"Let still the woman take An elder than herself: so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband's heart."

In "The Tempest" he writes again:

"If thou dost break her virgin knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be minister'd, No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both."

These admonitions are so far-fetched and so emphatic that they plainly discover personal feeling. We have, besides, those quaint, angry passages in the "Comedy of Errors," to which we have already drawn attention, which show that the poet detested his wife.

The known facts, too, all corroborate this inference: let us consider them a little. The first child was born within six months of the marriage; twins followed in 1585; a little later Shakespeare left Stratford not to return to it for eight or nine years, and when he did return there was probably no further intimacy with his wife; at any rate, there were no more children. Yet Shakespeare, one fancies, was fond of children. When his son Hamnet died his grief showed itself in his work—in "King John" and in "The Winter's Tale." He was full of loving kindness to his daughters, too, in later life; it was his wife alone for whom he had no affection, no forgiveness.

There are other facts which establish this conclusion. While Shakespeare was in London he allowed his wife to suffer the extremes of poverty. Sometime between 1585 and 1595 she appears to have borrowed forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father's shepherd. The money was still unpaid when Whittington died, in 1601, and he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet, and distribute it among the poor of Stratford. Now Shakespeare was rich when he returned to Stratford in 1595, and always generous. He paid off his father's heavy debts; how came it that he did not pay this trifling debt of his wife? The mere fact proves beyond doubt that Shakespeare disliked her and would have nothing to do with her.

Even towards the end of his life, when he was suffering from increasing weakness, which would have made most men sympathetic, even if it did not induce them completely to relent, Shakespeare shows the same aversion to his poor wife. In 1613, when on a short visit to London, he bought a house in Blackfriars for L140; in the purchase he barred his wife's dower, which proceeding seems even to Dryasdust "pretty conclusive proof that he had the intention of excluding her from the enjoyment of his possessions after his death."

In the first draft of his will Shakespeare did not mention his wife. The apologists explain this by saying that, of course, he had already given her all that she ought to have. But if he loved her he would have mentioned her with affection, if only to console her in her widowhood. Before the will was signed he inserted a bequest to her of his "second-best bed," and the apologists have been at pains to explain that the best bed was kept for guests, and that Shakespeare willed to his wife the bed they both occupied. How inarticulate poor William Shakespeare must have become! Could the master of language find no better word than the contemptuous one? Had he said "our bed" it would have been enough; "the second-best bed" admits of but one interpretation. His daughters, who had lived with their mother, and who had not been afflicted by her jealousy and scolding tongue, begged the dying man to put in some mention of her, and he wrote in that "second-best bed"—bitter to the last. If his own plain words and these inferences, drawn from indisputable facts, are not sufficient, then let us take one fact more, and consider its significance; one fact, so to speak, from the grave.

When Shakespeare died he left some lines to be placed over his tomb. Here they are:

"Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare To Digg the dust enclosed heare. Blessed be ye man yt spares thes stones And Curst be ye yt moves my bones."

Now, why did Shakespeare make this peculiar request? No one seems to have seen any meaning in it. It looks to me as if Shakespeare wrote the verses in order to prevent his wife being buried with him. He wanted to be free of her in death as in life. At any rate, the fact is that she was not buried with him, but apart from him; he had seen to that. His grave was never opened, though his wife expressed a desire to be buried with him. The man who needs further proofs would not be persuaded though one came from the dead to convince him.

The marriage was an unfortunate one for many reasons, as an enforced marriage is apt to be, even when it is not the marriage of a boy in his teens to a woman some eight years his senior. Shakespeare takes trouble to tell us in "The Comedy of Errors" that his wife was spitefully jealous, and a bitter scold. She must have injured him, poisoned his life with her jealous nagging, or Shakespeare would have forgiven her. There is some excuse for him, if excuse be needed. At the time the marriage must have seemed the wildest folly to him, seething as he was with inordinate conceit. He was wise beyond his years, and yet he had been forced to give hostages to fortune before he had any means of livelihood, before he had even found a place in life. What a position for a poet—penniless, saddled with a jealous wife and three children before he was twenty-one. And this poet was proud, and vain, and in love with all distinctions.

But why did Shakespeare nurse such persistent enmity all through his life to jealous, scolding Anne Hathaway? Shakespeare had wronged her; the keener his moral sense, the more certain he was to blame his partner in the fault, for in no other way could he excuse himself.

It was overpowering sensuality and rashness which had led Shakespeare into the noose, and now there was nothing for it but to cut the rope. He had either to be true to his higher nature or to the conventional view of his duty; he was true to himself and fled to London, and the world is the richer for his decision. The only excuse he ever made is to be found in the sonnet-line:

"Love is too young to know what conscience is."

For my part I do not see that any excuse is needed: if Shakespeare had married Anne Whately he might never have gone to London or written a play. Shakespeare's hatred of his wife and his regret for having married her were alike foolish. Our brains are seldom the wisest part of us. It was well that he made love to Anne Hathaway; well, too, that he was forced to marry her; well, finally, that he should desert her. I am sorry he treated her badly and left her unsupplied with money; that was needlessly cruel; but it is just the kindliest men who have these extraordinary lapses; Shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless, was a part of his own self-esteem, and his self-esteem was founded on snobbish non-essentials for many years, if not, indeed, throughout his life.

There is a tradition preserved by Rowe that before going to London young Shakespeare taught school in the country; it may be; but he did not teach for long, we can be sure, and what he had to teach there were few scholars in the English country then or now capable of learning. Another tradition asserts that he obtained employment as a lawyer's clerk, probably because of the frequent use of legal phrases in his plays. But these apologists all forget that they are speaking of men like themselves, and of times like ours. Politics is the main theme of talk in our day; but in the time of Elizabeth it was rather dangerous to show one's wisdom by criticizing the government: law was then the chief staple of conversation: every educated man was therefore familiar with law and its phraseology, as men are familiar in our day with the jargon of politics.

When did Shakespeare fly to London? Some say when he was twenty-one, as soon as his wife presented him with twins, in 1585. Others say as soon as Sir Thomas Lucy's persecution became intolerable. Both causes no doubt worked together, and yet another cause, given in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," was the real causa causans. Shakespeare was naturally ambitious; eager to measure himself with the best and try his powers. London was the arena where all great prizes were to be won: Shakespeare strained towards the Court like a greyhound in leash. But when did he go? Again in doubt I take the shepherd's words in "The Winter's Tale" as a guide. Most men would have said from fourteen to twenty was the dangerous age for a youth; but Shakespeare had perhaps a personal reason for the peculiar "ten to twenty-three." He was, no doubt, astoundingly precocious, and probably even at ten he had learned everything of value that the grammar school had to teach, and his thoughts had begun to play truant. Twenty-three, too, is a significant date in his life; in 1587, when he was twenty-three, two companies of actors, under the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord Leicester, returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited Stratford. In Lord Leicester's company were Burbage and Heminge, with whom we know that Shakespeare was closely connected in later life. It seems to me probable that he returned with this company to London, and arrived in London, as he tells us in "The Comedy of Errors," "stiff and weary with long travel," and at once went out to view the town and "peruse the traders."

There is a tradition that when he came to London in 1587 he held horses outside the doors of the theatre. This story was first put about by the compiler of "The Lives of the Poets," in 1753. According to the author the story was related by D'Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton must have told it, does not transmit it. Rowe was perhaps right to forget it or leave it out; though the story is not in itself incredible. Such work must have been infinitely distasteful to Shakespeare, but necessity is a hard master, and Greene, who talks of him later as "Shake-scene," also speaks in the same connection of these "grooms." The curious amplified version of the story that Shakespeare organized a service of boys to hold the horses is hardly to be believed. The great Doctor was anything but a poet, or a good judge of the poetic temperament.

The Shakespeares of this world are not apt to take up menial employs, and this one had already shown that he preferred idle musings and parasitic dependence to uncongenial labour. Whoever reads the second scene of the second act of "The Comedy of Errors," will see that Shakespeare, even at the beginning, had an uncommonly good opinion of himself. He plays gentleman from the first, and despises trade; he snubs his servant and will not brook familiarity from him. In "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," he tells us that he left the country and came to London seeking "honour," intending, no doubt, to make a name for himself by his writings. He had probably "Venus and Adonis" in his pocket when he first reached London. This would inspire a poet with the self-confidence which a well-filled purse lends to an ordinary man.

I am inclined to accept Rowe's statement that Shakespeare was received into an actor-company at first in a very mean rank. The parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century used to tell the visitors that Shakespeare entered the playhouse as a servitor; but, however he entered it, it is pretty certain he was not long in a subordinate position.

What manner of man was William Shakespeare when he first fronted life in London somewhere about 1587? Aubrey tells us that he was "a handsome, well-shap't man, very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt." The bust of him in Stratford Church was coloured; it gave him light hazel eyes, and auburn hair and beard. Rowe says of him that "besides the advantages of his witt, he was in himself a good-natured man, of too great sweetness in his manners, and a most agreeable companion."

I picture him to myself very like Swinburne—of middle height or below it, inclined to be stout; the face well-featured, with forehead domed to reverence and quick, pointed chin; a face lighted with hazel-clear vivid eyes and charming with sensuous-full mobile lips that curve easily to kisses or gay ironic laughter; an exceedingly sensitive, eager speaking face that mirrors every fleeting change of emotion....

I can see him talking, talking with extreme fluency in a high tenor voice, the reddish hair flung back from the high forehead, the eyes now dancing, now aflame, every feature quick with the "beating mind."

And such talk—the groundwork of it, so to speak, very intimate-careless; but gemmed with thoughts, diamonded with wit, rhythmic with feeling: don't we know how it ran—"A hundred and fifty tattered prodigals.... No eye hath seen such scarecrows, ... discarded, unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters, and ostlers trade-fallen: the cankers of a calm world and a long peace." And after the thought the humour again—"food for powder, food for powder."

Now let us consider some of his other qualities. In 1592 he published his "Venus and Adonis," which he had no doubt written in 1587 or even earlier, for he called it "the first heir of my invention" when he dedicated it to Lord Southampton. This work is to me extremely significant. It is all concerned with the wooing of young Adonis by Venus, an older woman. Now, goddesses have no age, nor do women, as a rule, woo in this sensual fashion. The peculiarities point to personal experience. "I, too," Shakespeare tells us practically, "was wooed by an older woman against my will." He seems to have wished the world to accept this version of his untimely marriage. Young Shakespeare in London was probably a little ashamed of being married to some one whom he could hardly introduce or avow. The apologists who declare that he made money very early in his career give us no explanation of the fact that he never brought his wife or children to London. Wherever we touch Shakespeare's intimate life, we find proof upon proof that he detested his wife and was glad to live without her.

Looked at in this light "Venus and Adonis" is not a very noble thing to have written; but I am dealing with a young poet's nature, and the majority of young poets would like to forget their Anne Hathaway if they could; or, to excuse themselves, would put the blame of an ill-sorted union upon the partner to it.

There is a certain weakness, however, shown in the whole story of his marriage; a weakness of character, as well as a weakness of morale, which it is impossible to ignore; and there were other weaknesses in Shakespeare, especially a weakness of body which must necessarily have had its correlative delicacies of mind.

I have pointed out in the first part of this book that sleeplessness was a characteristic of Shakespeare, even in youth; he attributes it to Henry IV. in old age, and to Henry V., a youth at the time, who probably never knew what a sleepless night meant. Shakespeare's alter ego, Valentine, in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," suffers from it, and so do Macbeth and Hamlet, and a dozen others of his chief characters, in particular his impersonations—all of which shows, I think, that from the beginning the mind of Shakespeare was too strong for his body. As we should say to-day, he was too emotional, and lived on his nerves. I always think of him as a ship over-engined; when the driving-power is working at full speed it shakes the ship to pieces.

One other weakness is marked in him, and that is that he could not drink, could not carry his liquor like a man—to use our accepted phrase. Hamlet thought drinking a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance; Cassius, Shakespeare's incarnation in "Othello," confessed that he had "poor unhappy brains for drinking": tradition informs us that Shakespeare himself died of a "feavour" from drinking—all of which confirms my opinion that Shakespeare was delicate rather than robust. He was, also, extraordinarily fastidious: in drama after drama he rails against the "greasy" caps and "stinking" breath of the common people. This overstrained disgust suggests to me a certain delicacy of constitution.

But there is still another indication of bodily weakness which in itself would be convincing to those accustomed to read closely; but which would carry little or no weight to the careless. In sonnet 129 Shakespeare tells us of lust and its effects, and the confession seems to me purely personal. Here are four lines of it:

"Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad."

Now, this is not the ordinary man's experience of passion and its effects. "Past reason hunted," such an one might say, but he would certainly not go on "No sooner had, Past reason hated." He is not moved to hate by enjoyment, but to tenderness; it is your weakling who is physically exhausted by enjoyment who is moved to hatred. This sonnet was written by Shakespeare in the prime of manhood at thirty-four or thirty-five at latest.

Shakespeare was probably healthy as a young man, but intensely sensitive and highly strung; too finely constituted ever to have been strong. One notices that he takes no pleasure in fighting; his heroes are, of course, all "valiant," but he shows no loving interest in the game of fighting as a game. In fact, we have already seen that he found no wonderful phrase for any of the manly virtues; he was a neuropath and a lover, and not a fighter, even in youth, or Fulk Sandells might have rued his interference.

The dominating facts to be kept ever in mind about Shakespeare are that he was delicate in body, and over-excitable; yielding and irresolute in character; with too great sweetness of manners and inordinately given to the pleasures of love.

How would such a man fare in the world of London in 1587? It was a wild and wilful age; eager English spirits were beginning to take a part in the opening up of the new world; the old, limiting horizons were gone; men dared to think for themselves and act boldly; ten years before Drake had sailed round the world—the adventurer was the characteristic product of the time. In ordinary company a word led to a blow, and the fight was often brought to a fatal conclusion with dagger or sword or both. In those rough days actors were almost outlaws; Ben Jonson is known to have killed two or three men; Marlowe died in a tavern brawl. Courage has always been highly esteemed in England, like gentility and a university training. Shakespeare possessed none of these passports to public favour. He could not shoulder his way through the throng. The wild adventurous life of the time was not to his liking, even in early manhood; from the beginning he preferred "the life removed" and his books; all given over to the "bettering of his mind" he could only have been appreciated at any time by the finer spirits.

Entering the theatre as a servitor he no doubt made such acquaintances as offered themselves, and spent a good deal of his leisure perforce with second-rate actors and writers in common taverns and studied his Bardolph and Pistol, and especially his Falstaff at first hand. Perhaps Marlowe was one of his ciceroni in rough company. Shakespeare had almost certainly met Marlowe very early in his career, for he worked with him in the "Third Part of Henry VI.," and his "Richard III." is a conscious imitation of Marlowe, and Marlowe was dissipated enough and wild enough to have shown him the wildest side of life in London in the '80's. It was the very best thing that could have happened to delicate Shakespeare, to come poor and unknown to London, and be soused in common rowdy life like this against his will by sheer necessity; for if left to his own devices he would probably have grown up a bookish poet—a second Coleridge. Fate takes care of her favourites.

It was all in his favour that he should have been forced at first to win his spurs as an actor. He must have been too intelligent, one would think, ever to have brought it far as a mummer; he looked upon the half-art of acting with disdain and disgust, as he tells us in the sonnets, and if in Hamlet he condescends to give advice to actors, it is to admonish them not to outrage the decencies of nature by tearing a passion to tatters. He had at hand a surer ladder to fame than the mummer's art. As soon as he felt his feet in London he set to work adapting plays, and writing plays, while reading his own poetry to all and sundry who would listen, and I have no doubt that patrons of the stage, who were also men of rank, were willing to listen to Shakespeare from the beginning. He was of those who require no introductions.

In 1592, four or five years after his arrival in London, he had already come to the front as a dramatist, or at least as an adapter of plays, for Robert Greene, a scholar and playwright, attacked him in his "Groatsworth of Wit" in this fashion:

"There is an upstart Crow, beautified in our feathers that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country. Oh, that I might intreat your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions."

It is plain from this weird appeal that Shakespeare had already made his mark.

There are further proofs of his rapid success. One of Chettle's references to Shakespeare (I take Chettle to be the original of Falstaff) throws light upon the poet's position in London in these early days. Shortly after Greene had insulted Shakespeare as "Shake-scene" Chettle apologized for the insult in these terms:

"I am as sorry," Chettle wrote, "as if the original fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seen his (i.e., Shakespeare's) demeanour no less civill than he (is) exelent in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art."

In 1592, then, Shakespeare was most "civill in demeanour," and had won golden opinions from people of importance.

Actors and poets of that time could not help knowing a good many of the young nobles who came to the theatre and sat round the stage listening to the performances. And Shakespeare, with his aristocratic sympathies and charming sweetness of nature, must have made friends with the greatest ease. Chettle's apology proves that early in his career he had the art or luck to win distinguished patrons who spoke well of him. While still new to town he came to know Lord Southampton, to whom he dedicated "Venus and Adonis"; the fulsome dedication of "Lucrece" to the same nobleman two years later shows that deference had rapidly ripened into affectionate devotion; no wonder Rowe noticed the "too great sweetness in his manners." Thinking of his intimacy with Southampton on the one hand and Bardolph on the other, one is constrained to say of Shakespeare what Apemantus says of Timon:

"The middle of humanity thou never knewest, But the extremity of both ends."

In the extremes characters show themselves more clearly than they do in the middle classes; at both ends of society speech and deed are unrestrained. Falstaff and Bardolph and the rest were free of convention by being below it, just as Bassanio and Mercutio were free because they were above it, and made the rules. The young lord did what he pleased, and spoke his mind as plainly as the footpad. Life at both ends was the very school for quick, sympathetic Shakespeare. But even in early manhood, as soon as he came to himself and found his work, one other quality is as plain in Shakespeare as even his humour—high impartial intellect with sincere ethical judgement. He judges even Falstaff severely, to the point of harshness, indeed; as he judged himself later in Enobarbus. This high critical faculty pervades all his work. But it must not be thought that his conduct was as scrupulous as his principles, or his will as sovereign as his intelligence. That he was a loose-liver while in London is well attested. Contemporary anecdotes generally hit off a man's peculiarities, and the only anecdote of Shakespeare that is known to have been told about him in his lifetime illustrates this master trait of his character. Burbage, we are told, when playing Richard III., arranged with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance. Shakespeare overheard the rendezvous, anticipated his fellow's visit, and met Burbage on his arrival with the jibe that "William the Conqueror came before Richard III." The lightness is no doubt as characteristic of Shakespeare as the impudent humour.

There is another fact in Shakespeare's life which throws almost as much light on his character as his marriage. He seems to have come to riches very early and very easily. As we have seen, he was never able to paint a miser, which confirms Jonson's testimony that he was "of an open and free nature." In 1597 he went down to Stratford and bought New Place, then in ruinous condition, but the chief house in the town, for L60; he spent at least as much more between 1597 and 1599 in rebuilding the house and stocking the barns with grain. In 1602 we find that he purchased from William and John Combe, of Stratford, a hundred and seven acres of arable land near the town, for which he paid L320; in 1605, too, he bought for L440 a moiety of the tithes of Stratford for an unexpired term of thirty-one years, which investment seems to have brought him in little except a wearisome lawsuit.

Now, how did the poet obtain this thousand pounds or so? English apologists naturally assume that he was a "good business man"; with delicious unconscious irony they one and all picture the man who hated tradesmen as himself a sort of thrifty tradesman-soul—a master of practical life who looked after the pennies from the beginning. These commentators all treat Shakespeare as the Hebrews treated God; they make him in their own likeness. In Shakespeare's case this practice leads to absurdity. Let us take the strongest advocate of the accepted view. Dryasdust is at pains to prove that Shakespeare's emoluments, even as an actor in the '90's, were not likely to have fallen below a hundred a year; but even Dryasdust admits that his large earnings came after 1599, from his shares in the Globe Theatre, and is inclined "to accept the tradition that Shakespeare received from the Earl of Southampton a large gift of money." As Southampton came of age in 1595, he may well out of his riches have helped the man who had dedicated his poems to him with servile adulation. Moreover, the statement is put forward by Rowe, who is certainly more trustworthy than the general run of gossip-mongers, and his account of the matter proves that he did not accept the story with eager credulity, but as one compelled by authority. Here is what he says:

"There is one story so singular in magnificence of this patron of Shakspeare that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir Wm. D'Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to insert that my lord Southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase to which he heard he had a mind. A bounty very great, and very rare at any time, almost equal to that profuse generosity the present age has shown to French dancers and Italian Eunuchs."

It seems to me a great deal more likely that this munificent gift of Southampton was the source of Shakespeare's wealth than that he added coin to coin in saving, careful fashion. It may be said at once that all the evidence we have is in favour of Shakespeare's extravagance, and against his thrift. As we have seen, when studying "The Merchant of Venice," the presumption is that he looked upon saving with contempt, and was himself freehanded to a fault. The Rev. John Ward, who was Vicar of Stratford from 1648 to 1679, tells us "that he spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard."

It is impossible to deny that Shakespeare got rid of a great deal of money even after his retirement to Stratford; and men accustomed to save are not likely to become prodigal in old age.

On the 10th March, 1613, Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars for L140; the next day he executed another deed, now in the British Museum, which stipulated that L60 of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage until the following Michaelmas; the money was unpaid at Shakespeare's death, which seems to me to argue a certain carelessness, to say the least of it.

Dryasdust makes out that Shakespeare, in the years from 1600 to 1612, was earning about six hundred a year in the money of the period, or nearly five thousand a year of our money, and yet he was unable or unwilling to pay off a paltry L60.

After passing the last five years of his life in village Stratford, where he could not possibly have found many opportunities of extravagance, he was only able to leave a little more than one year's income. He willed New Place to his elder daughter, Susanna Hall, together with the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford (except the tenement in Chapel Lane), and the house in Blackfriars, London, all together equal, at the most, to five or six hundred pounds; and to his younger daughter, Judith, he bequeathed the tenement in Chapel Lane, L150 in money, and another L150 to be paid if she was alive three years after the date of the will. Nine hundred pounds, or so, of the money of the period, would cover all he possessed at death. When we consider these things, it becomes plain, I think, that Shakespeare was extravagant to lavishness even in cautious age. While in London he no doubt earned and was given large sums of money; but he was free-handed and careless, and died far poorer than one would have expected from an ordinarily thrifty man. The loose-liver is usually a spendthrift.

There are worse faults to be laid to his account than lechery and extravagance. Every one who has read his works with any care must admit that Shakespeare was a snob of the purest English water. Aristocratic tastes were natural to him; inherent, indeed, in the delicate sensitiveness of his beauty-loving temperament; but he desired the outward and visible signs of gentility as much as any podgy millionaire of our time, and stooped as low to get them as man could stoop. In 1596, his young son, Hamnet, died at Stratford, and was buried on 11th August in the parish church. This event called Shakespeare back to his village, and while he was there he most probably paid his father's debts, and certainly tried to acquire for himself and his successors the position of gentlefolk. He induced his father to make application to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms, on the ground not only that his father was a man of substance, but that he had also married into a "worshipful" family. The draft grant of arms was not executed at the time. It may have been that the father's pecuniary position became known to the College, or perhaps the profession of the son created difficulties; but in any case nothing was done for some time. In 1597, however, the Earl of Essex became Earl Marshal and Chief of the Heralds' College, and the scholar and antiquary, William Camden, joined the College as Clarenceux King of Arms. Shakespeare must have been known to the Earl of Essex, who was an intimate friend of the Earl of Southampton; he was indeed almost certainly a friend and admirer of Essex. The Shakespeares' second application to be admitted to the status of gentlefolk took a new form. They asserted roundly that the coat as set out in the draft of 1596 had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the heralds were asked to give him a "recognition" of it. At the same time John Shakespeare asked for permission to quarter on his "ancient coat of arms" that of the Ardens of Wilmscote, his wife's family. But this was going too far, even for a friend of Essex. To grant such a request might have got the College into trouble with the influential Warwickshire family of Arden, and so it was refused; but the grant was "recognized," and Shakespeare's peculiar ambition was satisfied.

Every single incident in his life bears out what we have learned from his works. In all his writings he praises lords and gentlemen, and runs down the citizens and common people, and in his life he spent some years, a good deal of trouble, and many impudent lies in getting for his father a grant of arms and recognition as a gentleman—a very pitiful ambition, but peculiarly English. Shakespeare, one fancies, was a gentleman by nature, and a good deal more.

But his snobbishness had other worse results. Partly because of it he never got to know the middle classes in England. True, even in his time they were excessively Puritanical, which quality hedged them off, so to speak, from the playwright-poet. With his usual gentleness or timidity, Shakespeare never tells us directly what he thought of the Puritans, but his half-averted, contemptuous glance at them in passing, is very significant. Angelo, the would-be Puritan ruler, was a "false seemer," Malvolio was a "chough." The peculiar virtues of the English middle class, its courage and sheepishness; its good conduct and respect for duties; its religious sense and cocksure narrow-mindedness, held no attraction for Shakespeare, and, armoured in snobbishness, he utterly missed what a knowledge of the middle classes might have given him.

Let us take one instance of his loss. Though he lived in an age of fanaticism, he never drew a fanatic or reformer, never conceived a man as swimming against the stream of his time. He had but a vague conception of the few spirits in each age who lead humanity to new and higher ideals; he could not understand a Christ or a Mahomet, and it seems as if he took but small interest in Jeanne d'Arc, the noblest being that came within the ken of his art. For even if we admit that he did not write the first part of "Henry VI.," it is certain that it passed through his hands, and that in his youth, at any rate, he saw nothing to correct in that vile and stupid libel on the greatest of women. Even the English fanatic escaped his intelligence; his Jack Cade, as I have already noticed, is a wretched caricature; no Cade moves his fellows save by appealing to the best in them, to their sense of justice, or what they take for justice. The Cade who will wheedle men for his own gross ambitions may make a few dupes, but not thousands of devoted followers. These elementary truths Shakespeare never understood. Yet how much greater he would have been had he understood them; had he studied even one Puritan lovingly and depicted him sympathetically. For the fanatic is one of the hinges which swing the door of the modern world. Shakespeare's "universal sympathy"—to quote Coleridge—did not include the plainly-clad tub-thumper who dared to accuse him to his face of serving the Babylonish Whore. Shakespeare sneered at the Puritan instead of studying him; with the result that he belongs rather to the Renaissance than to the modern world, in spite even of his Hamlet. The best of a Wordsworth or a Turgenief is outside him; he would never have understood a Marianna or a Bazarof, and the noble faith of the sonnet to "Toussaint l'Ouverture" was quite beyond him. He could never have written:

"Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee, air, earth and skies; There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

It is time to speak of him frankly; he was gentle, and witty; gay, and sweet-mannered, very studious, too, and fair of mind; but at the same time he was weak in body and irresolute, hasty and wordy, and took habitually the easiest way out of difficulties; he was ill-endowed in the virile virtues and virile vices. When he showed arrogance it was always of intellect and not of character; he was a parasite by nature. But none of these faults would have brought him to ruin; he was snared again in full manhood by his master-quality, his overpowering sensuality, and thrown in the mire.



CHAPTER XV

SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE—continued

Shakespeare's life seems to fall sharply into two halves. Till he met Mistress Fitton, about 1597, he must have been happy and well content, I think, in spite of his deep underlying melancholy. According to my reckoning he had been in London about ten years, and no man has ever done so much in the time and been so successful even as the world counts success. He had not only written the early poems and the early plays, but in the last three or four years half-a-dozen masterpieces: "A Midsummer's Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet," "Richard II.," "King John," "The Merchant of Venice," "The Two Parts of Henry IV." At thirty-three he was already the greatest poet and dramatist of whom Time holds any record.

Southampton's bounty had given him ease, and allowed him to discharge his father's debts, and place his dearly loved mother in a position of comfort in the best house in Stratford.

He had troops of friends, we may be sure, for there was no gentler, gayer, kindlier creature in all London, and he set store by friendship. Ten years before he had neither money, place, nor position; now he had all these, and was known even at Court. The Queen had been kind to him. He ended the epilogue to the "Second Part of Henry IV.," which he had just finished, by kneeling "to pray for the Queen." Essex or Southampton had no doubt brought his work to Elizabeth's notice: she had approved his "Falstaff" and encouraged him to continue. Of all his successes, this royal recognition was surely the one which pleased him most. He was at the topmost height of happy hours when he met the woman who was to change the world for him.

In the lives of great men the typical tragedies are likely to repeat themselves. Socrates was condemned to drain many a poisoned cup before he was given the bowl of hemlock: Shakespeare had come to grief with many women before he fell with Mary Fitton. It was his ungovernable sensuality which drove him in youth to his untimely and unhappy marriage; it was his ungovernable sensuality, too, which in his maturity led him to worship Mary Fitton, and threw him into those twelve years of bondage to earthy, coarse service which he regretted so bitterly when the passion-fever had burned itself out.

One can easily guess how he came to know the self-willed and wild-living maid-of-honour. Like many of the courtiers, Mistress Fitton affected the society of the players. Kemp, the clown of his company, knew her, and dedicated a book to her rather familiarly. I have always thought that Shakespeare resented Kemp's intimacy with Mistress Fitton, for when Hamlet advises the players to prevent the clown from gagging, he adds, with a snarl of personal spite:

"a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it."

Mary Fitton's position, her proud, dark beauty, her daring of speech and deed took Shakespeare by storm. She was his complement in every failing; her strength matched his weakness; her resolution his hesitation, her boldness his timidity; besides, she was of rank and place, and out of pure snobbery he felt himself her inferior. He forgot that humble worship was not the way to win a high-spirited girl. He loved her so abjectly that he lost her; and it was undoubtedly his overpowering sensuality and snobbishness which brought him to his knees, and his love to ruin. He could not even keep her after winning her; desire blinded him. He would not see that Mary Fitton was not a wanton through mere lust. As soon as her fancy was touched she gave herself; but she was true to the new lover for the time. We know that she bore a son to Pembroke and two illegitimate daughters to Sir Richard Leveson. Her slips with these men wounded Shakespeare's vanity, and he persisted in underrating her. Let us probe to the root of the secret sore. Here is a page of "Troilus and Cressida," a page from that terrible fourth scene of the fourth act, when Troilus, having to part from Cressida, warns her against the Greeks and their proficience in the arts of love:

"Troilus. I cannot sing Nor heel the high lavolt, nor sweeten talk, Nor play at subtle games; fair virtues all, To which the Grecians are most prompt and pregnant: But I can tell thee in each grace of these There lurks a still and dumb-discoursive devil That tempts most cunningly: but be not tempted.

Cressida. Do you think I will?

Troilus. No: but something may be done that we will not."

The first lines show that poor Shakespeare often felt out of it at Court. The suggestion, I have put in italics, is unspeakable. Shakespeare made use of every sensual bait in hope of winning his love, liming himself and not the woman. His vanity was so inordinate that instead of saying to himself, "it's natural that a high-born girl of nineteen should prefer a great lord of her own age to a poor poet of thirty-four": he strives to persuade himself and us that Mary Fitton was won away from him by "subtle games," and in his rage of wounded vanity he wrote that tremendous libel on her, which he put in the mouth of Ulysses:

"Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader! set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity And daughters of the game."

His tortured sensuality caricatures her: that "ticklish reader" reveals him. Mary Fitton was finer than his portraits; we want her soul, and do not get it even in Cleopatra. It was the consciousness of his own age and physical inferiority that drove him to jealous denigration of his mistress.

Mary Fitton did not beguile Shakespeare to "the very heart of loss," as he cried; but to the innermost shrine of the temple of Fame. It was his absolute abandonment to passion which made Shakespeare the supreme poet. If it had not been for his excessive sensuality, and his mad passion for his "gipsy," we should never have had from him "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Othello," "Antony and Cleopatra," or "Lear." He would still have been a poet and a dramatic writer of the first rank; but he would not have stood alone above all others: he would not have been Shakespeare.

His passion for Mary Fitton lasted some twelve years. Again and again he lived golden hours with her like those Cleopatra boasted of and regretted. Life is wasted quickly in such orgasms of passion; lust whipped to madness by jealousy. Mary Fitton was the only woman Shakespeare ever loved, or at least, the only woman he loved with such intensity as to influence his art. She was Rosaline, Cressid, Cleopatra, and the "dark lady" of the sonnets. All his other women are parts of her or reflections of her, as all his heroes are sides of Hamlet, or reflections of him. Portia is the first full-length sketch of Mary Fitton, taken at a distance: Beatrice and Rosalind are mere reflections of her high spirits, her aristocratic pride and charm: her strength and resolution are incarnate in Lady Macbeth. Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, are but abstract longings for purity and constancy called into life by his mistress's faithlessness and passion.

Shakespeare admired Mary Fitton as intensely as he desired her, yet he could not be faithful to her for the dozen years his passion lasted. Love and her soft hours drew him irresistibly again and again: he was the ready spoil of opportunity. Here is one instance: it was his custom, Aubrey tells us, to visit Stratford every year, probably every summer: on his way he was accustomed to put up at an inn in Oxford, kept by John D'Avenant. Mrs. D'Avenant, we are told, was "a very beautiful woman, and of a very good witt and of conversation extremely agreeable." No doubt Shakespeare made up to her from the first. Her second son, William, who afterwards became the celebrated playwright, was born in March, 1605, and according to a tradition long current in Oxford, Shakespeare was his father. In later life Sir William D'Avenant himself was "contented enough to be thought his (Shakespeare's) son." There is every reason to accept the story as it has been handed down. Shakespeare, as Troilus, brags of his constancy; talks of himself as "plain and true"; but it was all boasting: from eighteen to forty-five he was as inconstant as the wind, and gave himself to all the "subtle games" of love with absolute abandonment, till his health broke under the strain.

In several of the Sonnets, notably in 36 and 37, Shakespeare tells us that he was "poor and despised ... made lame by fortune's dearest spite." He will not even have his friend's name coupled with his for fear lest his "bewailed guilt" should do him shame:

"Let me confess that we two must be twain, Although our undivided loves are one: So shall those blots that do with me remain Without thy help, by me be borne alone...."

Spalding and other critics believe that this "guilt" of Shakespeare refers to his profession as an actor, but that stain should not have prevented Lord Herbert from honouring him with "public kindness." It is clear, I think, from the words themselves, that the guilt refers to the fact that both Herbert and he were in love with the same woman. Jonson, as we have seen, had poked fun at their connection, and this is how Shakespeare tries to take the sting out of the sneer.

Shakespeare had many of the weaknesses of the neurotic and artistic temperament, but he had assuredly the noblest virtues of it: he was true to his friends, and more than generous to their merits.

If his ethical conscience was faulty, his aesthetical conscience was of the very highest. Whenever we find him in close relations with his contemporaries we are struck with his kindness and high impartial intelligence. Were they his rivals, he found the perfect word for their merits and shortcomings. How can one better praise Chapman than by talking of

"The proud full sail of his great verse"?

How can one touch his defect more lightly than by hinting that his learning needed feathers to lift it from the ground? And if Shakespeare was fair even to his rivals, his friends could always reckon on his goodwill and his unwearied service. All his fine qualities came out when as an elder he met churlish Ben Jonson. Jonson did not influence him as much as Marlowe had influenced him; but these were the two greatest of living men with whom he was brought into close contact, and his relations with Jonson show him as in a glass. Rowe has a characteristic story which must not be forgotten:

"His acquaintance with Ben Jonson began with a remarkable piece of humanity and good-nature; Mr. Jonson, who was at that time altogether unknown, had offered one of his playes to the Players, in order to have it acted; but the persons into whose hands it was put, after having turned it carelessly and superciliously over, were just upon returning it to him, with an ill-natured answer, that it would be of no service to their company, when Shakespeare luckily cast his eye upon it, and found something so well in it as to encourage him to read through and afterwards to recommend Ben Jonson and his writings to the publick. After this they were professed friends; though I don't know whether the other ever made him an equal return of gentleness and sincerity. Ben was naturally proud and indolent, and in the days of his reputation did so far take upon him the premier in witt that he could not but look with an evil eye upon anyone that seemed to stand in competition with him. And if at times he has affected to commend him, it has always been with some reserve, insinuating his incorrectness, a careless manner of writing and a want of judgment; the praise of seldom altering or blotting out what he writt which was given him by the players over the first publish of his works after his death was what Jonson could not bear...."

The story reads exactly like the story of Goethe and Schiller. It was Schiller who held aloof and was full of fault-finding criticism: it was Goethe who made all the advances and did all the kindnesses. It was Goethe who obtained for Schiller that place as professor of history at Jena which gave Schiller the leisure needed for his dramatic work. It is always the greater who gives and forgives.

I believe, of course, too, in the traditional account of the unforgettable evenings at the Mermaid. "Many were the wit-combats," wrote Fuller of Shakespeare in his "Worthies" (1662), "betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which too I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all sides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention."

It was natural for the onlooker to compare Ben Jonson and his "mountainous belly" to some Spanish galleon, and Shakespeare, with his quicker wit, to the more active English ship. It was Jonson's great size—a quality which has always been too highly esteemed in England—his domineering temper and desperate personal courage that induced the gossip to even him with Shakespeare.

Beaumont described these meetings, too, in his poetical letter to his friend Jonson:

"What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid? Heard words that have been So nimble and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life."

In one respect at least the two men were antitheses. Jonson was exceedingly combative and quarrelsome, and seems to have taken a chief part in all the bitter disputes of his time between actors and men of letters. He killed one actor in a duel and attacked Marston and Dekker in "The Poetaster"; they replied to him in the "Satiromastix." More than once he criticized Shakespeare's writings; more than once jibed at Shakespeare, unfairly trying to wound him; but Shakespeare would not retort. It is to Jonson's credit that though he found fault with Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" and "Pericles," he yet wrote of him in the "Poetaster" as a peacemaker, and, under the name of Virgil, honoured him as the greatest master of poetry.

Tradition gives us one witty story about the relations between the pair which seems to me extraordinarily characteristic. Shakespeare was godfather to one of Ben's children, and after the christening, being in a deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up, and asked him why he was so melancholy. "No, faith, Ben," says he; "not I, but I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild and I have resolved at last." "I pr'ythee, what?" sayes he. "I'faith, Ben, I'll e'en give him a dozen good Lattin spoons, and thou shalt translate them." Lattin, as everybody knows, was a mixed metal resembling brass: the play upon words and sly fun poked at Jonson's scholarship are in Shakespeare's best manner. The story must be regarded as Shakespeare's answer to Jonson's sneer that he had "little Latine and lesse Greeke."

Through the mist of tradition and more or less uncertain references in his poetry, one sees that he had come, probably through Southampton, to admire Essex, and the fall and execution of Essex had an immense effect upon him. It is certain, I think, that the noble speech on mercy put into Portia's mouth in "The Merchant of Venice," was primarily an appeal to Elizabeth for Essex or for Southampton. It is plainly addressed to the Queen, and not to a Jew pariah:

"... It becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this scepter'd sway, It is enthroned in the heart of kings. It is an attribute of God Himself, And earthly power doth then show likest God's, When Mercy seasons Justice."

All this must have seemed the veriest irony when addressed to an outcast Jew. It was clearly intended as an appeal to Elizabeth, and shows how far gentle Shakespeare would venture in defence of a friend. Like a woman, he gained a certain courage through his affections.

I feel convinced that he resented the condemnation of Essex and the imprisonment of Southampton very bitterly, for though he had praised Elizabeth in his salad days again and again, talked about her in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a "fair vestal throned by the west"; walking in "maiden meditation, fancy-free"; yet, when she died, he could not be induced to write one word about her. His silence was noticed, and Chettle challenged him to write in praise of the dead sovereign, because she had been kind to him; but he would not: he had come to realise the harsh nature of Elizabeth, and he detested her ruthless cruelties. Like a woman, he found it difficult to forgive one who had injured those he loved. Now that I have discussed at some length Shakespeare's character, its powers and its weaknesses, let us for a moment consider his intellect. All sorts and conditions of men talk of it in superlatives; but that does not help us much. It is as easy to sit in Shakespeare's brain and think from there, as it is from Balzac's. If we have read Shakespeare rightly, his intelligence was peculiarly self-centred; he was wise mainly through self-knowledge, and not, as is commonly supposed, through knowledge of others and observation; he was assuredly anything but worldly-wise. Take one little point. In nearly every play he discovers an intense love of music and of flowers; but he never tells you anything about the music he loves, and he only mentions a dozen flowers in all his works. True, he finds exquisite phrases for his favourites; but he only seems to have noticed or known the commonest. His knowledge of birds and beasts is similarly limited. But when Bacon praises flowers he shows at once the naturalist's gift of observation; he mentions hundreds of different kinds, enumerating them month by month; in April alone he names as many as Shakespeare has mentioned in all his writings. He used his eyes to study things outside himself, and memory to recall them; but Shakespeare's eyes were turned inward; he knew little of the world outside himself.

Shakespeare's knowledge of men and women has been overrated. With all his sensuality he only knew one woman, Mary Fitton, though he knew her in every mood, and only one man, himself, profoundly apprehended in every accident and moment of growth.

He could not construct plays or invent stories, though he selected good ones with considerable certainty. He often enriched the characters, seldom or never the incidents; even the characters he creates are usually sides of himself, or humorous masks without a soul. He must have heard of the statesman Burleigh often enough; but nowhere does he portray him; no hint in his works of Drake, or Raleigh, or Elizabeth, or Sidney. He has no care either for novelties; he never mentions forks or even tobacco or potatoes. A student by nature if ever there was one, all intent, as he tells us, on bettering his mind, he passes through Oxford a hundred times and never even mentions the schools: Oxford men had disgusted him with their alma mater.

The utmost reach of this self-student is extraordinary; the main puzzle of life is hidden from us as from him; but his word on it is deeper than any of ours, though we have had three centuries in which to climb above him.

"Men must abide Their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all."

And if it be said that the men of the Renaissance occupied themselves more with such questions than we do, and therefore show better in relation to them, let us take another phrase which has always seemed to me of extraordinary insight. Antony has beaten Caesar, and returns to Cleopatra, who greets him with the astounding words:

"Lord of lords, O, infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught?"

This is all more or less appropriate in the mouth of Cleopatra; but it is to me Shakespeare's own comment on life; he is conscious of his failure; he has said to himself: "if I, Shakespeare, have failed, it is because every one fails; life's handicap searches out every weakness; to go through life as a conqueror would require 'infinite virtue.'" This is perhaps the furthest throw of Shakespeare's thought.

But his worldly wisdom is to seek. After he had been betrayed by Lord Herbert he raves of man's ingratitude, in play after play. Of course men are ungrateful; it is only the rarest and noblest natures who can feel thankful for help without any injury to vanity. The majority of men love their inferiors, those whom they help; to give flatters self-esteem; but they hate their superiors, and lend to the word "patron" an intolerable smirk of condescension. Shakespeare should have understood that at thirty.

When his vanity was injured, his blindness was almost inconceivable. He should have seen Mary Fitton as she was and given us a deathless-true portrait of her; but the noble side of her, the soul-side a lover should have cherished, is not even suggested. He deserved to lose her, seeking only the common, careless of the "silent, silver lights" she could have shown him. He was just as blind with his wife; she had been unwillingly the ladder to his advancement; he should have forgiven her on that ground, if not on a higher.

He was inordinately vain and self-centred. He talked incontinently, as he himself assures us, and as Ben Jonson complains. He was exceedingly quick and witty and impatient. His language shows his speed of thought; again and again the images tumble over each other, and the mere music of his verse is breathlessly rapid, just as the movement of Tennyson's verse is extremely slow.

More than once in his works I have shown how, at the crisis of fate, he jumps to conclusions like a woman. He seems often to have realized the faults of his own haste. His Othello says:

"How poor are they that have not patience."

With this speed of thought and wealth of language and of wit, he naturally loved to show off in conversation; but as he wished to get on and make a figure in the world, he should have talked less and encouraged his patrons to show off. Poor heedless, witty, charming Shakespeare! One threat which he used again and again, discovers all his world-blindness to me. Gravely, in sonnet 140, he warns Mary Fitton that she had better not provoke him or he will write the truth about her—just as if the maid of honour who could bear bastard after bastard, while living at court, cared one straw what poor Shakespeare might say or write or sing of her. And Hamlet runs to the same weapon: he praises the players to Polonius as

"Brief chronicles of the time; after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live."

It is all untrue; actors were then, as now, only mummers without judgement. Shakespeare was thinking of himself, the dramatist-poet, who was indeed a chronicle of the time; but the courtier Lord Polonius would not care a dam for a rhymester's praise or blame. Posthumus, too, will write against the wantons he dislikes. Shakespeare's weapon of offence was his pen; but though he threatened, he seldom used it maliciously; he was indeed a "harmless opposite," too full of the milk of human kindness to do injury to any man. But these instances of misapprehension in the simple things of life, show us that gentle Shakespeare is no trustworthy guide through this rough all-hating world. The time has now come for me to consider how Shakespeare was treated by the men of his own time, and how this treatment affected his character. The commentators, of course, all present him as walking through life as a sort of uncrowned king, feted and reverenced on all sides during his residence in London, and in the fullness of years and honours retiring to Stratford to live out the remainder of his days in the bosom of his family as "a prosperous country gentleman," to use Dowden's unhappy phrase. As I have already shown, his works give the lie to this flattering fiction, which in all parts is of course absolutely incredible. It is your Tennyson, who is of his time and in perfect sympathy with it; Tennyson, with his May Queens, prig heroes and syrupy creed, who passes through life as a conqueror, and after death is borne in state to rest in the great Abbey.

The Shakespeares, not being of an age, but for all time, have another guess sort of reception. From the moment young Will came to London, he was treated as an upstart, without gentle birth or college training: to Greene he was "Maister of Artes in Neither University." He won through, and did his work; but he never could take root in life; his children perished out of the land. He was in high company on sufferance. On the stage he met the highest, Essex, Pembroke, Southampton, on terms of equality; but at court he stood among the menials and was despitefully treated. Let no one misunderstand me: I should delight in painting the other picture if there were any truth in it: I should have joyed in showing how the English aristocracy for this once threw off their senseless pride and hailed the greatest of men at least as an equal. Frederic the Great would have done this, for he put Voltaire at his own table, and told his astonished chamberlains that "privileged spirits rank with sovereigns." Such wisdom was altogether above the English aristocracy of that or any time. Yet they might have risen above the common in this one instance. For Shakespeare had not only supreme genius to commend him, but all the graces of manner, all the sweetness of disposition, all the exquisite courtesies of speech that go to ensure social success. His imperial intelligence, however, was too heavy a handicap. Men resent superiority at all times, and there is nothing your aristocrat so much dislikes as intellectual superiority, and especially intellect that is not hall-marked and accredited: the Southamptons and the Pembrokes must have found Shakespeare's insight and impartiality intolerable. It was Ben Jonson whom Pembroke made Poet Laureate; it was Chapman the learned, and not Shakespeare, who was regarded with reverence. How could these gentlemen appreciate Shakespeare when it was his "Venus and Adonis" and his "Lucrece" that they chiefly admired. "Venus and Adonis" went through seven editions in Shakespeare's lifetime, while "Othello" was not thought worthy of type till the author had been dead six years.

But badly as the aristocrats treated Shakespeare they yet treated him better than any other class. The shopkeepers in England are infinitely further removed from art or poetry than the nobles; now as in the time of Elizabeth they care infinitely more for beef and beer and broadcloth than for any spiritual enjoyment; while the masses of the people prefer a dog-fight to any masterpiece in art or letters.

Some will say that Shakespeare was perhaps condemned for dissolute living, and did not come to honour because of his shortcomings in character. Such a judgement misapprehends life altogether. Had Shakespeare's character been as high as his intellect he would not have been left contemptuously on one side; he would have been hated and persecuted, pilloried or thrown into prison as Bunyan was. It was his dissolute life that commended him to the liking of the loose-living Pembroke and Essex. Pembroke, we know from Clarendon, was "immoderately given to women." Four maids of honour, we learn, were enceintes to Essex at the same time. Shakespeare was hardly as dissolute as his noble patrons. The truth was they could not understand his genius; they had no measure wherewith to measure it, for no one can see above his own head; and so they treated him with much the same condescending familiarity that nobles nowadays show to a tenor or a ballet dancer. In March, 1604, after he had written "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," Shakespeare and some other actors walked from the Tower of London to Westminster in the procession which accompanied King James on his formal entry into London. Each of the actors received four and a half yards of scarlet cloth to wear as a cloak on the occasion. The scarlet cloak to Shakespeare must have been a sort of Nessus' shirt, or crown of thorns—the livery of derision.

Shakespeare, who measured both enemies and friends fairly, measured himself fairly, too. He usually praises his impersonations: Hamlet is "a noble heart," Brutus "the noblest Roman of them all"; and speaking directly he said of himself in a sonnet:

"I am that I am, and they that level At my abuses reckon up their own; I may be straight though they themselves be bevel."

He knew his own greatness, none better, and as soon as he reached middle age and began to take stock of himself, he must have felt bitterly that he, the best mind in the world, had not brought it far in the ordinary estimation of men. No wonder he showed passionate sympathy with all those who had failed in life; he could identify himself with Brutus and Antony, and not with the Caesars.

Shakespeare's view of England and of Englishmen was naturally affected by their treatment of him. He is continually spoken of as patriotic, and it is true that he started in youth with an almost lyrical love of country. His words in "Richard II." are often quoted; but they were written before he had any experience or knowledge of men.

"Gaunt. This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This happy breed of men, this little world; This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat, defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

The apologists who rejoice in his patriotism never realize that Shakespeare did not hold the same opinions throughout his life; as he grew and developed, his opinions developed with him. In "The Merchant of Venice" we find that he has already come to saner vision; when Portia and Nerissa talk of the English suitor, Portia says:

"You know I say nothing to him; for he understands not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian; and you will come into the court and swear that I have a poor pennyworth in the Englishman. He is a proper man's picture; but, alas, who can converse with a dumb show? How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere."

What super-excellent criticism it all is; true, now as then, "a proper man's picture but ... a dumb show." It proves conclusively that Shakespeare was able to see around and over the young English noble of his day. From this time on I find no praise of England or of Englishmen in any of his works, except "Henry V.," which was manifestly written to catch applause on account of its jingoism. In his maturity Shakespeare saw his countrymen as they were, and mentioned them chiefly to blame their love of drinking. Imogen says:

"Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day, night, Are they not but in Britain?..........................prithee, think There's livers out of Britain."

Whoever reads "Coriolanus" carefully will see how Shakespeare loathed the common Englishman; there can be no doubt at all that he incorporated his dislike of him once for all in Caliban. The qualities he lends Caliban are all characteristic. Whoever will give him drink is to Caliban a god. The brutish creature would violate and degrade art without a scruple, and the soul of him is given in the phrase that if he got the chance he would people the world with Calibans. Sometimes one thinks that if Shakespeare were living to-day he would be inclined to say that his prediction had come true.

One could have guessed without proof that in the course of his life Shakespeare, like Goethe, would rise above that parochial vanity which is so much belauded as patriotism. He was in love with the ideal and would not confine it to any country.

There is little to tell of his life after he met Mary Fitton, or rather the history of his life afterwards is the history of his passion and jealousy and madness as he himself has told it in the great tragedies. He appears to have grown fat and scant of breath when he was about thirty-six or seven. In 1608 his mother died, and "Coriolanus" was written as a sort of monument to the memory of "the noblest mother in the world." His intimacy with Mary Fitton lasted, I feel sure, up to his breakdown in 1608 or thereabouts, and was probably the chief cause of his infirmity and untimely death.

It only remains for me now to say a word or two about the end of his life. Rowe says that "the latter part of his life was spent as all men of good sense will that theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends. He had the good fortune to gather an estate equal to his occasion, and, in that, to his wish, and is said to have spent some years before his death at his native Stratford." Rowe, too, tells us that it is a story "well remembered in that country, that he had a particular intimacy with Mr. Combe, an old gentleman noted thereabouts for his wealth and usury; it happened that in a pleasant conversation amongst their common friends Mr. Combe told Shakespeare, in a laughing manner, that he fancied he intended to write his epitaph, if he happened to outlive him; and since he did not know what might be said of him when he was dead, he desired it might be done immediately; upon which Shakespeare gave him these four verses:

"Ten in the Hundred lies here ingrav'd 'Tis a Hundred to Ten his soul is not sav'd: If any Man ask, 'Who lies in this tomb,' Oh! ho! quoth the Devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe."

But the sharpness of the Satyr is said to have stung the man so severely that he never forgave him."

I have given all this because I want the reader to have the sources before him, and because the contempt of tradesman-gain and usury, even at the very end, is so characteristic.

It appears, too, from the Stratford records, and is therefore certain, that as early as the year 1614 a preacher was entertained at New Place—"Item, one quart of sack, and one quart of claret wine, given to a preacher at the New Place, twenty pence." The Reverend John Ward, who was vicar of Stratford, in a manuscript memorandum book written in the year 1664, asserts that "Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Johnson had a merie meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted."

Shakespeare, as we have seen from "The Tempest," retired to Stratford—"where every third thought shall be my grave"—in broken health and in a mood of despairing penitence. I do not suppose the mood lasted long; but the ill-health and persistent weakness explain to me as nothing else could his retirement to Stratford. It is incredible to me that Shakespeare should leave London at forty-seven or forty-eight years of age, in good health, and retire to Stratford to live as a "prosperous country gentleman"! What had Stratford to offer Shakespeare—village Stratford with a midden in the chief street and the charms of the village usurer's companionship tempered by the ministrations of a wandering tub-thumper?

There is abundant evidence, even in "The Winter's Tale" and "Cymbeline," to prove that the storm which wrecked Shakespeare's life had not blown itself out even when these last works were written in 1611-12; the jealousy of Leontes is as wild and sensual as the jealousy of Othello; the attitude of Posthumus towards women as bitter as anything to be found in "Troilus and Cressida":

"Could I find out The woman's part in me! For there's no motion That tends to vice in man but I affirm It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it, The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, Nice longing, slanders, mutability, All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows, Why, hers, in part or all, but rather all; For even to vice They are not constant, but are changing still One vice, but of a minute old, for one Not half so old as that."

The truth is, that the passions of lust and jealousy and rage had at length worn out Shakespeare's strength, and after trying in vain to win to serenity in "The Tempest," he crept home to Stratford to die.

In his native air, I imagine, his health gradually improved; but he was never strong enough to venture back to residence in London. He probably returned once or twice for a short visit, and during his absence his pious daughter, Mrs. Hall, entertained the wandering preacher in New Place.

As Shakespeare grew stronger he no doubt talked with Combe, the usurer, for want of any one better.

It is probable, too, that on one of his visits to London he took up Fletcher's "Henry VIII." and wrote in some scenes for him and touched up others, or Fletcher may have visited him in Stratford and there have begged his help.

His youngest daughter, Judith, was married early in 1616; it seems probable to me that this was the occasion of the visit of Jonson and Drayton to Stratford. No doubt Shakespeare was delighted to meet them, talked as few men ever talked before or since, and probably drank too much with those "poor unhappy brains for drinking" which his Cassius deplored. Thus fanned, the weak flame of his life wasted quickly and guttered out. It is all comprehensible enough, and more than likely, that the greatest man in the world, after the boredom of solitary years spent in Stratford, died through a merry meeting with his friends; in his joy and excitement he drank a glass or so of wine, which brought on a fever. It is all true, true to character, and pitiful beyond words.

Shakespeare to me is the perfect type of the artist, and the artist is gradually coming to his proper place in the world's esteem. In the introduction to one of his "Lives," Plutarch apologizes for writing about a painter, a mere artist, instead of about some statesman or general, who would be a worthy object of ambition for a well-born youth. But since Plutarch's time our view of the relative merits of men has changed and developed: to-day we put the artist higher even than the saint. Indeed, it seems to us that the hero or statesman, or saint, only ranks in proportion to the artist-faculty he may possess. The winning of a battle is not enough to engage all our admiration; it must be won by an artist. In every department of life this faculty is beginning to be appreciated as the finest possession of humanity, and Shakespeare was an almost perfect example of the self-conscious artist.

People talk as if his masterpieces were produced at haphazard or by unconscious fruition; but masterpieces are not brought forth in this happy-go-lucky fashion. They are of the sort that only come to flower with perfect tendance. Even if we did not know that Shakespeare corrected his finest verses again and again with critical care, we should have to assume it. But we know that he spared no pains to better his finer inspirations, and he has told us in a sonnet how anxiously he thought about his art and the art of his rivals:

"Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope With what I most enjoy contented least."

He has all the qualities and all the shortcomings of the reflective, humane, sensuous artist temperament, intensified by the fact that he had not had the advantage of a middle-class training.

In a dozen ways our Puritan discipline and the rubs and buffets one gets in this work-a-day world where money is more highly esteemed than birth or sainthood or genius, have brought us beyond Shakespeare in knowledge of men and things. The courage of the Puritan, his self-denial and self-control, have taught us invaluable lessons; Puritanism tempered character as steel is tempered with fire and ice, and the necessity of getting one's bread not as a parasite, but as a fighter, has had just as important results on character. Shakespeare is no longer an ideal to us; no single man can now fill our mental horizon; we can see around and above the greatest of the past: the overman of to-day is only on the next round of the ladder, and our children will smile at the fatuity of his conceit.

But if we can no longer worship Shakespeare, it is impossible not to honour him, impossible not to love him. All men—Spenser as well as Jonson—found him gentle and witty, gay and generous. He was always willing to touch up this man's play or write in an act for that one. He never said a bitter or cruel word about any man. Compare him with Dante or even with Goethe, and you shall find him vastly superior to either of them in loving kindness. He was more contemptuously treated in life than even Dante, and yet he never fell away to bitterness as Dante did: he complained, it is true; but he never allowed his fairness to be warped; he was of the noblest intellectual temper.

It is impossible not to honour him, for the truth is he had more virtue in him than any other son of man. "By their fruits ye shall know them." He produced more masterpieces than any other writer, and the finest sayings in the world's literature are his. Think of it: Goethe was perfectly equipped; he had a magnificent mind and body and temperament: he was born in the better middle classes; he was well off; splendidly handsome; thoroughly educated; his genius was recognized on all hands when he was in his teens; and it was developed by travel and princely patronage. Yet what did Goethe do in proof of his advantages? "Faust" is the only play he ever wrote that can rank at all with a dozen of Shakespeare's. Poor Shakespeare brought it further in the sixteenth century than even Goethe at full strain could bring it in the nineteenth. I find Shakespeare of surpassing virtue. Cervantes ranks with the greatest because he created Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; but Hamlet and Falstaff are more significant figures, and take Hamlet and Falstaff away from Shakespeare's achievement, and more is left than any other poet ever produced.

Harvest after harvest Shakespeare brought forth of astounding quality. Yet he was never strong, and he died at fifty-two, and the last six years of his life were wasted with weakness and ill-health. No braver spirit has ever lived. After "Hamlet" and "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Lear" and "Timon" he broke down: yet as soon as he struggled back to sanity, he came to the collar again and dug "The Winter's Tale" out of himself, and "Cymbeline," and seeing they were not his best, took breath, and brought forth "The Tempest"—another masterpiece, though written with a heart of lead and with the death-sweat dank on his forehead. Think of it; the noblest autumn fruit ever produced; all kindly-sweet and warm, bathed so to speak in love's golden sunshine; his last word to men:

"The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance...."

And then the master of many styles, including the simple, wins to a childlike simplicity, and touches the source of tears:

"We are such stuff as dreams are made of, And our little life is rounded with a sleep."

True, Shakespeare was not the kind of man Englishmen are accustomed to admire. By a curious irony of fate Jesus was sent to the Jews, the most unworldly soul to the most material of peoples, and Shakespeare to Englishmen, the most gentle sensuous charmer to a masculine, rude race. It may be well for us to learn what infinite virtue lay in that frail, sensual singer.

This dumb struggling world, all in travail between Thought and Being, longs above everything to realize itself and become articulate, and never has it found such width of understanding, such melody of speech, as in this Shakespeare. "I have often said, and will often repeat," writes Goethe, "that the final cause and consummation of all natural and human activity is dramatic poetry." Englishmen do not appear yet to understand what arrogance and what profound wisdom there is in this saying; but in a dull, half-conscious way they are beginning dimly to realize that the biggest thing they have done in the world yet is to produce Shakespeare. When I think of his paltry education, his limiting circumstances, the scanty appreciation of his contemporaries, his indifferent health, and recall his stupendous achievement, I am fain to apply to him, as most appropriate, the words he gave to his alter ego, Antony, Antony who, like himself, was world-worn and passion-weary:

"A rarer spirit never Did steer humanity; but you, gods, will give us Some faults to make us men."

THE END.



INDEX

Abbess Academe Achilles Actium Adam Adonis Adriana Aegeon Aeneas Agamemnon Agincourt Agrippa Ajax Albany, The Duke of (in "Lear") Aleppo Alexander Angelo Anne, Lady Antigone Antipholus Antonio Antonio (Duke in the "Tempest"), Antony, Marc "Antony and Cleopatra" Apelles Apemantus "Arabian Nights' Entertainment" Archbishop of Canterbury Arden, Mary Arden, the family of Argus Ariel Armado Arnold, Matthew Arthur, Prince Arviragus Asbies "As You Like It" Aubrey Aufidius Aumerle Austin, Alfred Autolycus

"Babes in a Wood" Bacon Bagot Balzac Bankside Banquo Bardolph Barnardine Bartholomew Fair Bassanio Bastard (the) Bazarof Beatrice Beaumont Beckett, Ernest, dedication. Belarius Belch, Sir Toby Bellario Benedick Benvolio Berowne Bertillon Betterton Bevis, Geo. Bianca Birnam Wood Biron Bishop of Worcester Blackfriars Blount, Sir Walter Boaden Bolingbroke Borachio Bottom Bourbon Boyet Brabant Brabantio Brandes Bright Browning Brutus Bullen, Anne Bunyan Burbage Bushey Byron

Cade Caesar Caliban Camden, William Campaspe Capulet Carlyle, Thomas Cassio Cassius Cecil, Sir Robert Cervantes Cesario Chamberlain, the Lord Chapel Lane Chapman Charlecot Charmian Chesterfield Chettle Chief Justice Chus Cinna Cinthio Clarenceux (King of Arms) Clarendon Claudio Claudius, King of Denmark Cleopatra Clifford Cloten "Colbourn's Magazine" Coleridge College of Heralds Combe, John "Comedy of Errors" Comic Muse Condell "Confessio Amantis" Constance Cordelia "Coriolanus" Cressida Crichton, Admiral Cromwell Cupid "Cymbeline"

Damon Dante Dark Lady (of the Sonnets) Dauphin D'Avenant, John D'Avenant, Mrs. D'Avenant, Sir William Dekker Desdemona Diana and Dian Dido Diomedes Dogberry Don John Don Pedro Don Quixote Douglas Dowden, Prof. Drake Drayton Dryasdust Duke (the Exiled in "As You Like It") Duke of York Duke of Milan ("Two Gentlemen of Verona") Duke of Venice ("The Merchant of Venice") Duke of Venice ("Othello ") Dumas Duncan, King

Eachin Eastcheap, tavern Ecclesiastes Edgar Egypt, Queen of Egypt, Elizabeth, Queen Ely, Bishop of Elysium Emilia Emerson "Encyclopedia Britannica" England Enobarbus Ephesus Erebus Eros Escalus Esmond Essex, Earl of Evans, Hugh "Every Man in his Humour"

Fair Maid of Perth, the Falstaff "Famous Victories of Henry V., The" Fauconbridge, Philip Faust Ferdinand First Gentleman First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster Fitton, Mistress Mary Flavius Fleance Fleet prison Fletcher (the poet) Ford, Mrs. Forman's Diary Fortinbras France Frederick the Great Fuller Furnival, Mr.

Gadshill Gauls Gaunt, John of Germany Gertrude (Queen: "Hamlet") Gill, Sir David Gladstone Glendower Globe Theatre Gloster Glostershire Gloucester Goethe Gollancz, Israel Gonzalo "Gorgias" Goneril ("Lear") Gower Gratiano Greece Green ("Richard II") Greene, Robert (the playwright) Greenhill Street "Groatsworth of Wit, The" Guildenstern

Hal, Prince Hall, Susann Hallam Halliwell-Phillipps Hamlet Hamnet Harfleur Haroun-al-Raschid Harrison, Rev. W. A. Hathaway, Anne Hathaway Richard Hazlitt Hector Heine Helen Hellicon Henley Street Heminge Henry IV., King ——First Part ——Second Part Henry V., King Henry VI., King ——First Part ——Second Part ——Third Part Henry VIII. Henry, Prince Herbert, Lord William Hermione Hero "Hero and Leander" Holland, John Holofernes Homer Horace Hotspur, Harry Hubert Humphrey, Duke of Gloster Hyperion

Iachimo Iago Imogen Iras Ironsides Irving, Sir Henry Isabella Isis Ismene Italy

Jack Jack-a-Lent Jacob James Jaques Jeanne d'Arc Jena Jessica Jesus Jews John (Prince: "Henry IV.") John, King Johnson, Dr. Jonson, Ben Joubert Jove Judas Judith Julia Juliet Julius Caesar Juno

Kate Katherine Keats Kemp Kent King King's Council King of Naples King of Navarre (Ferdinand) King James "Knight's Conjuring, A"

Laban Laertes Lamb Langland, William Launce Lear Leatherhead Lee, Sidney Leicester, Lord Leontes Lessing Leveson, Sir Richard Lieutenant of the Tower "Lives" (Plutarch) "Lives of the Poets, The" Lodge Lodovico London Longaville Lope de Vega Lord Governor of England Lord of Comedy Lord of Humour Lorenzo "Love's Labour's Lost" Lucetta Luciana Lucifer Lucio Lucius ("Julius Caesar") Lucrece Lucy, Sir Thomas Luther Lyly

Macbeth Macbeth, Lady Macduff Malcolm Malvolio Mamillius Marcus, Brutus Marcus ("Titus Andronicus") Mardian ("Antony and Cleopatra") Margaret Maria Mariana Marie Marina Marlowe Mars, Marston Master of the Revels Masque May Queen "Measure for Measure" "Merchant of Venice" Mercury Mercutio, Meredith, George Meres "Merry Wives of Windsor, The" "Midsummer Night's Dream" Milan Milton Miranda Moliere Montaigne Mortimer Motley "Much Ado" Naples Neptune Nerissa Nessus Nestor New Place Northumberland Nurse

Oberon Octavia Olivia Ophelia Orlando Orsino, Duke (in "Twelfth Night") Othello Otterbourne Old Lady ("Henry VIII.") Oxford

Padua Page, Mrs. Palace Pandarus Paris Parolles Paul Pedro (Prince: "Much Ado"), Pembroke, Percy, Lady, Perdita, Pericles, Phidias, Philario, Philippan, Philippi, Phoebus, Pinero, Pisanio, Pistol, Pity(?), Plantaginet, Plato, Plutarch, Poet Laureate, Poins, Polixenes, Polonius, Pompey, Portia, Posthumus, Princess of France (in "Love's Labour's Lost"), Proculeius, Prospero, Duke, Proteus, Pythias,

Queen Margaret Queen to King Richard II., Quickly, Dame,

Raleigh, Regan, Rembrandt, Renascence, Renaissance, Rialto, Richard Coeur de Lion, Richard II., King, Richard III., Richardson, John, Roman, Rome, Romeo, "Romeo and Juliet," Rosaline, Rosalind, Rosalynde, Rosencrantz, Rubicon, Rowe,

Salarino, Salique, Salisbury, Salvini, Sandells, Fulk, Sappho, Satan, Satiromastix, Sancho Panza, "Saturday Review, The," Saturn, Schiller, Scoop, Scott, Walter, Second Gentleman, Seleucus, Senate, "Sententiae Pueriles," Sidney, Severn, Shallow, Justice Shottery Shylock Silvia Slender, Master Snitterfield Solinus (Duke in "Comedy of Errors") Sophocles Southampton, Earl of Socrates Spalding Spencer, Herbert Spenser Star Chamber Stephanio Stratford Stratford Parish Church Suffolk Susanna Swinburne Sycorax Syracuse Sonnets: [Footnote 1] [36 and 37] [140] [40] [127] [104] [142] [18] [19] [20] [22] [23] [33] [144] [133] [41] [105] [136] [122] [78] [86] [131] [135] [88] [129] [37] Shakespeare

[Footnote 1: Sonnets in brackets are mentioned especially on the pages marked opposite.]

Shakespeare, John Shake-scene

Talbot "Taming of the Shrew" Tamora Tearsheet, Doll "Tempest, The" Temple Gardens Temple Grafton Tennyson Thackeray Thames Thane of Cawdor Thersites Thurio Thyreus Timbuctoo Timon Titania Titian Titus "Titus Andronicus" Tolstoi Tourgenief Toussaint l'Ouverture Tower of London Tree, Beerbohm Trial Table of the order of Shakespeare's Plays Trinculo Triton Troilus Trojans "Troilus and Cressida" "Troublesome Raigne of King John, The" Troy "True Tragedie of Richard, The" Tubal "Twelfth Night" "Two Gentlemen of Verona, The" "Two Noble Kinsmen, The" Tyler, Mr.

Ulysses

Valentine Valiant-for-Truth "Venus and Adonis" Vernon Veronese Vienna Villon Vincentio, Duke Viola Virgil "Vision of Piers Plowman" Venice Venus Voltaire

Ward, Rev. John Warwickshire Watts-Dunton, Theodore Westminster Westmoreland Whately, Anne Whittington, Thomas William the Conqueror Wilmcote Wilmscote "Winter's Tale" "Wit's Commonwealth" Wittenberg Worcester Wordsworth "Worthies," (Fuller's)

THE END