abbess in 'Comedy of Errors' Abbot, Archbishop Achilles in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare,' by John Weever (1595) Adam in 'As You Like It' Adriana in 'Comedy of Errors' 'Æneid' Æschylus 'Æsthetiske Studier,' by George Brandes 'Agamemnon,' by Seneca Agamemnon in 'Troilus and Cressida' Agincourt, Battle of, in 'Henry V.' Ajax in 'Troilus and Cressida' Albius in 'The Poetaster' 'Alceste,' Molière's Alcibiades in 'Timon of Athens' 'Alexander and Campaspe', by Lyly 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's Labour's Won' (1602-1603), chief characters in--Attack on Puritanism in, Alonso in the 'Tempest' 'Alphonsus, King of Arragon,' by Robert Greene Ambrogiuolo in Boccaccio's 'Decameron' Amintor in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Amleth in 'Saxo Grammaticus' 'Amores,' by Ovid 'Amoretti,' by Spenser 'Amphitruo,' by Plautus Amyot, Jacques Andersen, Hans Christian Andromache in 'Troilus and Cressida' Angelo in 'Measure for Measure' Angiers in 'King John' Anne Boleyn in 'Henry VIII.' Anne in 'Richard III.' Anne, James I.'s queen Antenor in 'Troilus and Cressida' Antigonus in 'Winter's Tale' Antiochus in 'Pericles' Antipholus of Syracuse in 'Comedy of Errors' Antonio in-- 'Merchant of Venice' 'Tempest' 'Twelfth Night' Antony, Mark, in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Antony and Cleopatra' Attractions for Shakespeare in-- Sources of 'Dark Lady,' as model in--Fall of the Republic as a world-catastrophe Apemantus in 'Timon of Athens' 'Apology, The,' by Socrates Apothecary in 'Romeo and Juliet' Appleton, Morgan's 'Shakespearean Myth' Arbaces in 'King and No King,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Arbury, Mary Fitton's portrait at 'Arcadia,' by Philip Sidney Archbishop of Canterbury in 'Henry V.' Archidamus in 'Winter's Tale, Arden, Edward ----Mary, mother of William Shakespeare ----Robert, grandfather of Shakespeare 'Arden of Feversham' Arethusa in 'Philaster,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Ariel in the 'Tempest' Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso' Aristotle Armada, Spanish Armado in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Armitage, Charles Artemidorus in 'Julius Cæsar' Arthur in 'King John' Arviragus in 'Cymbeline' 'As You Like It' (1600), Shakespeare's roving spirit and longing for nature--Wit and chief characters in Asbies at Wilmecote Aspasia in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher 'Athelie,' Racine's Aubrey Audrey in 'As You Like It' Aufidius in 'Coriolanus' Augustus in Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster' Aumerle in 'Richard II.' Autolycus in 'Winter's Tale' 'Axel and Valborg,' by Oehlenschläger Ayrer's, Jacob, 'Comedia von der schönen Sidea'

BACON, Anthony, patronised by Essex ----Delia, Miss, supporting the Baconian Theory (1856) ----Francis Baconian Theory concerning Shakespeare's plays Baif, De Balthasar in Merchant of Venice Romeo and Juliet Bandello Banquo's ghost in 'Macbeth' Barabas in C. Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta' Bardolph in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Barnabe Richs translation of Cinthios 'Hecatomithi' (1581) Barnadine in 'Measure for Measure' Barnes, Barnabe Barnfield, Richard Barnstorff 'Bartholomew Fair,' by Ben Jonson (1614) Basianus in 'Titus Andronicus' Bassanio in 'Merchant of Venice' Bates in 'Henry V.' 'Battle of Alcazar,' by George Peele Baynard's Castle Bear Garden Beards 'Theatre of God's Judgements' (1597) Beatrice in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Beaumont's, Francis, plays and career Belarius in 'Cymbeline' Bellay, Joachim du Belleforest's 'Histoires Tragiques' 'Ben Jonson,' by Symonds Benedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Benoit de St. Maures 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' (1160) Benvolio in 'Romeo and Juliet' Bermudas Bernabo in Boccaccio's 'Decameron' Berni's 'Orlando Innamorato' Bertram in 'All's Well that Ends Well' Beyersdorff's, Robert, 'Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare' Bianca in Othello Bierfreund, Theodor Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Bishop of Ely in 'Henry V.' Blackfriars Theatre Blade's 'Shakespeare and Typography' Blanch in 'King John' Blount, Edward Boaden Boccaccio's plays Boece's, Hector, 'Scotorum Historiæ' Boétie, Estienne de la, Montaigne's friendship for Bolingbroke in 'Richard II.' 'Book of Martyrs, Foxe's 'Book of Troy,' Lydgate's 'Booke of Ayres' (1601) 'Booke of Plaies, and Notes thereon,' by Dr. Simon Forman Börne Bosworth Field in 'Richard III.' Bothwell, Earl of Bottom in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Boyet in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Brabantio in 'Othello' Brandes, George Bright, James Heywood, 267 Briseida in Benoit's 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' (1160) Brown, Henry Browning, Robert Browne's, Sir Thomas, 'Religio Medici' (1642) Brown's, C. A., 'Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems' Brunnhofer, 350 Bruno's, Giordano, supposed influence over Shakespeare 'Brut,' by Layamon (1205) Brutus, Junius, in 'Coriolanus' ----Marcus, in 'Julius Cæsar' Bryan, George Buckingham, Duke of, in 'Richard III.' Bucknill, Dr., on Shakespeare's Medical Knowledge Burbage, James ----Richard, actor Burghley, Lord Butler, Samuel Byron

CADE, Jack, in 'Henry VI.' 'Cæsar's Fall' (1602) Caius Lucius in 'Cymbeline' Calchas in 'Troilus and Cressida' Calderon Calianax in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Caliban in the 'Tempest' Calphurnia in 'Julius Cæsar' Cambyses Camden, William Camillo in 'Winter's Tale' Campbell's, Lord, Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements 'Candelajo,' by Giordano Bruno 'Candide,' by Voltaire Caphis in 'Timon of Athens' Capulet in 'Romeo and Juliet' Carleton, Sir Dudley 'Carmosine,' by De Musset Carr, Robert, Viscount Rochester and Earl of Somerset, James I.'s favourite--Lady Essex's marriage with-- Crime and fall of Casca in 'Julius Cæsar' Cassio in 'Othello' Cassius in 'Cæsar' Catesby, Sir William, in 'Richard III.' 'Catiline,' by Ben Jonson Cato Cavalieri, Tommaso de' Cavendishs, George, 'Relics of Cardinal Wolsey' Cecil, Sir Robert Celia in 'As You Like It' Ceres in the 'Tempest' Cerimon in 'Pericles' Cervantes 'Don Quixote' Chalmers, Alexander Chamberlain, John Chapman Charlcote Charmian in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Chaucer Chettle, Henry Chief-justice in 'Henry IV.' Christian IV. of Denmark Christopher Sly in 'Taming of the Shrew' 'Chronicle History of King Leir' Cicero Cinna in 'Julius Cæsar' Cinthio 'Clärchen,' Goethe's Clarence, George, Duke of, in 'Richard III.' Clarendon's estimate of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke Claudio in-- 'Measure for Measure' 'Much Ado About Nothing' 'Clavigo,' by Goethe Cleopatra, in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Cleopatra,' by Daniel (1594) Clifford, Lord, in 'Henry VI.' 'Cloaca Maxima,' 181 Cloten in 'Cymbeline' Clown in-- 'All's Well that Ends Well, or 'Love's Labour's Won' 'Othello' 'Twelfth Night' Cobham, Lord Cobweb in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Coleridge 'Colin Clouts come Home Again,' by Spenser Colliers 'Shakespeare's Library' 'Comedia von der shönen Sidea,' by Jacob Ayrer 'Comedy of Errors' (1589-1591) Cominius in 'Coriolanus' Commedia dell' Arte 'Comus,' by Milton Condell 'Confessio Amantis,' by John Gower 'Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle, by Alfred de Musset Conrad, Hermann 'Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron,' by Chapman Constable, Henry Constance in 'King John' 'Contemporary History,' Wilson's Copernicus Cordelia in 'King Lear' Corin in 'As You Like It' 'Coriolanus' ---- Date of production--Shakespeare's hatred of the masses ---- Dramatic power of--Inconsistencies in Corneille Coryat Costard in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' Countess in 'Alls Well that Ends Well,' Cranmer in 'Henry VIII.,' Cressida in 'Troilus and Cressida,' Crispinus in 'Poetaster,' by Ben Jonson, Curius in Jonson's 'Catiline' 'Cymbeline' (1610), Shakespeare's country idyll and conception of morality in--Dual contrast and chief characters in Cynthia in Lyly's 'Endymion' 'Cynthia's Revels,' by Jonson

'DÆMONOLOGIE,' by James I. Dame Quickly in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Damon and Pythias in the Hero and Leander puppet-show in Jonson's 'Bartholomew Fair' Daniel, Samuel Danvers, Sir Charles Dares Phrygius, 'De Bello Trojano' 'Darius,' Count Stirling's 'Dark Lady,' or Mary Fitton (see that title) Darley, George Darnley, Lord Daudet's 'Sappho' 'Daughter of the Air' (1664) Dauphin in-- 'Henry V.' 'King John' Davenant, Mrs., courted by Shakespeare ---- Sir William, probable son of W. Shakespeare Davison's 'Poetical Rhapsody,' 'Day of the Seven Sleepers,' by T. L. Heiberg 'De Amicitia,' by Cicero 'De Analogia,' by Julius Cæsar 'De Bello Trojano,' by Dares Phrygius 'De Bello Trojano,' by Dictys Cretensis 'De la Causa' by Giordano Bruno 'Decameron,' by Boccaccio Decius in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Declaration of Popish Impostures,' by Harsnet 'Defence of Poesy,' by Sir Philip Sidney (1583) Dekker "Delia," by Daniel Delius, Nikolaus Demetrius in 'Midsummer Dream' 'Der bestrafte Brudermord' 'Der junge Tischermeister,' by Tieck 'Der Kinder Sünde der Vater Fluck,' by Paul Heyse Desdemona in 'Othello' Desportes, Philippe 'Dial of Princes,' by Guevara 'Diana,' by Montemayor (1520-1562) Diana in 'Pericles' Dick in 'Henry VI.' (2nd Part) 'Dictionary of National Biography,' by Robert Devereux Dictys Cretensis' 'De Bello Trojano' 'Die Räuber,' by Schiller Digges, Leonard Diomedes in Benoit's 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' 'Troilus and Cressida' Dionyza in 'Pericles' 'Discour sur la Tragédie,' by Voltaire 'Discoveries,' by Ben Jonson 'Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana' (1596) Doctor Caius in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 'Dr. Faustus,' by Marlowe Dogberry in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Dolabella in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Doll Tearsheet in 'Henry IV.' 'Doll's House' Don John, in 'Much Ado About Nothing' 'Don Juan,' by Byron ----Mozart's Don Pedro in 'Much Ado About Nothing' 'Don Quixote,' by Cervantes Donne, Dr. John Douglas in 'Henry IV.' Dowden Drake, Sir Francis Drayton Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare Dromio of Syracuse in 'Comedy of Errors' Drummond, William Dryden Duke in-- 'As You Like It' 'Measure for Measure' 'Othello' 'Twelfth Night' Dumain in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Dürer's, Albert, 'Melancholia'

EAST India Company 'Eastward Ho!' by Chapman Eden's 'Historye of Travaile in East and West Indies' (1577) Edgar in 'King Lear' Edmund in 'King Lear' 'Edward II.,' by C. Marlowe 'Edward III.,' authorship of Edward IV. in-- 'Henry VI.' 'Richard III.' Edward V., son of Edward IV., in 'Richard III.' Edward, Prince of Wales, in 'Henry VI.' 'El Principe Constante' 'El Secreto a Voces' Elizabeth, Princess, her marriage with the Elector Palatine, Tempest written for ---- Queen Elizabeth, Queen of Edward IV., in 'Richard III.' 'Elves,' by J. L. Heiberg Elze, Karl Emerson's 'Representative Men' Emilia in-- 'Othello,' 'Two Noble Kinsmen' 'Endymion,' by John Lyly Enobarbus in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' Escalus in 'Measure for Measure,' 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy,' by Dryden Essex, Earl of ---- Lady Frances, afterwards Lady Somerset ---- Lettice, Countess of Eudemus in 'Sejanus' Euphrasea or Bellario in 'Philaster,' by Beaumont and Fletcher 'Euphues,' by Lyly Evadne in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Evans, Sir Hugh, in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 'Every Man in His Humour' (1595), by Ben Jonson 'Every Man out of His Humour' (1599), by Ben Jonson

FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS, by Fletcher Falstaff in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor 'Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, containing the Honorable Battell of Agin-court Farmer, Dr. 'Fasti,' by Ovid Faulconbridge in King John Faust Feis', Jacob, 'Shakespeare and Montaigne' Fenton in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Ferdinand in 'Tempest' Fiammetta, Maria 'Filostrato,' by Boccaccio Fiorentino's, Sir Giovanni, 'Il Pecorone' (1558) Fitton's, Mary, relations with Shakespeare and Earl of Pembroke-- Addressed in the Sonnets as the Dark Lady Fitton, Anne, elder sister of Mary Fitton Flaubert Flavina in 'Two Noble Kinsmen' Flavius in-- 'Julius Cæsar' 'Timon of Athens' Fleance in 'Macbeth' Fleay Fletcher's, John, plays and career Florio Florizel in 'Winter's Tale' Fluellen in 'Henry V.' Fool in 'King Lear' Ford, Master and Mistress, in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Forest of Arden in 'As You Like It' Forman, Dr. Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, in 'Hamlet' Fortunate Shipwreck Frampton's translation of 'Marco Polo' (1579) Frederick in 'As You Like It' Frederick the Great and Voltaire Freiligrath Friar Bacon, by Greene Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet Friesen, Herr von Fuller Fulvia, wife of Mark Antony, 465, 468, 473 Fulvia in Jonson's Catiline, 337 Furnivall, 334, 578, 600, 608-610

'GALLIC WAR,' Cæsar's Gallus in Ben Jonsons 'Poetaster' 'Gammer Gurton's Needle' Gardiner Garnett, Richard Garnier's 'Henriade' Gaveston in C. Marlowe's 'Edward II.' Gawsworth Church, in 'Cheshire' Gerutha in 'Saxo Grammaticus' Gervinus 'Gesta Romanorum' Ghost in 'Hamlet' 'Gilette of Narbonne,' Boccaccio's story of Giordano Bruno. _See_ Bruno Glendower in 'Henry IV.' Globe Theatre Gloucester, Duke of, in-- 'Henry VI.' 'King Lear,' Gloucester, Richard, Earl of, in 'Henry VI.,' afterwards 'Richard III.' Gobbo in 'Merchant of Venice' Goethe Gogol's 'Revisor' Golding's, Arthur, translation of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' Gondomar, Count of Goneril in 'King Lear' Gontscharoff Gonzago in 'Hamlet' Gonzalo in the 'Tempest' Gosse 'Gossip from a Muniment-Room, being Passages in the lives of Anne and Mary Fitton,' published by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate Gosson, Stephen Gower, John Gracioso Gravedigger in 'Hamlet' Green, Robert, plays of Shakespeare attacked by ---- Thomas, Shakespeare's cousin Gremio in 'Taming of the Shrew' Gretchen in Goethe's 'Faust' Greville, Fulk Griseida or Cryseida in Boccaccio's 'Filostrato' 'Groat's Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance' by Greene (1592) Guarini's 'Pastor Fido' Guiderius in 'Cymbeline' Guido delle Columne Guildenstern in 'Hamlet' Gull's Hornebooke' (1609), by Dekker, 539 Gunpowder Plot

HALL, Elizabeth, Shakespeare's grand-daughter ---- John, Dr., husband of Susanna Shakespeare Hall, William Hallan, Brown Halliwell-Phillips Hamlet Antecedents in fiction, history, and drama--Parallels to circumstances in Criticism on dramatic art in--Shakespeare's attack on Kemp and eulogy of Tarlton--Danish March played in Dramatic features of Influence of 'Hamlet' on foreign literature Local colour in Montaigne's and Giordano Bruno's influence over Shakespeare-- Parallels in Lyly's 'Euphues' to 'Hamlet' Ophelia's relations with Hamlet compared with 'Faust' Personal element in Psychology of Hansen, Adolf Harington, Sir John Lord Harrison, Rev. W. A. Harsnet's 'Declaration of Popish Impostures' Hart, Joan, Shakespeare's sister ---- William, Shakespeare's nephew Hart's attack on Shakespeare in 1848 Harvey Hastings, Lord, in 'Richard III.' Hathaway, Anne, her marriage with Shakespeare--Children of William Hecate in 'Macbeth' 'Hecatomithi,' by Giraldi Cinthio (1565) Hector Hector in 'Troilus and Cressida' Heiberg, J. L. Heine, Heinrich Helen in 'Troilus and Cressida' Helena in-- 'All's Well that Ends Well' 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Helwys, Sir Gervase Heminge 'Henriade,' by Garnier 'Henry IV.' (1597), chief characters and scenes in--Freshness and perfection of the play 'Henry IV.':-- First Part Second Part 'Henry V.,' or Prince of Wales in 'Henry IV.' (1599), as a national drama--Patriotism and Chauvinism of--Vision of a greater England in--'Henry V.' as typical English hero 'Henry VI.':-- First Part Second Part Third Part Trilogy--Greene attacking Shakespeare on Shakespeare's authorship of 'Henry VIII.,' Shakespeare's part in Henry, Prince, son of James I. Henslow 'Heptameron of Civil Discourses,' by George Whetstone (1582) Herbert William. _See_ Earl of Pembroke Hericault, C. d' Hermann, Conrad Hermia in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Hermione in 'Winter's Tale' Hermogenes in 'Poetaster,' by Jonson 'Hero and Leander,' by C. Marlowe (1598) 'Hero and Leander,' or 'Touchstone of True Love,' by Ben Jonson Hero in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Hertzberg, W. Heyse's, Paul, 'Der Kinder Sünde der Vater Fluch' Hieronimo in Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy' Hippolyta in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Histoire de la Guerre de Troie' (1160), by Benoit de St. Maure 'Histoires Tragiques,' by Belleforest 'Historia Trojana,' by Guido delle Columne 'History of the Rebellion,' by Clarendon 'Historye of Travaile in East and West Indies' (1577), by Eden 'Histriomastix', by Prynne Hogarth Holberg Holinshed's Chronicle Holofernes in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Homer's 'Iliad' compared with 'Troilus and Cressida'

Horace Horatio in 'Hamlet' Hotspur or Henry Percy in 'Henry IV.' --Mastery of the character-drawing --Achilles compared with 'House of Fame,' by Chaucer Hubert de Burgh in 'King John,' Hudson, H. N. Hughes, William Hunsdon, Lord 'Hystoria novellamente ritrovata di dui nobili Amanti,' by Luigi da Porta

IACHIMO in 'Cymbeline' Iago in 'Othello' Iden in 'Henry VI.' Ides of March in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Il Pecorone,' by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino (1558) 'Iliad' Imogen in 'Cymbeline' 'Inganni' Ingleby Inigo Jones 'Iphigenia in Aulis,' by Racine 'Iphigenia in Tauris,' by Goethe Iras in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Iris in the 'Tempest' Isaac, Hermann Isabella in 'Measure for Measure' Italy visited by Shakespeare

JAGGARD, bookseller James I. of England and VI. of Scotland Jameson, Mrs. Jamy in 'Henry V.' Jaques in 'As You Like It' Jeanne d'Arc 'Jeppe pas Bjerget,' by Ludwig Holberg Jessica in 'Merchant of Venice' 'Jew of Malta,' by C. Marlowe Joan of Arc or La Pucelle in 'Henry VI.' John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in 'Richard II.' Jonson, Ben, his career, plays, and learning--Shakespeare compared with Julia in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,'; in the 'Poetaster' Juliet in-- 'Measure for Measure' Romeo and Juliet 'Julius Cæsar' (1601), Plutarch's Lives forming material for-- Defective representation of Cæsar's character--Characters of Brutus and Portia--Antony's Oration Juno in the 'Tempest' Jupiter in 'Cymbeline'

'KABALE UND LIEBE,' by Schiller Kalisch 'Käthchen von Heilbronn,' by Kleist Katherine in-- 'Henry V.' 'Henry VIII.' 'Taming of the Shrew' Kemp, William, actor Kent, Earl of, in 'King Lear' 'Kind-hart's Dreame' King in 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'King and no King,' by Beaumont and Fletcher King Claudius in 'Hamlet' King Duncan in 'Macbeth' 'King John,' Shakespeare's sorrow at death of Hamnet --Old play basis for--Patriotism and chief characters in 'King Lear' Ingratitude denounced by Shakespeare in--Sources of, 449-453 Titanic tragedy of human life--Construction of, 454-460 'King Leir' King of France in-- 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's Labour's Won' 'King John' 'King Lear' 'Kitchen-Stuff Woman,' by W. Kemp Kleist Klinger, Max Knight 'Knight's Conjuring' (1607), by Dekker Knollys, Sir William, admirer of Mary Fitton Kohélet König Krasinskis 'Undivine Comedy' and 'Temptation' Kreyssig Kronborg Kyd

'LA CENA DE LE CENERI,' by Giordano Bruno 'La Dama Duende' 'La Gran Cenobia' 'La Hija del Ayre' 'La Princesse d'Elde,' by Molière 'La Puente de Mantible' 'La sfortunata morte di due infelicissimi amanti,' by Bandello 'La Teseide, by Boccaccio' 'La Tosca,' by Victorien Sardou 'La Vida es Sueño' 'Lady of the May,' by Sir Philip Sidney Laertes in 'Hamlet' Lafeu in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Love's Labour's Won' Lambert, Edmund ---- John Languet's tenderness for Philip Sidney Launce in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Launcelot in 'Merchant of Venice' Lavinia in 'Titus Andronicus' Layamons 'Brut' (1205) Le Beau in 'As You Like It' Leander in Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' Sidney, 'Life of Shakespeare' Leicester, Earl of Lennox in 'Macbeth' Leonato in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Leonine in 'Pericles' Leontes in 'Winter's Tale' Lepidus in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Life is a Dream,' by Calderon (1635) Limoges in 'King John' Lion in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Livia in 'Sejanus' Livy 'Locrine' Lodge, Thomas 'London Prodigal' (1605) Longaville in 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Lord Cromwell' (1613) Lord Mayor of London in 'Richard III.' Lorenzo in 'Merchant of Venice' 'Los Empeños de un Acaso' Lougher, John, Mary Fitton's second husband 'Love's Labour's Lost' (1589), matter, style, and motives of 'Love's Labour's Won,' or 'All's Well that Ends Well' (_see_ that title) 'Lucan,' Marlowe's translation of Lucentio in 'Taming of the Shrew' Lucetta in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona Luciana in 'Comedy of Errors' Lucio in 'Measure for Measure' Lucius in-- 'Julius Cæsar' 'Timon of Athens' 'Titus Andronicus' 'Lucrece,' relation to painting in Lucy, Sir Thomas, Shakespeare's relations with Ludovico in 'Othello' Ludwig, Otto Lupercal Feast in 'Julius Cæsar' Lychorida in 'Pericles' Lydgate Lyly, John Lysander in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Lysimachus in Pericles

'MACBETH' (1604-1605), similarity between 'Hamlet' and 'Macbeth' Belief in Witches--Defective text--Macbeth's children--Moral lesson ---- Lady, in 'Macbeth' Macduff in 'Macbeth' ---- Lady, in 'Macbeth' Macmorris in 'Henry V.' Magna Charta ignored by Shakespeare 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Malcolm in 'Macbeth' 'Malcontent,' by Marston Malone, Edmund Malvolio in 'Twelfth Night' Mamillius in 'Winter's Tale' 'Manfred,' by Byron Manningham, John 'Marco Polo,' Frampton's translation of (1579) Mardian in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Margaret in 'Much Ado About Nothing' ---- Henry VI.'s widow in 'Richard III.' ---- of Anjou in 'Henry VI.' Maria in-- 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Twelfth Night' Mariana in 'Measure for Measure' Marianus, Byzantine scholar Marina in 'Pericles' Marlowe, Christopher, English tragedy created by Shakespeare influenced by Marlowe Marston, John Marullus in 'Julius Cæsar' 'Masque of Blackness,' by Ben Jonson 'Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn,' by Beaumont Massey Massinger Mauvissière, French ambassador 'Maydes Metamorphosis,' by Lyly 'Measure for Measure,' chief characters and scenes in--Pessimism and monarchical tone of Meissner, Johan 'Melancholia,' by Albert Dürer Melantius in 'Maid's Tragedy,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Menelaus in 'Troilus and Cressida' Menenius in 'Coriolanus' 'Menœchmi' of Plautus Mephistopheles in 'Faust' 'Merchant of Venice' (1596-1598), Shakespeare's craving for wealth and position--Sources of--Chief characters in--Shakespeare's love of music shown in Mercutio in 'Romeo and Juliet' Meres (1598) 'Mermaid' Tavern 'Merry Wives of Windsor' (1599), prosaic and bourgeois tone of--Fairy scenes in 'Metamorphoses', Ovid's Michael Angelo Mickiewicz Middleton 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Miles Gloriosus' Milton Minto, Professor Miranda in the 'Tempest' 'Mirror of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir Iohn Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham,' by John Weever 'Mirrour of Policie' (1598) 'Miseries of Enforced Marriage', by George Wilkins Mistress Overdone in 'Measure for Measure' 'Mitre' Tavern Molière Mommsen Montague in 'Romeo and Juliet' Montaigne Montemayor's 'Diana' Montgomery, Lord Moonshine in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' More's 'Utopia' 'Mort de César,' by Voltaire Mortimer in 'Henry IV.' Moth in 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Much Ado About Nothing' Muley Hamlet or Muley Mahomet in 'G. Peele's Battle of Alcazar' Munday Musset, Alfred de Mustard-seed in 'Midsummer Nights Dream' 'Mydas,' by John Lyly

NASH, Thomas 'Natural History,' by Pliny 'Natural History of the Insects mentioned by Shakespeare,' by R. Paterson (1841) Navarre, King of, in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Neile, Bishop Nerissa in 'Merchant of Venice' Nestor in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'New Inn,' by Ben Jonson 'New Shakspere Society's Transactions' Newdigate-Newdegate, Lady 'News of Purgatory,' by Tarlton Nicholson Niels Steno on Geology Nietzsche 'Night Raven,' by Samuel Rowland 'Nine Daies Wonder,' by Kemp Norfolk, Duke of, in-- 'Richard II.' 'Richard III.' North Northampton, Lord Northumberland, Earl of, in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Richard II.' Nottingham, Lord 'Nouvelles Françaises du 14me Siècle' 'Nugæ Antiquæ,' by Rev. H. Harington (1779) Nurse in 'Romeo and Juliet' 'Nutcrackers,' by J. L. Heiberg Nym in 'Merry Wives of Windsor'

OBERON in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Octavia in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Octavius Cæsar in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Odyssey' Oehlenschläger Oldcastle, Sir John. _See_ Falstaff Oldys Oliver in 'As You Like It' Olivia in 'Twelfth Night' 'On Poet-Ape,' by Ben Jonson Ophelia in 'Hamlet' Orlando in 'As You Like It' 'Orlando Furioso,' Ariosto's 'Orlando Innamorato,' by Berni Osrick in 'Hamlet' 'Othello' (1605) Iago's character and significance Theme and origin of--Othello as a monograph Overbury, Sir Thomas Ovid Oxford Oxford, Earl of

'PÆAN TRIUMPHALL,' by Drayton Wage, Mr., Mrs., and Anne, in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 'Palace of Pleasure,' by Paynter Palamon in 'Two Noble Kinsmen' Palatine Anthology, The 'Palladis Tamia,' by Francis (1598) Pandarus in 'Troilus and Cressida' Pandulph in 'King John,' 'Panegyrike Congratulatorie to the King's Majestie,' by Samuel Daniel Panurge compared with Sir John Falstaff Paris in-- 'Romeo and Juliet' 'Troilus and Cressida' Parolles in 'Love's Labour's Won,' or 'All's Well that Ends Well' Pascal 'Passionate Pilgrim' (1599) 'Pastor Fido,' by Guarini Patroclus in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'Patterne of Paynfull Adventures,' by Lawrence Twine Patterson's, R., 'Natural History of the Insects mentioned by Shakespeare' (1841) Paulina in 'Winter's Tale' Pavier Paynter's 'Palace of Pleasure' Pease-blossom in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Peele, George Pembroke, Lady Mary ---- William Herbert, Earl of, passionately loved by Shakespeare --Sonnets addressed to Mary Fitton's relations with--Career of 'Penates,' by Ben Jonson 'Pensées,' by Pascal Percy, Henry. _See_ Hotspur Lady, wife of Hotspur, in 'Henry IV.' Perdita in 'Winter's Tale' 'Pericles,' Shakespeare's collaboration with Wilkins and Rowley --Corneille compared with Shakespeare--Shakespeare's restoration to happiness 'Persæ' of Æschylus Peter in 'Romeo and Juliet' Petrarch Petruchio in 'Taming of the Shrew' Phebe in 'As You Like It' 'Phèdre,' by Racine 'Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding,' by Beaumont and Fletcher Philippi, 307 Phrynia in 'Timon of Athens' 'Pimlyco, or Runne Redcap' (1609) Pindar Piombo, Sebastian del Pisanio in 'Cymbeline' Pistol in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Henry V.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Plato Platonism in Shakespeare's Sonnets Plautus 'Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie,' by John Davies 'Pleasant Comedie called Common Conditions' Pliny's 'Natural History' Plutarch 'Poetaster,' by Ben Jonson (1601) 'Poetical Rhapsody,' by Davison 'Poet's Vision and a Prince's Glorie,' by Thomas Greene Poins in 'Henry IV.' Polixenes in 'Winter's Tale' Polonius in 'Hamlet' Polwheele, William, Mary Fitton's first husband Pompey in 'Measure for Measure' Pompey the Great Pope, Thomas Porter in 'Macbeth' Portia in-- 'Julius Cæsar' 'Merchant of Venice' Posthumus in 'Cymbeline' 'Précieuses Ridicules' Priam in 'Troilus and Cressida' Princess in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Propertius Prospero in the 'Tempest' Proteus in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Provost in 'Measure for Measure' Prynne's 'Histriomastix' 'Psyché,' by Molière Puck in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Puritanism hated and attacked by Shakespeare Pushkin, influence of 'Hamlet' on Pyramus in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Pyrgopolinices Pythagoreans

QUEEN in-- 'Cymbeline' 'Hamlet' 'Queen of Corinth' Quince in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Quiney, Adrian ---- Richard ---- Thomas, husband of Judith Shakespeare

RABELAIS compared with Shakespeare Racine Raigne of King Edward Third (1596) Raleigh, Sir Walter, career of--Accusations against--Fate of 'Ralph Roister Doister' Raoul le Fevre's 'Recueil des Histoires de Troyes' 'Ratsey's Ghost' Regan in 'King Lear' 'Relics of Cardinal Wolsey,' by George Cavendish 'Religio Medici,' by Sir Th. Browne Renaissance 'Representative Men,' by Emerson 'Return from Parnassus' (1606), by Ben Jonson 'Revisor,' by Gogol Rich, Lady Penelope 'Richard II.,' C. Marlowe's Edward II. used by Shakespeare as model for 'Richard III.,' principal scenes and classic tendency of Richard of York. _See_ York and Gloucester Richter, Jean Paul 'Right Excellent and Famous History of Promos and Cassandra' (1578), by George Whetstone Rivers, Earl, in 'Richard III.' Rizzio Rochester, Viscount. _See_ Robert Carr Roderigo in 'Othello' Romano, Giulio, in 'Winter's Tale' 'Romeo and Juliet' (1591), Romanesque structure of --Conception of love in Ronsard Rosalind in 'As You Like It' Rosaline in-- 'Love's Labour's Lost' 'Romeo and Juliet' 'Rosalynde,' by Lodge Rosencrantz in 'Hamlet' Rosse in 'Macbeth' Rossetti, W. M. Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer Rowland's, Samuel, 'Night Raven' Rowley, William Rushtons 'Shakespeare's Euphuism' (1871) Russell, Mrs. Anne Russell, Mrs. Bess Rutland, Lord Rutland's death in 'Henry VI.,

SACKVILLE, Thomas 'Sad Shepherd, The,' by Ben Jonson Sadler, Hamlet, Shakespeare's friend Sallust in 'Catiline,' by Ben Jonson 'Sappho,' by Daudet Sardou's, Victorien, La Tosca 'Satiromastix,' by Marston and Dekker Saturninus in 'Titus Andronicus' Saxo Grammaticus Scheffler, Ludwig von Schiller 'School of Abuse,' by Stephen Gosson (1579) Schopenhauer Schück, Henry 'Scotorum Historiæ,' by Hector Boece Seasons of Shakspeare's Plays Sebastian in-- 'Tempest' 'Twelfth Night, Segar, Maister William, Garter King at Armes, notebook of 'Sejanus,' by Ben Jonson (1603) Seneca, poet 'Sententiæ Pueriles' Servilia, Brutus's mother Servilius in Timon of Athens Seven Ages of Man, Shakespeare's speech in 'As You Like It' Sextus in 'Rape of Lucrece' Sextus Pompeius in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Seymour's, Lord William, marriage with Arabella Stuart Shadow of the Night, by Chapman (1594) Shakespeare, John, father of William Shakespeare ---- Richard, grandfather of William Shakespeare ---- William, Anne Hathaway's marriage with--Shakespeare's conception of relation of the sexes Aristocratic principles of--Shakespeare's hatred of the masses, Associates of Attacks upon--The Baconian Theory Biographies of Bohemian life and dissipation of Brilliant and happiest period of--Feminine types belonging to it Bruno's, Giordano, supposed influence over Corneille, Pierre, compared with Davenant, Mrs., courted by Heath of Diction of Dramatic art, Shakespeare's conception of Elizabeth, Queen, cause of Shakespeare's coolness towards Elizabethan England in the youth of Euphuism and pedantry ridiculed by--Traces of John Lyly's Euphues' in 'Hamlet' Fitton, Mary, or the Dark Lady, loved by Greene's, Robert, attack on Hamnet, son of Shakespeare's sorrow at death of Italy visited by--Discussion on James I.'s patronage of--Relations between Jonson, Ben, compared with--Relations between Judith, daughter of Kemp's, actor, relations with Knowledge of physical and philosophical London, Shakespeare's first arrival in--Buildings, costumes, manners --Political and religious conditions of the period Lucy's, Sir Thomas, relations with--Shakespeare's consequent departure from Stratford Marlowe's, C., influence on Melancholy, pessimism, and misanthropy of causes of--Shakespeare's restoration to happiness Montaigne's influence over Morality--Shakespeare's conception of true morality Music, Shakespeare's love of Nature and solitude, Shakespeare's love and longing for Painting described by Parentage and boyhood of Shakespeare at Stratford Pembroke, William Herbert, Earl of, passionately loved by-- Shakespeare's Platonism and idolatry in friendship Position of Prosperity and wealth of--Shakespeare's purchase of New Place, houses, and land--Money transactions and lawsuits Puritanism hated and attacked by Rabelais compared with Return of Shakespeare to Stratford--Surroundings of--Visit of Shakespeare to London--Last years of his life Rivalry, Shakespeare's sense of Self-transformation, Shakespeare's power of Susannah, daughter of Tarlton eulogised by Tavern life of Theatres in time of, situation and arrangements of--Costumes, players and audiences Will of Womanhood, Shakespeare's ideal of Women, Shakespeare's contempt for 'Shakespeare and Montaigne,' by Jacob Feis 'Shakespeare and Typography,' Blades 'Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems,' by C. A. Brown 'Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse,' by Ingleby 'Shakespeare's Euphuism,' by Rushton (1871) 'Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible,' by Bishop Charles Wordsworth 'Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements,' by Lord Campbell 'Shakespeare's Library, Collier's' 'Shakespeare's Mulberry Tree,' sung by Garrick 'Shakespearean Myth,' by Appleton Morgan Shallow in-- 'Henry IV.' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Sheffield, Countess of Shelley 'Shepheard's Spring Song for the Entertainment of King James,' by Henry Chettle 'Shepherdess Felismena' 'Shepherd's Calendar,' by Spenser Sheppard Sherborne 'Shirley's Eulogy' of Beaumont and Fletcher Shottery, Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shrewsbury battlefield in 'Henry IV.' Shylock in 'Merchant of Venice' Sicinius in Coriolanus Sidney, Sir Philip Silence, Justice, in 'Henry IV.' 'Silent Woman, The,' by Ben Jonson (1609) Silvayn's, Alexander, 'Orator' Silvia in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Simonides in 'Pericles' Simpson, Mr. Richard Sir Andrew Aguecheek in 'Twelfth Night,' Sir John Oldcastle (1600) Sir Tobby Belch in 'Twelfth Night' Slender in 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Slowacki Smith in Henry VI. Smith, William, founding the Baconian Theory (1856) Smith's, Thomas, 'Voiage and Entertainement in Rushia' Snug in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Socrates 'Apology' 'Solyman and Perseda,' by Kyd Somer, Sir George Somerset, Earl of _See_ Robert Carr Sonnets (1601), melancholy and sadness of--Date of Pembroke and Mary Fitton addressed in Shakespeare's Platonism, idolatry in friendship, and inner life shown in--Form and poetic value of Sören Kierkegaard Southampton, Earl of, Shakespeare's patron--Conspiracy of Southampton, Lady Southwell, Elizabeth ---- Robert Spaccio, by Giordano Bruno Spanish Alliance 'Spanish Tragedy,' by Kyd Spedding James Speed in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Spenser Stanley, Lord, in Richard III. Stationers' Register Statius' 'Thebaide' Stedefeld, G. F. Stephano in the 'Tempest' Stern, Alfred Stirling's, Count, 'Darius' Story of 'Troylus and Pandor' (1515) Stows Summarie of the Chronicles of England, 111 Straparola's Two Lovers of Pisa Stratford on Avon-- Birth of Shakespeare at--Description of town and Shakespeare's boyhood at Departure of Shakespeare from Property bought by Shakespeare at Shakespeare restoring position and prosperity of his family at Return of Shakespeare to--Surroundings of--Visit of Shakespeare to London--Last years of his life at Stuart, Arabella ---- Mary, mother of James I. Study of Shakespeare, by Swinburne Sturley, Abraham Suffolk, Duke of, in 'Henry VI.' Sullivan, E. Summarie of the Chronicles of England, by Stow Surrey, Henry, Earl of 'Swan' Theatre Swinburne Sycorax in the Tempest Sylvia in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Symonds, John Addington Symons, Arthur Syren, literary club founded by Sir Walter Raleigh

TADEMA, ALMA-- Tagelied Tailor's, Robert, 'Hog has Lost his Pearl' (1614) Taine Talbot, Lord 'Tamburlaine the Great,' by C. Marlowe 'Taming of the Shrew' (1596) Tamora in 'Titus Andronicus' 'Tancred and Gismunda' Tantalus in Seneca's 'Thyestes' Tarlton, actor, Shakespeare's eulogy of 'Tarlton's Jests and News, &c.' 'Tartuffe,' by Molière 'Tears of Fancie,' by Watson 'Tears of the Muses,' by Spenser 'Tempest' (1612-1613) Dramatic value of--Chief characters in--Shakespeare's farewell to Art Sources of Wedding of Princess Elizabeth celebrated by Temptation, by Krasinski Thaisa in Pericles 'The Case is Altered,' by Ben Jonson 'The Hog has Lost His Pearl' (1614), by Robert Tailor 'The Orator,' by Alexander Silvayn 'The Prince,' 'The Puritan' (1607) 'The Supposes' 'The Theatre,' first play-house erected in London and owned by James Burbage 'The Witch,' by Middleton 'Theatre of God's Judgements' (1597) 'Theatrum Licentia,' in Laquei Ridiculosi (1616) 'Thebaide,' by Statius 'Théodore, Vierge et Martyre,' by Pierre Corneille Thersites in 'Troilus and Cressida' Theseus in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Two Noble Kinsmen' 'Third Blast of Retraite from Plaies' (1580) Thisbe in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Thorpe, Thomas Thorvaldsen 'Thyestes,' by Seneca Thyreus in 'Antony and Cleopatra' Tiberius in Sejanus, by Ben Jonson Tibullus in Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster' Tieck Timandra in 'Timon of Athens' 'Timbreo of Candona,' Bandello's story of 'Times displayed in Six Sestyads,' by Sheppard 'Timon of Athens,' sources of--Shakespeare's part and purpose in--Coriolanus compared with Timon--Non-Shakespearian elements in--Shakespeare's bitterness and hatred of mankind, Titania in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' 'Titus and Vespasian' (1592) 'Titus Andronicus,' Shakespeare's authorship of Titus Lartius in "Coriolanus" Tolstoi, influence of 'Hamlet' on 'To the Majestie of King James, a Gratulatorie Poem,' by Michael Drayton Tophas, Sir, in John Lyly's 'Endymion' 'Tottel's Miscellany' (1557) 'Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem,' motto on sign of Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's allusion to Touchstone in 'As You Like It' Touchstone of True Love, or Hero and Leander, by Ben Jonson (_see_ that title) 'Tragedie of Antonie' 'Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,' etc., etc. 'Travels of Three English Brothers' 'Treatise on Education,' by Plutarch 'Triar Table of the Order of Shakespeare's Plays,' by Furnival Trinculo in the 'Tempest' 'Troilus and Cressida' (1609) Contempt for women portrayed in Cressida's character Historical material for Homer's 'Iliad' compared with Scorn of woman's guile and public stupidity in 'Troilus and Cressida,' by Chaucer, (1630) 'Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, with the discouerie of King Richard Cordelions Base sonne (vulgarly named the Bastard Fawconbridge): also the death of King John at Swinstead Abbey' Troy, destruction of 'True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death of the good King Henrie the Sixt' 'True Tragedy of Richard III.' Tschischwitz Tubal in 'Merchant of Venice' Tucca in Dekker's 'Satiromastix' Türck, Hermann Turgueneff, influence of 'Hamlet' on 'Turkish Mahomet and Hyren the Fair Greek,' by George Peele Turner, Mrs. 'Twelfth Night' (1601), gibes at Puritanism and chief characters in--Melancholy tone of Twine's, Lawrence, 'Patterne of Paynfull Adventures' 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' 'Two Lovers of Pisa,' by Straparola 'Two Noble Kinsmen,' Shakespeare's and Fletcher's parts in Tybalt in 'Romeo and Juliet' Tycho Brahe Tyler, Mr. Thomas Tyrone's, O'Neil, Earl of, rebellion in Ireland Tyrwhitt, Thomas

ULYSSES in 'Troilus and Cressida' 'Ulysses von Ithacia,' by Holberg 'Undivine Comedy,' by Krasinski 'Utopia,' More's

VALENTINE in 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' Venice Ventidius in 'Antony and Cleopatra' 'Venus and Adonis' (1590-1591), descriptions of nature in Vere, Bridget Verges in 'Much Ado About Nothing' Vernon, Lady Elizabeth, Earl of Southampton's marriage with Sir Richard in 'Henry IV.' Verona Vespasian in 'Titus and Vespasian' Victor Hugo Vidushakus Vigny, Alfred de Villiers, Sir George, James I.'s favourite Viola in 'Twelfth Night' Virgil in 'Poetaster,' &c., by Ben Jonson Virgilia in 'Coriolanus' Virginia 'Vittoria Corombona,' by Webster 'Voiage and Entertainement in Rushia,' by Th. Smith 'Volpone,' by Jonson Voltaire Voltemand in 'Hamlet' Volumnia in 'Coriolanus' Vorstius, Conrad

WALKER, Henry Wall in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Walsingham Ward, John, Vicar of Stratford Warner Warwick, Earl of, in-- 'Edward III.' 'Henry IV.' 'Henry VI.' Watkins, Lloyd Watson's 'Tears of Fancie,' sonnets Webster, John Weever, John 'Mirrors of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir John Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham' Weldon, Sir Anthony Werder, K. Weston, Richard Whetstone, George 'White Divel' (1612), by John Webster Whyte, Rowland Widow of Florence in 'Alls Well that Ends Well' or 'Love's Labour's Won' 'Wild Goose Chase,' by Fletcher 'Wilhelm Meister,' by Goethe Wilkins, George William Rufus, King William in 'As You Like It' 'Merry Wives of Windsor' Williams in 'Henry V.' Willoughby, Ambrose Wilmecote Wilson, Arthur Wilton Winstanley Winter, Sir Edward 'Winter's Tale,' Greene supplying material for--Euphuism ridiculed in--Chief characters in Winwood, Lord Witches in 'Macbeth' 'Wit's Miserie,' by Thomas Lodge Witt, Jan de Wittenberg Wolsey in 'Henry VIII.' 'Woman-Hater,' by Fletcher Worcester in 'Henry IV.' Wordsworth 'Worthies,' by Fuller Wotton, Sir Henry Wrightman, Edward Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton, Wynkyn de Worde

YONG's, Bartholomew, translation of 'Diana' York in 'Richard II.' York, Duchess of, mother of Edward IV. in 'Richard III.' ---- Duke of, father of Edward IV., in 'Henry VI.' ---- Edward of. _See_ Edward IV. ---- Edward of, son of Edward IV. _See_ 'Edward V.' ---- Richard of, afterwards Earl of Gloucester and Richard III. _See_ Gloucester Yorkshire Tragedy" (1608)

THE END