and so forth. I might compare this with what Romeo says of his banishment, and perhaps infer from this two-fold treatment of the theme that Shakespeare left behind in Stratford some dark beauty who may have given Anne Hathaway good cause for jealous rage. It must not be forgotten here that Dryasdust tells us he was betrothed to another girl when Anne Hathaway's relations forced him to marry their kinswoman.

A moment later and this lover Valentine uses the very words that we found so characteristic in the mouth of the lover Orsino in Twelfth Night":

"O I have fed upon this woe already, And now excess of it will make me surfeit."

Valentine, indeed, shows us traits of nearly all Shakespeare's later lovers, and this seems to me interesting, because of course all the qualities were in the youth, which were later differenced into various characters. His advice to the Duke, who pretends to be in love, is far too ripe, too contemptuous-true, to suit the character of such a votary of fond desire as Valentine was; it is mellow with experience and man-of-the-world wisdom, and the last couplet of it distinctly fore-shadows Benedick:

"Flatter and praise, commend, extol their graces; Though ne'er so black, say they have angels' faces. That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man If with his tongue he cannot win a woman."

But this is only an involuntary apercu of Valentine, as indeed Benedick is only an intellectual mood of Shakespeare. And here Valentine is contrasted with Proteus, who gives somewhat different advice to Thurio, and yet advice which is still more characteristic of Shakespeare than Valentine-Benedick's counsel. Proteus says:

"You must lay lime to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets, whose composed rhymes Should be full fraught with serviceable vows."

In this way the young poet sought to give expression to different views of life, and so realize the complexity of his own nature.

The other traits of Valentine's character that do not necessarily belong to him as a lover are all characteristic traits of Shakespeare. When he is playing the banished robber-chief far from his love, this is how Valentine consoles himself:

"This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods, I better brook than flourishing peopled towns: Here can I sit alone unseen of any, And to the nightingale's complaining notes Tune my distresses and record my woes."

This idyllic love of nature, this marked preference for the country over the city, however peculiar in a highway robber, are characteristics of Shakespeare from youth to age. Not only do his comedies lead us continually from the haunts of men to the forest and stream, but also his tragedies. He turns to nature, indeed, in all times of stress and trouble for its healing unconsciousness, its gentle changes that can be foreseen and reckoned upon, and that yet bring fresh interests and charming surprises; and in times of health and happiness he pictures the pleasant earth and its diviner beauties with a passionate intensity. Again and again we shall have to notice his poet's love for "unfrequented woods," his thinker's longing for "the life removed."

At the end of the drama Valentine displays the gentle forgivingness of disposition which we have already had reason to regard as one of Shakespeare's most marked characteristics. As soon as "false, fleeting Proteus" confesses his sin Valentine pardons him with words that echo and re-echo through Shakespeare's later dramas:

"Then I am paid, And once again I do receive thee honest. Who by repentance is not satisfied Is nor of heaven nor earth; for these are pleased; By patience the Eternal's wrath's appeased."

He even goes further than this, and confounds our knowledge of human nature by adding:

"And that my love may appear plain and free All that was mine in Silvia I give thee."

And that the meaning may be made more distinct than words can make it, he causes Julia to faint on hearing the proposal. One cannot help recalling the passage in "The Merchant of Venice" when Bassanio and Gratiano both declare they would sacrifice their wives to free Antonio, and a well-known sonnet which seems to prove that Shakespeare thought more of a man's friendship for a man than of a man's love for a woman. But as I shall have to discuss this point at length when I handle the Sonnets, I have, perhaps, said enough for the moment. Nor need I consider the fact here that the whole of this last scene of the last act was manifestly revised or rewritten by Shakespeare circa 1598—years after the rest of the play.

I think every one will admit now that Shakespeare revealed himself in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," and especially in Valentine, much more fully than in Biron and in "Love's Labour's Lost" The three earliest comedies prove that from the very beginning of his career Shakespeare's chief aim was to reveal and realize himself.



CHAPTER II

SHAKESPEARE AS ANTONIO, THE MERCHANT

No one, so far as I know, has yet tried to identify Antonio, the Merchant of Venice, with Shakespeare, and yet Antonio is Shakespeare himself, and Shakespeare in what to us, children of an industrial civilization, is the most interesting attitude possible. Here in Antonio for the first time we discover Shakespeare in direct relations with real life, as real life is understood in the twentieth century. From Antonio we shall learn what Shakespeare thought of business men and business methods—of our modern way of living. Of course we must be on our guard against drawing general conclusions from this solitary example, unless we find from other plays that Antonio's attitude towards practical affairs was indeed Shakespeare's. But if this is the case, if Shakespeare has depicted himself characteristically in Antonio, how interesting it will be to hear his opinion of our money-making civilization. It will be as if he rose from the dead to tell us what he thinks of our doings. He has been represented by this critic and by that as a master of affairs, a prudent thrifty soul; now we shall see if this monstrous hybrid of tradesman-poet ever had any foundation in fact.

The first point to be settled is: Did Shakespeare reveal himself very ingenuously and completely in Antonio, or was the "royal merchant" a mere pose of his, a mood or a convention? Let us take Antonio's first words, the words, too, which begin the play:

"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad: It wearies me; you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn; And such a want-wit sadness makes of me, That I have much ado to know myself."

It is this very sadness that makes it easy for us to know Shakespeare, even when he disguises himself as a Venetian merchant. A little later and Jaques will describe and define the disease as "humorous melancholy"; but here it is already a settled habit of mind.

Antonio then explains that his sadness has no cause, and incidentally attributes his wealth to fortune and not to his own brains or endeavour. The modern idea of the Captain of Industry who enriches others as well as himself, had evidently never entered into Shakespeare's head. Salarino says Antonio is "sad to think upon his merchandise"; but Antonio answers:

"Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it. My ventures are not in one bottom trusted, Nor to one place: nor is my whole estate Upon the fortune of this present year: Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad."

This tone of modest gentle sincerity is Shakespeare's habitual tone from about his thirtieth year to the end of his life: it has the accent of unaffected nature. In bidding farewell to Salarino Antonio shows us the exquisite courtesy which Shakespeare used in life. Salarino, seeing Bassanio approaching, says:

"I would have stayed till I had made you merry, If worthier friends had not prevented me."

Antonio answers:

"Your worth is very dear in my regard. I take it, your own business calls on you, And you embrace the occasion to depart."

More characteristic still is the dialogue between Gratiano and Antonio in the same scene. Gratiano, the twin-brother surely of Mercutio, tells Antonio that he thinks too much of the things of this world, and warns him:

"They lose it that do buy it with much care."

Antonio replies:

"I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage, where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one."

Every one who has followed me so far will admit that this is Shakespeare's most usual and most ingenuous attitude towards life; "I do not esteem worldly possessions," he says; "life itself is too transient, too unreal to be dearly held." Gratiano's reflection, too, is Shakespeare's, and puts the truth in a nutshell:

"They lose it that do buy it with much care."

We now come to the most salient peculiarity in this play. When Bassanio, his debtor, asks him for more money, Antonio answers:

"My purse, my person, my extremes! means, Lie all unlocked to your occasions."

And, though Bassanio tells him his money is to be risked on a romantic and wild adventure, Antonio declares that Bassanio's doubt does him more wrong than if his friend had already wasted all he has, and the act closes by Antonio pressing Bassanio to use his credit "to the uttermost." Now, this contempt of money was, no doubt, a pose, if not a habit of the aristocratic society of the time, and Shakespeare may have been aping the tone of his betters in putting to show a most lavish generosity. But even if his social superiors encouraged him in a wasteful extravagance, it must be admitted that Shakespeare betters their teaching. The lord was riotously lavish, no doubt, because he had money, or could get it without much trouble; but, put in Antonio's position, he would not press his last penny on his friend, much less strain his credit "to the uttermost" for him as Antonio does for Bassanio. Here we have the personal note of Shakespeare: "Your affection," says the elder man to the younger, "is all to me, and money's less than nothing in the balance. Don't let us waste a word on it; a doubt of me were an injury!" But men will do that for affection which they would never do in cool blood, and therefore one cannot help asking whether Shakespeare really felt and practised this extreme contempt of wealth? For the moment, if we leave his actions out of the account, there can be, I think, no doubt about his feelings. His dislike of money makes him disfigure reality. No merchant, it may fairly be said, either of the sixteenth century or the twentieth, ever amassed or kept a fortune with Antonio's principles. In our day of world-wide speculation and immense wealth it is just possible for a man to be a millionaire and generous; but in the sixteenth century, when wealth was made by penurious saving, by slow daily adding of coin to coin, merchants like this Antonio were unheard of, impossible.

Moreover all the amiable characters in this play regard money with unaffected disdain; Portia no sooner hears of Shylock's suit than she cries:

"Pay him six thousand, and deface the bond; Double six thousand, and then treble that, Before a friend of this description Shall lose a hair through Bassanio's fault."

And if we attribute this outburst to her love we must not forget that, when it comes to the test in court, and she holds the Jew in her hand and might save her gold, she again reminds him:

"Shylock, there's thrice thy money offered thee."

A boundless generosity is the characteristic of Portia, and Bassanio, the penniless fortune-hunter, is just as extravagant; he will pay the Jew's bond twice over, and,

"If that will not suffice, I will be bound to pay it ten times o'er, On forfeit of my hands, my head, my heart."

It may, of course, be urged that these Christians are all prodigal in order to throw Shylock's avarice and meanness into higher light; but that this disdain of money is not assumed for the sake of any artistic effect will appear from other plays. At the risk of being accused of super-subtlety, I must confess that I find in Shylock himself traces of Shakespeare's contempt of money; Jessica says of him:

"I have heard him swear To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen, That he would rather have Antonio's flesh Than twenty times the value of the sum That he did owe him."

Even Shylock, it appears, hated Antonio more than he valued money, and this hatred, though it may have its root in love of money, half redeems him in our eyes. Shakespeare could not imagine a man who loved money more than anything else; his hated and hateful usurer is more a man of passion than a Jew.

The same prodigality and contempt of money are to be found in nearly all Shakespeare's plays, and, curiously enough, the persons to show this disdain most strongly are usually the masks of Shakespeare himself. A philosophic soliloquy is hardly more characteristic of Shakespeare than a sneer at money. It should be noted, too, that this peculiarity is not a trait of his youth chiefly, as it is with most men who are free-handed. It rather seems, as in the case of Antonio, to be a reasoned attitude towards life, and it undoubtedly becomes more and more marked as Shakespeare grows older. Contempt of wealth is stronger in Brutus than in Antonio; stronger in Lear than in Brutus, and stronger in Timon than in Lear.

But can we be at all certain that Antonio's view of life in this respect was Shakespeare's? It may be that Shakespeare pretended to this generosity in order to loosen the purse-strings of his lordly patrons. Even if his motive for writing in this strain were a worthy motive, who is to assure us that he practised the generosity he preached? When I come to his life I think I shall be able to prove that Shakespeare was excessively careless of money; extravagant, indeed, and generous to a fault. Shakespeare did not win to eminence as a dramatist without exciting the envy and jealousy of many of his colleagues and contemporaries, and if these sharp-eyed critics had found him in drama after drama advocating lavish free-handedness while showing meanness or even ordinary prudence in his own expenditure, we should probably have heard of it as we heard from Greene how he took plays from other playwrights. But the silence of his contemporaries goes to confirm the positive testimony of Ben Jonson, that he was of "an open and free nature,"—openhanded always, and liberal, we may be sure, to a fault. In any case, the burden of proof lies with those who wish us to believe that Shakespeare was "a careful and prudent man of business," for in a dozen plays the personages who are his heroes and incarnations pour contempt on those who would lock "rascal counters" from their friends, and, in default of proof to the contrary, we are compelled to assume that he practised the generosity which he so earnestly and sedulously praised. At least it will be advisable for the moment to assume that he pictured himself as generous Antonio, without difficulty or conscious self-deception.

But this Antonio has not only the melancholy, courtesy and boundless generosity of Shakespeare; he has other qualities of the master which need to be thrown into relief.

First of all, Antonio has that submission to misfortune, that resignation in face of defeat and suffering which we have already seen as characteristics of Richard II. The resignation might almost be called saintly, were it not that it seems to spring rather from the natural melancholy and sadness of Shakespeare's disposition; "the world is a hard, all-hating world," he seems to say, "and misery is the natural lot of man; defeat comes to all; why should I hope for any better fortune?" At the very beginning of the trial he recognizes that he is certain to lose; Bassanio and Gratiano appeal to the Duke for him; but he never speaks in his own defence; he says of his opponent at the outset:

"I do oppose My patience to his fury, and am arm'd To suffer, with a quietness of spirit, The very tyranny and rage of his."

and again he will not contend, but begs the Court,

".... with all brief and plain conveniency Let me have judgement and the Jew his will."

Even when Bassanio tries to cheer him,

"What, man, courage yet! The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones and all, Ere thou shalt lose for me one drop of blood."

Antonio answers:

"I am a tainted wether of the flock, Meetest for death: the weakest kind of fruit Drops earliest to the ground: and so let me: You cannot better be employed, Bassanio, Than to live still and write mine epitaph."

He will not be saved: he gives himself at once to that "sweet way of despair" which we have found to be the second Richard's way and Shakespeare's way.

Just as we noticed, when speaking of Posthumus in "Cymbeline," that Shakespeare's hero and alter ego is always praised by the other personages of the drama, so this Antonio is praised preposterously by the chief personages of the play, and in the terms of praise we may see how Shakespeare, even in early manhood, liked to be considered. He had no ambition to be counted stalwart, or bold, or resolute like most young males of his race, much less "a good hater," as Dr. Johnson confessed himself: he wanted his gentle qualities recognized, and his intellectual gifts; Hamlet wished to be thought a courtier, scholar, gentleman; and here Salarino says of Antonio:

"A kinder gentleman treads not the earth,"

and he goes on to tell how Antonio, when parting from Bassanio, had "eyes big with tears":

"Turning his face, he put his hand behind him, And with affection wondrous sensible He wrung Bassanio's hand; and so they parted."

This Antonio is as tender-hearted and loving as young Arthur. And Lorenzo speaks of Antonio to Portia just as Salarino spoke of him:

"Lor. But if you knew to whom you show this honour. How true a gentleman you send relief, How dear a lover of my lord your husband, I know you would be prouder of the work Than customary bounty can enforce you."

and finally Bassanio sums Antonio up in enthusiastic superlatives:

"The dearest friend to me, the kindest man, The best-condition'd and unwearied spirit In doing courtesies, and one in whom The ancient Roman honour more appears Than any that draws breath in Italy."

It is as a prince of friends and most courteous gentleman that Antonio acts his part from the beginning to the end of the play with one notable exception to which I shall return in a moment. It is astonishing to find this sadness, this courtesy, this lavish generosity and contempt of money, this love of love and friendship and affection in any man in early manhood; but these qualities were Shakespeare's from youth to old age.

I say that Antonio was most courteous to all with one notable exception, and that exception was Shylock.

It has become the custom on the English stage for the actor to try to turn Shylock into a hero; but that was assuredly not Shakespeare's intention. True, he makes Shylock appeal to the common humanity of both Jew and Christian.

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

But if Shakespeare was far in advance of his age in this intellectual appreciation of the brotherhood of man; yet as an artist and thinker and poet he is particularly contemptuous of the usurer and trader in other men's necessities, and therefore, when Antonio meets Shylock, though he wants a favour from him, he cannot be even decently polite to him. He begins by saying in the third scene of the first act:

"Although I neither lend nor borrow By taking nor by giving of excess, Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend, I'll break a custom."

The first phrase here reminds me of Polonius: "neither a borrower nor a lender be." When Shylock attempts to defend himself by citing the way Jacob cheated Laban, Antonio answers contemptuously "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." Shylock then goes on:

"Signor Antonio, many a time and oft, In the Rialto you have rated me About my moneys and my usances: Still, I have borne it with a patient shrug, For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me mis-believer, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, And all for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help: Go to, then; you come to me, and you say, 'Shylock, we would have moneys:' you say so You that did void your rheum upon my beard And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold: moneys is your suit. What should I say to you? Should I not say 'Hath a dog money? is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats?'"

Antonio answers this in words which it would be almost impossible to take for Shakespeare's because of their brutal rudeness, were it not, as we shall see later, that Shakespeare loathed the Jew usurer more than any character in all his plays. Here are the words:

"Ant. I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too. If thou will lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends; for when did friendship take A breed for barren metal of his friend? But lend it rather to thine enemy Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face Exact the penalty."

Then Shylock makes peace, and proposes his modest penalty. Bassanio says:

"You shall not seal to such a bond for me: I'll rather dwell in my necessity."

Antonio is perfectly careless and content: he says:

"Content, i' faith: I'll seal to such a bond, And say there is much kindness in the Jew."

Antonio's heedless trust of other men and impatience are qualities most foreign to the merchant; but are shown again and again by Shakespeare's impersonations.

Perhaps it will be well here to prove once for all that Shakespeare did really hate the Jew. In the first place he excites our sympathy again and again for him on the broad grounds of common humanity; but the moment it comes to a particular occasion he represents him as hateful, even where a little thought would have taught him that the Jew must be at his best. It is a peculiarity of humanity which Shakespeare should not have overlooked, that all pariahs and outcasts display intense family affection; those whom the world scouts and hates are generally at their noblest in their own homes. The pressure from the outside, Herbert Spencer would say, tends to bring about cohesion among the members of the despised caste. The family affection of the Jew, his kindness to his kindred, have become proverbial. But Shakespeare admits no such kindness in Shylock: when his daughter leaves Shylock one would think that Shakespeare would picture the father's desolation and misery, his sorrow at losing his only child; but here there is no touch of sympathy in gentle Shakespeare:

".... I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!"

But there is even better proof than this: when Shylock is defeated in his case and leaves the Court penniless and broken, Shakespeare allows him to be insulted by a gentleman. Shylock becomes pathetic in his defeat, for Shakespeare always sympathized with failure, even before he came to grief himself:

"Shy. Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that: You take my house when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life When you do take the means whereby I live."

"Por. What mercy can you render him, Antonio?

Gra. A halter gratis; nothing else for God's sake."

And then Antonio offers to "quit the fine for one-half his goods." Utterly broken now, Shylock says:

"I pray you, give me leave to go from hence; I am not well: send the deed after me, And I will sign it.

Duke. Get thee gone, but do it.

Gra. In christening shalt thou have two godfathers: Had I been judge, thou should'st have had ten more, To bring thee to the gallows, not the font."

A brutal insult from a gallant gentleman to the broken Jew: it is the only time in all Shakespeare when a beaten and ruined man is so insulted.

Antonio, it must be confessed, is a very charming sketch of Shakespeare when he was about thirty years of age, and it is amusing to reflect that it is just the rich merchant with all his wealth at hazard whom he picks out to embody his utter contempt of riches. The "royal merchant," as he calls him, trained from youth to barter, is the very last man in the world to back such a venture as Bassanio's—much less would such a man treat money with disdain. But Shakespeare from the beginning of the play put himself quite naively in Antonio's place, and so the astounding antinomy came to expression.



CHAPTER III

THE SONNETS: PART I

Ever since Wordsworth wrote that the sonnets were the key to Shakespeare's heart, it has been taken for granted (save by those who regard even the sonnets as mere poetical exercises) that Shakespeare's real nature is discovered in the sonnets more easily and more surely than in the plays. Those readers who have followed me so far in examining his plays will hardly need to be told that I do not agree with this assumption. The author whose personality is rich and complex enough to create and vitalize a dozen characters, reveals himself more fully in his creations than he can in his proper person. It was natural enough that Wordsworth, a great lyric poet, should catch Shakespeare's accent better in his sonnets than in his dramas; but that is owing to Wordsworth's limitations. And if the majority of later English critics have agreed with Wordsworth, it only shows that Englishmen in general are better judges of lyric than of dramatic work. We have the greatest lyrics in the world; but our dramas, with the exception of Shakespeare's, are not remarkable. And in that modern extension of the drama, the novel, we are distinctly inferior to the French and Russians. This inferiority must be ascribed to the new-fangled prudery of language and thought which emasculates all our later fiction; but as that prudery is not found in our lyric verse it is evident that here alone the inspiration is full and rich enough to overflow the limits of epicene convention.

Whether the reader agrees with me or not on this point, it may be accepted that Shakespeare revealed himself far more completely in his plays than as a lyric poet. Just as he chose his dramatic subjects with some felicity to reveal his many-sided nature, so he used the sonnets with equal artistry to discover that part of himself which could hardly be rendered objectively. Whatever is masculine in a man can be depicted superbly on the stage, but his feminine qualities—passionate self-abandonment, facile forgivingness, self-pity—do not show well in the dramatic struggle. What sort of a drama would that be in which the hero would have to confess that when in the vale of years he had fallen desperately in love with a girl, and that he had been foolish enough to send a friend, a young noble, to plead his cause, with the result that the girl won the friend and gave herself to him? The protagonist would earn mocking laughter and not sympathy, and this Shakespeare no doubt foresaw. Besides, to Shakespeare, this story, which is in brief the story of the sonnets, was terribly real and intimate, and he felt instinctively that he could not treat it objectively; it was too near him, too exquisitely painful for that.

At some time or other life overpowers the strongest of us, and that defeat we all treat lyrically; when the deepest depth in us is stirred we cannot feign, or depict ourselves from the outside dispassionately; we can only cry our passion, our pain and our despair; this once we use no art, simple truth is all we seek to reach. The crisis of Shakespeare's life, the hour of agony and bloody sweat when his weakness found him out and life's handicap proved too heavy even for his strength—that is the subject of the sonnets.

Now what was Shakespeare's weakness? his besetting temptation? "Love is my sin," he says; "Love of love and her soft hours" was his weakness: passion the snare that meshed his soul. No wonder Antony cries:

"Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?"

for his gipsy led Shakespeare from shame to shame, to the verge of madness. The sonnets give us the story, the whole terrible, sinful, magical story of Shakespeare's passion.

As might have been expected, Englishmen like Wordsworth, with an intense appreciation of lyric poetry, have done good work in criticism of the sonnets, and one Englishman has read them with extraordinary understanding. Mr. Tyler's work on the sonnets ranks higher than that of Coleridge on the plays. I do not mean to say that it is on the same intellectual level with the work of Coleridge, though it shows wide reading, astonishing acuteness, and much skill in the marshalling of argument. But Mr. Tyler had the good fortune to be the first to give to the personages of the sonnets a local habitation and a name, and that unique achievement puts him in a place by himself far above the mass of commentators. Before his book appeared in 1890 the sonnets lay in the dim light of guess-work. It is true that Hallam had adopted the hypothesis of Boaden and Bright, and had identified William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, with the high-born, handsome youth for whom Shakespeare, in the sonnets, expressed such passionate affection; but still, there were people who thought that the Earl of Southampton filled the requirements even better than William Herbert, and as I say, the whole subject lay in the twilight of surmise and supposition.

Mr. Tyler, working on a hint of the Rev. W. A. Harrison, identified Shakespeare's high-born mistress, the "dark lady" of the sonnets, with Mistress Mary Fitton, a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth.

These, then, are the personages of the drama, and the story is very simple: Shakespeare loved Mistress Fitton and sent his friend, the young Lord Herbert, to her on some pretext, but with the design that he should commend Shakespeare to the lady. Mistress Fitton fell in love with William Herbert, wooed and won him, and Shakespeare had to mourn the loss of both friend and mistress.

It would be natural to speak of this identification of Mr. Tyler's as the best working hypothesis yet put forward; but it would be unfair to him; it is more than this. Till his book appeared, even the date of the sonnets was not fixed; many critics regarded them as an early work, as early indeed, as 1591 or 1592; he was the first person to prove that the time they cover extends roughly from 1598 to 1601. Mr. Tyler then has not only given us the names of the actors, but he has put the tragedy in its proper place in Shakespeare's life, and he deserves all thanks for his illuminating work.

I bring to this theory fresh corroboration from the plays. Strange to say, Mr. Tyler has hardly used the plays, yet, as regards the story told in the sonnets, the proof that it is a real and not an imaginary story can be drawn from the plays. I may have to point out, incidentally, what I regard as mistakes and oversights in Mr. Tyler's work; but in the main it stands four-square, imposing itself on the reason and satisfying at the same time instinct and sympathy.

Let us first see how far the story told in the sonnets is borne out by the plays. For a great many critics, even to-day, reject the story altogether, and believe that the sonnets were nothing but poetic exercises.

The sonnets fall naturally into two parts: from 1 to 126 they tell how Shakespeare loved a youth of high rank and great personal beauty; sonnet 127 is an envoi; from 128 to 152 they tell of Shakespeare's love for a "dark lady." What binds the two series together is the story told in both, or at least told in one and corroborated in the other, that Shakespeare first sent his friend to the lady, most probably to plead his cause, and that she wooed his friend and gave herself to him. Now this is not a common or easily invented story. No one would guess that Shakespeare could be so foolish as to send his friend to plead his love for him. That's a mistake that no man who knows women would be likely to make: but the unlikelihood of the story is part of the evidence of its truth—credo quia incredibile has an element of persuasion in it.

No one has yet noticed that the story of the sonnets is treated three times in Shakespeare's plays. The first time the story appears it is handled so lightly that it looks to me as if he had not then lived through the incidents which he narrates. In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona" Proteus is asked by the Duke to plead Thurio's cause with Silvia, and he promises to do so; but instead, presses his own suit and is rejected. The incident is handled so carelessly (Proteus not being Thurio's friend) that it seems to me to have no importance save as a mere coincidence. When the scene between Proteus and Silvia was written Shakespeare had not yet been deceived by his friend. Still in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" there is one speech which certainly betrays personal passion. It is in the last scene of the fifth act, when Valentine surprises Proteus offering violence to Silvia.

"Val.(coming forward) Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil touch,— Thou friend of an ill fashion!

Pro. Valentine!

Val. Thou common friend, that's without faith or love,— For such is a friend now;—treacherous man! Thou hast beguiled my hopes: nought but mine eye Could have persuaded me. Now I dare not say I have one friend alive: thou would'st disprove me. Who should be trusted when one's own right hand Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus, I am sorry I must never trust thee more, But count the world a stranger for thy sake. The private wound is deepest: time most accurst 'Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!"

The first lines which I have italicised are too plain to be misread; when they were written Shakespeare had just been cheated by his friend; they are his passionate comment on the occurrence—"For such is a friend now"—can hardly be otherwise explained. The last couplet, too, which I have also put in italics, is manifestly a reflection on his betrayal: it is a twin rendering of the feeling expressed in sonnet 40:

"And yet love knows it is a greater grief To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury."

It contrasts "foe and friend," just as the sonnet contrasts "love and hate."

Mr. Israel Gollancz declares that "several critics are inclined to attribute this final scene to another hand," and to his mind "it bears evident signs of hasty composition." No guess could be wider from the truth. The scene is most manifestly pure Shakespeare—I take the soliloquy of Valentine, with which the scene opens, as among Shakespeare's most characteristic utterances—but the whole scene is certainly later than the rest of the play. The truth probably is that after his friend had deceived him, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" was played again, and that Shakespeare rewrote this last scene under the influence of personal feeling. The 170 lines of it are full of phrases which might be taken direct from the sonnets. Here 's such a couplet:

"O, 'tis the curse in love, and still approved, When women cannot love where they're beloved."

The whole scene tells the story a little more frankly than we find it in the sonnets, as might be expected, seeing that Shakespeare's rival was a great noble and not to be criticised freely. This fact explains to me Valentine's unmotived renunciation of Silvia; explains, too, why he is reconciled to his friend with such unseemly haste. Valentine's last words in the scene are illuminating:

"'Twere pity two such friends should be long foes."

The way this scene in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" is told throws more light on Shakespeare's feelings at the moment of his betrayal than the sonnets themselves. Under the cover of fictitious names Shakespeare ventured to show the disgust and contempt he felt for Lord Herbert's betrayal more plainly than he cared, or perhaps dared, to do when speaking in his own person.

There is another play where the same incident is handled in such fashion as to put the truth of the sonnet-story beyond all doubt.

In "Much Ado about Nothing" the incident is dragged in by the ears, and the whole treatment is most remarkable. Every one will remember how Claudio tells the Prince that he loves Hero, and asks his friend's assistance: "your highness now may do me good." There's no reason for Claudio's shyness: no reason why he should call upon the Prince for help in a case where most men prefer to use their own tongues; but Claudio is young, and so we glide over the inherent improbability of the incident. The Prince at once promises to plead for Claudio with Hero and with her father:

"And thou shalt have her. Was't not to this end That thou began'st to twist so fine a story?"

Now comes the peculiar handling of the incident. Claudio knows the Prince is wooing Hero for him, therefore when Don John tells him that the Prince "is enamoured on Hero," he should at once infer that Don John is mistaken through ignorance of this fact; but instead of that he falls suspicious, and questions:

"How know you he loves her?

D. John. I heard him swear his affection.

Bor. So did I too, and he swore he would marry her to-night."

There is absolutely nothing even in this corroboration by Borachio to shake Claudio's trust in the Prince: neither Don John nor Borachio knows what he knows, that the Prince is wooing for him (Claudio) and at his request. He should therefore smile at the futile attempt to excite his jealousy. But at once he is persuaded of the worst, as a man would be who had already experienced such disloyalty: he cries:

"'Tis certain so; the prince woos for himself."

And then we should expect to hear him curse the prince as a traitorous friend, and dwell on his own loyal service by way of contrast, and so keep turning the dagger in the wound with the thought that no one but himself was ever so repaid for such honesty of love. But, no! Claudio has no bitterness in him, no reproachings; he speaks of the whole matter as if it had happened months and months before, as indeed it had; for "Much Ado about Nothing" was written about 1599. Reflection had already shown Shakespeare the unreason of revolt, and he puts his own thought in the mouth of Claudio:

"'Tis certain so; the prince woos for himself. Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love: Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues; Let every eye negotiate for itself, And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch, Against whose charms faith melteth into blood. This is an accident of hourly proof, Which I mistrusted not. Farewell, therefore, Hero."

The Claudio who spoke like this in the first madness of love lost and friendship cheated would be a monster. Here we have Shakespeare speaking in all calmness of something that happened to himself a considerable time before. The lines I have put in italics admit no other interpretation: they show Shakespeare's philosophic acceptance of things as they are; what has happened to him is not to be assumed as singular but is the common lot of man—"an accident of hourly proof"—which he blames himself for not foreseeing. In fact, Claudio's temper here is as detached and impartial as Benedick's. Benedick declares that Claudio should be whipped:

"D. Pedro. To be whipped! What's his fault?

Benedick. The flat transgression of a schoolboy, who being overjoyed with finding a bird's nest, shows it his companion and he steals it."

That is the view of the realist who knows life and men, and plays the game according to the rules accepted. Shakespeare understood this side of life as well as most men. But Don Pedro is a prince—a Shakespearean prince at that—full of all loyalties and ideal sentiments; he answers Benedick from Shakespeare's own heart:

"Wilt thou make a trust a transgression? The transgression is in the stealer."

It is curious that Shakespeare doesn't see that Claudio must feel this truth a thousand times more keenly than the Prince. As I have said, Claudio's calm acceptance of the fact is a revelation of Shakespeare's own attitude, an attitude just modified by the moral reprobation put in the mouth of the Prince. The recital itself shows that the incident was a personal experience of Shakespeare, and as one might expect in this case it does not accelerate but retard the action of the drama; it is, indeed, altogether foreign to the drama, an excrescence upon it and not an improvement but a blemish. Moreover, the reflective, disillusioned, slightly pessimistic tone of the narrative is alien and strange to the optimistic temper of the play; finally, this garb of patient sadness does not suit Claudio, who should be all love and eagerness, and diminishes instead of increasing our sympathy with his later actions. Whoever considers these facts will admit that we have here Shakespeare telling us what happened to himself, and what he really thought of his friend's betrayal.

"The transgression is in the stealer."

That is Shakespeare's mature judgement of Lord Herbert's betrayal.

The third mention of this sonnet-story in a play is later still: it is in "Twelfth Night." The Duke, as we have seen, is an incarnation of Shakespeare himself, and, indeed, the finest incarnation we have of his temperament. In the fourth scene of the first act he sends Viola to plead his cause for him with Olivia, much in the same way, no doubt, as Shakespeare sent Pembroke to Miss Fitton. The whole scene deserves careful reading.

"Cesario, Thou know'st no less but all; I have unclasp'd To thee the book even of my secret soul: Therefore, good youth, address thy gait unto her Be not denied access, stand at her doors, And tell them, there thy fixed foot shall grow Till thou have audience.

Vio. Sure, my noble lord, If she be so abandon'd to her sorrow As it is spoke, she never will admit me.

Duke. Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds Rather than make unprofited return.

Vio. Say I do speak with her, my lord, what then?

Duke. O, then unfold the passion of my love, Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith: It shall become thee well to act my woes; She will attend it better in thy youth Than in a nuncio's of more grave aspect.

Vio. I think not so, my lord.

Duke. Dear lad, believe it; For they shall yet belie thy happy years, That say thou art a man: Diana's lip Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound; And all is semblative a woman's part. I know thy constellation is right apt For this affair. Some four or five attend him; All if you will; for I myself am best When least in company."

I do not want to find more here than is in the text: the passage simply shows that this idea of sending some one to plead his love was constantly in Shakespeare's mind in these years. The curious part of the matter is that he should pick a youth as ambassador, and a youth who is merely his page. He can discover no reason for choosing such a boy as Viola, and so simply asserts that youth will be better attended to, which is certainly not the fact. Lord Herbert's youth was in his mind: but he could not put the truth in the play that when he chose his ambassador he chose him for his high position and personal beauty and charm, and not because of his youth. The whole incident is treated lightly as something of small import; the bitterness in "Much Ado" has died out: "Twelfth Night" was written about 1601, a year or so later than "Much Ado."

I do not want to labour the conclusion I have reached; but it must be admitted that I have found in the plays, and especially in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Much Ado," the same story which is told in the sonnets; a story lugged into the plays, where, indeed, its introduction is a grave fault in art and its treatment too peculiar to be anything but personal. Here in the plays we have, so to speak, three views of the sonnet-story; the first in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," when the betrayal is fresh in Shakespeare's memory and his words are embittered with angry feeling:

"Thou common friend that's without faith or love."

The second view is taken in "Much Ado About Nothing" when the pain of the betrayal has been a little salved by time. Shakespeare now moralizes the occurrence. He shows us how it would be looked upon by a philosopher (for that is what the lover, Claudio, is in regard to his betrayal) and by a soldier and man of the world, Benedick, and by a Prince. Shakespeare selects the prince to give effect to the view that the fault is in the transgressor and not in the man who trusts. The many-sided treatment of the story shows all the stages through which Shakespeare's mind moved, and the result is to me a more complete confession than is to be found in the sonnets. Finally the story is touched upon in "Twelfth Night," when the betrayal has faded into oblivion, but the poet lets out the fact that his ambassador was a youth, and the reason he gives for this is plainly insufficient. If after these three recitals any one can still believe that the sonnet-story is imaginary, he is beyond persuasion by argument.



CHAPTER IV

THE SONNETS: PART II

Now that we have found the story of the sonnets repeated three times in the plays, it may be worth our while to see if we can discover in the plays anything that throws light upon the circumstances or personages of this curious triangular drama. At the outset, I must admit that save in these three plays I can find no mention whatever of Shakespeare's betrayer, Lord Herbert. He was "a false friend," the plays tell us, a "common friend without faith or love," "a friend of an ill fashion"; young, too, yet trusted; but beyond this summary superficial characterization there is silence. Me judice Lord Herbert made no deep or peculiar impression on Shakespeare; an opinion calculated to give pause to the scandal-mongers. For there can be no doubt whatever that Shakespeare's love, Mistress Fitton, the "dark lady" of the sonnet-series from 128 to 152 is to be found again and again in play after play, profoundly modifying the poet's outlook upon life and art. Before I take in hand this identification of Miss Fitton and her influence upon Shakespeare, let me beg the reader to bear in mind the fact that Shakespeare was a sensualist by nature, a lover, which is as rare a thing as consummate genius. The story of his idolatrous passion for Mary Fitton is the story of his life. This is what the commentators and critics hitherto have failed to appreciate. Let us now get at the facts and see what light the dramas throw upon the chief personage of the story, Mistress Fitton. The study will probably teach us that Shakespeare was the most impassioned lover and love-poet in all literature.

History tells us that Mary Fitton became a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth in 1595 at the age of seventeen. From a letter addressed by her father to Sir Robert Cecil on January 29th, 1599, it is fairly certain that she had already been married at the age of sixteen; the union was probably not entirely valid, but the mere fact suggests a certain recklessness of character, or overpowering sensuality, or both, and shows that even as a girl Mistress Fitton was no shrinking, timid, modest maiden. Wrapped in a horseman's cloak she used to leave the Palace at night to meet her lover, Lord William Herbert. Though twice married, she had an illegitimate child by Herbert, and two later by Sir Richard Leveson.

This extraordinary woman is undoubtedly the sort of woman Shakespeare depicted as the "dark lady" of the sonnets. Nearly every sonnet of the twenty-six devoted to his mistress contains some accusation against her; and all these charges are manifestly directed against one and the same woman. First of all she is described in sonnet 131 as "tyrannous"; then in sonnet 133 as "faithless"; in sonnet 137 as "the bay where all men ride ... the wide world's commonplace"; in sonnet 138 as "false"; in 139, she is "coquettish"; 140, "proud"; "false to the bonds of love"; "black as hell... dark as night"—in both looks and character; "full of foul faults "; "cruel"; "unworthy," but of "powerful" personality; "unkind—inconstant... unfaithful... forsworn."

Now, the first question is: Can we find this "dark lady" of the sonnets in the plays? The sonnets tell us she was of pale complexion with black eyes and hair; do the plays bear out this description? And if they do bear it out do they throw any new light upon Miss Fitton's character? Did Miss Fitton seem proud and inconstant, tyrannous and wanton, to Shakespeare when he first met her, and before she knew Lord Herbert?

The earliest mention of the poet's mistress in the plays is to be found, I think, in "Romeo and Juliet." "Romeo and Juliet" is dated by Mr. Furnival 1591-1593; it was first mentioned in 1595 by Meres; first published in 1597. I think in its present form it must be taken to date from 1597. Romeo, who as we have already seen, is an incarnation of Shakespeare, is presented to us in the very first scene as in love with one Rosaline. This in itself tells me nothing; but the proof that Shakespeare stands in intimate relation to the girl called Rosaline comes later, and so the first introductory words have a certain significance for me. Romeo himself tells us that "she hath Dian's wit," one of Shakespeare's favourite comparisons for his love, and speaks of her chastity, or rather of her unapproachableness; he goes on:

"O she is rich in beauty, only poor That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store."

which reminds us curiously of the first sonnets. In the second scene Benvolio invites Romeo to the feast of Capulet, where his love, "the fair Rosaline," is supping, and adds:

"Compare her face with some that I shall shew, And I will make thee think thy swan a crow."

Romeo replies that there is none fairer than his love, and Benvolio retorts:

"Tut! You saw her fair, none else being by."

This bantering is most pointed if we assume that Rosaline was dark rather than fair.

In the second act Mercutio comes upon the scene, and, mocking Romeo's melancholy and passion, cries:

"I conjure thee, by Rosaline's bright eyes, By her high forehead and her scarlet lip...."

This description surprises me. Shakespeare rarely uses such physical portraiture of his personages, and Mercutio is a side of Shakespeare himself; a character all compact of wit and talkativeness, a character wholly invented by the poet.

A little later my suspicion is confirmed. In the fourth scene of the second act Mercutio talks to Benvolio about Romeo; they both wonder where he is, and Mercutio says:

"Ah, that same pale-hearted wench, that Rosaline, Torments him so that he will sure run mad."

And again, a moment later, Mercutio laughs at Romeo as already dead, "stabbed with a white wench's black eye." Now, here is confirmation of my suspicion. It is most unusual for Shakespeare to give the physical peculiarities of any of his characters; no one knows how Romeo looked, or Juliet or even Hamlet or Ophelia; and here he repeats the description.

The only other examples we have as yet found in Shakespeare of such physical portraiture is the sketching of Falstaff in "Henry IV." and the snapshot of Master Slender in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," as a "little wee face, with a little yellow beard,—a cane-coloured beard." Both these photographs, as we noticed at the time, were very significant, and Slender's extraordinarily significant by reason of its striking and peculiar realism. Though an insignificant character, Slender is photographed for us by Shakespeare's contempt and hatred, just as this Rosaline is photographed by his passionate love, photographed again and again.

Shakespeare's usual way of describing the physical appearance of a man or woman, when he allowed himself to do it at all, which was seldom, was what one might call the ideal or conventional way. A good example is to be found in Hamlet's description of his father; he is speaking to his mother:

"Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill."

In the special case I am considering Rosaline is less even than a secondary character; she is not a personage in the play at all. She is merely mentioned casually by Benvolio and then by Mercutio, and even Mercutio is not the protagonist; yet his mention of her is strikingly detailed, astonishingly realistic, in spite of its off-hand brevity. We have a photographic snapshot, so to speak, of this girl: she "torments" Romeo; she is "hard-hearted"; a "white wench" with "black eyes"; twice in four lines she is called now "pale," now "white"—plainly her complexion had no red in it, and was in startling contrast to her black eyes and hair. Manifestly this picture is taken from life, and it is just as manifestly the portrait of the "dark lady" of the sonnets.

As if to make assurance doubly sure, there is another description of this same Rosaline in another play, so detailed and striking, composed as it is of contrasting and startling peculiarities that I can only wonder that its full significance has not been appreciated ages ago. To have missed its meaning only proves that men do not read Shakespeare with love's fine wit.

The repetition of the portrait is fortunate for another reason: it tells us when the love story took place. The allusion to the "dark lady" in "Romeo and Juliet" is difficult to date exactly; the next mention of her in a play can be fixed in time with some precision. "Love's Labour's Lost" was revised by Shakespeare for production at Court during the Christmas festivities of 1597. When the quarto was published in 1598 it bore on its title-page the words, "A pleasant conceited comedy called 'Love's Labour's Lost.' As it was presented before Her Highnes this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented By W. Shakespeare." It is in the revised part that we find Shakespeare introducing his dark love again, and this time, too, curiously enough, under the name of Rosaline. Evidently he enjoyed the mere music of the word. Biron is an incarnation of Shakespeare himself, as we have already seen, and the meeting of Biron and his love, Rosaline, in the play is extremely interesting for us as Shakespeare in this revised production, one would think, would wish to ingratiate himself with his love, more especially as she would probably be present when the play was produced. Rosaline is made to praise Biron, before he appears, as a merry man and a most excellent talker; but when they meet they simply indulge in a tourney of wit, in which Rosaline more than holds her own, showing indeed astounding self-assurance, spiced with a little contempt of Biron; "hard-hearted" Mercutio called it. Every word deserves to be weighed:

"Biron. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

Ros. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

Biron. I know you did.

Ros. How needless was it, then, to ask the question!

Biron. You must not be so quick.

Ros. 'Tis long of you that spur me with such questions.

Biron. Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.

Ros. Not till it leave the rider in the mire.

Biron. What time o' day?

Ros. The hour that fools should ask.

Biron. Now fair befall your mask!

Ros. Fair fall the face it covers!

Biron. And send you many lovers!

Ros. Amen, so you be none.

Biron. Nay, then will I be gone."

Clearly this Rosaline, too, has Dian's wit and is not in love with Biron, any more than the Rosaline of "Romeo and Juliet" was in love with Romeo.

The next allusion is even more characteristic. Biron and Longaville and Boyet are talking; Longaville shows his admiration for one of the Princess's women, "the one in the white" he declares, is a most sweet lady...."

Biron. What is her name in the cap?

Boyet. Rosaline, by good hap.

Biron. Is she wedded or no?

Boyet. To her will, sir, or so.

Biron. You are welcome, sir: adieu."

This, "To her will, sir, or so," is exactly in the spirit of the sonnets: every one will remember the first two lines of sonnet 135:

"Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;"

That, "To her will, sir, or so," I find astonishingly significant, for not only has it nothing to do with the play and is therefore unexpected, but the character-drawing is unexpected, too; maids are not usually wedded to their will in a double sense, and no other of these maids of honour is described at all.

A little later Biron speaks again of Rosaline in a way which shocks expectation. First of all, he rages at himself for being in love at all. "And I, forsooth in love! I, that have been love's whip!" Here I pause again, it seems to me that Shakespeare is making confession to us, just as when he admitted without reason that Jaques was lewd. Be that as it may, he certainly goes on in words which are astounding, so utterly unforeseen are they, and therefore the more characteristic:

"Nay, to be perjured, which is worst of all; And, among three, to love the worst of all;"

The first line of this couplet, that he is perjured in loving Rosaline may be taken as applying to the circumstances of the play; but Shakespeare also talks of himself in sonnet 152 as "perjured," for he only swears in order to misuse his love, or with a side glance at the fact that he is married and therefore perjured when he swears love to one not his wife. It is well to keep this "perjured" in memory.

But it is the second line which is the more astonishing; there Biron tells us that among the three of the Princess's women he loves "the worst of all." Up to this moment we have only been told kindly things of Rosaline and the other ladies; we had no idea that any one of them was bad, much less that Rosaline was "the worst of all." The suspicion grows upon us, a suspicion which is confirmed immediately afterwards, that Shakespeare is speaking of himself and of a particular woman; else we should have to admit that his portraiture of Rosaline's character was artistically bad, and bad without excuse, for why should he lavish all this wealth of unpleasant detail on a mere subsidiary character? He goes on, however, to make the fault worse; he next speaks of his love Rosaline as—

"A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes; Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed; Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard: And I to sigh for her! to watch for her! To pray for her! Go to! it is a plague."

It is, of course, a blot upon the play for Biron to declare that his love is a wanton of the worst. It is not merely unexpected and uncalled-for; it diminishes our sympathy with Biron and his love, and also with the play. But we have already found the rule trustworthy that whenever Shakespeare makes a mistake in art it is because of some strong personal feeling and not for want of wit, and this rule evidently holds good here. Shakespeare-Biron is picturing the woman he himself loves; for not only does he describe her as a wanton to the detriment of the play; but he pictures her precisely, and this Rosaline is the only person in the play of whom we have any physical description at all. Moreover, he has given such precise and repeated photographs of no other character in any of his plays:

"A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes."

This is certainly the same Rosaline we found depicted in "Romeo and Juliet"; but the portraiture here, both physical and moral, is more detailed and peculiar than it was in the earlier play. Shakespeare now knows his Rosaline intimately. The mere facts that here again her physical appearance is set forth with such particularity, and that the "hard-heartedness" which Mercutio noted in her has now become "wantonness" is all-important, especially when we remember that Miss Fitton was probably listening to the play. Even at Christmas, 1597, Shakespeare's passion has reached the height of a sex-duel. Miss Fitton has tortured him so that he delights in calling her names to her face in public when the play would have led one to expect ingratiating or complimentary courtesies. It does not weaken this argument to admit that the general audience would not perhaps have understood the allusions.

It is an almost incredible fact that not a single one of his hundreds of commentators has even noticed any peculiarity in this physical portraiture of Rosaline; Shakespeare uses this realism so rarely one would have thought that every critic would have been astounded by it; but no, they all pass over it without a word, Coleridge, Mr. Tyler, all of them.

The fourth act of "Love's Labour's Lost" begins with a most characteristic soliloquy of Biron:

"Biron. The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself: they have pitched a toil; I am toiling in a pitch—pitch that defiles: defile! a foul word."

Here Biron is manifestly playing on the "pitch-balls" his love has for eyes, and also on the "foul faults" Shakespeare speaks of in the sonnets and in Othello. Biron goes on:

"O, but her eye—by this light, but for her eye, I would not love her; yes, for her two eyes. Well, I do nothing in the world but lie, and lie in my throat. By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and here my melancholy. Well, she hath one o' my sonnets already: the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady!"

This proves to me that some of Shakespeare's sonnets were written in 1597. True, Mr. Tyler would try to bind all the sonnets within the three years from 1598 to 1601, the three years which Shakespeare speaks about in sonnet 104:

"Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd In process of the seasons have I seen. Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd, Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green."

Lord Herbert first came to Court in the spring of 1598, and so sonnet 104 may have represented the fact precisely so far as Herbert was concerned; but I am not minded to take the poet so literally. Instead of beginning in the spring of 1598, some of the sonnets to the lady were probably written in the autumn of 1597, or even earlier, and yet Shakespeare would be quite justified in talking of three years, if the period ended in 1601. A poet is not to be bound to an almanack's exactitude.

In the fourth act of "Love's Labour's Lost," when Biron confesses his love for "the heavenly Rosaline," the King banters him in the spirit of the time:

"King. By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.

Biron. Is ebony like her? O wood divine! A wife of such wood were felicity. O, who can give an oath? Where is a book? That I may swear beauty doth beauty lack, If that she learn not of her eye to look: No face is fair that is not full so black."

Here we have Shakespeare again describing his mistress for us, though he has done it better earlier in the play; he harps upon her dark beauty here to praise it, just as he praised it in sonnet 127; it is passion's trick to sound the extremes of blame and praise alternately.

In the time of Elizabeth it was customary for poets and courtiers to praise red hair and a fair complexion as "beauty's ensign," and so compliment the Queen. The flunkeyism, which is a characteristic of all the Germanic races, was peculiarly marked in England from the earliest times, and induced men, even in those "spacious days," not only to overpraise fair hair, but to run down dark hair and eyes as ugly. The King replies:

"O paradox! Black is the badge of hell, The hue of dungeons and the school of night; And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."

Biron answers:

"Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light. O, if in black my lady's brow be deck'd It mourns that painting and usurping hair Should ravish doters with a false aspect; And therefore is she born to make black fair. Her favour turns the fashion of the days, For native blood is counted painting now; And therefore red that would avoid dispraise, Paints itself black, to imitate her brow."

Our timid poet is bold enough, when cloaked under a stage-name, to uphold the colour of his love's hair against the Queen's; the mere fact speaks volumes to those who know their Shakespeare.

Sonnet 127 runs in almost the same words; though now the poet speaking in his own person is less bold:

"In the old age black was not counted fair, Or, if it were, it bore not beauty's name; But now is black beauty's successive heir, And beauty slandered with a bastard shame: For since each hand hath put on nature's power, Fairing the soul with art's false borrow'd face, Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower, But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace. Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black, Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack, Slandering creation with a false esteem: Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe That every tongue says beauty should look so."

There can be no doubt that in this Rosaline of "Romeo and Juliet" and of "Love's Labour's Lost," Shakespeare is describing the "dark lady" of the second sonnet-series, and describing her, against his custom in play-writing, even more exactly than he described her in the lyrics.

There is a line at the end of this act which is very characteristic when considered with what has gone before; it is clearly a confession of Shakespeare himself, and a perfect example of what one might call the conscience that pervades all his mature work:

"Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn."

We were right, it seems, in putting some stress on that "perjured" when we first met it.

In the second scene of the fifth act, which opens with a talk between the Princess and her ladies, our view of Rosaline is confirmed. Katherine calls Rosaline light, and jests upon this in lewd fashion; declares, too, that she is "a merry, nimble, stirring spirit," in fact, tells her that she is

"A light condition in a beauty dark."

All these needless repetitions prove to me that Shakespeare is describing his mistress as she lived and moved. Those who disagree with me should give another instance in which he has used or abused the same precise portraiture. But there is more in this light badinage of the girls than a description of Rosaline. When Rosaline says that she will torture Biron before she goes, and turn him into her vassal, the Princess adds,

"None are so surely caught when they are catch'd As wit turned fool."

Rosaline replies,

"The blood of youth burns not with such excess As gravity's revolt to wantonness."

This remark has no pertinence or meaning in Rosaline's mouth. Biron is supposed to be young in the play, and he has never been distinguished for his gravity, but for his wit and humour: the Princess calls him "quick Biron." The two lines are clearly Shakespeare's criticism of himself. When he wrote the sonnets he thought himself old, and certainly his years (thirty-four) contrasted badly with those of Mary Fitton who was at this time not more than nineteen.

Late in 1597 then, before William Herbert came upon the scene at all, Shakespeare knew that his mistress was a wanton:

"Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed; Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard."

Shakespeare has painted his love for us in these plays as a most extraordinary woman: in person she is tall, with pallid complexion and black eyes and black brows, "a gipsy," he calls her; in nature imperious, lawless, witty, passionate—a "wanton"; moreover, a person of birth and position. That a girl of the time has been discovered who united all these qualities in herself would bring conviction to almost any mind; but belief passes into certitude when we reflect that this portrait of his mistress is given with greatest particularity in the plays, where in fact it is out of place and a fault in art. When studying the later plays we shall find this gipsy wanton again and again; she made the deepest impression on Shakespeare; was, indeed, the one love of his life. It was her falseness that brought him to self-knowledge and knowledge of life, and turned him from a light-hearted writer of comedies and histories into the author of the greatest tragedies that have ever been conceived. Shakespeare owes the greater part of his renown to Mary Fitton.



CHAPTER V

THE SONNETS: PART III

The most interesting question in the sonnets, the question the vital importance of which dwarfs all others, has never yet been fairly tackled and decided. As soon as English critics noticed, a hundred years or so ago, that the sonnets fell into two series, and that the first, and longer, series was addressed to a young man, they cried, "shocking! shocking!" and registered judgement with smug haste on evidence that would not hang a cat. Hallam, "the judicious," held that "it would have been better for Shakespeare's reputation if the sonnets had never been written," and even Heine, led away by the consensus of opinion, accepted the condemnation, and regretted "the miserable degradation of humanity" to be found in the sonnets. But before giving ourselves to the novel enjoyment of moral superiority over Shakespeare, it may be worth while to ask, is the fact proved? is his guilt established?

No one, I think, who has followed me so far will need to be told that I take no interest in white-washing Shakespeare: I am intent on painting him as he lived and loved, and if I found him as vicious as Villon, or as cruel as a stoat, I would set it all down as faithfully as I would give proof of his generosity or his gentleness.

Before the reader can fairly judge of Shakespeare's innocence or guilt, he must hold in mind two salient peculiarities of the man which I have already noted; but which must now be relieved out into due prominence so that one will make instinctive allowance for them at every moment, his sensuality and his snobbishness.

His sensuality is the quality, as we have seen, which unites the creatures of his temperament with those of his intellect, his poets with his thinkers, and proves that Romeo and Jaques, the Duke of "Twelfth Night" and Hamlet, are one and the same person. If the matter is fairly considered it will be found that this all-pervading sensuality is the source, or at least a natural accompaniment of his gentle kindness and his unrivalled sympathy.

Shakespeare painted no portrait of the hero or of the adventurer; found no new word for the virile virtues or virile vices, but he gave immortal expression to desire and its offspring, to love, jealousy, and despair, to every form of pathos, pleading and pity, to all the gentler and more feminine qualities. Desire in especial has inspired him with phrases more magically expressive even than those gasped out by panting Sappho when lust had made her body a lyre of deathless music. Her lyric to the beloved is not so intense as Othello's:

"O, thou weed Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet That the sense aches at thee";

or as Cleopatra's astonishing:

"There is gold, and here My bluest veins to kiss";

—the revelation of a lifetime devoted to vanity and sensuality, sensuality pampered as a god and adored with an Eastern devotion.

I do not think I need labour this point further; as I have already noticed, Orsino, the Duke of "Twelfth Night," sums up Shakespeare's philosophy of love in the words:

"Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die."—

Shakespeare told us the truth about himself when he wrote in sonnet 142, "Love is my sin." We can expect from him new words or a new method in the painting of passionate desire.

The second peculiarity of Shakespeare which we must establish firmly in our minds before we attempt to construe the sonnets is his extraordinary snobbishness.

English snobbishness is like a London fog, intenser than can be found in any other country; it is so extravagant, indeed, that it seems different in kind. One instance of this: when Mr. Gladstone was being examined once in a case, he was asked by counsel, Was he a friend of a certain lord? Instead of answering simply that he was, he replied that he did not think it right to say he was a friend of so great a noble: "he had the honour of his acquaintance." Only in England would the man who could make noblemen at will be found bowing before them with this humility of soul.

In Shakespeare's time English snobbishness was stronger than it is to-day; it was then supported by law and enforced by penalties. To speak of a lord without his title was regarded as defamation, and was punished as such more than once by the Star Chamber. Shakespeare's position, too, explains how this native snobbishness in him was heightened to flunkeyism. He was an aristocrat born, as we have seen, and felt in himself a kinship for the courtesies, chivalries, and generosities of aristocratic life. This tendency was accentuated by his calling. The middle class, already steeped in Puritanism, looked upon the theatre as scarcely better than the brothel, and showed their contempt for the players in a thousand ways. The groundlings and common people, with their "greasy caps" and "stinking breath" were as loathsome to Shakespeare as the crop-headed, gain-loving citizens who condemned him and his like pitilessly. He was thrown back, therefore, upon the young noblemen who had read the classics and loved the arts. His works show how he admires them. He could paint you Bassanio or Benedick or Mercutio to the life. Everybody has noticed the predilection with which he lends such characters his own poetic spirit and charm. His lower orders are all food for comedy or farce: he will not treat them seriously.

His snobbishness carries him to astounding lengths. One instance: every capable critic has been astonished by the extraordinary fidelity to fact he shows in his historical plays; he often takes whole pages of an earlier play or of Plutarch, and merely varying the language uses them in his drama. He is punctiliously careful to set down the fact, whatever it may be, and explain it, even when it troubles the flow of his story; but as soon as the fact comes into conflict with his respect for dignitaries, he loses his nice conscience. He tells us of Agincourt without ever mentioning the fact that the English bowmen won the battle; he had the truth before him; the chronicler from whom he took the story vouched for the fact; but Shakespeare preferred to ascribe the victory to Henry and his lords. Shakespeare loved a lord with a passionate admiration, and when he paints himself it is usually as a duke or prince.

Holding these truths in our mind, Shakespeare's intense sensitiveness and sensuality, and his almost inconceivable snobbishness, we may now take up the sonnets.

The first thing that strikes one in the sonnets is the fact that, though a hundred and twenty-five of them are devoted to a young man, and Shakespeare's affection for him, and only twenty-six to the woman, every one of those to the woman is characterized by a terrible veracity of passion, whereas those addressed to the youth are rather conventional than convincing. He pictures the woman to the life; strong, proud, with dark eyes and hair, pale complexion—a wanton with the rare power of carrying off even a wanton's shame. He finds a method new to literature to describe her. He will have no poetic exaggeration; snow is whiter than her breasts; violets sweeter than her breath:

"And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare."

His passion is so intense that he has no desire to paint her seduction as greater than it was. She has got into his blood, so to speak, and each drop of it under the microscope would show her image. Take any sonnet at haphazard, and you will hear the rage of his desire.

But what is the youth like?—"the master-mistress" of his passion, to give him the title which seems to have convinced the witless of Shakespeare's guilt. Not one word of description is to be found anywhere; no painting epithet—nothing. Where is the cry of this terrible, shameless, outrageous passion that mastered Shakespeare's conscience and enslaved his will? Hardly a phrase that goes beyond affection—such affection as Shakespeare at thirty-four might well feel for a gifted, handsome aristocrat like Lord Herbert, who had youth, beauty, wealth, wit to recommend him. Herbert was a poet, too: a patron unparagoned! "If Southampton gave me a thousand pounds," Shakespeare may well have argued, "perhaps Lord Herbert will get me made Master of the Revels, or even give me a higher place." An aristocratic society tends to make parasites even of the strong, as Dr. Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield proves. But let us leave supposition and come to the sonnets themselves, which are addressed to the youth. The first sonnet begins:

"From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty's rose might never die."

This is a very good argument indeed when addressed to a woman; but when addressed to a man by a man it rings strained and false. Yet it is the theme of the first seventeen sonnets. It is precisely the same argument which Shakespeare set forth in "Venus and Adonis" again and again:

"Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty; Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty." "And so, in spite of death, thou dost survive, In that thy likeness still is left alive ..." (173-4.)

"Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, But gold that's put to use more gold begets." (767-8.)

At the end of the third sonnet we find the same argument:

"But if thou live, remember'd not to be, Die single, and thine image dies with thee."

Again, in the fourth, sixth, and seventh sonnets the same plea is urged. In the tenth sonnet the poet cries:

"Make thee another self, for love of me, That beauty still may live in thine or thee."

And again at the end of the thirteenth sonnet:

"You had a father; let your son say so."

Every one of these sonnets contains simply the argument which is set forth with equal force and far superior pertinence in "Venus and Adonis."

That is, Shakespeare makes use of the passion he has felt for a woman to give reality to the expression of his affection for the youth. No better proof could be imagined of the fact that he never loved the youth with passion.

In sonnet 18 Shakespeare begins to alter his note. He then tells the youth that he will achieve immortality, not through his children, but through Shakespeare's verses. Sonnet 19 is rounded with the same thought:

"Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young."

Sonnet 20 is often referred to as suggesting intimacy:

"A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created; Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure."

The sextet of this sonnet absolutely disproves guilty intimacy, and is, I believe, intended to disprove it; Shakespeare had already fathomed the scandal-loving minds of his friends, and wanted to set forth the noble disinterestedness of his affection.

Sonnet 22 is more sincere, though not so passionate; it neither strengthens nor rebuts the argument. Sonnet 23 is the sonnet upon which all those chiefly rely who wish to condemn Shakespeare. Here it is:

"As an unperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put beside his part, Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart; So I, for fear of trust, forget to say The perfect ceremony of love's rite, And in mine own love's strength seem to decay, O'ercharged with burthen of mine own love's might. O, let my looks be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast; Who plead for love, and look for recompense, More than that tongue that more hath more express'd. O, learn to read what silent love hath writ: To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit."

We can interpret the phrases, "the perfect ceremony of love's rite" and "look for recompense" as we will; but it must be admitted that even when used to the uttermost they form an astonishingly small base on which to raise so huge and hideous a superstructure.

But we shall be told that the condemnation of Shakespeare is based, not upon any sonnet or any line; but upon the way Shakespeare speaks as soon as he discovers that his mistress has betrayed him in favour of his friend. One is inclined to expect that he will throw the blame on the friend, and, after casting him off, seek to win again the affections of his mistress. Nine men out of ten would act in this way. But the sonnets tell us with iteration and most peculiar emphasis that Shakespeare does not condemn the friend. As soon as he hears of the traitorism he cries (sonnet 33):

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace: Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all triumphant splendour on my brow; But out! alack! he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now. Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth."

It is the loss of his friend he regrets, rather than the loss of his mistress; she is not mentioned save by comparison with "basest clouds." Yet even when read by Gradgrind and his compeers the thirteenth line of this sonnet is utterly inconsistent with passion.

In the next sonnet the friend repents, and weeps the "strong offence," and Shakespeare accepts the sorrow as salve that "heals the wound"; his friend's tears are pearls that "ransom all ill deeds." The next sonnet begins with the line:

"No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done";

Shakespeare will be an "accessory" to his friend's "theft," though he admits that the robbery is still sour. Then come four sonnets in which he is content to forget all about the wrong he has suffered, and simply exhausts himself in praise of his friend. Sonnet 40 begins:

"Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call; All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more."

This is surely the very soul of tender affection; but it is significant that even here the word "true" is emphasized and not "love"; he goes on:

"I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty; And yet love knows it is a greater grief To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury."

Never before was a man so gentle-kind; we might be listening to the lament of a broken-hearted woman who smiles through her tears to reassure her lover; yet there is no attempt to disguise the fact that Herbert has done "wrong." The next sonnet puts the poet's feeling as strongly as possible.

"Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits, When I am sometime absent from thy heart, Thy beauty and thy years full well befits, For still temptation follows where thou art. Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won, Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd; And when a woman woos, what woman's son Will sourly leave her till she have prevail'd? Ay me! but yet thou might'st my seat forbear, And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth, Who lead thee in their riot even there Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth; Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee, Thine by thy beauty being false to me."

The first lines show that Shakespeare is pretending; he attempts not only to minimize the offence, but to find it charming. A mother who caught her young son kissing a girl would reproach him in this fashion; to her his faults would be the "pretty wrongs that liberty commits." But this is not the way passion speaks, and here again the sextet condemns Herbert in the plainest terms. At length we have the summing-up:

"That thou hast her, it is not all my grief, And yet it may be said I lov'd her dearly; That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief, A loss in love that touches me more nearly. Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye: Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her; And for my sake even so doth she abuse me, Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her. If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain, And losing her, my friend hath found that loss; Both find each other, and I lose both twain, And both for my sake lay on me this cross: But here's the joy; my friend and I are one; Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone."

This sonnet, with its affected word-play and wire-drawn consolation, leaves one gaping: Shakespeare's verbal affectations had got into his very blood. To my mind the whole sonnet is too extravagant to be sincere; it is only to be explained by the fact that Shakespeare's liking for Herbert was heightened by snobbishness and by the hope of patronage. None of it rings true except the first couplet. Yet the argument of it is repeated, strange to say, and emphasized in the sonnets addressed to the "dark lady" whom Shakespeare loved. Sonnet 144 is clear enough:

"Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still: The better angel is a man, right fair, The worser spirit a woman, colour'd ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, Wooing his purity with her foul pride. And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend Suspect I may, yet not directly tell; But being both from me, both to each friend, I guess one angel in another's hell: Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt, Till my bad angel fire my good one out."

As soon as his mistress comes on the scene Shakespeare's passionate sincerity cannot be questioned. The truth is the intensity of his passion leads him to condemn and spite the woman, while the absence of passion allows him to pretend affection for the friend. Sonnet 133, written to the woman, is decisive:

"Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan For that deep wound it gives my friend and me! Is't not enough to torture me alone, But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be? Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken, And my next self thou harder hast engross'd: Of him, myself, and thee, I am forsaken; A torment thrice threefold thus to be cross'd. Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward, But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail; Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard; Thou canst not then use rigour in my gaol: And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee, Perforce am thine, and all that is in me."

The last couplet is to me "perforce" conclusive. But let us take it that these sonnets prove the contention of the cry of critics that Shakespeare preferred friendship to love, and held his friend dearer than his mistress, and let us see if the plays corroborate the sonnets on this point. We may possibly find that the plays only strengthen the doubt which the sonnets implant in us.

"The Merchant of Venice" has always seemed to me important as helping to fix the date of the sonnets. Antonio, as I have shown, is an impersonation of Shakespeare himself. It seems to me Shakespeare would have found it impossible to write of Antonio's self-sacrificing love for Bassanio after he himself had been cheated by his friend. This play then must have been written shortly before his betrayal, and should give us Shakespeare's ordinary attitude. Many expressions in the play remind us of the sonnets, and one in especial of sonnet 41. In the sixth scene of the second act, Jessica, when escaping from her father's house, uses Shakespeare's voice to say:

"But love is blind and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit."

Here we have "the pretty follies" which is used again as "pretty wrongs" in sonnet 41. Immediately afterwards Lorenzo, another mask of Shakespeare, praises Jessica as "wise, fair, and true," just as in sonnet 105 Shakespeare praises his friend as "kind, fair, and true," using again words which his passion for a woman has taught him.

The fourth act sets forth the same argument we find in the sonnets. When it looks as if Antonio would have to give his life as forfeit to the Jew, Bassanio exclaims:

"Antonio, I am married to a wife Which is as dear to me as life itself; But life itself, my wife and all the world Are not with me esteem'd above thy life. I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all Here to this devil to deliver you."

This is the language of passionate exaggeration, one might say. Antoniois suffering in Bassanio's place, paying the penalty, so to speak, for Bassanio's happiness. No wonder Bassanio exaggerates his grief and the sacrifice he would be prepared to make. But Gratiano has no such excuse for extravagant speech, and yet Gratiano follows in the self-same vein:

"I have a wife whom, I protest, I love: I would she were in heaven, so she could Entreat some power to change this currish Jew."

The peculiarity of this attitude is heightened by the fact that the two wives, Portia and Nerissa, both take the ordinary view. Portia says:

"Your wife would give you little thanks for that If she were by to hear you make the offer."

And Nerissa goes a little further:

"Tis well you offer it behind her back, The wish would make else an unquiet house."

The blunder is monstrous; not only is the friend prepared to sacrifice all he possesses, including his wife, to save his benefactor, but the friend's friend is content to sacrifice his wife too for the same object. Shakespeare then in early manhood was accustomed to put friendship before love; we must find some explanation of what seems to us so unnatural an attitude.

In the last scene of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," which is due to a later revision, the sonnet-case is emphasized. And at this time Shakespeare has suffered Herbert's betrayal. As soon as the false friend Proteus says he is sorry and asks forgiveness, Valentine, another impersonation of Shakespeare, replies:

"Then I am paid; And once again I do receive thee honest: Who by repentance is not satisfied, Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas'd; By penitence the Eternal's wrath's appeased; And that my love may appear plain and free, All that was mine in Silvia I give thee."

This incarnation of Shakespeare speaks of repentance in Shakespeare's most characteristic fashion, and then coolly surrenders the woman he loves to his friend without a moment's hesitation, and without even considering whether the woman would be satisfied with the transfer. The words admit of no misconstruction; they stand four-square, not to be shaken by any ingenuity of reason, and Shakespeare supplies us with further corroboration of them.

"Coriolanus" was written fully ten years after "The Merchant of Venice," and long after the revision of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." And yet Shakespeare's attitude at forty-three is, in regard to this matter, just what it was at thirty-three. When Aufidius finds Coriolanus in his house, and learns that he has been banished from Rome and is now prepared to turn his army against his countrymen, he welcomes him as "more a friend than e'er an enemy," and this is the way he takes to show his joy:

"Know thou first, I loved the maid I married: never man Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here, Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold."

Here's the same attitude; the same extravagance; the same insistence on the fact that the man loves the maid and yet has more delight in the friend. What does it mean? When we first find it in "The Merchant of Venice" it must give the reader pause; in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" it surprises us; in the sonnets, accompanied as it is by every flattering expression of tender affection for the friend, it brings us to question; but its repetition in "Coriolanus" must assure us that it is a mere pose. Aufidius was not such a friend of Coriolanus that we can take his protestation seriously. The argument is evidently a stock argument to Shakespeare: a part of the ordinary furniture of his mind: it is like a fashionable dress of the period—the wearer does not notice its peculiarity.

The truth is, Shakespeare found in the literature of his time, and in the minds of his contemporaries, a fantastically high appreciation of friendship, coupled with a corresponding disdain for love as we moderns understand it. In "Wit's Commonwealth," published in 1598, we find: "The love of men to women is a thing common and of course, but the friendship of man to man, infinite and immortal." Passionate devotion to friendship is a sort of mark of the Renaissance, and the words "love" and "lover" in Elizabethan English were commonly used for "friend" and "friendship." Moreover, one must not forget that Lyly, whose euphuistic speech affected Shakespeare for years, had handled this same incident in his "Campaspe," where Alexander gives up his love to his rival, Apelles. Shakespeare, not to be outdone in any loyalty, sets forth the same fantastical devotion in the sonnets and plays. He does this, partly because the spirit of the time infected him, partly out of sincere admiration for Herbert, but oftener, I imagine, out of self-interest. It is pose, flunkeyism and the hope of benefits to come and not passion that inspired the first series of sonnets.